Canada’s Public Health Agency has admitted to secretly tracking location data from at least 33 million mobile devices to analyze people’s movements during Covid-19 lockdowns.
The agency earlier this year collected data, including geolocation information from cell-towers, “due to the urgency of the pandemic,” a PHAC spokesperson told the National Post, essentially confirming a report by Blacklock’s Reporter. The tracking data was allegedly only used to evaluate the effectiveness of lockdown measures and identify possible links between the movement of people and the spread of Covid-19.
PHAC obtained the information, which was “de-identified and aggregated,” through an outside contractor, Canadian telecommunications giant Telus. The contract ran from last March to October, and PHAC said it no longer had access to the data after the deal expired.
However, the agency plans to similarly track the movements of citizens over the next five years toward such ends as preventing the spread of other infectious diseases and improving mental health. PHAC last week posted a notice to prospective contractors seeking anonymous mobile data dating as far back as January 2019 and running through at least May 2023.
Critics argued that government tracking of citizens is likely more extensive than has been revealed and may become more troublesome in the years ahead.
“I think that the Canadian public will find out about many other such unauthorized surveillance initiatives before the pandemic is over—and afterwards,” privacy advocate David Lyon told the Post. He noted, too, that “de-identified” data can easily be “re-identified.”
Author Julius Reuchel said the tracking initiative smacks of a surveillance state spying on citizens “for your safety.” Another author, Paul Alves, said that with its new contract, PHAC will have direct access to all mobile location data, and expressed fear that “contact tracing will no longer require permission or a warrant.”
As people around the world are celebrating Christmas, occupied Palestine, the birthplace of Christianity, remains under brutal Israeli apartheid. Meanwhile, the Israeli regime targets Western Christians with Zionist propaganda.
Zionist propaganda
The Israeli propaganda apparatus “Hasbara” has long invested large amounts of money and significant PR efforts in legitimizing the Zionist settler-colony in the eyes of its international audiences. In portraying the colony as a democracy with alleged human rights and co-existence between various religions, the Israeli regime has attempted to whitewash its genocidal oppression of Palestinians in the eyes of the West. The propaganda attempts have been successful to a large degree, as many Christians in the West either ignore the Palestinian plight, or provide outright support to the apartheid regime.
Evangelical Zionists in the United States have been amongst the most radical supporters of Israel. Christian tourism has contributed to the colony’s economy. This year again, Zionist politicians and officials have extended their holiday greetings to “Christian friends” around the world.
Such greetings are packed with colonial propaganda and appropriation of history. Israeli PM Naftali Bennett published a video on Christmas Eve this year from occupied Jerusalem, connecting the “ancient land” and the Bible to the current colony in his address to Christians. Bennett, who previously bragged about how many Arabs he killed in his life, lied that the colony provided “religious freedom, tolerance, and prosperity in a region where Christians are routinely persecuted.” The illusion that Israel offered religious freedom and that Christians outside of the colony are persecuted is widespread in the West. Bennett claimed that Israel is the “only one place” that “protects Christian life” and thanked his audience for “fighting for the state of Israel.”
While such proclamations further add to the positive image of the colony in the West, they stand in stark contrast to the reality on the ground.
The plight of Palestinian Christians
In fact, the world’s oldest Christian communities are victims of Israel’s genocidal settler-colonialism.
As a result of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign, the Christian population in Palestine has sharply declined throughout the decades. Places of significant importance for Christians are cut off from the outside world. The town of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, is surrounded by the apartheid wall.
Besides suffering under the structures of the apartheid regime, Palestinian Christians are also oftentimes prevented from exercising their religion. While foreign visitors may access Palestinian churches, the Palestinian right to worship is tightly controlled by the apartheid regime. Depending on where they live, Palestinians require permits issued by the apartheid authorities to attend Mass in churches. This year again, Palestinian Christians from Gaza applied for permits to travel to Bethlehem to attend prayers. Their requests were either rejected or outright ignored.
Palestinians are harassed by apartheid authorities on holy days, such as Easter and Christmas. This year on Easter, apartheid authorities escalated their ethnic cleansing campaign by expelling Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah (East al-Quds) from their homes. This Christmas again, hundreds of Palestinians were injured by occupation forces when they protested against settlement expansion in the West Bank.
Israeli violence has always extended beyond the borders of historic Palestine. The Israeli colonial regime has a history of targeting indigenous Christians in the region. It has done so during its military occupation and numerous wars in Lebanon and its continuous attacks on Syria. During last year’s Christmas celebrations, the Israeli regime invaded the Lebanese airspace to conduct airstrikes on Syria from there, killing several people.
The fallacy of a religious war
The Israeli regime is terrorizing Palestinians of all religions, but has been trying to portray the settler-colonial conquest as a “conflict” that is allegedly religious in its nature. Exploiting traditional Orientalism and anti-Muslim sentiments that are prevalent in Western cultures, the Israeli rhetoric has long focused not only on portraying Palestinian resistance – and oftentimes the very Palestinian existence as such – as anti-Jewish, but the regime has also tried to identify all Palestinians as Muslims to better advance its Islamophobic dichotomy and to frame the Palestinian struggle for freedom and liberation as a religious movement. It is the religious frame and the anti-Muslim prejudice amongst Israel’s backers that allows the apartheid regime to advance its goals. It is thus not surprising that the Israeli project is highly popular among the far-right and fascists around the world.
Of course the Palestinian struggle was never a sectarian one and many leading figures of Palestinian resistance have been Christians. Nor should the religion of colonized people determine the solidarity and support they receive from the outside world.
After all, destroying the cultural diversity of the region and dividing the population according to sectarian and ethnic lines have been long established practices of imperialist and colonialist forces.
Numerous Palestinian Christian leaders have appealed to Christians around the world to not turn a blind eye toward the continuous oppression and exploitation of Palestine. The Palestinian Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church in al-Quds, Atallah Hanna, himself a crucial figure in the Palestinian resistance, has repeatedly affirmed that al-Quds (Jerusalem) and the holy sites will remain Palestinian. The Archbishop reminded Christians around the world that while streets and squares in Western cities are decorated with lights and Christmas trees, there would be no point in celebrating Christmas if they do not pay attention to what is happening in Palestine. He called upon all churches to urgently defend Palestine. The archbishop has reportedly been poisoned by Israeli authorities, but survived the attack.
The racist ideology of Zionism targets people of all religious affiliations who stand in the way of the settler-colonial conquest. This is, unfortunately, more often than not ignored internationally, and particularly by Western Christians. This year again, many Christians in the West celebrate the birth of Jesus without talking about the struggle in Palestine.
Denijal Jegic is a writer and researcher, currently based in Beirut, Lebanon. He holds a PhD in American studies.
By covertly recruiting popular YouTube influencer Abigail Thorn to counter growing opposition to UK gov’t Covid restrictions, psy-ops pros are bringing home the tactics they honed in the Syrian dirty war.
Leaked documents have revealed a state-sponsored influence operation designed to undermine critics of the British government’s coronavirus policies by astroturfing a prominent founder of the BreadTube clique of “anti-fascist” YouTube influencers.
The project aims to conduct psychological profiling on British citizens dissenting against policies such as mandatory vaccination and lockdowns, then leverage the data to establish a YouTube channel that portrays these critics as dangerous “superspreaders” of “disinformation.”
Designed “to curb the influence of pseudoscience material online, with specific emphasis on Coronavirus-related ‘anti-vaxxing’ sentiment,” the operation is run by the UK’s Royal Institution, and dubbed “Challenging Pseudoscience.”
Its top patron is Charles, the Prince of Wales, next in line to the British throne, who recently hit out at supposed “conspiracy theories” surrounding COVID-19 vaccines. The organization received a substantial cash injection in 2020 from the UK government’s Culture Recovery Fund earmarked for video production.
Leaked files obtained by The Grayzone indicate that the Royal Institution has enlisted the services of Valent Projects, a “social change” communications firm founded by a public relations operative previously involved in the UK Foreign Office’s campaign for violent regime change in Syria. Valent has also been sponsored by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a US intelligence cut-out, for a project aimed at “investigating disinformation.”
Valent’s central role in the operation highlights the trend of information warfare specialists bringing the techniques they honed against targets like the Syrian government back home to the West, where increasingly unpopular governments confront masses of citizens ever-bristling at coronavirus restrictions.
As in Syria, where communications firms like Valent created, trained and instrumentalized media organizations to further regime change objectives, they have covertly recruited a famed British YouTube influencer to lend their carefully calculated messaging campaign an authentic flavor.
According to internal documents, Valent plans to design a “mass appeal social media campaign fronted and owned by prominent social media figure Abigail Thorn,” the founder of Philosophy Tube. Valent’s research on British citizens who reject official policy on COVID-19 “will be used to devise a campaign that utilises YouTuber Abigail Thorn’s existing platform to achieve a measurable cognitive shift in the target audience,” the files state.
Boasting over one million subscribers to her YouTube channel and more than 7000 Patreon supporters, Thorn has established a potent vehicle for any communications campaign. She is also a core member of BreadTube, an assortment of left-branded social media influencers that has attracted intense establishment interest for its purported ability “to pop YouTube’s political bubbles to create space for deradicalisation.”
While top BreadTubers are best known for employing memes and theatrical ploys to counter right-wing narratives, they have also dedicated intense energy to attacking the anti-imperialist left as “tankies” engaged in a secret “red-brown alliance” with right-wing extremists.
BreadTube “speaks in the name of left-wing sounding ideals. In reality, it is likely serving one section of the American ruling elite and the intelligence agencies,” Maupin wrote.
The covert relationship between BreadTube’s Abigail Thorn, Valent Projects, and the Royal Institute appears to validate Maupin’s thesis.
“It does not surprise me at all to find out there is documented evidence that the British Royal Family and an intelligence contractor is bankrolling the work of Abigail Thorn,” Maupin told The Grayzone. “It lines up with everything I have observed about her and the BreadTube trend overall.”
Maupin continued, “BreadTube’s ‘socialism’ is not really socialism, it is mobilizing young liberals to keep dissident elements in line. It’s securing the rule of British and American corporations over the planet by trying to silence those who get in its way.”
The national security establishment’s favorite socialists
Since launching Philosophy Tube in 2013, Abigail Thorn’s YouTube channel boasts over 7000 paying Patreon fans and well over one million YouTube subscribers. By probing complex philosophical and political issues in a highly accessible, engaging manner and deploying elaborate, artisanal audio and visual effects, she has emerged as a social media celebrity. A lengthy profile video produced by the BBC refers to her as “one of the most high-profile transgender figures in the UK.”
Thorn is among the most prominent figures within the loosely knit collective of YouTube influencers known as BreadTube. Inspired by the title of anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s tract, The Conquest of Bread, BreadTube advances a hyper-identitarian, imperialism-friendly interpretation of socialist politics that has earned its creators enthusiastic promotion from establishment interests.
The New York Times, for example, published a lengthy 2019 profile of a young man named Caleb Cain who supposedly “fell down the alt-right rabbit hole” on YouTube. Cain claimed he was de-radicalized through exposure to videos by Thorn and other popular BreadTubers like Natalie Wynn of Contrapoints. During the Trump era, as the Google-owned YouTube implemented a raft of stringent speech codes, it began amplifying BreadTube influencers through its algorithm.
BREAKING NEWS!! TRIGGER WARNING!! Small brain pro CIA @VaushV advocates for the torture of #JulianAssange in a sad attempt to hurt those who support him. Please donate to and disseminate @wikileaks documents. pic.twitter.com/vyF0yD6oBa
Then there is Shaun, a British BreadTuber whose recent attack on left-wing political comedian Jimmy Dore’s criticisms of government Covid restrictions contained echoes of the “Challenging Pseudoscience” project prepared for Thorn by intelligence-related outfits. Shaun’s arguments relied heavily on statements by official experts and US government bodies like the FDA and CDC. While Dore has been limited by YouTube’s sweeping speech codes, Shaun’s viral video appears to have benefited from an algorithmic boost.
“All the key signs of infiltration are there,” Caleb Maupin said of BreadTube. “Since when does US mainstream media highlight the work of Marxist revolutionaries? Why are people who seem so unfamiliar with basic elements of socialist ideology suddenly elevated to the position of respected experts by the algorithms? Why do their foreign policy views seem to line up so closely with the US State Department? I have had no doubt they were being covertly supported by powerful entities with goals other than overthrowing capitalism.”
Unlike some fellow BreadTubers, Thorn comes across as amiable and trustworthy, fostering a personal bond with her viewers and regularly publishing thank you notes to patrons, listing them each by name. These qualities have attracted support for Philosophy Tube by both public and private backers.
Thorn’s April 2021 dismantling of the politics of right-wing culture warrior Jordan Peterson has racked up almost two million views and was sponsored by Curiosity Stream, a US media streaming service. The video opens with a black screen disclosing the support provided by the company and claiming Thorn would donate her fee to the feminist campaign group, Sisters Uncut. The video is also emblazoned with YouTube’s “paid promotion” logo.
Yet no such disclaimer referring to support from the Royal Institution can be found on any of her other uploads. And that may be because the Covid campaign was intended to be covert.
Astroturf campaign seeks to achieve ‘measurable cognitive shift’
The “Challenging Pseudoscience” operation designed for Thorn was launched in February 2021 by liberal science journalist Angela Saini. The author of several popular titles and a forthcoming book on “the origins of patriarchy,” she is also part of The Lancet Covid-19 Commission’s Task Force on Global Health Diplomacy.
The commission’s chief, Peter Daszak, a zoologist who serves as president of the US-based NGO known as EcoHealth Alliance, was forced to resign in June over conflict of interest issues.
In the years leading up to the outbreak of Covid-19, Daszak worked extensively on bat coronaviruses and gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. His organization received tens of millions in funding from the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a division “[countering] weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.” In December 2019, Daszak warned that coronaviruses can “get into human cells,” one can “manipulate them in the lab pretty easily,” and “you can’t vaccinate against them.”
The host of Saini’s project, the Royal Institute, was founded in 1799 by British scientists of the day “with the aim of introducing new technologies and teaching science to the general public.” Landed gentry and royalty have always occupied the Institution’s highest levels. Queen Elizabeth II’s cousin, Field Marshal Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent, has served as president since 1976.
The files indicate that the Royal Institution enlisted the services of Valent Projects, a communications firm “[working] with clients in the UK and all over the world to counter disinformation and strengthen the bonds between people.”
Valent was founded by Amil Khan, a former Reuters and BBC reporter who officially left journalism “to help good causes navigate the new information landscape.”
From February, Valent Projects proposed a “two-phase” project to “develop an understanding of the psychological drivers behind the generation and spread of anti-vaxxer narratives.” It planned to exploit this data “to develop and test public messaging responses.”
The findings would “inform other programming by Challenging Pseudoscience… as well as other stakeholders including the science community and concerned governments and public health bodies.”
In the campaign’s first phase, extensive online interviews were to be conducted, along with “ethnographic research” to secure “comprehensive understanding of the key online audiences driving anti-vaxxing mis/disinformation around the Coronavirus pandemic.”
Valent Projects then planned to “draw together insights” from these findings, developing “comprehensive audience profiles” – including “demographic information” – to design a “mass appeal social media campaign fronted and owned by prominent social media figure Abigail Thorn,” who runs online channel Philosophy Tube.
Valent indicated its intent to exploit Philosophy Tube’s sizable platform to “achieve a measurable cognitive shift [emphasis added] in the target audience.”
Reaching the intended viewers was forecast to be a significant task in itself, however. Valent noted most Philosophy Tube viewers are within the 18 to 35 age range, but “existing research” suggested the “most prolific consumers of pseudoscience material” were over the age of 45.
The firm felt the “best topic to address this issue is probably along the lines of ‘the thing about expertise’ [sic].” Fittingly, in August 2020 Thorn uploaded a video, “Who’s afraid of the experts?” Featuring comedian Adam Conover of the popular show, “Adam Ruins Everything,” the 45 minute-long defense of the scientific consensus on the HIV/AIDS debate is the first result in any search for the term “vaccine” on Philosophy Tube’s channel.
The leaked documents thus expose what had long been suspected by critics of BreadTube: the popular social media collective has been instrumentalized by powerful interests with connections to Western intelligence agencies.
An astroturfed information warfare campaign hiding in plain sight
Multiple requests for comment from The Grayzone to Abigail Thorn’s agent and Angela Saini have gone unanswered.
When quizzed about the leaked files on Twitter, Valent Projects CEO Amil Khan flew into a rage, angrily asserting they were “obtained through hacking and then doctored,” in the manner of “classic doxing,” and threatened legal action against this journalist for publicizing them.
Khan later pumped out a series of tweets aimed at controlling the damage of his imminent exposure. In one, he falsely claimed that a co-author of this piece would publish their reporting in “Russian state affiliated media.”
Russian info ops arent what they used to be. Someone going by the name @KitKlarenberg is about to publish an article in [insert Russian state-affiliated media] accusing me of being a terrorist propandist etc etc. So far, so yawn. Heres a short #thread on why I expected better 1/:
Yet when challenged about his claim of doctoring, Khan did not respond.
Subsequent requests for clarity on which elements of the documents were maliciously altered and how that might have taken place have also gone unanswered. But evidence of the secret project’s existence was hiding in plain sight.
For example, Valent Projects lists the Royal Institution on its website as a client. An accompanying writeup notes it “developed and implemented a data-led behaviour change campaign [emphasis added] aimed at understanding and working with the psychological drivers behind anti-vaxer sentiment in the UK” for the organization.
Similarly, a post on the company’s official LinkedIn page refers to an “analysis of tens of thousands of UK-based social media users “posting/sharing anti-vax content online” it conducted for Countering Pseudoscience, which would “be used to inform ethnographic research designed to understand ‘why’ people hold these views.” In other words, a specific programming strand outlined in the documents.
From Valent Projects’ LinkedIn page
Moreover, none other than Abigail Thorn was guest-of-honor at Challenging Pseudoscience’s launch event in February, “Vaccines: Warriors and Worriers,” which featured a debate on “how vaccines work, why people are skeptical despite the evidence, and how disinformation about vaccines spreads online.”
Abigail Thorn of Philosophy Tube participating in the Royal Institution’s “Vaccines: Warriors and Worriers” event
Also on the event’s panel were an immunologist named Zania Stamataki and Marianna Spring, the BBC’s first “specialist disinformation reporter.” She has repeatedly perpetuated falsehoods about the size of anti-lockdown protests in 2020 and nature of their participants. In a bizarre experiment, she furthermore personally set up numerous “fake troll” accounts on assorted online platforms that “engaged” with “misogynistic” content, allegedly for academic purposes.
In May, Thorn published a characteristically ornate video, “Ignorance & Censorship,” which touched on the topic of “disinformation” and vaccines. The next month, Challenging Pseudoscience convened a similarly named panel discussion, “Misinformation or Censorship.”
Then, the newly-launched Challenging Pseudoscience podcast shared two prior Royal Institution debates – the aforementioned Vaccines: Warriors and worriers, and “Disinformation and how to counter it,” which featured none other than Amil Khan as a speaker. It would be entirely unsurprising if this deluge was a coordinated effort.
A wide-ranging, long-running, cross-platform propaganda campaign involving multiple actors requires substantial resources. Until 2020, however, the Royal Institution struggled financially despite its royal patronage and elite trustees.
The organization has been forced to rent out its grand central London headquarters for conferences, corporate bashes and weddings. To plug a multimillion pound budget deficit in late 2015, the Royal Institution auctioned off treasured first editions of works by Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton and other eminent scientists. The fire sale prompted the BBC to ask whether the organization was on the verge of collapse.
Miraculously though, in October 2020, the Institution received hundreds of thousands of pounds from the UK government’s £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund “to help face the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic and ensure it has a sustainable future.”
An accompanying press release noted the Royal Institution had over the course of the pandemic “[developed] a successful programme of weekly science talks online” broadcast via its “well-established” YouTube channel, which today boasts 1.11 million subscribers. The cash injection would “increase the number of livestreamed science talks” hosted by the organization, and help it develop “new digital content.”
Valent Projects staffer Hamish Falconer has disclosed that the “exciting” Challenging Pseudoscience campaign has also received “generous support” from the Open Society Foundations of CIA-adjacent billionaire George Soros.
As the Washington Post’s David Ignatius reported in 1991, Soros was at the heart of a network of “overt operators” helping US intelligence carry out “spyless coups” against former Soviet satellite states.
In July 2021, Soros teamed up with fellow billionaire Bill Gates to purchase a UK-based Covid-19 test developer for $41 million.
Three months later, as Alex Rubinstein documented for The Grayzone, Soros partnered with tech oligarch Reid Hoffmann to found Good Information Inc, a social media censorship operation marketed under the aegis of “countering disinformation.”
Hamish is the son of Charlie Falconer, a longtime friend and former roommate of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Following Blair’s May 1997 election victory, Falconer senior was elevated to the unelected House of Lords, and served in a series of high-ranking government posts throughout his pal’s tenure.
Along the way, he applied “huge pressure” to Attorney General Lord Goldsmith to change his view that invading Iraq would be illegal. His intervention may have played a decisive role in greenlighting the war of aggression.
Valent founder “embedded into terrorist organizations,” ran Syria psy-ops for armed extremists
Hamish Falconer’s hiring at Valent Projects in March 2021 highlights the firm’s deep ties to the UK’s intelligence apparatus. At the time, he was ostensibly on leave from the UK Foreign Office.
Khan trumpeted Falconer’s hire on LinkedIn, declaring that “he brings the action end to our work – experimenting and innovating with digital influence for good.” Having met in Pakistan “over a decade ago,” the pair “have not stopped talking and comparing notes since.”
Falconer’s spartan online résumé sheds little light on his professional history, noting only a spell at the UK government’s Department for International Development, followed by a seven-month gap, before he joined the Foreign Office as a ‘Diplomat’ until August 2020.
No detail is offered either on where Falconer has been posted, or what his role entailed at any point. He is a graduate of Yale University’s Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellows Program, named for the AIG founder who nearly became CIA director. The Greenberg fellows program identifies and grooms prospective future influencers, including no shortage of US-backed would-be coup leaders. Among the most famous alumni of the program is jailed Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny.
The Greenberg program’s profile of Falconer states, “he has led the Foreign Office’s Terrorism Response Team, UK efforts to start a peace process in Afghanistan and served in Pakistan and South Sudan,” and served a stint at the National Crime Agency – London’s equivalent of the FBI.
Counter-terror is not a stated Foreign Office purview, but just one of “three core areas of focus” for the UK foreign intelligence service MI6. It may just be a coincidence the agency’s spies typically pose as ‘diplomats’ overseas.
By contrast, Khan’s activities between December 2008, when he left his position as ‘hostile environments reporter’ for the BBC, and October 2017, when he joined elite UK national security think tank Chatham House as an ‘associate fellow’ – the next entry on his public CV – can be pieced together with much greater certitude, but still only approximately.
Valent Projects founder Amil Khan
A leaked document indicates that he first crossed paths with Falconer while managing a ‘countering violent extremism’ propaganda campaign for the UK government in Islamabad. The file relates to a Foreign Office funded effort to train “articulate Syrian armed and civilian grassroots opposition entities,” and promote them to “Syrian and international audiences” as a credible alternative to the government of Bashar al-Assad.
The project was delivered by ARK, a shadowy intelligence contractor founded by the likely MI6 operative, Alistair Harris, which has raked in innumerable lucrative contracts from waging covert information warfare operations on behalf of the UK government.
Khan was heavily involved in ARK’s Syrian efforts. Another leaked file, outlining some of the company’s work inside Syria shows that it oversaw a “rebranding” of the CIA-armed Free Syrian Army to portray it as a moderate, secular force unconnected to the hardcore jihadist factions that dominated the armed opposition. Khan is named as one of three operatives managing the media office of the parallel Syrian National Coalition government controlled by London through intelligence cutouts like ARK.
This work placed Khan in extremely close quarters with members of violent ‘rebel’ factions implicated in hideous crimes against humanity. That he “[provided] political and media support to opposition political and military groups” in Syria has been openly confirmed. A scathing internal Whitehall review of the Foreign Office’s information warfare operations in the country concluded they were “poorly planned, probably illegal, and cost lives.”
It wasn’t the first time Khan been in such murderous company. At some point after leaving ARK in August 2014, he joined InCoStrat, another contractor that conducted destabilizing psy-ops on the UK government’s behalf throughout the Syrian crisis. InCoStrat delivered “strategic communications support” to a variety of armed groups on-the-ground, including the notoriously brutal, Saudi-backed militia known as Jaysh al-Islam.
Khan also played a central role in this dubious initiative. In a document discussing its ability to “[develop] contacts in Arabic-speaking conflict affected states,” InCoStrat bragged how, “in his previous career as a journalist,” Khan “established relationships with, and embedded himself into terrorist organizations in the UK and the Middle East,” gaining “unique insight into their narratives, communication methods, recruitment processes and management of networks” as a result.
InCoStrat was founded by ex-Foreign Office political officer Emma Winberg and UK military intelligence journeyman Paul Tilley, a former director of Strategic Communications for the UK Ministry of Defence in the Middle East and North Africa. Winberg left to join Mayday Rescue, parent ‘charity’ of the fraudulent humanitarian group known as the White Helmets. She later married its founder, James Le Mesurier, who died in mysterious circumstances in 2019 after damaging revelations of financial corruption came to light.
A broad landscape of state-backed Covid propaganda ops
It’s probable the “Countering Pseudoscience” project is just one part of a wider landscape of online astroturf initiatives designed to restore cratering public trust in authorities around Covid policy.
Valent Projects has also conducted work for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a neoconservative think tank, researching “violent actors using the ‘dark web’ to mobilise recruits and threaten public figures in Europe.” This initiative was likely also aimed at countering lockdown opposition.
Back in April 2020, Khan appeared on a panel discussion convened by the organization, “Countering Disinformation in a Time of COVID19.”
At the start of December, the Institute released a brief report, “Between conspiracy and extremism: A long COVID threat?”, which attempted to frame the “radicalization” of anti-lockdown protesters as a terrorist threat. What input Khan may have had in this publication was unclear.
Valent Projects is just one of an array of companies that have brought psy-ops techniques honed in Syria and other theaters of Western information warfare back home with them, like soldiers returning from battlefields marketing their deadly skills to private security and intelligence firms. And Abigail Thorn is just one YouTuber, at a time when the British state is known to be maliciously recruiting digital personalities to further its interests across the globe.
For example, Foreign Office contractor Zinc Network maintains a clandestine nexus of Russian-speaking social media influencers throughout the former Soviet Union, to promote “media integrity, democratic values [and] complex social issues,” a campaign so intensive its relationship with these individuals necessitates “daily management.” This squadron of undercover psy-ops warriors are supported by an expert “in-house team of Russian speaking producers, researchers and digital growth strategists” in London, helping them create, edit and promote their output.
Coincidentally, Zinc has been engaged in efforts since the onset of the pandemic to concoct a link between extremist activities and anti-lockdown, vaccine hesitant views. It has also published research on how to best market a test-and-trace app to UK citizens, “as part of a broader research project on public understanding of and support for Artificial Intelligence.”
It is simply inconceivable that similar operations have not been enacted elsewhere in the world, or that this phenomenon is exclusive to the UK. Further, it is impossible to know if the next slick viral video countering grassroots dissent of an official narrative is state or quasi-state propaganda, cleverly crafted to induce a “cognitive shift” in viewers, in which the star of the online show is effectively an intelligence asset rattling off a script drawn up by full-time spooks.
Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance has come to the defence of SAGE and its modelling after some torrid headlines this week following a Twitter exchange between lead modeller Professor Graham Medley and Spectator editor Fraser Nelson in which Professor Medley revealed that SAGE had not been asked to model less disastrous scenarios.
Writing in the Times, Dr. Vallance appeared directly to contradict some of the statements made by Prof. Medley, leaving observers baffled as to which of the two is correct as it is unclear how both can be. Dr. Vallance claimed that modelling of other, less severe scenarios, had been done and presented to Government, while Prof. Medley said it had not, at least by his team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). Dr. Vallance writes:
The modellers always have to make assumptions and do so across a wide range of possibilities, some optimistic and some pessimistic. They do not, contrary to what you might have heard, only model the worst outcomes. They will make assumptions about vaccine effectiveness, they will model different levels of viral transmission, mixing patterns and different levels of disease severity. The range of assumptions modelled can be very broad; for disease severity for Omicron one model explored a range from 10% of Delta severity through to 100%. For immunity a range of assumptions on vaccine efficacy, speed of vaccine rollout and vaccine coverage in different parts of the population were explored.
This claim is backed up by the minutes of the most recent SAGE meeting, published yesterday, although it doesn’t square with what Prof. Medley told Fraser Nelson. Prof. Medley, who chairs the SAGE modelling committee, said that lower virulence scenarios don’t “add any further information” and implied his committee – SPI-M – had not been asked to provide them.
Fraser asked Prof. Medley: “I guess the question is why LSHTM did not (like JP Morgan) include a scenario of lower virulence – given that this is a very-plausible option that changes outlook massively.”
What would be the point of that? Not a snarky question – genuine to know what you think decision makers would learn from that scenario… If somebody draws a line on a graph it doesn’t add any further information. Decision-makers are generally only interested in situations where decisions have to be made… That scenario doesn’t inform anything. Decision-makers don’t have to decide if nothing happens… We generally model what we are asked to model. There is a dialogue in which policy teams discuss with the modellers what they need to inform their policy.
Fraser later observed that Prof. Medley appeared to be saying his brief was very limited and did not include less severe assumptions and outcomes.
He seemed to suggest that he has been given a very limited brief, and asked to churn out worse-case scenarios without being asked to comment on how plausible they are… Note how careful he is to stay vague on whether any of the various scenarios in the SAGE document are likely or even plausible. What happened to the original system of presenting a ‘reasonable worse-case scenario’ together with a central scenario? And what’s the point of modelling if it doesn’t say how likely any these scenarios are?
From what Professor Medley says, it’s unclear that the most-likely scenario is even being presented to ministers this time around. So how are they supposed to make good decisions? I highly doubt that Sajid Javid is only asking to churn out models that make the case for lockdown. That instruction, if it is being issued, will have come from somewhere else.
Often the job of scientific advice is to allow ministers to understand both a central case and the uncertainty surrounding it, what drives that uncertainty and when the uncertainty might be reduced. Speaking scientific truth to power is a difficult but necessary part of the democratic process if ministers are to be able to make an informed decision. This is what SAGE does.
If Dr. Vallance is accurately describing the advice given to ministers by SAGE, why did LSHTM not model those scenarios and estimate their likelihood? Why did the chairman of the SAGE modelling committee state that such scenarios had not been requested because they do not add anything useful to the discussion? The only explanation I can think of is that the broader range of scenarios referred to in the minutes of the SAGE meeting dated December 20th was not reflected in the SAGE memo circulated to ministers for that afternoon’s Cabinet meeting. That is, SAGE modelled less gloomy scenarios but didn’t bother to include them in the advice it gave to the Cabinet.
Dr. Vallance claims SAGE is a neutral adviser, being neither pessimistic nor optimistic and not pushing for any “dogmatic” answer or directive.
It is not the job of SAGE to take a particular policy stance or to either spread gloom or give Panglossian optimism. Ministers and the cabinet need to hear the information whether uncomfortable or encouraging. They of course need to factor it in to all the other information that provides inputs to policy decisions. SAGE does not provide dogmatic answers or directives, it provides information, advice, scenarios and helps determine possible consequences of actions. Part of the advice may contain a “reasonable worst case scenario” – data that are often seized upon.
But they are just that – a reasonable worst case scenario and one of many possible outcomes and trajectories presented to ministers for planning purposes and decision making.
But Dr. Vallance is failing to acknowledge the reason that prompted the need for his defence of SAGE modelling in the first place, which is that the chairman of his main modelling committee had stated that they had not been asked to provide alternative scenarios to ministers because it “doesn’t add any further information”. Dr. Vallance implies that others are at fault for having arbitrarily “seized upon” the reasonable worst case scenario presented to ministers, ignoring that the present controversy arose because the Government’s lead modeller said no other scenarios were modelled because they were pointless.
Dr. Vallance is also being, at best, naïve about the key role SAGE’s projections and advice have played in pushing the Government into making extreme interventions. His comments here about it being “not the job of SAGE to take a particular policy stance or to either spread gloom or give Panglossian optimism” are contradicted by his enthusiastic endorsement of boosters earlier in the same article – “Vaccine boosters are crucial” – and by what he told the BBC in October about his risk-averse approach to the pandemic.
My mantra for a long time during this (pandemic) has been… you’ve got to go sooner than you want to in terms of taking interventions. You’ve got to go harder than you want to, and you’ve got to go more geographically broad than you want to. And that is the Sage advice. And that’s what I’ve been saying. And I will say it going forward, and the prime minister knows that’s what I think. And he knows that’s what I would do in that situation.
That sounds very much like he’s offering policy recommendations to me, and recommendations of precisely the kind he’s denying SAGE makes in his Times article.
Dr. Vallance concludes with a defence of the role of science and the scientific method in the pandemic.
Science has served us extraordinarily well during this pandemic and has given us many insights as well as new diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics. Science is self-correcting, and advances by overturning previous dogma and challenging accepted truths. Encouraging a range of opinions, views and interpretation of data is all part of the process. No scientist would ever claim, in this fast-changing and unpredictable pandemic, to have a monopoly of wisdom on what happens next.
Yet two of America’s top scientists, Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, have been exposed as plotting to smear the eminent authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Dr. Collins wrote to Dr. Fauci that the declaration was the work of “three fringe epidemiologists” and “seems to be getting a lot of attention”. He added that “there needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet – is it underway?” Shortly afterwards an online ‘fact check‘ appeared, courtesy of a team that included U.K. Government-linked MP Neil O’Brien.
So much for challenging accepted truths and encouraging a range of opinions.
It’s good to see the gloomy lockdown zealots on the back foot for a change and having to defend themselves. I just wish they could stick with the facts rather than spinning make-believe and changing the ‘facts’ to fit the narrative rather than vice-versa.
Stop Press: Dr. Jenny Harries, Chief Executive of the UKHSA, has also taken to the airwaves in defence of the advisers’ doomy forecasts, telling the BBC that while there’s “a glimmer of Christmas hope in the findings that we published yesterday”, it “definitely isn’t yet at the point where we could downgrade that serious threat”, referring to her earlier claim that Omicron was “probably the most significant threat we’ve had since the start of the pandemic”. For evidence she pointed to the “quite staggering” speed of spread compared to previous variants – despite her own agency publishing data this week showing that the household secondary attack rate (the proportion of household contacts an infected person infects) of Omicron is lower than the direct secondary attack rate (an almost equivalent measure) of the Alpha variant this time last year.
Near the top of the results of Google new search of the phrase climate change today is a post from KPTM Fox 42 in Omaha, Nebraska claiming climate change is contributing to an increase in extreme weather events. This is false. Real-world data and the most recent report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicate the incidences of extreme weather events are not increasing, nor are the duration or severity of such events worsening.
“‘Climate change is something that it is real and here now,’” Shulski told KPTM, continuing, “‘It really impacts everything, the question is not did climate change cause it, the question is more how much worse was it made with climate change. There is a climate change signature on all of these events we experience, its really just a matter of how strong of a signature.’”
Nobody disputes climate change is occurring. Climate has changed on local, regional, continental, and global scales across the course of history. However, available data does not show ongoing climate change is making instances of extreme weather more common or more severe.
The KPTM article discusses a recent spate of tornadoes which struck Iowa and Nebraska in mid-December. Concerning tornadoes, the IPCC states, “There is low confidence in observed trends in small spatial-scale phenomena such as tornadoes.”
As discussed in Climate at a Glance: Tornadoes, data conclusively shows the number of tornadoes has been declining for the past 50 years, and, as shown in the figure below, the number of strong tornadoes, F3 or higher, has been dramatically declining for the past 50 years.
Concerning flooding, another extreme weather event Shulski links to climate change in the KPTM story, there has been no increase flooding frequency or severity as the climate modestly warms. The IPCC admits having “low confidence” in any climate change impact regarding the frequency or severity of floods. Although the IPCC states in its recent 6th Assessment Report, “the frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation have likely increased at the global scale over a majority of land regions with good observational coverage,” it explicitly states “heavier rainfall does not always lead to greater flooding.”
In addition, the IPCC writes, “Confidence about peak flow trends over past decades on the global scale is low, … [and] there is low confidence in the human influence on the changes in high river flows on the global scale.”
The best available evidence shows extreme weather is neither more frequent, nor more severe than it has been historically. Shulski was wrong to say otherwise, and KPTM was wrong to report her claims without checking the facts.
at what point will the world wake up to the fact that we are currently inhabiting far more of a testdemic than a pandemic?
data from the UK is showing that only 1 in 3 recent “covid hospitalizations” is actually in the hospital for covid. the vast majority were there for something else and tested positive after admission. this is literally tripling the reported count of new patients.
“Two-thirds of new Covid hospital patients in England were actually admitted for a different ailment, MailOnline’s analysis of NHS data suggests – as a growing number of studies show Omicron is much milder than Delta.
In the two weeks to December 21, hospitals in England recorded 563 new coronavirus inpatients — the majority of which are believed to be Omicron now that the variant is the country’s dominant stain.
But just 197 (35 per cent) were being primarily treated for Covid, with the remaining 366 (65 per cent) only testing positive after being admitted for something else.
Experts told MailOnline it was important to distinguish between admissions primarily for Covid so that rising numbers do not spook ministers into more social restrictions or scare the public from going to hospital.
The rising number of so-called ‘incidental cases’ – people who are only diagnosed with the virus after going to the NHS for a different ailment – is in line with the picture in South Africa.
Studies in the epicentre Gauteng province have shown up to three-quarters of Omicron patients there were not admitted primarily for the virus.”
how, at this stage of affairs and after 2 years of time to learn to get the stats straight is everyone still getting this all so wrong? it outright beggars belief.
how is anyone supposed to make decisions or analyze data when the quality is this low?
if you relentlessly test everyone in sight, symptomatic or no, for covid using overclocked PCR tests at 40+ Ct you’re going to find it everywhere. these tests were never actually suited for purpose and have been locking onto trace virus, dead virus, and all manner of other non-clinical positives.
this is not a sound basis for analysis or behavior.
hospitalization has been massively tainted by it as nosocomial spread is rife at the trace level. this issue gets amplified by the payout for finding such “cases” as it allows for more billing on new codes and access to additional insurance and coverage pools. this has turned the hyper-aggressive hunt for cases in hospitals into a huge profit center.
deaths are the same. death with (or within 30 days of) discernable trace virus detection by super sensitive assay is an outlandishly inclusive definition that vastly exceeds actual “death from covid” as a primary or even significant cause.
nothing else is counted this way. ever.
not in all of human history has anything remotely like this taken place.
we’re running more covid tests in a week in the US that we’ve run flu tests in entire decades and more in a season than we’ve run flu tests in the history of the nation.
is it any wonder that with such inclusive definitions, over-amplified detection modalities, and obsessive and malincentivized testing regimes that this all looks so “unprecedented”?
of course it does. we’ve never looked for anything in all of human history the way we’re looking for covid. what other result could one even plausibly expect?
we’ve tested our way into a pit of inescapable dodgy data quicksand.
continuing to treat this “data” as though it is clinically or societally meaningful has become a far greater problem than the disease itself.
the cure, of course, is simple:
stop this OCD level testing strategy.
stop testing the asymptomatic altogether
dial down the amplification on PCR to 30Ct at a max and probably something more like 26
stop obsessively testing healthy children
stop encouraging people to test themselves over and over and to demand the same from their friends and family
sending out rapid tests to everyone is not good public health policy. it’s epidemiological derangement.
it’s cosplay medicine that perpetuates panic through performative ritual and obeisance. it serves no useful end save digging this hole deeper.
it will not end, assuage, or mitigate spread or the pandemic. it will only lead to more misguided perception and response.
this is not normal. it’s not science. it’s not even sane.
in another big win for irony (who, let’s face it has been having a banner year) the relentless fear and overtesting is actually becoming a problem for hospitals.
the testdemic has become the problem and is combining with a profound lack of perspective to generate astonishing harm.
“a virus so dangerous that you need to test for it to tell it apart from the common cold” is a laughable pretext for hijacking half the planet.
it’s clear these folks cannot hear themselves anymore.
public health has turned into some sort of golem that cannot be turned off and will mindlessly keep digging a trench until the heat death of the universe unless someone steps in and disables it.
so stop it. stop getting tested.
when you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes and this is a very, very stupid game we’re all taking part in…
There is no moral, legal or logical argument for mandatory vaccination. The only logical argument, from a public health perspective, would be either to reduce the spread of infection or reduce the impact on health services via some other mechanism.
We will explore the evidence which shows that the COVID-19 supposed “vaccines” are incapable of achieving either.
That didn’t stop the UK parliament voting to allow the government to mandate vaccination for NHS staff. In doing so, they laid the path clear for a wider, national mandate.
UK MPs apparently decided that the doctors and nurses didn’t know what they were talking about and were not interested in the scientific evidence they cited. While this illustrates that decision making is not led by science, perhaps this is not the primary concern.
Whatever the political or popular opinion may be, to insist that an individual must submit to injection against their will is to deny them their inalienable right of bodily integrity.
This right was described by Professor David Feldman in Civil Liberties and Human Rights In England and Wales:
A right to be free from physical interference. [This] covers negative liberties: freedom from physical assaults, torture, medical or other experimentation, immunization and compelled eugenic or social sterilization, and cruel or degrading treatment or punishment. It also encompasses some positive duties on the state to protect people against inference by others.”
Both the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 3) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Articles 1 & 3) allegedly guarantee the integrity of the person.
However, these are “Human Rights” written on pieces of paper by politicians and lawyers. As such, they can be overruled by governments and other politicians and lawyers. Human Rights are not rights, they are government permits and permits can be rescinded.
More importantly, in the UK, there is a clear legal precedent for the concept of bodily integrity. In Montgomery vs Lanarkshire Health Board the Supreme Court ruled:
An adult person of sound mind is entitled to decide which, if any, of the available forms of treatment to undergo, and her consent must be obtained before treatment interfering with her bodily integrity is undertaken.”
If society decrees that the population no longer has a right to bodily integrity then the people become the slaves of that society. A society that advocates mandatory vaccinations equally advocates slavery. Those who advocate mandatory vaccination support slavery in principle. None of the justifications they offer negate this fact.
The legal definition of ownership is the “exclusive legal right to possession.” A vaccination mandate decrees that the individual no longer has legal possession of their own body. It removes the individual’s legal right to ownership of their physical being and hands it over to the state. This constitutes slavery.
The condition of being legally owned by someone else and forced to work for or obey them”
There are those who suggest that the “common good” warrants slavery. They state, based upon assumption and ignorance, that when a person refuses COVID-19 vaccination they are putting others at risk and behaving in a way that jeopardises the common good.
As pointed out by many, a mandate differs from law. However, a government mandate is something the state uses to claim the non-existent right to force people to obey. Individuals can be punished–fined or even imprisoned–for failing to abide with a state mandate. The right to bodily integrity is denied by mandate and all citizens are made slaves by virtue of it.
Some anti-rationalists have argued that a mandate does not constitute “force.” This is a ridiculous contention.
Threatening to fine people is coercion and warning of potential imprisonment is the threat of violence. This is the literal definition of the use of force:
Coercion or compulsion, especially with the use or threat of violence.”
Where violence is defined as:
Extremely forceful actions that are intended to hurt people or are likely to cause damage”
Those who believe in the concept of the common good, debating the point at which it overrides individual sovereignty, accept that some group they choose to empower has the right to force others to obey.
Regardless of whatever rationale they claim, by ultimately insisting that no citizen has the right to bodily integrity, they promote slavery, including their own.
Some people are a bit squeamish about admitting their support for slavery and prefer to pretend that forcing compliance through other means is not slavery.
O’Leary’s suggestion is that those who decline the vaccine should be punished for their disobedience. He thinks that threatening people with poverty, starvation and a shorter life expectancy is perfectly acceptable in order to force them do as he wishes. He believes that, if this isn’t officially mandated, doing so will somehow protect their rights:
[A mandate] is an infringement of your civil liberties. But you simply make life so difficult. Or [make it that] there are lots of things that you can’t do unless you get vaccinated”
Proponents of the “common good,” who insist that getting vaccinated is the “right thing” and therefore not complying is wrong, cannot both proclaim society’s alleged authority to ignore the inalienable right of bodily integrity and simultaneously pretend they oppose slavery.
If, as a society, we allow the government to mandate or if, like O’Leary, we choose to enforce vaccination by other means, then we have collectively consented to live in a slave state where we are all slaves.
If we go down this path we condemn future generations to slavery. Yet somehow those who decline the offer of slavery, who oppose it in principle, are considered to be selfish by wider society.
The supporters of slavery justify this to themselves because they believe the extremely limited public health impact of a low mortality respiratory disease is more important than human freedom.
This opinion is informed by the flawed and irrelevant assumption that the jabs protect others. The efficacy and safety of the vaccines is immaterial. To deny an individual’s right to bodily integrity is slavery. It does not matter what the claimed justification is.
There are already many slaves being traded, exploited and abused in the UK. While the experience of those who suffer the daily hell of modern slavery is in no way comparable to merely being forcibly injected with a drug once or twice a year, the principle of slavery is the same. It seems odd that the suggested “common good” doesn’t demand freedom for those currently living as slaves. Perhaps society no longer cares.
Putting aside the lack of moral and legal legitimacy, there are other reasons why we should reject any notion of a vaccine mandate. Primarily that the so-called vaccines don’t work and are dangerous.
“The state produced by the establishment of one or more pathogenic agents (such as a bacteria, protozoans, or viruses).”
If you had looked at the medical definition of “vaccine” in 2019 you would have understood a vaccine to be:
A preparation of killed microorganisms, living attenuated organisms, or living fully virulent organisms that is administered to produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease”
The quality or state of being immune; especially: a condition of being able to resist a particular disease especially through preventing development of a pathogenic microorganism or by counteracting the effects of its products.”
A vaccine was a drug that “especially” reduced infection. It could theoretically stop a pathogenic agent, such as a bacteria, protozoans, or virus from establishing itself in a biological system. Thus reducing the incidents of disease and subsequent transmission of the pathogen.
However, in the wake of the pseudopandemic, that is not what the changed definition of “vaccine” has come to mean today. The only thing an alleged, so-called vaccine is required to demonstrate is immunogenicity:
A preparation that is administered (as by injection) to stimulate the body’s immune response against a specific infectious agent or disease”
Purely by changing the definition, a “vaccine” is now a drug that stimulates an immune response. It says nothing about how effective or safe that immune response is. Inflammation is an immune response and it is potentially lethal.
Absent the ability to protect against infection, most people would consider a drug which only reduces the severity of disease to be a treatment, not a vaccine.
While it is true that language constantly evolves and definitions change all the time, where that change fundamentally redefines the commonly accepted meaning of a word, everyone needs to be aware of the new interpretation. If not, they could accept an implied meaning that no longer exists.
For example, people could easily be fooled into believing a COVID-19 “vaccine” stops infection. To draw a distinction between what most people imagine “vaccine” to mean and what it now means, we will refer to the alleged COVID-19 “vaccines” as jabs.
THE JABS HAVE NOT COMPLETED & DO NOT NEED TO COMPLETE ANY CLINICAL TRIALS
Unlike every vaccine that preceded them, the jabs have not completed clinical trials prior to being given to more people than any other vaccine in history.
At the time of writing there are no results posted for the NCT04614948 trial of the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA jab; none for the NCT04516746 Astrazeneca jab; there are no results from Moderna’s NCT04470427 trial nor any from J&J’s NCT04368728 trial of their Jansen jab.
When the UK medicines regulators, the MHRA, said that they“carried out a rigorous scientific assessment of all the available evidence of quality, safety and effectiveness,” prior to allowing the jabs’ Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA,) they did not mean they had studied the results of any clinical trials. They couldn’t, because there aren’t any.
What they meant is that they had received interim reports from the manufacturers and their sponsors (UK Research and Innovation, National Institutes for Health Research (NIHR), Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lemann Foundation etc.) The MHRA, as other regulators around the world, based their decision to grant the EUAs on these interim reports, not upon the results of any clinical trials.
Massive coronavirus vaccine trials involving tens of thousands of participants have so far surfaced no signs of serious side effects.”
The continual impression given is that the jabs are clinically proven to be safe and effective. In reality, few adverse reactions have been reported in the trials because no trial results have been posted.
The trials were designed to be blind Randomised Control Trials (RCTs.) As they were trialling the first proposed vaccines for a novel disease, the standard RCT approach to determine the safety and efficacy of the jabs was to compare the long term health outcomes of jab recipients to those of a placebo group. These would be “blinded,” meaning that the trial participants were not told if they had been jabbed or received a placebo.
The secondary outcomes for the trials were designed to assess the effects of the vaccines. This including assessment of any adverse drug reactions (ADRs) for up to 2 or more years after the final dose. So far, none of the secondary outcomes have been measured because we are more than a year away from the end of the minimum trial periods.
There is now no chance that these clinical trials will ever reveal any meaningful results. As reported in the British Medical Journal both J&J and Moderna have “unblinded” their trials by giving their jab to their placebo groups. They have abandoned the secondary outcomes, years before the trials are complete. When asked, neither Astrazeneca nor Pfizer-BioNTech denied doing the same.
In any event, it appears their trials were poorly designed and lacked scientific credibility. It is strongly alleged that Pfizer-BioNTech, at least, falsified data, unblinded their study, failed to adequately train staff and were reluctant to follow up on reported adverse events.
When independent researchers used a Freedom of Information request (FoIR) to ask UK regulator, The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), why the Pfizer-BioNTech NCT04614948 clinical trial hadn’t assessed the vaccine’s impact upon pregnant women, the MHRA stated:
The above trial was not conducted in the UK, the MHRA did not assess its content and are therefore not in a position to answer specific questions relating to it.”
Not bothering to consider the primary clinical trial doesn’t appear to be a very “rigorous scientific assessment.” Rather, it seems the MHRA are among a group of regulators who unquestioningly accepted whatever the manufacturers claim without genuinely scrutinising anything.
The MHRA have now formally adopted this laissez-faire approach to future jab regulation. Having aligned themselves with the Access Consortium of regulators (Australia, Canada, Singapore and Switzerland), the MHRA are among those who see no reason for any further regulatory scrutiny prior to the approval of new jabs.
The Consortium believe new iterations, responding to allegedly new variants of COVID-19, can effectively be waved through automatically. This is based upon the impossible.
The MHRA assert that their initial EUA reflected their appraisal of the “pivotal clinical trials,” for which there are no posted results. Having authorised the jab roll-outs without any substantiating evidence, the MHRA now claim that, for all tweaked future versions:
Clinical efficacy studies prior to approval are not required. Regulatory Authorities request bridging data on immunogenicity from a sufficient number of individuals”
This speeds up the process of getting jabs straight out of the corporate labs and into the arms of a broadly misinformed public. Whatever tweaks the manufacturers choose to make will just be rubber stamped by the Consortium as long as the pharmaceutical corporations submit the appropriate immunogenicity claims.
The issuance of an EUA is not the same as regulatory approval of a medicine. As explained by the U.S. regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA,) an EUA is a temporary authorisation of an investigational medication:
An EUA for a COVID-19 vaccine may allow for rapid and widespread deployment for administration of the investigational vaccine to millions of individuals”
The FDA also state that an investigational drug, still in trials, is an experimental drug:
An investigational drug can also be called an experimental drug.”
The current COVID-19 jabs are still in trials and are “experimental drugs.” So-called fact checkers have been dispatched to mislead the public into believing this is not the case.
For example Full Fact, the UK based political activists who work with policy makers to market their own business, claimed:
The three Covid vaccines currently approved for use in the UK have already been shown to be safe and effective in clinical trials.”
This was a factually inaccurate statement. In terms of issuing EUAs, all that was known from the phase 3 trials was the interim results.
These reported what little data was available from the first two months of phase 1. This was merely a claim that the jabs were relatively safe for a small cohort of fit and healthy, predominantly younger people. We will shortly discuss why even this assertion is false.
All we can say at this juncture is that there is no perceptible regulation of the jabs. They are effectively unregulated.
The trials have yet to demonstrate that the jabs are either safe or effective. The exclusion criteria for all the trials ruled out trialling the jabs on those most vulnerable to COVID-19. The interim reports from phase 1 only claim efficacy and safety among those least susceptible to apparent COVID-19 risks. Now those trials will never be completed.
The interim trial reports claimed efficacy in terms or relative instead of absolute risk reduction. This enabled the manufacturers to claim a 95%+ reduction in mortality (efficacy.) This was then reported to the public who were swayed by this reporting bias.
The claimed absolute risk reduction (efficacy) was typically less than 1%. Had this been reported to the public the people would have been less enthusiastic and perhaps more sceptical about the jabs, which is why it wasn’t.
The EUAs, on both sides of the Atlantic, also came with immunity from prosecution for the manufacturers. In the UK, the Human Medicines (Coronavirus and Influenza) (Amendment) Regulations 2020 extended the liability protection offered to administering medical practitioners to the pharmaceutical corporations.
Immunity from prosecution is an apparent deal breaker for the drug companies. In early 2021 the managing director of the World Bank, David Malpass, reported that some jab manufacturers would not distribute their jabs to countries that did not fully indemnify them against prosecution:
The immediate problem is indemnification. Pfizer has been hesitant to go into some of the countries because of the liability problems, they don’t have a liability shield. So we work with the countries to try to do that.”
There is no doubt that the jabs are experimental drugs that have not completed any clinical trials. As such the population who have received them are part of a global medical experiment. In partnership with government, that experiment is being conducted by global pharmaceutical corporations which have no liability for any harm they may cause.
Statements from the NHS such as “The COVID-19 vaccines are the best way to protect yourself and others” or “any side effects are usually mild and should not last longer than a week” are not based upon any clinical trial evidence. They are speculative, misleading and potentially dangerous proclamations.
Unless, before being jabbed, recipients were explicitly made aware of these facts they cannot possibly have given informed consent.
In each and every instance, despite the fact free denials of the comically misnamed fact checkers, this constitutes a breech of the Nuremberg Code.
BLAMING THE UNJABBED
Following the comments of the health secretary, Sajid Javid, the MSM dutifully reported that there are around 5M “unvaccinated” people in the UK. This figure appears to be only partially accurate.
According to figures released by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), by mid December 2021, with the booster roll-out well underway, of the approximate 44.6M adults in England, around 38.6M had received at least two doses and were therefore temporarily deemed to be “fully vaccinated.”
This means that currently about 6M adults in England alone are officially “unvaccinated.” England represents approximately 84% of the UK population. Assuming similar vaccine distribution figures for the whole of the UK, this suggests that at least 6.9M adults are officially unvaccinated. This represents nearly than 13% of the adult UK population.
The size of the unvaccinated population is set to grow. The UK government have already said that a booster will be needed for the NHS COVID Pass (certificate) for international travel.
Initially the UK government said that they didn’t intend to extend this to the domestic vaccine passport but they also repeatedly denied that they would introduce vaccine passports.
Subsequent comments from the Health Secretary clarified the government’s intention to continually shift their definition of “fully vaccinated.” To be fully vaccinated the slave must always agree to the next jab.
With the jab sales force insisting that boosters will be needed for years to come, it seems “fully vaccinated” status will last for about 6 month.
The MSM, on behalf of the government who fund them, have propagandised the nation into believing that it is the unvaccinated who are “overwhelming” health services. With headlines like ICU is Full Of The Unvaccinated – My Patience With Them Is Wearing Thin, it is no wonder that the jabbed majority are turning their hate towards the people who don’t want the jabs. It is extremely common to read social media comments such as:
Unvaccinated people are taking beds from other sick people, some of whom become sicker as a result. Not being vaccinated during a pandemic is an act of selfishness hiding behind the facade of individual liberty.”
The “ICU is Full” Guardian article was from an anonymous source. No one was willing to put their name to it. It was primarily an appeal to emotion and offered no evidence to back up any of its claims. This is because the evidence does not support any aspect of the published story. The only apparent reason for the article was to incite hatred.
Real journalists, like Kit Knightly from the OffGuardian, which is censored by the social media platforms, have been willing to put their name to the reporting of the facts.
As he shows, ICUs are not overwhelmed at all. They are quite busy, as usual, but they are certainly not overrun with COVID-19 “cases,” as the Guardian and others have deceptively claimed.
Currently there are 4330 critical care beds in England. On December 14th 2021, 925 were occupied by so-called COVID-19 patients, a COVID-19 ICU bed occupancy rate of 21.4%. There were 775 (17.9%) unoccupied ICU beds with 2657 beds (61.4%) taken by patients who had not tested positive for the selected COVID-19 nucleotide sequences.
In their Week 50 Vaccine Surveillance Report UKHSA state that, for the preceding 4 week period, 2965 alleged COVID-19 adult hospital patients had not received a jab and 4557 had received at least one. Therefore UKHSA claim that the un-jabbed represent 39.4% of total COVID-19 hospital admissions.
For the same 4 week period, UKHSA also reported that 715 of the 3083 total adult deaths, within 28 days of a positive test, were people who were not jabbed. This represents 23.2% of alleged COVID-19 deaths. With 28 deaths attributed to those with an unknown jab status, the remaining 2340 were jabbed. The jabbed represent 76% of all alleged COVID-19 deaths.
Similar data for Wales also belies the false claim that it is the unjabbed who are “overwhelming” health services. In November 2021 12.8% of hospital inpatients were “unvaccinated.” The “vaccinated” accounted for 84.5% of hospital inpatients with 2.7% of unknown jab status.
The anonymous claims reported in the Guardian weren’t even remotely accurate. The tale was a propagandist disinformation. It was “fake news.”
Yet the politicians are desperate to peddle the same lie, with the assistance of their compliant MSM. Once again, the Guardianreported the comments of the Health Secretary as if they were realistic. Speaking about the people who have considered the evidence and have decided not to take the jab, Javid said:
They must really think about the damage they are doing to society. They take up hospital beds that could have been used for someone with maybe a heart problem, or maybe someone who is waiting for elective surgery.”
At no point did the fearless journalists at the Guardian inform the public that what he was saying was total nonsense. Instead, they doubled-down on the lies with added disinformation of their own, claiming that “nine out of 10 of those needing the most care in hospital are unvaccinated.” Yet another example of absolute fake news, intended to deceive the public.
As we will discuss shortly, it is the seeming clamour to “get boosted,” incessantly pushed by the MSM and the politicians, effectively shutting down primary healthcare, that presents a far greater risk to public health. The mendacity of Javid’s disinformation was breathtaking.
The people who are queuing for their jabs aren’t selfish, just misinformed. However, the 13% of adult the population who don’t want one aren’t selfish either.
The MSM and the politicians persistently try to drive a wedge between the jabbed and the unjabbed. They seek to cause divisions based upon disinformation, lies and propaganda.
The reason for this is clear. Just like all tyrannical regimes throughout history, the current UK dictatorship wish to scapegoat a minority in order to avoid wider public attention turning on them. They do this to reduce the chance of the people questioning the tyrants who are enslaving them. It is nothing more complex than divide and rule.
THE JABS DON’T WORK
Speaking in October, the current UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, effectively admitted that the jabs are not “vaccines.” They do not function like any vaccines we are familiar with. Apparently, they are much more like a treatment:
Double vaccination provides a lot of protection against serious illness and death but it doesn’t protect you against catching the disease, and it doesn’t protect you against passing it on.”
Johnson’s observation was partially accurate. Recent research from the US found that there was no difference in viral load between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. These findings appear to be corroborated by a study from Singapore, which strongly advocated the jabs for their claimed ability to reduce mortality, but also noted:
PCR cycle threshold (Ct) values were similar between both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups at diagnosis, but viral loads decreased faster in vaccinated individuals […] viral load indicated by PCR Ct values was similar between vaccinated and unvaccinated patients.”
For the jabs to function as a vaccine, in the traditional sense, the higher the jab rate the lower disease prevalence should be. This is an obvious point, but seemingly one that needs to be stressed as the wider public appear to be largely unaware of this.
There is no statistical correlation between population jab rates, infection rates and disease prevalence. A joint U.S. and Canadian study, which assessed statistical reports from 68 countries and 2947 US counties found:
At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days. In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people.”
Yet, somewhat contrary to their own findings, the researchers still promoted the jabs as part of broader approach to disease mitigation using non pharmaceutical interventions, including wearing face-masks, lockdowns and social distancing. As we will discuss shortly, promoting the official narrative is now a prerequisite for peer review and publication.
Presumably, to stay within the permitted boundaries of the official scientific consensus, the researchers maintained the new definition of “vaccine,” describing a drug incapable of reducing infection rates that acts like a treatment:
Vaccinations offers protection to individuals against severe hospitalization and death.”
The peninsula of Gibraltar, with a population of around 34,000, was delighted to declare that it had achieved a 100% jab rate. Thereafter it suffered a surge in reported cases.
In Israel, where the definition of “fully vaccinated” means someone received two initial jabs and a booster (3 jabs,) there have been 67 recorded cases of the Omicron variant. Of these 54 (nearly 81%) were fully jabbed. Of the remaining 13 cases we don’t know if any of them were genuinely unjabbed. They could have received one or two jabs and still be categorised as not “fully vaccinated.”
If we look at a recent map of vaccine coverage provided by CNN we can identify some interesting comparisons.
Brazil, with jab coverage of 150 jabs per 100 people, has more than 103,000 COVID cases per million people (CPM). Neighbouring Bolivia, with 77 jabs per 100, has a case rate of just under 47,000 CPM. Paraguay has a slightly higher jab rate of 88 and a slightly higher case rate of 64,000 CPM. Argentina, with the highest jab rate of all, at 220 per 100, also has the highest CPM of all, at just over 117,000.
The most striking feature of the CNN map is the very low vaccinations rates in Africa. Nigeria, Tanzania and Zambia, for example, have less than 10 jabs per 100. They are among the countries with the lowest case rates in the world. Zambia has just over 11,000 CPM and Nigeria and Tanzania much less. By contrast Botswana, with a relatively high African vaccination rate of 62 per 100 people, has a CPM of nearly 82,000.
Some scientists are apparently mystified by the low rates of COVID-19 in Africa as a whole. They offer a range of possible explanations. They point towards a younger population or early border closures, some suggest lower urban density or perhaps more outdoor activity to account for the obvious anomaly.
Calling it a “mystery” Prof. Wafaa El-Sadr, global health lead at Columbia University, said:
Africa doesn’t have the vaccines and the resources to fight COVID-19 that they have in Europe and the US, but somehow they seem to be doing better.”
African nations are certainly doing better than the U.S. With approximately 4% of the World’s population and a vaccine rate of 147 per 100 people, the U.S. account for more than 36% of the current 27,586,743 active global cases.
In fact, the list of the top 20 nations with the highest case rates around the world is predominantly composed of the countries with the highest vaccination rates.
Scientists are looking at all the variables to try and figure out what could possibly explain the African mystery. The only factor they aren’t considering is the most obvious one.
Despite most African nations having no first wave, the global scientific and medical authorities are hell-bent on preventing the second with the jabs. Prof. Salim Abdool Karim from the South Africa’s University of KwaZulu-Natal said:
We need to be vaccinating all out to prepare for the next wave.”
There are multiple studies which demonstrate that natural immunity derived from infection is considerably better than any imparted by the jabs. A recent Israeli investigation suggests that natural immunity, following infection, is up to 27 times more robust than any conferred by the jabs.
Regardless of scientific debates about antigens, T-cells and immunogenicity etc., which all relate to how the jabs supposedly function, very basic statistical analysis is sufficient to clearly demonstrate that they do not work as vaccines.
The only remaining claim for the jabs efficacy is that they reduce hospitalisation and death. Unfortunately, there is a lot of evidence which casts doubt upon this claim too.
Anthony Fauci (left) & Salim Abdool Karim (right)
If the jabs are incapable of stopping infection and transmission and serve only to reduce natural immunity, there is no possible public health rationale for a jab mandate. An uninfected individual is no more likely to catch COVID-19 from an unjabbed person than they are from a jabbed citizen. According to the official definition of a COVID-19 case, the statistics show that the jabs don’t make any difference whatsoever to the spread of disease.
In his more recent address to the nation, pushing the unregulated booster jabs, Boris Johnson said:
Over the past year we have shown that vaccination is the key to beating Covid and that it works […] It is now clear that two doses of vaccine are simply not enough to give the level of protection we all need […] we must urgently reinforce our wall of vaccine protection to keep our friends and loved ones safe […] As we focus on boosters […] it will mean some other appointments will need to be postponed until the New Year […] If we don’t do this now, the wave of Omicron could be so big that cancellations and disruptions, like the loss of cancer appointments, would be even greater next year”
Johnson’s speech was utterly incoherent. On the one hand the vaccines work but on the other they don’t and a booster is required. To fend off a wave of cases, defined by a test that can’t identify cases, apparently trivial health interventions, like cancer screening appointments, need to be cancelled for the benefit of the nation’s health and the common good.
Shortly following Johnson’s plea to “get boosted now” the UK government clarified that GP surgeries across the land would focus upon jabs and emergency appointments only.
By declaring a “national mission” to jab as many people as possible, primary care has practically been suspended in the UK. This has been done in the winter, in the middle of an alleged respiratory disease pandemic. The Health impact from this will be disastrous.
The British Medical Association has already warned that the reconfiguration of the NHS, first into a COVID-19 only service and now a jab only service, has terrible public health consequences.
Just in the 3 month period following the first lockdown there were up to 1.5M fewer elective admissions to hospital; first time patient attendance, for all conditions, dropped by 2.6M; urgent cancer referrals were down by an alarming 280,000, with up to 26,000 fewer patients starting treatment, of which 15,000 would normally have first come to light via a GP referral.
Yet, knowing all this, the government would have you believe that their intention is to save life. This claim is not credible.
THE JABS ARE DANGEROUS
Further evidence from Israel suggests that the the period between the first and second jab, and shortly thereafter, increases the COVID-19 mortality risk. Vulnerability to disease is significantly greater during this 3 to 5 week period.
Prof. Dr. Seligmann (Ph.D) and his research partner calculated the base rate likelihood of COVID-19 mortality for different age groups prior to being jabbed. For example, for those over 60, it was 0.00022631% per day. He then contrasted this with the official Israeli data for mortality immediately post jab.
During the 13 day period after the first dose of the Pfizer jab, the COVID-19 daily mortality risk for the over 60’s was 14.5 times higher at 0.003303% per day. After 13 days this risk increased to 0.005484% per day, more than 24.2 times greater. This rose further, up to 6 days after the second dose, to 0.006076% per day, representing a 26.85-fold increased risk of COVID-19 mortality for the jabbed.
Prof. Seligmann found similarly huge increases in the COVID-19 mortality risk for all the jabs during what he called the “period of vaccination.” Once the recipients were “fully vaccinated” Seligmann found some benefit for the jabbed, as they afforded a marginal reduction in COVID-19 mortality risks when compared to those of the unjabbed.
He calculated that, for this benefit to outweigh the massive increase in risk during the “period of vaccination,” the jabs would have to provide near 100% protection for more than two years just to offset the initial health cost of being jabbed. This benefit is not seen in the data.
A recent Swedish study is one among many to show that any possible COVID-19 benefit, once fully jabbed, wanes quickly. Unable to protect those most vulnerable to COVID-19 after 6 months, Dr Seligmann’s research indicates that there is no COVID-19 health benefit associated with the jabs.
Official risk/benefit analysis suggests that being fully jabbed provides some marginal protection against hospitalisation. There is also a barely discernible statistical signal suggesting that they also reduce mortality, to a very limited degree.
Prof. Seligmann found the same. However, this only related to the COVID-19 statistics and they are based upon non-diagnostic RT-PCR test results. Official claims take no account for the additional “period of vaccination” risk identified by Seligmann.
Prof. Selligman and Dr. Spiro P. Pantazatos, assistant Professor of Clinical Neurobiology at Columbia University, subsequently undertook further evaluation of the all cause mortality risk following the jabs.
Their research showed an estimated U.S. Vaccine Fatality Rate (VFR) of 0.04%, suggesting that the CDC declared VFR of 0.002% underestimates mortality caused by the jabs by a factor of 20. The scientists found that the data indicated U.S. jab related deaths of between 146,000 and 187,000 for the period between February to August 2021.
Pantazatos and Seligmann also identified a significant increase in the all-cause mortality risk in the first 5-6 weeks following the first jab. Again, demonstrating that the initial risk of being jabbed is not offset by the short-lived benefit once “fully vaccinated.”
There is little reason to accept the officially reported statistics.
The attribution of COVID-19 to mortality is spurious. Death within 28 or 60 days of a positive RT-PCR test is used, depending on whose statistics you look at. This is not “proof” that COVID-19 was the cause of death.
Attribution of COVID-19 to hospital admissions is equally weak. Research by independent auditors shows that people with a range of non-COVID related presentations, such as limb or head injuries, are often admitted to hospital as supposed COVID-19 patents.
The researchers found that, in more than 90% of alleged COVID-19 admissions, there was no clinical reason to describe them as such.
All alleged benefits of the jabs are based upon these woolly definitions and questionable statistical assertions. Consequently, if we truly want to understand the possible benefits of the jabs, we need to look at all cause mortality.
This can be considered more reliable because it is simply an anaylisis of all registered deaths, irrespective of the cause.
If the jabs work and are safe, then a difference in all cause mortality between the the jabbed and the unjabbed should be observed. While the jabbed aren’t protected against other causes of death, they are supposedly protected against COVID-19 and this should be detectable in the data.
A team of statisticians from Queen Mary University London conducted a study of all cause mortality data in England. They examined the vaccine surveillance monitoring reports issued by the Office of National Statistics (ONS).
They noted that initially, as we’ve discussed, these official reports seem to show a benefit from the jabs. However, they identified a series of anomalies in the data.
They found that non-COVID-19 mortality patterns, for the supposedly unjabbed, had peaks that correlated with the jab rollouts. After the “period of vaccination” the Non COVID-19 mortality for both the jabbed and allegedly unjabbed cohorts remained similar and relatively stable. Further, in general, the unjabbed appeared to have unusually high non-COVID-19 mortality while the jabbed seemingly had unusually low non-COVID-19 mortality.
They also looked at the different categories of jabbed people. These were “within 21 days of first dose,” “at least 21 days after first dose,” and “second dose.”
They found a consistent but large variation in the mortality figures between these groups. “Second dose” non-COVID-19 mortality was persistently below baseline mortality, while “within 21 days” mortality was always far above baseline.
Most striking was the different patterns in mortality between the three studied age groups. Historical data shows that for those in the 60-69, 70-79 and 80+ age groups, while all cause mortality increases with age, the three groups always shared the same mortality distribution pattern, typically with a peak in the winter months. This is often referred to as “excess winter mortality.”
Yet in 2021, not only did the three groups have separate periods of peak mortality, dispersed unseasonably throughout the year, for the unjabbed that mortality corresponded directly with the jab rollouts in each age group. Nor did these peaks in unjabbed mortality corrolate to supposed waves of COVID-19. They followed the jab rollouts.
The researchers concluded:
Whatever the explanations for the observed data, it is clear that it is both unreliable and misleading […] we believe the most likely explanations are systematic miscategorisation of deaths between the different groups of unvaccinated and vaccinated; delayed or non-reporting of vaccinations; systematic underestimation of the proportion of unvaccinated [and] incorrect population selection for Covid deaths. With these considerations in mind we applied adjustments to the ONS data and showed that they lead to the conclusion that the vaccines do not reduce all-cause mortality, but rather produce genuine spikes in all-cause mortality shortly after vaccination.”
The head of the research team, Prof. Dr. Norman Fenton, gave a radio interview where he explained why his paper had not been peer reviewed or submitted to a journal for publication:
The unvaccinated seem to be dying after not getting the first dose and the single dose are dying after not getting the second dose […] the vaccinated are dying within 14 days of vaccination and are simply being categorised as unvaccinated […] There is no evidence for their efficacy when it is measured by the only sensible way to measure it, which is all cause mortality […] When we first started doing research on this we had no problem getting our work into peer reviewed papers, because we weren’t challenging the narrative […] As soon as it became clear, you know, with the sort of mass testing of asymptomatic people, that the potential for false positives for asymptomatics was inflating case numbers and COVID so-called hospitalisations and deaths, as soon as we started raising those concerns in our work, as soon as we submitted it for publication, it was being rejected without review. Something I have never had before.”
Rejecting science, because it doesn’t abide by the official narrative, is not a new problem but it is “anti-science” and suggests a coordinated effort to deceive. The work of Prof. Seligmann and others, looking at both COVID-19 and all cause mortality, appears to independently corroborate the finding of Queen Mary team.
There is no doubt that the jabs can kill. There have been a number of inquests that have found that death was caused by complications following the jabs.
Causes of death have included venous infarction thrombosis, intracerebral haemorrhage, anaphylaxis, vaccine-induced thrombosis & thrombocytopenia and “unrecognised consequences of elective COVID-19 vaccines,” to name a few. The only question is the scale of the mortality caused by the jabs.
US researchers found a 19 fold increase in myocarditis (heart inflammation) among the 12 – 15 year olds which directly correlated with the jab roll-out. The study was peer reviewed and then published, before being withdrawn by journal editors without explanation.
Myocarditis is extremely serious for young people and often requires a heart transplant in later life, significantly reducing their life expectancy.
Just as some in the scientific community are mystified by the almost perfect correlation between jab and COVID-19 “case” rates, so the medical profession are similarly bewildered by the marked rise in cardiac emergencies in Scotland. These too followed the jab rollout for the impacted age groups.
Apparently doctors haven’t got the faintest idea what the cause could possibly be. They are not investigating if it could be the jabs.
Why they aren’t could be seen as yet another mystery, because the statistical evidence indicates that the jabs are lethal. If we look at statistics from the ONS it is evident that, between January and October 2021, the jabbed under 60’s in England were dying at approximatly double the rate of the unjabbed.
This is not an insignificant fact but comes with important caveats. Prof. Fenton and his team did not analyse this age group because it is too broad. Depending on the progress with the jab rollouts, with older people jabbed first, the jabbed cohort is likely have a higher baseline mortality risk than the jabbed.
Taken in isolation this statistic doesn’t reveal much. It is more telling in context with a German study which also found a clear correlation between the jabs and mortality.
Together these add further corroboration the other statistical findings we’ve discussed. The German scientists, Prof. Dr. Rolf Steyer and Dr. Gregor Kappler, concluded:
The higher the vaccination rate, the higher the excess mortality. In view of the forthcoming policy measures aimed at reducing the virus, this figure is worrying and needs to be explained if further policy measures are to be taken with the aim of increasing the vaccination rate.”
The only rationale that can explain how the ONS, MHRA, EMA, FDA and other official bodies around the world are maintaining the lie that the jabs save lives is that they have chosen, or have been ordered, to release disinformation that knowingly endangers public health. There is yet more evidence from the clinical trials that this is the case.
The FDA, MHRA, EMA and other supposed regulators granted EUA’s for the Pfizer/BioNTech jab based upon 2 months of extremely limited, interim trial data. Research by the Canadian COVID Care Alliance has exposed this wholly untrustworthy process. There was no mention in the original, interim trial data, submitted by Pfizer, of the scale of the ADRs caused by their product.
Using relative risk they claimed their jabs were amazing and nearly everyone, including the regulators, simply took their word for it. Those who didn’t were vilified as “covid deniers” or “anti-vaxxers.”
Six months into the jab rollout Pfizer released more data with another interim study. They made more claims about the efficacy and safety of their BNT162b2 jabs:
BNT162b2 continued to be safe and have an acceptable adverse-event profile. Few participants had adverse events leading to withdrawal from the trial.”
However, this wasn’t true at all. In their released report, published by “respected journals” like the Lancet, they forgot to analyse the supplementary evidence concerning ADRs, also contained within their findings.
This revealed a consistent elevated risk of Adverse Events (AEs) for the jabbed. For example, “related events” are adverse health events that are deemed to be caused by the jab. For the jabbed the related risk ratio was 23.9, for the unjabbed it was 6. This is nearly a 300% increase in the risk of health harm if you take the Pfizer jab.
Serious adverse events are likely to put you in hospital. For the jabbed the risk was 0.6, for the unjabbed it was 0.5. In other words the jab increases your risk of being hospitalised by 10%.
A drug that increases illness in the population is not an “effective vaccine.” Reducing “case numbers” for one ailment is an utterly pointless exercise if population levels of illness and hospitalisation increase as a result. It gets worse.
Prior to unblinding their own trials, thereby ending the supposed RCTs years before completion, jabbed and unjabbed cohorts were equal in size. 15 people died in the jabbed cohort and 14 died in the unjabbed cohort. Following unblinding a further 5 jabbed people died, including 2 who were previously unjabbed.
The jab increases the mortality risk. This is precisely as observed by Seligmann, Fenton, Steyer, Kappler, Pantazatos and many other scientists and statisticians.
Pfizer were eager to report the 100% reduction in COVID-19 mortality in the main body of their study. Of the 21,926 people in the jabbed cohort only 1 died with a positive RT-PCR confirmed COVID-19 “case.” Whereas 2 of the 21,921 placebo group died. Hence Pfizer’s 100% improvement claim of efficacy.
They failed to mention that their product doubled the chance of you suffering a cardiovascular event and they definitely shied away from the most unpallatable reality of all. There were 4 heart attack deaths among the jabbed compared to 1 in the placebo group. A 300% increased risk of fatal heart failure following the jab.
If the objective of the jabs is to “save life” then it is impossible to understand how they ever received EUAs.
Fully indemnified against prosecution and with carte blanche from the regulators to do whatever they like, the pharmaceutical corporations are fully committed to jabbing all our children, including infants.
This is something our governments and the majority of the population wholeheartedly approve of. If you question it you are selfish.
THE REGULATORS SEEMING EFFORTS TO HIDE THE TRUTH ABOUT THE JABS
It is common to read claims from the regulators, and everyone else who advocates the jabs, that the benefits of the vaccines outweigh the risks.
This is based on the alleged risk of COVID-19, which is practically impossible to assess due to the massive corruption of the data, and an apparent blank refusal to consider any risks from the vaccines.
At first glance, the safety profiles for the jabs look appalling. So far, in the UK alone, there are 1,822 possible jab related deaths recorded via the MHRA yellow card scheme.
In response to a Freedom of Information Request (FOIR,) the MHRA revealed that they had received:
“[…] a total of 404 UK spontaneous suspected ADR reports for any vaccine between 01/01/2001 – 25/08/2021 associated with a fatal outcome.”
With more than 1,800 suspected fatalities reported for the COVID jabs already, currently they potentially account for three and half times more fatalities than all other vaccines combined over the last two decades. This is a statistical pattern repeated in every nation that has rolled them out.
We also know that the vast majority of possible ADRs remain unreported. A 2018 survey study of paediatric healthcare professionals found that 64% had not reported known ADRs. Of the total surveyed 16% didn’t even know the Yellow Card system existed and 26% didn’t know how to use it, with only 18% having undertaken any relevant training.
“It is estimated that only 10% of serious reactions and between 2 and 4% of non-serious reactions are reported.”
There is no evidence that the MHRA have done anything to improve yellow card reporting. Apparently they have promoted the Yellow Card Scheme, it is just that no one noticed. With nearly 400,000 COVID jab ADR reports on the system already, it is likely that the true figure is in excess of 10 million and possible UK deaths caused by the jabs could certainly exceed 18,000.
This is necessarily speculative to a degree, because the MHRA have not investigated any of the recorded ADRs. They have no idea how many people have been killed by the jabs and have shown no interest in finding out.
While they claim their role is to investigate potential ADRs, to provide an “early warning system” for possible vaccine harm, they also say:
The suspected ADRs described in this report are not interpreted as being proven side effects of COVID-19 vaccines.”
This is reasonable if those reports are then investigated. That is not what the MHRA do. Their position and their statements are wholly unreasonable.
To date, they have provided nothing that proves these reports are not evidence of ADRs. Their given interpretation, that these reports provide no proof, is meaningless. Nothing can ever be proven if you don’t bother to examine the evidence.
There is no commitment from the MHRA that they will ever investigate any Yellow Card reports for the jabs. All they will do is highlight possible safety issues, note the reports, and maybe discuss these with other national regulators. There is no expressed intention to question the manufacturer’s claims for the jabs at all.
The UK’s MHRA claim that a dedicated team look for “signals” in the data and where a signal is found they will discuss this with some selected experts.
Given that they acknowledge both the under-reporting and that current monitoring suggests the jabs have a mortality rate orders of magnitude worse than any vaccine, you would imagine that the MHRA would have identified a very concerning “signal.” Indeed they admit:
Yellow Cards in isolation are sufficient to allow signal detection.”
Yet they choose not to use the Yellow Cards as an “early warning.” There is no record of them following up on any Yellow Card reports. Instead they first apply a number of relative risk calculations to see if the signal is worthy of further discussion.
In particular, they use the MaxSPRT (Sequential Probability Ratio Test). This compares reported ADRs to the general population, or background, risk of the same adverse event. If the likelihood ratio test (LRT) indicates that the risk is higher following a jab, then a signal has been identified. However, dishonesty lurks within this approach.
MaxSPRT is based upon a series of assumptions about the data. Specifically that it is constantly monitored in real time and that there is a matched exposure between the jabbed and the unjabbed to contrast incident rates.
When we are talking about 40M jabbed compared to 7M injabbed adults, the disparity between and the size of the jabbed and the unjabbed cohorts invalidates this methodology.
This particular LRT, which conditions on the total number of events, is designed for the rare event case in which only one event is expected to be observed per exposure […] However, when events are not extremely rare, or when the probability within a stratum of more than one event occurring is not small, the assumptions of this LRT are violated.”
In other words the MHRA appraisal is highly sensitive to extremely rare ADRs but is likely to hide, rather than reveal, the more common side effects that are killing people. The MHRA are using a system that will obscure serious problems with the jabs. The only signals their dedicated team might discuss with experts will be “extremely rare.”
They won’t see any signals for more common adverse events and can therefore overlook the obvious and ignore the danger.
MHRA – Dedicated Team
Presumably this is why the MHRA have chosen not to use the “Yellow Cards in isolation.” The raw data clearly indicates huge reason for concern. It has to be reworked and remodelled in order to ignore the glaringly evident. Again, this is a common feature of all jab safety monitoring (pharmacovigilance) systems, which scientists have described as “utterly inadequate.”
Correlation does not prove causation, yet where correlation is persistent and pronounced the chance of it not demonstrating causation diminishes rapidly. Wherever we look, the jabs appear to be causing severe ADRs on an alarming scale.
COVID JABS: INEFFECTIVE, OPPRESSIVE AND DANGEROUS
There is no evidence to substantiate any official or MSM claims about COVID-19 jab efficacy or safety. They are experimental drugs with unknown risk profiles that are being forced upon people without offering them any opportunity to give their informed consent. The jab roll-outs breech numerous international conventions including the Nuremberg Code.
What data does exist is alarming, to say the least, and all the indications are that the jabs are extremely dangerous. There is no doubt that they can kill. Those who support a jab mandate are advocating that people should be forced to take a potentially lethal injection. Those who are aware of this, understandably, do not wish to take them.
For this they are being demonised by government, the MSM and a large percentage of those who have elected to be jabbed. If they try to raise any concerns they are dismissed by the same as anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, covid-deniers or dangerous refuseniks and are accused of being selfish. Despite that fact that it is the jab obsession that is destroying public health and medical services.
There is clear evidence of obfuscation and denial to hide the dangers of the jabs from the public. This seems to cross the threshold of criminality in nearly every nation state where the jabs are deployed. National populations are clearly under attack by their own governments and their partners.
However, perhaps the most insidious aspect of the jabs is their central role within a new system of governmental authority that is enslaving humanity. Our jab status is the required license to participate in a technocratic, behavioural control and surveillance grid. Not only will our vaccine passport (app) monitor and report where we go, who we meet and what we are allowed to do, it will also determine what services we can access.
Those who think the jabs are essential to protect themselves and others, against a low mortality respiratory virus, have either not been given, or choose to ignore, the information required to make this judgement. They believe that they are free because they can now register to use the services that hitherto were freely available to all. They have accepted that they need permission from the government simply to conduct normal, everyday activities.
They are committed to take whatever drugs are given to them for the rest of their lives. If they wish to retain their societal permits, this is not negotiable. Their imaginary freedom is conditional upon their continued compliance.
They do not own their own body and are no longer, in any sense, free. They are elective slaves and are seemingly content to condemn future generations, including their own children, to the same fate.
You can read more of Iain’s work at his blog In This Together or on UK Column. His new book Pseudopandemic, is now available, in both in kindle and paperback, from Amazon and other sellers. Or you can claim a free copy by subscribing to his newsletter.
If you are worried about Omicron, guess what? The vaccine they gave you is going to make you MORE likely to get infected, not less. If you stay on the vaccine treadmill, it will be even harder to get off in the future. In short, we’ve been lied to about the vaccine.
Everyone needs to stop listening to the CDC now and start listening to people who have been saying to ditch the vaccines and aggressively promote early treatment with repurposed drugs.
Alix Mayer alerted me to this game changing tweet which instantly went viral as you can see from the number of retweets:
Holy moly.
This study shows that after three months the vaccine effectiveness of Pfizer & Moderna against Omicron is actually negative. Pfizer customers are 76.5% more likely and Moderna customers are 39.3% more likely to be infected than unvaxxed people. https://t.co/wPgAwG8BW3pic.twitter.com/3Oh3IJSVIk
I want to tell you what this really means and how it is being attacked.
Summary: Refuse to comply with mandates
This paper means we will need to inject people every 30 days if we want to “protect” them. Based on what the vaccines do to our immune system, it’s likely that the needed interval will shorten with each booster.
If people don’t get boosted as required, they will be MORE vulnerable to Delta and Omicron than if they weren’t vaccinated. That’s what NEGATIVE vaccine efficacy means. It doesn’t mean the protection wears off (like we were told). It means the OPPOSITE of what you were told: it means the vaccine helps the virus to infect you (by suppressing your immune system). It means we were lied to.
In short, the vaccine is like a heroin addiction: once you’ve had a taste of it, you are hooked: you have to continue it for life if you want protection. If you stop it, you’re a sitting duck for the virus.
What’s worse is our government is mandating this now. In light of this paper, they will change the vaccine mandates to force you to get vaccinated every month or you will be fired from your job. Their next move could well be to make it illegal not to be vaccinated. This seems like where things are headed based on what is happening in other countries where they are quickly stripping away your rights to do anything without a vaccination.
And we have no clue what monthly (and later weekly) vaccination will do to your body. This has never been tested.
My advice is simple. If you have been vaccinated, you need to stop now. Do not get the booster. My friend Dr. Robert Malone is fond of repeating the old addage, “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
Sadly, most people cannot afford to lose their jobs, so they will get vaccinated.
Start at the comments, both from social media and also from medrxiv readers.
Check out the social media portion of the comments
Here are some comments (on old and new version of the paper):
So assume the results you like (high VE for recent vaccination) are causal, but hand wave confounders at results you don’t like (negative VE for distant vaccination)? Science?
This is a superb paper, especially the careful approach to CNV calling and the Bayesian methods used throughout.
Looking at the graphs, I see both vaccines lose all effectiveness at 90 days, but worse, actually drop into strong negative effectiveness after that time.This would mean that these vaccines *increase* one’s chances of infection after the initial 90 days “honeymoon” period.Am I getting this right?If so, why are governments pushing third doses as Omicron is becoming dominant?
The graphs above tell the story. Negative VE means the vaccine is helping the virus, not you.
So at 60 days, the protection is close to zero, so if you want to maintain protection, getting vaccinated every 30 days is required.
This isn’t a vaccine at all. This is basically stimulating your immune system so it is already “geared up” to fight the virus. That’s not what a vaccine is supposed to do.
Furthermore, the negative VE after 90 days means you are hooked for life and I would guess (based on the mechanism of action), that we will need shorter and shorter dosing intervals for every booster you get (since it kills off your immune system every time).
So it could very well be monthly boosters after the 2nd dose, weekly boosters after the 3rd dose, and perhaps daily boosters after the 4th dose to maintain your “immunity.”
You can’t stop after that because if you stop, you’re in worse shape than if you never started.
The stunning conclusion of the paper
In light of the exponential rise in Omicron cases, these findings highlight the need for massive rollout of vaccinations and booster vaccinations.
All I can say is “wow.” This should be a wake up call: the vaccines do not work. Stop repeating the insanity. Early treatments like the Fareed and Tyson protocol are 10X better than any new therapy, they don’t “hook you,” and they don’t cause disability or death.
If doctors started prescribing the Fareed and Tyson protocol, we’d have virtually no deaths, and few hospitalization. But they can’t do that since medical board will take away the licenses of any physicians who prescribe ivermectin, etc. This is happening now.
We are in this mess because the NIH, CDC, FDA are corrupt and incompetent and they will not hold themselves accountable in an open debate. This has been going on for 20 years in the vaccine space… it’s nothing new. The book “Evidence of harm” documents all of this. Kirby was deliberately neutral in his presentation (being non-judgmental like reporters are supposed to be), but any neutral thinking person will side against the authorities.
Why the paper went viral
So, the reason this paper went viral is because
It is well done,
It was done by PhDs in infectious disease and epidemiology,
The results show what is really happening, and
Nobody has been able to attack the paper with a credible argument, even on Twitter.
It confirms what my team of experts has been saying about negative VE
Here are some of the ridiculous attempts to discredit the paper:
This is a video with fake subtitles but you’ll enjoy watching it. It’s humor.
This article looks at the Danish study (described here) and the UK data. Note that the VE numbers in the two studies are different because if you separate out Omicron, you get a very different picture of VE compared to analyses that don’t separate this out: Denmark: Vaccine a DANGER to the vaxxed
While lockdowns were supposed to be temporary — initially just a couple of weeks to “flatten the curve” — nearly two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s no end in sight. Thanksgiving was once again canceled in many parts of the U.S., and many government leaders again urged residents to cancel their Christmas celebrations too. The latest “Omicron” mutation has given bureaucrats additional reasons to unleash their power and raise panic.
What many still don’t realize is that the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic has little to do with the spread of an actual virus, and everything to do with the planned global takeover and implementation of a technocratic agenda known as The Great Reset.
Universal mask mandates, social distancing, business shutdowns, online working and learning, and quarantining of asymptomatic individuals are all forms of “soft indoctrination” to get us used to an entirely new, and unfathomably inhumane, way of life devoid of our usual rights and freedoms.
The Other Klaus
Klaus Schwab is the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. Schwab announced the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset Agenda in June 2020,1 which includes stripping people of their privately owned assets.
In addition to being a poster boy for technocracy, Schwab also has a strong transhumanist bend, and wrote the book on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a hallmark of which is the merger of man and machine, biology and digital technology.2
According to Winter Oak — a British nonprofit social justice organization — Schwab and his globalist accomplices are using the COVID-19 pandemic “to bypass democratic accountability, to override opposition, to accelerate their agenda and to impose it on the rest of humankind against our will.”
Greatest Wealth Transfer in History Is Underway
While the Great Reset plan is being sold as a way to make life fair and equitable for all, the required sacrifices do not apply to the technocrats running the system.
On the contrary, as noted by Patrick Wood in an interview with James Delingpole, the wealth distribution and circular economies promoted by the technocratic elite will never benefit the people, because what they’re really referring to is the redistribution of wealth from the people, to themselves.
Evidence of this can be seen in the decision to allow big box stores to remain open during the pandemic while forcing small businesses to close, no matter how small the infection risk.
There’s really no rhyme or reason for such a decision, other than to shift wealth away from small, private business owners to multinational corporations. More than half of all small business owners fear their businesses won’t survive.3
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the collective wealth of 651 billionaires in the U.S. rose by more than $1 trillion (36%).4 To put their current wealth in perspective, not only did the number of billionaires in America swell to 745 during the pandemic, but their assets grew by $2.1 trillion.5
According to the online newsletter Inequality, “The $5 trillion in wealth now held by 745 billionaires is two-thirds more than the $3 trillion in wealth held by the bottom 50 percent of U.S. households estimated by the Federal Reserve Board.”
As noted by Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, “Never before has America seen such an accumulation of wealth in so few hands.”6
That’s technocratic wealth redistribution for you. Ultimately, The Great Reset will result in two tiers or people: the technocratic elite, who have all the power and rule over all assets, and the rest of humanity, who have no power, no assets and no voice.
That the COVID-19 pandemic is a form of class war is also evident in the way rules are enforced. While citizens are threatened with fines and arrest if they don’t do as they’re told, those who lay down the rules repeatedly break them without repercussions.
What Vaccines Have to Do With It
If you need more evidence that we’re in the middle of a technocratic takeover, look no further than the mass vaccination agenda and the promotion of fake, lab-grown meat. Bill Gates, another frontline technocrat, has repeatedly stated that we have no choice but to vaccinate everyone against COVID-19.
Naturally, he’s heavily invested in said vaccine and stands to gain handsomely from a global mass vaccination campaign. Technocrats are nothing if not self-serving, all while pretending to be do-gooders — much like COVID Claus in our little video.
Eventually, your personal identification, medical records, finances and who knows what else will all be tied together and embedded somewhere on or in your body. Every possible aspect of your biology and life activities will be trackable 24/7. You will also be digitally tied into the internet of things, which eventually will include smart cities.
All the different parts of this giant population control grid fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The global vaccination agenda ties into the biometric identity agenda, which ties into the cashless society agenda, which ties into the social credit system agenda, which ties into the social engineering agenda and so on.
When you follow this experiment to its ultimate conclusion, you find all of humanity enslaved within a digitized prison with no way out. Those who rebel will simply have their digital-everything restricted or shut down.
Fake Meat Is Part of the Reset Too
The rise of fake, lab-grown meat is a puzzle piece of The Great Reset agenda too. According to the World Economic Forum, lab-grown, cultured meat is a more sustainable alternative to conventional livestock, and in the future, we’ll all be eating a lot less meat. As noted on its website:7
“As the world looks to reset its economy, along with food systems, in a cleaner way post-pandemic, one more sustainable solution coming to fruition is cultured meat … Cultured meat takes much less time to grow, uses fewer of the planet’s resources, and no animals are slaughtered.”
But don’t think for a second that this has anything to do with environmental protection. No, it’s about controlling the food supply and preventing food independence.
Already, multinational corporations have taken over a majority of the global food supply with their patented genetically engineered seeds. Patented cultured meats and seafood will allow private companies to control the food supply in its entirety, and by controlling the food supply, they will control countries and entire populations.
Public health will undoubtedly suffer from this dietary switch, as canola and safflower oil8 are primary sources of fat in these fake meat concoctions. Vegetable oils are loaded with linoleic acid (LA), an omega-6 fat that, in excess, acts as a metabolic poison, causing severe mitochondrial dysfunction, insulin resistance, decreased NAD+ levels, obesity and a radical decrease in your ability to generate cellular energy.
Our LA consumption 150 years ago was between 2 and 3 grams per day. Today it is 10 to 20 times higher. If fake meat becomes a staple, the average LA intake is bound to increase even further.
Make a Christmas Vow to Undo The Great Reset
The Great Reset is well underway, but it’s not yet too late to stop it. Enough people have to see it and understand it, though. And then they must act. If we want to prevent The Great Reset from destroying life as we know it, we must view civil disobedience as a duty. We must resist it from every angle.
We must reclaim our sovereignty, our right to live free, to open our businesses and move about freely. We must communicate with our elected leaders and demand they not infringe on our constitutional rights. We have to engage in political processes and help educate our local sheriffs of their role as defenders of the constitution. We may also need to support legal challenges.
A small step in the right direction that you can take right now would be to celebrate Christmas like you normally would this week, and not allow the Klaus Schwabs and Bill Gateses of the world rob you of valuable time with family and friends.
There are no guarantees in this life, and for many, this will be their last Christmas. So, spend it well. Cherish life by actually living it and spending it with those you love. Refusing to give up our humanity is how we resist The Great Reset.
The spectacular, catalyzing terror attack of 9/11 was not allowed to happen. It was made to happen. But why? Who, other than the devout Muslim suicide warriors posited by the official 9/11 conspiracy theorists, would do such a thing? And for what purpose?
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TRANSCRIPT
“The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality—counter-moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical.”
Joseph Conrad The Secret Agent
INTRODUCTION
Alexandria, Egypt. July 23rd, 1954.
It’s Revolution Day in Egypt and the streets of Alexandria are teeming with revelers. Two men—Victor Levy and Philip Natanson—pick their way through the crowd on their way to the cinema quarter, each nervously clutching a device in their pocket. Eyeing the fire trucks parked at the intersections, Philip leans over to Victor and whispers: “They’re expecting us.”
They reach the steps of the Rio Cinema just as the audience from the afternoon showing begin pouring out of the entrance. They fight their way through the stream of people and into the foyer and immediately see a man in the usual garb of an Egyptian plainclothes detective waiting for them. Philip turns to run away but instantly a wave of heat begins to sear his thigh. He tries to tell Victor to run, but no words come out. Instead, a white hot flame leaps from his trousers. He squeezes his thigh with all his strength in a vain attempt to stop the flame before the bomb can ignite—but it’s too late.
There’s an explosion.
Philip lies on the ground, his arms and legs burnt black from the bomb. Victor is nowhere to be seen. Soon, a police sergeant arrives, along with the plainclothes detective. Someone in the crowd shouts, “Take care! He may have another bomb!” But the sergeant moves in all the same. “Don’t worry. We were waiting for them.”
The police had been expecting them. Victor and Philip were Egyptian Jews, members of a sleeper cell established by Israeli military intelligence in 1951.
The Israelis had watched in dismay as the military coup in Egypt in 1952 led to the rise of Gamel Abdel Nasser, who was not only hostile to Israel, but who, as a perceived anti-communist, was securing military and financial aid from the Americans and even the British. With Britain already staging talks to withdraw from their Suez military base, Israel decided to act. In 1954, they activated their military intelligence sleeper cell in the country for an audacious mission. Codenamed Operation Susannah, their plan was to stage an increasingly spectacular series of bombings in Cairo and Alexandria.
The first bombing—an explosion at the Alexandria central post office on July 2nd—had gone off without a hitch. The second, a simultaneous attack on the American Libraries in Cairo and Alexandria, was similarly successful. It was their third attack—an ambitious attempt to bomb two cinemas in Cairo, two in Alexandria and the Cairo railway station—that failed, derailing the operation. Ten members of the cell were rounded up. Of the ten, two committed suicide in the course of their interrogations by the Egyptian police, two more were executed, and six were sentenced to prison, eventually making their way to Israel after their release.
After decades of internal Israeli investigations, finger pointing, political scandal and high-profile resignations, the full truth of Operation Susannah remains shrouded in official secrecy. The Israeli government did not even formally acknowledge the incident until 2005, a full half century after the affair, when nine of the agents were officially commended for their service.
But the reasoning behind the operation was revealed during one of the commissions of inquiry that was established to examine the affair. According to one officer who was given oral instructions directly from Israel’s Military Intelligence chief, Binyamin Gibli:
[Our goal is] to break the West’s confidence in the existing [Egyptian] regime …. The actions should cause arrests, demonstrations, and expressions of revenge. The Israeli origin should be totally covered while attention should be shifted to any other possible factor. The purpose is to prevent economic and military aid from the West to Egypt.
In short, the Israelis had attempted a false flag operation, hoping to blame their own spectacular acts of violence on the Muslim Brotherhood or the communists in order to destabilize Nasser’s government, undermine Western confidence in its Egyptian ally, and persuade the British military to remain at their Suez base.
The operation was a failure in every sense. The cell was discovered and its members imprisoned. Their actions did not destabilize the Nasser government, nor did they influence the relationship between Egypt and the West. And the British did leave their base in 1956, after an abortive Israeli/British/French invasion of the region was brought to an end by the US and the Soviets. But it did implant an idea in the minds of the Western military planners: that acts of terrorism could be staged and blamed on Muslim scapegoats to further their own political goals.
As we shall see, it was not long before America’s military brass were forwarding their own operational plans making use of this tactic . . . plans that would culminate in the most spectacular terrorist attack the world had yet seen.
Part Two: 9/11
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
EARLY SHOW: Miles and miles of sunshine. Miles Davis. Going to put Miles out there today. Nice as it could be across the Northeast. Rough seas still from from the chop from that hurricane, but other than that it’s kind of quiet around the country. We like quiet. It’s quiet. It’s too quiet.
In a matter of moments, however, the quiet of that Tuesday morning transformed into the turbulence of 9/11 and the world seemed to turn upside-down. As the events of that day played out like a Hollywood movie on tv screens around the world, the meaning of those events was still far from clear. Who was behind this attack? Why were they attacking? What did the perpetrators hope to gain from it?
And yet it was there, in the initial hours of those chaotic events—years before the congressional inquiries and presidential commissions presumed to answer those questions—that all of the essential pieces of the official story of 9/11 were laid out on the tv screens of the American public.
8:50 AM
DIANE SAWYER: We want to tell you what we know as we know it, but we just got a report in that there’s been some sort of explosion at the World Trade Center in New York City. One report said—and we can’t confirm any of this—that a plane may have hit one of the two towers of the World Trade Center, but again you’re seeing the live pictures here.
9:03 AM JON SCOTT: There was a pilot who flew— There was another one! We just saw— We just saw another. We just saw another one apparently go— Another plane just flew into the second tower. This raises— This has to be deliberate, folks.
CORRESPONDENT: Well, that would begin to say that, yeah.
SCOTT: We just saw on live television as a second plane flew into the second tower of the World Trade Center. Now, given what has been going on around the world, some of the key suspects come to mind: Osama bin Laden. Who knows what?
11:51 AM MARK WALSH: I was watching with my roommate—it was approximately several minutes after the first plane had hit. I saw this plane come out of nowhere and just ream right into the side of the Twin Tower, exploding through the other side. And then I witnessed both towers collapse, one first and then the second, mostly due to structural failure because the fire was just too intense.
11:54 AM JERROLD POST: The highest degree of probability associated with this attack, which had remarkable coordination and logistical sophistication, would be Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda group.
PETER JENNINGS: He—an engineer and an architect—speculates here that the heat above the crash site on the twin trade towers may have indeed caused the building above to melt, just simply collapsing in itself and putting enormous weight on the rest of the building below which could not possibly stand it. And the steel columns which go up through the building, built to code at best would only be able, he believes, to have been able to stand an hour or an hour and a half of intense fire like this, pressing down on the rest of the building until it finally was able to give way.
Remarkably, these initial, off-the-cuff speculations turned out to be—according to the various inquiries and investigations that followed—accurate in all their main respects. Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, had planned and directed this attack. The Twin Towers had collapsed due to structural failure because the fire was just too intense.
These assertions, drilled into the minds of a susceptible audience still reeling in shock from the horror of the events they had just witnessed, became the core tenets of what would become enshrined in the final report of the 9/11 Commission as the “official story” of 9/11.
In this official story, Osama bin Laden, once the “anti-Soviet warrior on the road to peace,” was now an international terror kingpin. Radicalized by the arrival of US military forces in the Arabian peninsula in the Gulf war, he issued a fatwa against the United States and began a series of strikes on US targets; first bombing the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, and then bombing the USS Cole while it was harbored in Aden in October of 2000.
According to this version of events, the 9/11 plot was hatched by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a “highly educated” Pakistani militant who presented the “planes operation“—as the 9/11 Commission asserts it was originally known—to Osama bin Laden and his chief of operations, Mohammed Atef, in 1996. It was bin Laden, we are told, who greenlighted the operation “sometime in late 1998 or early 1999.” The three of them developed a list of buildings to be targeted—the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and the World Trade Center—and bin Laden himself hand-picked the men he wanted to carry out the operation.
Carefully moving their operatives into place over the course of the next two years, this crack terror squad—devoted Muslim radicals willing to die for their beliefs—succeeded through a combination of skill and the colossal failure of the American intelligence complex, hindered by bureaucracy and hampered by a lack of political will to recognize the growing threat of Islamic terror.
No individual was to blame for this “failure,” the official story of 9/11 concludes, but the remedy to the problems presented by the 9/11 attack was obvious: to erect a new homeland security complex, tear down the walls between foreign intelligence and domestic policing, implement warrantless surveillance and other legally dubious means of disrupting potential terror threats on the home front, and launch a war on terror abroad to bring the battle to the terrorists.
But this narrative, now enshrined as the official history of 9/11—that the 9/11 plot was hatched by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 1996, that it was directed by terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and that it was executed by Al Qaeda so flawlessly that the intelligence agencies could not have even envisioned it, let alone prevented it—
GEORGE W. BUSH: Nobody in our government, at least—and I don’t think the prior government—could envision flying airplanes into buildings.
—is now contested in every respect, even by defenders of that official history.
As even mainstream authors like Jason Burke were forced to admit, the popular conception of Al Qaeda—that of a top-down organization with a single leader overseeing its operations—was a convenient fiction, created by the FBI so they could prosecute bin Laden in absentia for the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in East Africa. In order to prosecute bin Laden, they had to show that Al Qaeda “coordinates the activities of its global membership” and that bin Laden, as the leader of the group, bears the responsibility for any actions attributed to the organization.
JASON BURKE: The idea, which is critical to the FBI’s prosecution—that bin laden ran a coherent organization with operatives and cells all around the world, of which you could be a member—is a myth. There is no Al Qaeda organization. There is no international network with a leader, with carders who will unquestionably obey orders, with tentacles that stretch out to sleeper cells in America, in Africa, in Europe. That idea of a coherent structured terrorist network with an organized capability simply does not exist.
Even the 9/11 Commission’s final report had to admit that Al Qaeda was less of a mafia-like organization with a capo served by his faithful lieutenants and more of a funding organization for “terrorist entrepreneurs.” “Al Qaeda’s worldwide terrorist operations,” the report conceded, “relied heavily on the ideas and work of enterprising and strong-willed field commanders who enjoyed considerable autonomy.”
As we saw in Part 1 of this exploration, Origin Story, these “terrorist entrepreneurs” included among their ranks renowned international Islamic radicals—like “The Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman—and lesser-known but incredibly prolific terror cell leaders—like Ali Mohamed—whose remarkable abilities to evade State Department watch lists and foment and direct spectacular terror attacks directly under the nose of the intelligence agencies defies explanation . . . unless one assumes, as their closest associates did, that they were working under the purview of those intelligence agencies.
In order to better understand this aspect of the story, we have to return to 1990, the year that the specter of Islamic terror appeared on the shores of the United States.
Abdullah Azzam—Osama bin Laden’s mentor and co-founder with bin Laden of the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), or the “Office of Services,” which provided funding, training and an international support network to the “Afghan Arabs” during the Soviet-Afghan war—is dead, killed in a car bombing in Peshawar, Pakistan. It is never determined who committed the assassination, but Azzam’s death resolves a dispute about the future of the jihad movement. Azzam had favoured continuing the fight in Afghanistan, pressing for the formation of an Islamic regime in Kabul. Bin Laden had other ideas; and now, as the undisputed leader of the old MAK network, he is free to pursue those ideas under the “Al Qaeda” banner.
But “Al Qaeda,” at this point, barely even exists as a propaganda construct. Despite grandiose visions of creating “a unified global jihad movement,” the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan and the end of the war leaves the group’s future in doubt. Bin Laden returns to Saudi Arabia, looking for ways to leverage his family’s wealth and power to make a name for himself in the Muslim world.
Meanwhile, in New York, the era of “Islamic terror” in the United States is about to begin.
Manhattan, New York. November 5th, 1990.
Meir Kahane—an Orthodox Jewish rabbi and a convicted terrorist whose anti-Arab views were considered so extreme he was banned from the Israeli Knesset—has just finished delivering a speech in the Morgan D Room of the New York Marriott East Side Hotel. Leaving the podium, Kahane has begun mingling with the crowd. Suddenly one man, Sayyid Nosair, draws a .357 Magnum and fires, hitting Kahane twice, once in the neck.
Nosair flees, shooting one of Kahane’s supporters in the leg in his rush out the door. His accomplice, Mahmud Abouhalima, is supposed to be waiting at the front door in a taxi to drive him away, but the doorman had waved Abouhalima away moments earlier, so Nosair jumps in the wrong cab by mistake. When he realizes his error, he brandishes the .357, ordering the cabbie to start driving. Instead, the driver scrambles out of the taxi and runs away.
Nosair is forced to flee on foot, racing down Lexington Avenue with his gun still in hand. Carlos Acosta, a US postal inspector, tries to stop him, drawing his weapon, but it’s too late; Nosair fires first, hitting Acosta in the shoulder. Undeterred, Acosta drops to his knee, steadies himself and shoots back, hitting Nosair in the neck. Both Nosair and Kahane are rushed to Bellevue Hospital’s trauma unit. Nosair survives his emergency operation. Kahane does not.
The dramatic events of that November night would culminate in an even more surprising verdict 13 months later. Not only was Nosair treated as a “lone gunman” acting of his own accord, but he was not even convicted of Kahane’s murder. Despite such a brazen assassination—perpetrated in a crowded room and followed by a spectacular chase—Nosair was acquitted of murder, convicted instead on four lesser counts, including gun possession, assault and coercion. He was sentenced to just 22 years.
So, what went wrong? The jurors contend that they had “reasonable doubt” of Nosair’s guilt because “the prosecution did not offer a witness during the five-week trial who saw the defendant fire the fatal shots” and—since Kahane’s family had opposed an autopsy—the fatal bullet could not be matched to Nosair’s weapon. But, in reality, the fix was in from the start. As even the Congressional Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks conceded in a staff statement a decade after the trial:
According to FBI officials who were interviewed, the NYPD and the District Attorney’s office resisted attempts to label the Kahane assassination a “conspiracy” despite the apparent links to a broader network of radicals. Instead, these organizations reportedly wanted the appearance of speedy justice and a quick resolution to a volatile situation. By arresting Nosair, they felt they had accomplished both.
The typically bureaucratic wording of the statement obscures the reality: the NYPD and the District Attorney’s office didn’t just passively resist the attempts to “label” the assassination a “conspiracy”; they deliberately covered up vitally important information that would have unwound that conspiracy and undermined the next decade of spectacular Al Qaeda terrorism.
Immediately after his arrest, forty-seven boxes of material were seized from Nosair’s house in New Jersey. Among those materials were Top Secret training manuals from Fort Bragg and Secret communiqués from the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Lest there be any doubt where the materials came from, they even discovered a video of Ali Mohammed’s lectures at the Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. But those weren’t the only pieces of evidence that connected the Kahane assassination conspiracy—now commonly portrayed as the first act of Islamic terrorism on US soil—to Ali Mohammed, the remarkable CIA asset, US Army officer and FBI informant who, we are told, was “Al Qaeda’s” strangely untouchable “triple agent” in the heart of the American intelligence establishment.
El Sayyid Nosair himself—the 34-year old Egyptian-born janitor with a penchant for Prozac who quite literally got away with murder—was, as it turns out, not unknown to the authorities. In fact, he had been known to the FBI since at least the previous summer. That’s when, as it was later admitted, Nosair and a ragtag bunch of associates had been surveilled loading up a convoy of vehicles with semi-aututomatic weapons and copious amounts of ammo and heading to the Calverton Shooting Range on Long Island.
For four consecutive Sundays in July of 1989, the FBI’s elite Special O perations Group—apparently tipped off that “PLO terrorists were threatening to blow up casinos in Atlantic City”—followed Nosair’s convoy to the shooting range, snapping dozens of photographs of the group engaging in target practice with handguns, rifles and even an AK-47.
The group had set off from the Brooklyn Al Kifah Refugee Center—Al Qaeda’s New York office, which, as we have seen, not only operated in full view of the intelligence community but “doubled as a recruiting post for the CIA seeking to steer fresh troops to the mujahideen” in Afghanistan.
Among those in attendance at the FBI-surveilled target practice sessions:
Nosair himself, brandishing the chrome-plated .357 that he would later use to slay Kahane;
Clement Rodney Hampton-El, an American-born black Muslim medical technician known as “Dr. Rashid” who claimed to have been wounded in Afghanistan;
Mahmud Abouhalima, known as “the Red” for his curly red hair, covered during the sessions by an NRA cap;
Nidal Ayyad, a Kuwaiti who had taken classes to become a US citizen;
and Mohammed Salameh, a Palestinian who grew up in Jordan and studied under Abdullah Azzam.
Not present at those sessions in July, however, was the group’s trainer, Ali Mohammed, the remarkable Al Qaeda “triple agent” who had been taking weekend breaks from his post at the heart of the US Army’s Special Forces training center at Fort Bragg to instruct the Al Kifah cell in the techniques of guerrilla warfare, including bomb making and weapons handling.
Nosair and his fellow Al Kifah plotters had been under surveillance by the FBI. Mohammed, their handler came straight from Fort Bragg, providing them with Top Secret government documents and personally overseeing their training. But, incredibly, none of these points were raised at Nosair’s trial for the murder of Kahane. FBI officers who tried to follow the leads into the bigger plot were ordered to stand down.
INTERVIEWER: What was your theory about the “lone gunman” theory.
ROBERT FRIEDMAN: I thought it was preposterous. Based on what my sources in the NYPD told me that they were ordered to treat this as a simple homicide, based on what my sources in the FBI told me that every time that they got a little bit ambitious and started broadening their investigation to search out El Sayyid Nosair’s possible alleged terrorist links, they were told from the top to cool it, to stop investigating. That the NYPD would handle it as a simple homicide.
And, according to the official history, the boxes of Arabic documents seized from Nosair’s house were not translated until years later.
Nosair’s not guilty verdict was cheered by his supporters, and the same cadre of Ali Mohammed-trained radicals who had been surveilled at the shooting range by the FBI moved on to plot their next spectacular terror attack: the bombing of the World Trade Center.
And, as would be revealed in dramatic fashion years after the event, this plot, too, had an FBI informant at its heart.
DAN RATHER: Last winter, the FBI was praised for its speed in cracking the case of the World Trade Center bombing and bringing four suspects to trial. Now there is some evidence that the FBI may have known of the plot in advance through an informant and might—might—even have stopped the bombing that killed six people.
When Emad Salem—a former lieutenant colonel in the Egyptian army who arrived in the United States in 1988—began working as an FBI asset, he was not originally assigned to infiltrate Islamic terror groups. No, in 1988 the Cold War was still on and the FBI tasked Salem with penetrating KGB and Russian mafia rings operating in New York City.
But by 1991, things had changed. With the Cold War over, the Bureau’s priorities were shifting. Salem’s handler, Nancy Floyd, who appreciated his work, thought the Egyptian informant’s background might make him useful to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Salem’s new handlers in the Bureau’s counterterror division, Louie Napoli and John Anticev, put him to work infiltrating the groups raising funds for international Islamic terror on US soil. His first priority: insinuating himself into the ring around the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abel Rahman, including El Sayyid Nosair, then on trial for the slaying of Kahane, and his Calverton shooting range associates.
Salem was remarkably successful in his assignment. Haunting the trial of Nosair, he soon befriended Nosair’s cousin, Ibrahim el-Gabrowny. El-Gabrowny immediately took to the affable Egyptian, introducing Salem to Nosair in jail and describing him as “a new member of the family.” In a mere matter of weeks, Salem was caught on camera as one of Rahman’s bodyguards, even personally driving the Blind Sheikh to Detroit to deliver fundraising speeches.
Soon thereafter, el-Gabrowny invited Salem to join him for dinner at his Brooklyn apartment. There, after turning up the television in the dining room, explaining that he feared the apartment was bugged, el-Gabrowny sought to recruit Salem for a special mission.
EMAD SALEM: I was in Brooklyn with Ibrahim el-Gabrowny. Ibrahim el-Gabrowny is Sayyid Nosair’s cousin. He said that, “We should start to do something, brother, so the government has some pressure and they don’t put Brother Sayyid in more trouble.”
So I said, “Sure, of course we should do something.”
He said, “OK, and you know how to build a bomb?
I said, “Of course! That’s what we do!”
He said, “OK, I want you to build some bombs and I’ll tell you later. What do you need?”
So I said to Ibrahim el-Gabrowny, “I need explosives, I need detonators, I need people to help me build the bombs, I need a safe place to build a bomb in.”
He said, “OK. Let me make some phone calls to Afghanistan.”
At this early stage, the plot was less of a precise plan and more of a vague idea, devoid of details. Even the target of the proposed attack was undecided, with Salem being told that the group intended to set off bombs at twelve “Jewish locations,” including temples, banks and Jewish centres around Brooklyn and Manhattan. Without knowing it and with hardly any effort, Salem had been recruited into an operation that would eventually result in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Salem worked the plot as best he could, meeting more of the Calverton shooting range associates and gathering information from the cell members to pass along to the Bureau. As the preparations for the bombing began to take shape, Salem’s role in the FBI sting operation seemed clear: he would lead the cell along, swapping out the explosives for a harmless powder before the bombs were placed. Then, when the cell was ready to strike, the FBI would swoop in and round up the plotters.
But that is not what happened.
Salem’s remarkable success in infiltrating an active plot to stage terror attacks in New York—something that most FBI assets fail to accomplish in the course of their career— is, in retrospect, stunning. But not as stunning as the FBI’s response to this incredible turn of events.
As author and journalist Peter Lance, who interviewed many of the FBI personnel involved in the story, explained in his book, Triple Cross:
[P]art of Salem’s deal with the Feds was that he would be a deep cover “asset,” as opposed to an informant who was willing to tape conversations and swear to his undercover evidence on the stand. Salem, who had family in Egypt, was deeply wary of the Blind Sheikh’s deadly reach. So the Bureau promised him that he’d never have to wear a wire or testify in open court.
But in June 1992, Carson Dunbar—a rising young star in the FBI’s New York Office—was appointed to head the counterterror division. Dunbar and his deputy, John Crouthamel, didn’t trust Salem. Soon they were trying to get him to submit to additional polygraphs and, eventually, they broke their deal with Salem and demanded he wear a wire. Salem refused and withdrew from the operation, shutting the FBI out of the bomb plot.
SALEM: It was a silly, personal confrontation. And, actually, he said (and I quote him), “You son of a bitch! Coming from the Middle East, dragging sand in your shoes all the way up to here to tell me how to run my FBI and how to do my job!”
I told him, “Sir, I am doing your job. None of your agents could have went undercover that deep. I’m doing it, you’re not.”
And that even provoked him more and he said, “Get out of here!”
I walked out of his office, I looked at Nancy and John. I said, “Guys, when this bomb been built by somebody and goes off by somebody else, don’t come knock on my door!”
With Salem out of the picture, the Ali Mohammed-trained, Blind Sheikh-supported, Al Kifah-connected cell continued on with their plot. But, with internal disputes disrupting their plans, they had to find someone else to actually build the bomb. They found that person in Ramzi Yousef.
To this day, despite having been caught, tried and convicted for the World Trade Center bombing, little is known about Ramzi Yousef’s origins, or even his identity. The 9/11 Commission—relying on the torture testimony of his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—identified him merely as a “Sunni extremist” whose real name was Abdul Basit. But this supposedly devout Muslim fundamentalist is reported to have hung out at karaoke bars and dated b-girls during his trips to the Philippines while his wife and daughters waited for him in Baluchistan. Even his birthplace remains a mystery.
What is known is that Yousef learned bomb-making in Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, perhaps from Ali Mohammed himself; that in 1995 Newsday reported that the FBI was “considering a probe of whether the CIA had any relationship with Yousef;” and that in 1999 Swiss journalist Richard Labeviere reported that a “classified FBI file indicates that he was recruited by the local branch of the CIA.”
And, like so many of the other key operatives in the Al Qaeda story, Yousef was able to avoid regular screening procedures, waltz across borders with forged travel documents and enter the United States without a visa.
On August 31, 1992, Yousef and Ahmad Ajaj—a fellow mujahideen who Yousef had allegedly met at the training camps in Afghanistan—flew from Pakistan to the US despite lacking the proper travel documents to do so, a miraculous feat that the FBI has alleged was enabled by “direct assistance from senior Pakistani intelligence officials.” Upon their arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on September 1st, both men were immediately detained by immigration officials.
Ajaj, acting “loud and belligerent,” was caught with a crudely forged Swedish passport and taken to a back office for questioning. “The U.S. government was pretty sure Ahmad Mohammad Ajaj was a terrorist from the moment he stepped foot on U.S. soil,” the Los Angeles Times later reported, noting that his suitcases were “stuffed with fake passports, fake IDs and a cheat sheet on how to lie to U.S. immigration inspectors.” But that wasn’t all; among his possessions, inspectors also found two handwritten notebooks filled with bomb recipes, six bomb-making guides that included pages from Fort Bragg military manuals, and four how-to videotapes concerning weaponry and surveillance training. Ajaj was charged with passport violations and sentenced to six months in prison.
Yousef, meanwhile, tried a different approach. Dressed in “traditional peasant garb” and carrying an Iraqi passport without a US visa, Yousef strode confidently up to the immigration inspector and declared himself to be a refugee seeking asylum from the oppressive Iraqi government, politely asking to be admitted into America. After being questioned and fingerprinted, one alert immigration official noted his links to Ajaj and sought to detain him, but “there was not enough room in the INS lockup,” so he was released on the condition that he show up at an asylum hearing later.
Yousef then left the airport, took a cab to New York’s East Village and immediately met with Mahmud Abouhalima, “the Red,” who had trained with Ali Mohammed and who had served as the getaway driver for Nosair before being waved away by the hotel doorman. Yousef set about professionalizing the ragtag band of misfits, transforming their vague “Jewish locations” plot into an altogether more ambitious plan: to plant a bomb in the basement of one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, collapsing it into the other tower and killing tens of thousands in the process. He got to work immediately, organizing the cell, renting a storage locker across the Hudson River in Jersey City and beginning the five month task of constructing the bomb.
Without Salem, the FBI ostensibly no longer had an asset in the cell to watch as the plot took shape. But, if there had been a serious investigation underway, unraveling the cell and discovering their intentions would have been trivial. Ahmad Ajaj, who had been caught with a raft of terrorist training materials and bomb-making guides, remained in contact without Yousef the whole time, speaking to him frequently via the prison phone. But, although those calls were taped, no one from the FBI or any other agency monitored or even attempted to translate those phone calls until after the World Trade Center explosion the following February, and no one traced the pair’s flights back to discover that they had both boarded in Pakistan without the proper travel documents and had even sat together for the first leg of their journey to New York.
Salem even tried one last time to warn the FBI about the cell. Meeting his old handler, Nancy Floyd, at a Subway sandwich shop near the FBI’s New York office in October of 1992 to collect his final $500 cash payment, he informed her that he had heard that the group was planning a new attack and begged her to put surveillance on Abouhalima and Salameh. But it was no use. Carson Dunbar had taken her off the terror investigation and all she could do was pass along the suggestion. Salem’s warning was ignored and no one followed up on the lead.
The FBI had followed the Al Kifah plotters to the shooting range, investigated their role in the Kahane murder, had an informant in their midst reporting on their plans for a spectacular terror attack and now another high-level terror operative had been allowed to enter the country and proceed with his activities unmolested, just as Ali Mohammed and the Blind Sheikh before him.
And so it was that at noon on February 26, 1993, Ramzi Yousef and Eyad Ismoil, a Jordanian associate, drove a yellow Ryder van into the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center, parking on the B-2 level. Yousef ignited the 20-foot fuse and fled. Twelve minutes later, the bomb went off.
The bomb—cutting through the parking garage with an explosive force of 150,000 pounds per square inch— might have lacked the explosive force to fulfill Yousef’s goal of toppling the towers, but it did wreak havoc. Six people died, over a thousand were injured and 50,000 were forced to evacuate the building in the chaotic aftermath of the explosion. Learning of the bombing, Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert working for the Rand Corporation, remarked: “We may be talking about the opening salvo of a new conflict for a New World Order.”
As the investigation into the bombing began, a letter arrived in the offices of various New York newspapers claiming responsibility for the attack. The letter, sent under the name “Liberation Army, Fifth Battalion” issued three demands: end US aid to Israel, end diplomatic relations with Israel and stop interfering with the internal affairs of Middle Eastern nations. If these demands were not met, the letter promised that 150 suicide soldiers would be ready to commit more attacks, including launching strikes on “potential Nuclear targets.”
If there was any doubt about who was behind the explosion, those doubts were quickly dispelled. Just two days into the investigation, in one of the FBI’s first descents into the pitch-black, smoke-filled, five-story crater left by the blast, an explosives enforcement officer from the ATF found the proverbial “needle in the haystack“: a part from the Ryder van itself bearing a Vehicle Identification Number.
The van rental was traced back to Mohammed Salameh, one of Ali Mohammed’s trainees from the Al Kifah center. Absurdly, Salameh was apprehended on March 4, one week after the bombing, when he returned to the Ryder rental office in Jersey City to reclaim the deposit on the van. Salameh’s arrest quickly led to the arrest and eventual conviction of three others in the Al Kifah cell: Nidal Ayyad, Mahmud Abouhalima and Ahmad Ajaj. It also led investigators to the apartment of Ramzi Yousef.
But it was too late. Ramzi Yousef had boarded a flight to Karachi the night of the bombing and then vanished, flying from country to country with impunity, plotting assassinations and bombings in Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines and Iran, and concocting an elaborate plot called “Bojinka” to blow up a number of airliners in mid-flight before finally being captured in Pakistan in 1995.
But it was not just Yousef himself—the mysteriously protected terror mastermind who had entered the US without a visa—who vanished. When Pakistani federal investigators later went to check their immigration records, they discovered that all of the documents pertaining to Yousef’s journey to the United States in 1992, including his embarkation card, had “mysteriously disappeared.”
In the wake of the bombing, the FBI—now facing enormous public pressure to round up those involved and bust the terror cell that they had infiltrated and abandoned just the year before—turned once again to Emad Salem. Once again, Salem was able to quickly penetrate the Blind Sheikh’s cell and to begin working with them on a new scheme, the so-called “landmarks” plot to bomb key targets around New York City, including the UN headquarters, the Lincoln Tunnel and the George Washington Bridge. This time, the FBI arrested the plotters before they could stage their attack.
But at the trial two years later, Salem had a surprise for the prosecution. He had secretly recorded dozens of phone conversations with his FBI handlers, conversations that revealed for the first time the FBI’s real role in the World Trade Center bombing.
JACQUELINE ADAMS: FBI agents might have been able to prevent last February’s deadly explosion at New York’s World Trade Center. They discussed secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives. But they didn’t, according to the FBI’s own informant, Emad Salem.
Unbeknownst to the FBI at the time, Salem recorded many of his conversations with his handlers.
WILLIAM KUNSTLER: I’m holding nine hundred and three pages of draft transcripts . . .
ADAMS: William Kunstler represents Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahaman and several others charged with conspiring to blow up a series of New York City landmarks four months after the World Trade Center bombing. That case has not yet gone to trial.
Kunstler confirmed newspaper reports of the Salem transcripts. In one, Salem complains to an FBI agent, “Since the bomb went off, I feel terrible. I feel bad. I feel: here is people who don’t listen.” The agent replies: “Hey, I mean it wasn’t like you didn’t try and I didn’t try. You can’t force people to do the right thing.
Predictably, in the wake of the blast, the debate began to center on the government’s “mismanagement” of the case. The Blind Sheikh’s entry to the US had been a “mistake.” The NYPD’s refusal to investigate Nosair’s accomplices in the killing of Kahane had just been a politically expedient omission. The FBI having pulled their informant out of an active terror plot before it developed into the World Trade Center bombing was simply “incompetence.” The presence of a CIA-linked, Fort Bragg-stationed Green Beret in the midst of this radical terror cell was just an example of “blowback.” And Ramzi Yousef’s miraculous ability to enter and leave countries at will without the proper documentation was just the result of bureaucratic bungling and overworked immigration officials.
The admissions of “error” and professions of “blowback” verged on admissions of guilt. Even the CIA—in an internal investigation into its role in supporting the Al Kifah center’s operations—concluded that the agency itself was “partly culpable” for the World Trade Center bombing.
But the “incompetence” narrative soon arrived at its inevitable conclusion: the very agencies that had so signally “bungled” every step along this path were now to be given more money and bestowed more authority to conduct their “counterterror” operations.
BILL CLINTON: This year I’ll submit to Congress comprehensive legislation to strengthen our hand in combating terrorists—whether they strike at home or abroad. As the cowards who bombed the World Trade Center found out, this country will hunt down terrorists and bring them to justice.
Others proposed a less charitable reading of these events. Ron Kuby, the lawyer who, along with William Kunstler, acted as a defense lawyer for the accused bombers and their accomplices—did not mince words in assigning blame for the World Trade Center bombing plot:
The “mastermind” [of the plot] is the government of the United States. It was a phony, government-engineered “conspiracy” to begin with. It would never have amounted to anything had the government not planned it.
Emad Salem himself summarized the story of the World Trade Center bombing in a phone call with his FBI handler, John Anticev, that was later released to the public.
SALEM: I don’t think it was. If that’s what you think, guys, fine. But I don’t think that because we was start already building the bomb which is went off in the World Trade Center I was built by
supervising—supervision from the Bureau and the DA and we was all informed about it. And we know that the bomb start to be built. By who? By your confidential informant. What a wonderful, great case!
And then he put his head in the sand and said, “Oh, no no no, that’s not true.” He is son of a bitch.
OK. It’s built with a different way in another place and that’s it.
If this pattern of “missed opportunities” and “miraculous” cross-border movements really had been the result of mere “incompetence” or “inattentiveness,” then the resources and attention that were thrown at the problem of international terrorism in the wake of the World Trade Center bombing would have improved the intelligence agencies’ record against their erstwhile foes. But, remarkably, the scarcely believable trend of the early 1990s—that of intelligence agencies consistently “missing” the terrorists operating directly under their nose, border agents allowing known terrorists to pass from country to country unmolested and law enforcement officials letting these Al Qaeda-linked operatives off the hook—did not just continue into the late 1990s, the trend actually accelerated. And, as Al Qaeda went from a loose-knit group of a few dozen amateur mujahideen at the beginning of the decade to the premiere international terrorist organization at the end of the decade, the number of “mistakes” and “missed opportunities” multiplied from the merely unbelievable to the downright impossible.
When Mahmud Abouhalima was arrested for his part in the World Trade Center plot in 1993, he attempted to bargain with federal prosecutors. Abouhalima revealed the name of Wadih El-Hage—a Lebanese-born naturalized American citizen living in Texas who the Al Kifah cell had turned to for help in purchasing weapons—and recounted his experiences in Afghanistan with Mohammed Odeh, a Palestinian from Jordan who would later claim to have provided the rifles and rocket launchers that killed 18 U.S. soldiers and wounded 73 in Mogadishu in October of 1993. Abouhalima then offered more information about the World Trade Center plot and his associates in exchange for a lighter sentence. Prosecutors turned down the deal and failed to follow up on either El-Hage or Odeh.
Ali Mohamed, meanwhile, continued in his remarkably successful mission to infiltrate the intelligence arms of the US government. After having worked for the CIA and served as a special forces instructor at Fort Bragg, his next target was the FBI. Following his honourable discharge from the Army, Mohamed returned to his wife in California and applied to be a translator for the Bureau. He was turned down for the position; instead, he was asked to work as an FBI informant in a local document forgery ring.
In 1992, the Bureau—evidently impressed with Mohamed’s work—“opened” him as a Foreign Counter Intelligence agent and tasked him with gaining intelligence on a San Jose mosque. But Mohamed was assigned to a rookie agent and routine steps like administering a polygraph were never taken. As a retired special agent who worked in the FBI’s New York Office later told journalist Peter Lance: “One of the most unbelievable aspects of the Ali Mohamed story is that the Bureau could be dealing with this guy and they didn’t put him on the box. The first thing you do with any kind of asset or informant is you polygraph him and if the relationship continues, you make him submit to continued polygraphs down the line. That is a basic principle of running informants.”
Still, despite repeatedly traveling back and forth to and from the Middle East throughout the period, Mohamed remained untouchable by law enforcement and border security. In 1992, he was detained in Rome when he was discovered with a Coca-Cola can containing a secret storage compartment. Mohamed convinced the airport security that he was a security agent for the Summer Olympics in Barcelona and was released with a warning that if anything happened on the flight, he would be blamed.
In 1993, after helping Ayman al-Zawahiri enter the US on forged documents for a fundraising tour, Mohamed traveled to Vancouver, Canada to help an associate of Zawahiri, Essam Marzouk, enter the country. Marzouk, caught with forged Saudi passports by Canadian customs officials, was detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. When Mohamed arrived inquiring about his friend, he was detained by the RCMP as well. After hours of interrogation, he told them he was an FBI asset, giving them the phone number of his handler, John Zent. Zent’s word was good enough. The RCMP let Mohamed go.
Mohamed’s travels during this busy period included a trip to Afghanistan in the summer of 1991 to help Osama bin Laden and his fledgling Al Qaeda organization relocate to Sudan.
Osama’s move to Sudan came at a time when, we are told, the wealthy Saudi was looking to cement his reputation as a holy warrior. The official story of Al Qaeda holds that during this period, Bin Laden returned briefly to Saudi Arabia but, incensed by the Saudi royals’ decision to invite US soldiers onto Saudi soil for the Gulf War, left the country for good.
Searching for a place to move his operations, his gaze turned across the Red Sea to Sudan, where, as luck would have it, hardline Islamic extremist Hassan al-Turabi had come to power in a military coup just as the war was ending in Afghanistan. Heading the National Islamic Front Party, which sought to impose sharia law in the country, al-Turabi traveled to London for a meeting of the International Muslim Brotherhood where he openly declared his intention to allow Sudan to act as a base for Islamist terror groups. By the summer of 1991, Osama Bin Laden had answered that call, moving his fighters and equipment from the outskirts of Afghanistan to his new base in Sudan with the help of FBI asset Ali Mohamed.
Turabi was not the only one traveling to London to foster his terror plans, however. In between Bin Laden’s work establishing himself as a businessman in Sudan—using $12 million granted him by the Saudi Binladen Group to start a bewildering array of commercial enterprises in the country, from a construction company to an investment firm to a trucking business to a tannery, a bakery, a furniture-making business and even a commercial farm employing four thousand labourers—the budding terror mastermind was, according to numerous sources, shuttling back and forth between Khartoum, Karachi and London.
Osama Bin Laden’s visits to the UK in the early 1990s include an alleged stay at the London estate of Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz, a meeting in Manchester with representatives of an Algerian Islamic group who were later accused of being infiltrated by government moles and used to launch a series of false flag attacks in France, a period of several months in 1994 when he actually lived in the UK, allegedly buying a house in Wembley through an intermediate, and, even more explosively, a 1996 trip to his London press office which was—according to Swiss journalist Richard Labeviere, citing “several Arab diplomatic sources”—”clearly under the protection of the British authorities.”
Although the official story holds that Bin Laden was at this time barely a blip on the US intelligence community’s radar, this is contradicted by numerous lines of evidence. Ali Mohamed, for instance, had “volunteered the earliest insider description of al Qaeda that is publicly known” to the FBI in 1993, telling them that Bin Laden was “building an army” to overthrow the Saudi government and admitting that he had personally trained terrorists at the camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. But the FBI, according to the Wall Street Journal, was “flummoxed” by this information and made no attempt to act on it.
This “news” about Al Qaeda’s activities would not have been news to the US government’s main intelligence agencies, however. It was later revealed that, despite claims that the US government was only dimly aware of Bin Laden at this point, he was in fact already under extensive electronic surveillance. Having obtained his voiceprint from recordings of his anti-Saddam speeches in Saudi Arabia, the NSA and CIA were already using signals intelligence to identify and monitor Bin Laden’s personal satellite calls and cell phone traffic.
In another key contradiction that is never addressed by the purveyors of the official Al Qaeda story, it was during this period that Osama Bin Laden—making trips to the UK under the alleged protection of British authorities and while admittedly under surveillance by American intelligence—began the streak of increasingly brazen terror attacks that, we are told, would end up in 9/11.
In 1992, Al Qaeda mounted their first terror operation against an American target. In December of that year, bombs went off outside two hotels in Aden where, it was believed, American servicemen were being quartered on their way to Somalia for Operation Restore Hope. The attack killed an Australian tourist and a Yemeni hotel worker, but no Americans; the troops had been staying at a different hotel. Osama only claimed responsibility for the bombing six years later.
In 1993, eighteen American soldiers were killed and 73 wounded in Mogadishu during an intense two-day firefight that resulted in the downing of two Black Hawk helicopters by rocket-propelled grenades. It wasn’t until the release of the 9/11 Commission Report in 2004, however, that the commission—citing “new information” received by “the intelligence community” in “1996—1997″—told the public that Al Qaeda had had a role in the incident.
The burnishing of Bin Laden’s terrorist credentials by the US government continued in 1996. In January of that year, the CIA officially opened “Alec Station,” a so-called virtual station dedicated solely to tracking Osama Bin Laden and his associates. Headed at first by Michael Scheuer—an analyst at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center who had taken a special interest in the Saudi exile—and named after Scheuer’s son, Alec Station soon became the hub for a mostly-female group of analysts who dubbed themselves “the Manson Family” because “they had acquired a reputation for crazed alarmism about the rising al-Qaeda threat.”
1996 was also the year that the US government began putting diplomatic pressure on Sudan to hand over their files on Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda operatives. The secret negotiations between the two countries culminated with Elfatih Erwa, Sudan’s then minister of state for defense, flying from Khartoum to Washington. There, Erwa made a stunning offer: not to turn over the Sudanese government’s records on Bin Laden, but to turn over Bin Laden himself. Washington rejected the offer because, The Village Voicelater reported, “the FBI did not believe it had sufficient evidence to try Bin Laden in a US court.” Instead, they demanded that Sudan expel the supposed arch-terrorist to “any other country except Somalia.” Sudan complied, protesting that Osama would simply return to Afghanistan where there was no government for Washington to negotiate with. “We told him Sudan is no longer safe for him and creates problems for us and asked him to leave,” Erwa told The Village Voice.
“We liquidated everything, and he left with his money. We didn’t confiscate anything because there was no legal basis. Nobody had indicted him. He rented a charter plane and left in broad daylight. He was free to plot and build his network. The Americans then came back and wanted us to help track him, but by then it was too late. He didn’t trust us anymore.”
In June of 1996, a truck bomb exploded outside of the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The facility—located in the heart of the Saudi oil industry’s administrative area, where the US had built its first air base and where Standard Oil first struck oil in the country, establishing what would later become ARAMCO—was housing US and allied forces involved in enforcing the Iraqi no-fly zones. The massive blast left an 85-foot crater, killing 19 and injuring hundreds.
At the time, the US blamed Tehran for the bombing, with Clinton’s Defense Secretary William Perry later admitting that there was a contingency plan in place to attack Iran if the link had been proven. But by 2007, Perry had changed his assessment:
WILLIAM PERRY: I believe that the Khobar Tower bombing was probably masterminded by Osama bin Laden. I can’t be sure of that, but in retrospect, that’s what I believe. At the time he was not a suspect. At the time, all of the examinations, all of the evidence was pointing to Iran.”
All of these incidents helped to raise Bin Ladens profile in the intelligence community, but it was a series of events in 1998 that introduced the broader public to Osama Bin Laden. In February of that year, Bin Laden—following up on a declaration of war against America that he had made to CNN’s TV cameras in an interview with Peter Bergen the previous year—issued his fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Americans:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.
In May of that year, John Miller—then reporting for ABC News, but soon to become the FBI’s chief spokesman—traveled to Afghanistan for a dramatic Nightline report on “The Most Dangerous Man You’ve Never Heard Of” that would air on ABC the following month:
TED KOPPEL: He lives in a cave atop a range of mountains in Afghanistan. From there he controls a web of financial logistical and strategic assistance to Sunni Islamic groups engaged in what they consider a “jihad,” or a holy war. The principal targets of their jihad are the Israelis and the United States. His name is Osama bin Laden and you will meet him a little later in this program. He does nothing to undermine the profile of himself as a terrorist leader with global influence. Indeed, he seems to take considerable satisfaction in it even though the profile has been drawn by US intelligence agencies.
[. . .]
OSAMA BIN LADEN (VIA INTERPRETER): We believe that the biggest thieves in the world are Americans and the biggest terrorists on earth are the Americans. The only way for us to fend off these assaults is by using similar means. We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians; they’re all targets in this fatwa.
[. . .]
JOHN MILLER: Bin Laden has issued these fatwas and made these threats before but this time there’s something different: he put a time cap on it saying that whatever action will be taken against Americans in the Gulf. Whatever violence awaits will occur within the next few weeks.
And, in August of 1998, the name of Osama Bin Laden, terror mastermind, and his shadowy terror group, Al Qaeda, finally exploded into the public consciousness.
On the morning of August 7, 1998, two Saudis in Kenya—Mohammed al-‘Owhali and “Jihad Ali” Azzam, both of whom had been in the hut when John Miller was interviewing Osama Bin Laden earlier that year—loaded some boxes into their Toyota cargo truck and headed off to the American embassy in downtown Nairobi. The boxes contained two thousand pounds of TNT, aluminum nitrate and aluminum powder. At the same time, Hamden Khalif Allah Awad—an Egyptian known as “Ahmed the German” for his fair hair—loaded a similar bomb into a gasoline truck in Tanzania and set off for the American embassy in Dar es Salaam.
The Saudis arrived at the Nairobi embassy at 10:30 AM. ‘Owhali jumped out of the truck as it approached the gates, demanding that the security guard raise the drop bar protecting the entrance. The guard refused. ‘Owhali threw a stun grenade into the courtyard and ran and then the bomb went off. The blast ripped the face off of the embassy building, collapsing a nearby secretarial college and lighting the tar-covered street and a nearby bus on fire. 213 were dead and 4,500 injured.
Nine minutes later, Ahmed the German parked the gasoline truck in the parking lot of the American embassy in Dar es Salaam and detonated his bomb. He had parked next to a water tanker truck, which ended up absorbing much of the blast, but the building was still badly damaged. 11 were dead and 85 injured.
The message was clear and was dutifully broadcast by media around the world: A “new” terror group had conducted a sophisticated, coordinated attack against multiple US targets overseas and its leader was waging holy war against Americans. Al Qaeda had arrived.
REPORTER: What had happened was the first major attack by al-Qaida on American targets and the worst international terrorist incident on African soil. Afterwards, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation placed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden on its list of most wanted fugitives.
But, like so many events in the Al Qaeda story, this attack, too, bore the fingerprints of American intelligence on each stage of its development and execution.
The attacks, prosecutors later discovered, were being planned as far back as 1993, when Osama Bin Laden sent his FBI/CIA/Green Beret triple agent extraordinaire, Ali Mohamed “to survey potential U.S., British, French and Israeli targets in Nairobi.” According to Mohamed’s own testimony:
I later went to Khartoum, where my surveillance files and photographs were reviewed by Osama bin Laden, Abu Hafs, Abu Ubaidah, and others. Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber.
Joining Mohamed on the scouting mission was Anas al Liby, a member of a Libyan Al Qaeda cell known as al-Muqatila. Described as the “computer wizard of Al Qaeda’s hierarchy,” not only was al-Liby personally trained by Mohamed at the Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, he was also a protected British intelligence asset. Al-Liby applied for asylum in Britain in 1995, claiming to be a political enemy of the Libyan government. But, as The Guardianlater reported:
Astonishingly, despite suspicions that he was a high-level Al Qaeda operative, al-Liby was given political asylum in Britain and lived in Manchester until May of 2000 when he eluded a police raid on his house and fled abroad. The raid discovered a 180-page Al Qaeda ‘manual for jihad‘ containing instructions for terrorist attacks.
Even more incredibly, not only did the British government grant that asylum, they then recruited al-Liby for a failed MI6 operation to assassinate Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 1996, and then let him continue to live in the country even after the embassy bombing before ultimately letting him escape. According to FBI investigator Ali Soufan, the Manchester raid didn’t just nab a “manual for jihad;” it caught al-Liby himself. As Soufan recounts in his book, The Black Banners, the British police let al-Liby go when he denied being a terrorist. He evaded the team that was sent to follow him and fled the country, eventually ending up on the US government’s most wanted list with a $25 million reward for his capture.
Yet another important figure in the bombing who was well-known to American intelligence was Wadih El-Hage, the naturalized American citizen who had assisted the Al Kifah plotters and who Mahmud Abouhalima had identified to prosecutors after his arrest for the World Trade Center bombing. As was later revealed, US intelligence had El-Hage under surveillance during the entire period that the embassy bombing plot was being hatched, but once again merely watched as the attack unfolded. As The Los Angeles Timesdetailed:
The CIA and the FBI missed key opportunities to prevent the blasts. They knew from wiretaps on El-Hage’s four Nairobi phones, as well as from the computer files they had seized, that Al Qaeda was forming a terror cell in the Kenyan capital. Indeed, U.S. agents had in hand the names and identities of some of the key Nairobi cell members who would rent the bomb factory, build the bomb, buy the bomb truck, brief the suicide bombers and even escort the bomb truck the day of the attack.
Author Simon Reeve revealed even more damning evidence about CIA involvement in the plot in his 1999 book, The New Jackals. “The CIA also had informants working within the east Africa cell,” he reported, citing an interview with a CIA official, “but they apparently failed to warn of Bin Laden’s plans.”
Even if the CIA’s sources within the plot had somehow “failed” to warn them of the attack, the fact that multiple members of the cell under their surveillance—including Abdullah Ahmed Abdulah, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, Usama al-Kini, Mohammed Sadiq Odeh and five other conspirators—all fled Kenya for Pakistan the night before the bombing would have instantly raised alarm bells if the agencies’ intention had been to prevent an attack.
Instead, the plotters conspired with CIA informants in their midst and the attacks went ahead under the watchful eye of CIA, NSA and FBI surveillance.
However they transpired, the bombings succeeded in introducing Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda to the world stage. Despite the years of intelligence agency surveillance and even the creation of a virtual CIA station dedicated solely to the capture, arrest or assassination of Bin Laden and his network, it wasn’t until after the embassy bombings that the world at large began to hear the name of Osama Bin Laden.
On August 20th—three weeks after the bombing and just three days after being publicly interrogated about the Monica Lewinsky affair—President Clinton ordered a missile strike on alleged Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan, boldly proclaiming that actions against Bin Laden and international terror had become a new mission for the US military.
CLINTON: Today I ordered our armed forces to strike at terrorist-related facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan because of the imminent threat they presented to our national security. I want to speak with you about the objective of this action and why it was necessary. Our target was terror. Our mission was clear – to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Osama bin Laden, perhaps the preeminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today
The strike, however—a barrage of 66 Tomohawk cruise missiles targeting Al Qaeda’s camp in Khost, Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant thought to be manufacturing chemical weapons in Khartoum—was a spectacular failure on almost every level. Neither Bin Laden nor Zawahiri were killed in the attacks and the “chemical weapons” plant in Khartoum had nothing to do with either Bin Laden or chemical weapons, but was in fact manufacturing much-needed medicines for the region. The plant’s destruction—in the estimation of Werner Daum, then Germany’s ambassador to Sudan—led to “several tens of thousands” of deaths in the region.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s long-time associate and future leader of Al Qaeda, was on one of Bin Laden’s monitored satellite phones at the time of the attack, telling BBC journalist Rahumullah Yusufzai that “Bin Laden has a message. He says, ‘I have not bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. I have declared jihad, but I was not involved.'” Zawahiri’s exact position would have been immediately detectable by American surveillance aircraft in the region, but—in a move that journalist Lawrence Wright called “inexplicable”—the aircraft were not available prior to the strike and Zawahiri escaped unscathed.
Bin Laden, meanwhile, was—according to CIA intelligence gleaned from intercepted satellite calls—going to be at his training camp in Khost the day of the missile strike. But he was not. He was, Clinton counter-terror czar Richard Clarke later speculated, tipped off about the attack by “a retired head of the ISI,” Pakistan’s intelligence service that had long been known as an adjunct of the CIA.
The attacks did succeed in two key respects, however: they kept Clinton’s personal dalliances in the Oval Office from leading America’s nightly news broadcasts for at least one news cycle and they reinforced the importance of the new threat to global security: Osama Bin Laden.
This “new threat” provided a green light for the American security establishment and its allies around the world to ramp up operations in the name of fighting the Al Qaeda menace. The FBI began an international investigation of the bombing, the CIA began a “surge” of reporting on terror threats that counter-terror officials later complained overwhelmed the system and diverted attention and resources, and in November of 1998 the United States Federal Court finally issued its first public indictment of Osama Bin laden.
The first international arrest warrant for Bin Laden—a confidential document intended only for police and judicial authorities—had in fact already been issued in April of that year, but it was not issued by the US. Instead, it was the Libyan government that had issued the warrant through Interpol. They were pursuing the terror mastermind for his part in the murder of two German intelligence agents in Libya in 1994. At the time, despite publicly recognizing Bin Laden as the premier financier of international terrorism, the US and British governments downplayed the document, even making sure to scrub the charges against Osama and any mention of Libya’s role in issuing the document from the public record.
But this surge in activity around the Al Qaeda threat resulted in at least one surprising development. In one of the most consequential and underreported moves in this redoubled counter-terrorism effort, Ali Mohamed was finally arrested.
Contacted in the days after the bombing, Mohamed admitted to FBI agents that he knew who had carried out the attack but would not give the government the names. Subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in the Southern District of New York, he was finally arrested, although even the charges against him were kept secret from the public. On October 20, 2000, Mohamed pled guilty to involvement in the embassy bombings, but he was never sentenced. He then disappeared from sight forever, held in what was later reported as “protective custody.” To this day, there is no public record of Ali Mohamed—the ex-US Sergeant and FBI asset who admitted to his key role in Al Qaeda—ever being sentenced. There is no public record of his incarceration. And there are only a handful of accounts that have ever surfaced from people who talked to him in prison in the aftermath of 9/11.
And, just like that, one of the deepest mysteries of the Al Qaeda story disappeared from public sight, never to be seen again.
But, despite all this increased activity, the same pattern of “oversights” and “mistakes” by the intelligence agencies continued unabated.
On October 12, 2000, when a small fiberglass fishing boat approached the massive, 8,300 ton USS Cole—a billion dollar guided-missile destroyer employing the latest stealth technology and armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles and a five-inch canon—the sailors onboard watched in amusement. The tiny skiff stopped amidships and two men stood up, waving and smiling. Then, a bomb exploded.
The boat had been carrying over 400 pounds of C4 explosive molded into a shaped charge. The explosion was immense, knocking over cars passing by onshore. In the city, miles away, people believed there was an earthquake taking place. The blast tore a hole forty feet by forty feet in the hull of the Cole, killing 17 US servicemen and injuring thirty-nine more. It was the deadliest attack on a US destroyer in over a decade.
But this attack, like all of Al Qaeda’s spectacular terror attacks of the 1990s, was preceded by a string of “missed opportunities” and “unheeded warnings.” Not only was there there intelligence about a potential attack on a US naval ship from several different sources—including reports from multiple informants and intercepted phone calls to Al Qaeda’s NSA-monitored Yemen communications hub—but, as Congressman Curt Weldon revealed in 2005, a secret military intelligence operation codenamed Able Danger actually warned the Pentagon days before the bombing that an attack was going to take place in Yemen.
CURT WELDON: But two weeks before the attack on the Cole—in fact, two days before the attack on the Cole—they saw an increase 0f activity that led them to say to the senior leadership in the Pentagon at that time and the Clinton administration “There’s something going to happen in Yemen and we better be on high alert.” But it was discounted. That story has yet to be told to the American people. Another Able Danger successful activity that was thwarted.
But even after the spectacular “failure” of these intelligence agencies to thwart the attack, and despite President Clinton’s assurance that he would find and retaliate against the bomb plotters . . .
CLINTON: If, as it now appears, this was an act of terrorism, it was a despicable and cowardly act. We will find out who was responsible and hold them accountable.
. . . the CIA repeatedly denied FBI investigators access to key information about the plot.
But, it turns out, the CIA did have such information. And that information—deliberately withheld from the FBI or any other investigative agency—led directly into the heart of the operation behind the next spectacular terror attack to be blamed on Al Qaeda : 9/11.
From the beginning, 9/11 was presented to the public as an open-and-shut case. Osama Bin Laden’s name was raised on air by the TV news anchors within seconds of the second plane strike and was endlessly repeated in the hours and days that followed. By the end of the week, the public was convinced that the events were the work of Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda and all of the subsequent “investigations” and commissions only served to bolster that pre-formed conclusion.
So it was no surprise at all when, on September 14, 2001, the FBI released its list of nineteen hijackers, Muslims with Arabic names who, we were told, had been sent by Bin Laden on a suicide mission.
But who were these men?
For the general public, the newscasters’ solemn intonation that the nineteen hijackers had been identified, followed by a mugshot-like line up of photographs, was all that was needed to cement the case in their minds. Those who required more detail turned to made-for-TV dramas and documentaries to learn about the so-called “Hamburg cell” of radicalized Al Qaeda soldiers, which included Mohammed Atta, Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi, three of the alleged suicide pilots. Finally, the 9/11 Commission and its associated monographs—like the staff report on 9/11 and Terrorist Travel—attempted to fill in the paper trail for researchers concerned about the documentary record of these men, including their motivations and their movement.
From these accounts, a picture emerged. These nineteen terrorists, crack operatives hand-picked by Osama Bin Laden and trained in his terror camps in Afghanistan, had used their carefully honed spycraft to slip into the country, deftly avoiding scrutiny from the authorities even as they trained at flight schools in the US and finalized the operational details of their plan. Then, after years of meticulous preparation, these men, consumed by their hatred of the West, their love of Allah and their devotion to Bin Laden—deftly piloted their planes into their targets, wreaking havoc and devastation exactly as planned.
But this story, too, is a carefully constructed lie, every part of which falls apart under sustained scrutiny.
In the official conspiracy theory of 9/11, the alleged hijackers were such devout fundamentalist Muslims that they were willing to give their lives for the cause. Marwan al-Shehhi, we were told, was so devoted to his religious beliefs that he observed the Ramadan fast against medical advice after a stomach operation, causing him to fall severely ill. Ziad Jarrah, meanwhile, “initially caroused and smoked” during his early days in Hamburg but “then grew intensely religious and withdrawn.” And, according to award-winning journalist Lawrence Wright, Mohammed Atta’s “extreme rigidity of character” made him into a ruthless killer who “constantly demonstrated an aversion to women.”
When reporters began following the trail that these supposed suicide soldiers had left behind, however, they began to uncover an altogether different story. Atta and his associates frequented strip clubs in San Diego, Las Vegas and Daytona Beach, where they drank alcohol and ordered lap dances. They hung out for days at a time at Harry’s Bar in New York, where Atta preferred a table near the piano. And, three nights before the attack, Atta and al-Shehhi went to Shuckums Oyster Bar in Fort Lauderdale, where, according to bar manager Tony Amos, they consumed several drinks, became drunk and gave the bartender a hard time about the bill.
“The guy Mohamed was drunk, his voice was slurred and he had a thick accent,” Amos told the Associated Press the day after 9/11.
Even the New York Times reported on Atta and al-Shehhi’s “high life” during multiple visits to the Philippines between 1998 and 2000, where the pair of strict religious fundamentalists and an entourage of Arab men and their girlfriends flashed money, drank and partied regularly. “Many times I saw him let a girl go at the gate in the morning,” the Times quoted one hotel chambermaid as recalling about Atta. “It was always a different girl.”
And, during his research for Welcome to Terrorland—an investigation into the Venice, Florida flight schools where Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah were enrolled in the year 2000—Daniel Hopsicker interviewed Amanda Keller, a former stripper who claimed to have been Atta’s girlfriend during his time in Venice and who shared more stories about the partying of these alleged jihadis.
AMANDA KELLER: These guys had money flowing out their ass—excuse my language. But they never seemed to run out of money. I mean they wouldn’t just just cost some money left and right I mean it was just like oh my god and they had they had massive supplies of cocaine whenever they run out they’d go to the flight school.
But Hopsicker’s investigation uncovered more than just the alleged hijacker’s trail of booze, drugs and women. He also became one of the only reporters to look into the strange connections of Huffman Aviation and the Florida Flight Training Center in Venice, Florida, where Atta, al-Shehhi and Jarrah trained the year before September 11th. Huffman Aviation was also the flight school that Yeslam Bin Laden, Osama’s half-brother, paid for flight lessons for one of his acquaintances.
The flight school was run by Rudi Dekkers, a Dutch native who was running a commuter airline with Wally Hilliard. Hilliard—the founder and former president of a Green Bay, Wisconsin-based insurance company—made news in October 2000 when his personal jet was found to be transporting 42 pounds of heroin and was seized by federal agents in what was called the biggest drug bust in central Florida history. But Hilliard’s charter airline start-up had high-level political support: Jeb Bush, then Governor of Florida, posed for photo ops in support of Hilliard’s airline.
Dekkers, meanwhile, was arrested in 2012, having told an undercover agent—in the words of the criminal complaint against him—that he was “involved in narcotics transportation via private aircraft and that he has flown narcotics and U.S. currency previously without any problems.” He was carrying over 18 kilograms of cocaine and nearly one kilogram of heroin at the time of his arrest.
Despite the many questions that still hang over the alleged hijackers’ activities in Venice and their connection to the drug running that was allegedly taking place at the Venice airport, an even deeper question was soon to emerge: How did these pilots—who were rated as competent at best and who, one instructor insisted, should have been further along the flight school curriculum than they were—manage to fly jumbo jets that require thousands of hours of flying experience with such precision?
That question is even more important in the case of the other alleged 9/11 pilot, Hani Hanjour, the diminutive 5 foot 5 inch Saudi who, the official story tells us, helped overpower grizzled Navy Top Gun honor graduate Chuck Burlingame and his flight crew at the controls of American Airlines Flight 77. According to that story, Hanjour allegedly flew a Boeing 757 with what aviation sources for The Washington Post described as “extraordinary skill” through a seven thousand foot spiral descent to hit the Pentagon, a move that veteran airline pilot Ed Soliday told the 9/11 Commission would be “tough for any airline pilot, including himself,” and which left one radar operator at Dulles Airport stunned: “The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane.”
But Hanjour, by all accounts, was a completely inept pilot. He dropped out of his first flight school, the Sierra Academy of Aeronautics, after only a few classes. He then dropped out of his next school, Cockpit Resource Management in Scottsdale, Arizona, after the school’s owner dismissed him as a “weak student” who was “wasting our resources.” When he returned to that school again the following year, the school owner refused, asserting: “You’re never going to make it.” An instructor at his next school, Sawyer Aviation, called him a “neophyte” who “got overwhelmed with the instruments” in the school’s flight simulator. An instructor at his next school concurred: Hanjour had “no motivation, a poor understanding of the basic principles of aviation, and poor judgment, combined with poor technical skills.”
After bypassing the FAA to obtain a commercial pilot’s license from a for-profit contractor, the operation manager at yet another flight school in the Phoenix area, Peggy Chevrette, told Fox News that Hanjour was clearly unqualified to be in the cockpit: “I couldn’t believe that he had a license of any kind with the skills that he had.” Even The New York Times conceded that the remarkable flight attributed to Hanjour on 9/11 was inexplicable. In an article headlined “A Trainee Noted For Incompetence,” the paper quoted one former flight school employee who knew Hanjour as saying: ”I’m still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon. He could not fly at all.”
Whatever the case, what would eventually become the official explanation for this seeming incongruity—namely, that the single engine aircraft training and jet simulation training that they had received was good enough for these men to jump into the cockpit of commercial jet airliners and pilot them hundreds of miles to their targets—was rejected in the first hours of the attack as completely implausible.
COURIC: And meanwhile they did spend seven months at this flying school in Venice. And although they were not trained to fly jets, do people believe that what they learned there is easily transferrable to, say, a 757 or a 767?
SANDERS: Actually, no, they don’t say it’s easily transferrable because it’s such a different type of jet. But nonetheless they got that initial training in Venice, Florida. Whether their training continued elsewhere—you have to assume it took place somewhere else. Where they learned it, though, at this point, I don’t know and the FBI hasn’t told us.
A Newsweek story of September 15, 2001, provided one potential answer to this puzzle. According to a “high-ranking US Navy source” cited by the report, “[t]hree of the alleged hijackers listed their address on drivers licenses and car registrations as the Naval Air Station in Pensacola” and, according to a separate “high-ranking Pentagon official,” another of the alleged hijackers “may have received language instruction at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.” But this report—like the subsequent reports of people with the same name as the alleged hijackers turning up alive and well in the wake of 9/11, which prompted the FBI to apologize to one mistakenly named suspect and forced FBI Director Robert Mueller to acknowledge that they were not certain of the identities of several of the named men—were eventually dismissed as mere confusion over common Arab names.
On September 28, 2001, the FBI released the final list of names and photographs of the alleged hijackers and this rogues’ gallery of fearsome Al Qaeda operatives was cemented in the public imagination.
So who were these nineteen men? If they really were who the FBI said they were, who directed them? How were they supposed to have entered the United States? How did they fund their operations? And how did they evade detection while living openly in the US for months and in some cases years?
In the months after the attacks, we were told that the men identified by the FBI as the culprits had “moved through Europe and America unnoticed” and that although several of them “had been tracked by intelligence until they got inside the United States,” they were ultimately “lost.”
We were told that Al Qaeda’s communications had been monitored, but that Bin Laden and his henchman used “scramblers, Internet encryption, fiber optics” so it was “very hard” to intercept those transmissions.
And we were told that no one was to blame for the attacks, which had merely been a “failure of imagination.”
THOMAS KEAN: As we detail in our report, this was a failure of policy, management, capability, and above all, a failure of imagination.
But, as the public was to learn in bits and pieces over the course of the next two decades, every one of these assertions was a demonstrable lie.
This alleged team of crack Al Qaeda operatives did not “move through Europe and America unnoticed.” Their communications were not rendered opaque to the intelligence agencies because of “fiber optics.” Their successful penetration of America’s defenses was not due to a “failure of imagination.”
Instead—as even the official story of the attacks now concedes—every major branch of US intelligence had key pieces of information on these Al Qaeda operatives, their communications, their movements and their plans. In fact, as can now be shown from official sources, these agencies not only deliberately allowed these operatives to proceed unmolested but actively stopped investigators and agents within their ranks from blowing the whistle on the plot.
At the FBI, Special Agent Robert Wright led an investigation into terrorist financing called Vulgar Betrayal that managed to uncover a money trail connecting a suspected Chicago terror cell to Al Qaeda. But when Wright attempted to bring criminal charges against the cell’s members, his supervisor flew into a rage, shouting: “You will not open criminal investigations. I forbid any of you. You will not open criminal investigations against any of these intelligence subjects.”
After the embassy bombings, when Wright’s team began to trace the financing of the attacks to a group of Saudi businessmen, the FBI moved to shut down the investigation altogether. Wright was kicked off the case in 1999 and Vulgar Betrayal was officially shut down in 2000.
ROBERT WRIGHT: Knowing what I know—and again, this was written 91 days before the attack. Knowing what I know, I can confidently say that until the investigative responsibilities for terrorism are removed from the FBI, I will not feel safe.
While Wright was pursuing the financial trail, FBI field agents across the US were picking up on another trend: Muslim extremists learning to fly.
Agents in Oklahoma and Phoenix both wrote memos about the “large numbers of Middle Eastern males receiving flight training” and warned that some of them had documentable ties to Al Qaeda, but the warnings were ignored. Agents in Minneapolis frantically sought approval for a search warrant to search the laptop of Zaccarias Moussaoui, a suspected terrorist who had been receiving flight training in the area.
When that request was denied, one exasperated agent told FBI headquarters that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” Rita Flack, an intelligence opearations specialist at headquarters who had read the Phoenix memo, failed to pass that info on to any of her colleagues involved in the decision to deny the warrant to search Moussaoi’s laptop.
FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley later revealed that agents in the Minneapolis office—desperately trying to find an answer to the question of why the Bureau was deliberately sabotaging the case—faced the problem with gallows humour: “I know I shouldn’t be flippant about this, but jokes were actually made that the key FBIHQ personnel had to be spies or moles, like Robert Hansen, who were actually working for Osama Bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis’ effort.”
The Pentagon’s intelligence branch, meanwhile, not only had foreknowledge of the plot, but—according to information that emerged years later and was quickly suppressed—had identified four of the presumed terror operatives and mapped out the network connecting them to the Brooklyn cell headed by the Blind Sheikh.
“Able Danger” was a classified information operations campaign against transnational terrorism launched by military intelligence in the fall of 1999. First revealed to the public in June 2005, Able Danger employed data mining techniques on open source and classified information to identify networks of likely terror agents, including those operating in the US.
The program was remarkably successful: not only did it warn the Pentagon of an impending attack just days before the Cole bombing, as we have already seen, but, according to Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) whistleblower Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and four of his colleagues working on the operation, Able Danger identified two of the terror cells connecting Al Qaeda to the alleged hijackers. It even identified four of those suspects—including Mohamed Atta—by name.
When Lt. Col. Shaffer tried to set up a meeting between his supervisor and FBI officials in Washington to discuss a collaborative approach to tracking these cells, he was rebuffed by lawyers for the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command. Shortly thereafter, Shaffer was ordered off the Able Danger team and the unit was disbanded, with the Pentagon ordering all the Able Danger data—2.5 terabytes worth of information, equivalent to one quarter of all the printed material in the Library of Congress—destroyed.
After a hostile investigation that left witnesses feeling intimidated into changing their story about Able Danger still found five Pentagon employees who said they had seen the organizational chart with Atta’s name on it, the Department of Defense Inspector General concluded that Able Danger had never identified Atta or any other alleged hijacker. And, just two months after the story became public—including Shaffer’s revelation that he had met with 9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow and told him all of the details of the program in an extensive hour-long debriefing in Afghanistan that did not find its way into the Commission’s final report—the DIA stripped Shaffer of his security clearance, essentially ending his decades-long career as a military intelligence officer.
WELDON: Mr. Speaker, this is not some third-rate burglary cover-up. This is not some Watergate incident. This is an attempt to prevent the American people from knowing the facts about how we could have prevented 9/11 and people are covering it up today! And they’re ruining the career of a military officer to do it and we can’t let it stand!
The NSA, meanwhile—despite the “scrambler and fiber optics” excuses of the agency’s apologists—were monitoring all of the communications going through Al Qaeda’s pivotal Yemen communications hub from the lead-up to the Embassy bombings straight through to the execution of 9/11 itself. This “communications hub”—discovered in 1996 when the NSA began tapping into and transcribing the satellite phone calls of Bin Laden—was, in fact, the home of Ahmed al-Hada, one of the jihadis who had fought alongside Bin Laden against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Hada’s phone was used by various Al Qaeda-linked operatives to pass messages to each other, as some countries blocked or monitored calls to other countries as possible terrorist communications.
The NSA listened as Mohamed al-Owhali, one of the bombers involved in the embassy attack, made multiple calls to the hub before and after the attack. They listened as Al Qaeda operatives called the hub to discuss attacking a US warship in the months prior to the Cole bombing. And they listened as numerous terror suspects called to discuss their operations with Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the alleged 9/11 hijackers and the son-in-law of Ahmed al-Hada.
Thomas Drake was a decorated United States Air Force and United States Navy veteran with a background in military crypto-electronics who had worked for twelve years as an outside contractor at the NSA. 9/11 was his first full day as an employee of the agency, and it was in the wake of that attack that he was handed a report from one of his colleagues in the NSA’s “CounterTerror Shop” that laid out the agency’s role in the events of that day.
According to Drake, the report was “an extraordinarily detailed long-term study of Al Qaeda’s activities” that identified “the planning cells” for 9/11, including “a number of the hijackers based on actual copy: Atta, Hazmi, Mihdhar,” all of whom had appeared on the NSA’s radar by the start of 2001. It also contained specific warnings about 9/11.
Drake immediately gave the document to his supervisor, Maureen Baginski, who told him: “Tom, I wish you had not brought this to my attention.” He was subsequently forced out of his position, stripped of his security clearance and indicted under the Espionage Act.
On the day of the attacks, knowing the information that the NSA had that could have foiled the plot, the analysts began to break down. Two staffers suffered heart attacks, with one dying. Another, a female analyst who had been responsible for monitoring the Yemen hub communications, left NSA headquarters after suffering what Drake was told was a nervous breakdown. Yet another, a 40-something man, began openly crying in a hallway, telling three women he was talking to in full view of everyone passing: “We knew this was being planned months ago, but they would not let us issue the reports we wrote.”
NSA leadership, however, like Drake’s supervisor and the head of the SIGINT division, Maureen Baginski, had a different reaction to the events unfolding that morning.
THOMAS DRAKE: I would hear the following phrase, which I think one person in particular probably regrets ever saying more publicly, that 9/11 was a gift to NSA. A gift.
In fact, the story of intelligence agency foreknowledge of the plot goes from the merely impossible to the outright absurd when it is revealed that it wasn’t just US intelligence that had a window into the plot, but every major intelligence service in the world.
In subsequent years, it has emerged that intelligence agencies in Indonesia, the UK, Germany, Italy, Egypt, Russia, Jordan, France and, of course, Israel had all passed on various warnings about an imminent attack in the months and years leading up to 9/11.
And, infamously, the President received a classified intelligence briefing on August 6, 2001, that unequivocally stated that an attack was being prepared.
RICHARD BEN-VENISTE: Isn’t it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6th PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: I believe the title was, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.”
It’s no surprise that this plot—the most important ever attempted by Al Qaeda—would have been known by so many. Not only did the men that (we are told) bin Laden hand-picked for the operation make no effort to hide their movements or obscure their activities, they instead—in the words of some investigators—left a deliberate trail behind them, a trail that was picked up and extensively reported on in the immediate wake of the attacks.
NARRATOR: Customs inspectors at Dubai airport became suspicious when they noticed that Jarrah had pasted a page of the Koran into his passport. When they searched his luggage, they discovered piles of radical Muslim propaganda. What he did next remains a mystery to terrorism experts worldwide: he talked freely about his future plans.
ANCHOR: One possible clue has developed in Florida. A car was towed from the Daytona Beach airport to this impound lot near Daytona. An airport worker called police because the car had photographs of Osama bin Laden in the back seat.
KERRY SANDERS: . . . and that’s why they geared up the FBI agents in the field immediately and they located him in South Florida, and again over on the West coast of Florida in Venice—
KATIE COURIC: Were they surprised, Kerry, that he wasn’t traveling under an assumed name?
SANDERS: I think they are, but clearly from what the indications are at this point these terrorists are not hiding after the fact or anything like that. I think that—one of the agents told me that what he believes is that they wanted to leave this trail.
Perhaps the greatest clue as to the real nature of the 9/11 operation, however, is found in one of the most stunning pieces of evidence of direct intelligence agency complicity in the plot. In the years after the attack, it was revealed that the CIA were not just surveilling the supposed hijackers or gathering information on their plans; they actively stopped information about these men’s travels from reaching other intelligence agencies, deliberately hiding the fact that two of these agents had entered the US and were openly living in the country from the FBI and even from the National Security Council itself for over one and a half years.
This incredible fact, buried in footnote 44 of chapter 6 of the 9/11 Commission report, was no trivial detail.
9/11 Commission chair Thomas Kean called it “one of the most troubling aspects of our entire report.”
White House counterterror czar Richard Clarke said that it is evidence of both CIA malfeasance and misfeasance.
And Mark Rossini, an FBI agent assigned to the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, believed it to be part of a secret intelligence operation involving these supposed terrorist hijackers that the agency didn’t want anyone to discover.
MARK ROSSINI: You know, the Agency had an obligation to tell the Bureau about these individuals, an in particular when it was determened that they did go on to the U.S., that they did travel to America. I think they had some sort of operational plan going on they didn’t want the Bureau to know about.
Shortly after the Cole bombing, Fahad al-Quso, a Yemeni with known links to Osama Bin Laden, was interrogated by Yemeni agents and admitted that he had flown from Yemen to Bangkok the previous January to deliver $36,000 dollars to “Khallad,” a terrorist based in Malaysia who Quso identified as the bombing mastermind. The money, Quso said, was to buy this one-legged terror mastermind an artificial leg.
But Ali Soufan—the head of the FBI investigation into the Cole bombing—was puzzled by this lead. Why was Al Qaeda transferring money out of Yemen when they were supposedly planning an attack in that country? Was this money for a different operation?
As with every such lead, Soufan followed up with an official request to the CIA for any information they had on “Khallad” in Malaysia or the phone number that Quso had used to contact him there. The CIA never responded to any of these official requests.
But Soufan’s intuitions were correct.
On December 29, 1999—with all of the US intelligence services on heightened alert due to the threat of millennium terror attacks—the NSA shares information from their wiretap of Al Qaeda’s Yemen communications hub with the CIA: Khalid Al-Mihdhar, Nawaf Alhazmi, and Salem Alhazmi will be flying to Malaysia to attend an important Al Qaeda summit the following month. The CIA, already aware of Almihdhar’s connection to the Yemen communications hub, tasks agents from eight CIA offices and six friendly foreign intelligence services with tracking his travel to Malaysia.
The surveillance operation is successful. When Al-Mihdhar changes planes in Dubai, the CIA obtains a copy of his passport. Inside is a vital piece of information: this known bin Laden associate, on his way to an Al Qaeda summit, has a visa to enter the United States. A visa that was issued at the same Jeddah consulate where, Michael Springmann testified, the CIA was helping to secure visas for Osama bin Laden’s men during the Afghan-Soviet war.
Seasoned intelligence officials have no trouble understanding the importance of this fact. Reflecting on the incredible nature of this series of events years later, veteran FBI agent Jack Cloonan remarked:
“How often do you get into someone’s suitcase and find multiple-entry visas? And how often do you know there’s going to be an organizational meeting of Al Qaeda any place in the world? The chances are slim to none! This is as good as it gets. It’s a home run in the ninth inning of the World Series. This is the kind of case you hope your whole life for.”
What happened next is so inexplicable for purveyors of the official 9/11 conspiracy theory that it is typically never discussed.
After scoring this once-in-a-lifetime intelligence coup—this “home run in the ninth inning of the World Series”—the CIA then failed to watchlist either Al-Mihdhar or Alhazmi, allegedly lost track of them after they went on from Malaysia to Thailand (despite having the phone number of the hotel where they stayed in Bangkok) and failed to inform FBI investigators like Ali Soufan that these known terror associates had been tracked to an Al Qaeda summit. Most incredibly of all, the official record shows that supervisors in the CIA’s Bin Laden unit repeatedly and deliberately stopped agents from sending info about Al-Mihdhar’s US visa to the FBI.
On January 5th, 2000, while the summit was still underway in Kuala Lumpur, the CIA’s Riyadh station forwarded the information about Al-Mihdhar’s visa to Alec station at Langley. Doug Miller—an FBI officer assigned to the Bin Laden unit as part of an intelligence sharing program between the CIA and the FBI—read the cable and, following protocol, immediately drafted a memo asking for permission to forward the info to FBI headquarters. The reply from his CIA supervisor, Michael Anne Casey, citing Alex station’s deputy chief, Tom Wilshere, was immediate and unequivocal: “This is not a matter for the FBI.”
Thus began an 18-month odyssey in which 50 CIA personnel documentably accessed this information and not one of them ever officially shared it with any FBI or National Security Council official, even then-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.
CLARKE: You understand, the way they update us at the White House is: every morning, I come in, I turn on my computer and I get 100-150 CIA reports. I’m not relying on somebody calling me and telling me things. You have to intentionally stop it. You have to intervene and say, “No, I don’t want that report to go,” and I never got a report to that effect.
On its own, this is scarcely believable. The Central Intelligence Agency actively and deliberately made a decision to stop the automatic sharing of information on the most sensitive national security intelligence in their possession.
On September 12, 2001, when the CIA finally granted Ali Soufan’s request from nearly one year before and sent him their intelligence about the Malaysia meeting, he began visibly shaking and rushed to the bathroom, vomiting on the floor next to the toilet. When one of his colleagues asked him what had happened, he said: “They knew, they knew.”
But neither Soufan nor anyone else familiar with the hidden history of Al Qaeda should be surprised. When put into its context, this episode is a perfectly predictable continuation of the same pattern of intelligence agency aid that, as we have seen, defines the story of Al Qaeda.
It is sometimes said that in order to be successful in their mission, the intelligence agencies have to get everything right all the time whereas the terrorists only have to get lucky once. But the Al Qaeda “terrorists”—protected, shepherded and aided by the intelligence agencies as they demonstrably were—did not get lucky once.
They got lucky over and over and over again, time after time after time, year after year after year from their earliest beginnings through their development and growth, through their rise to international prominence, through every major terrorist attack of the 1990s and right up to the doorstep of 9/11.
At this point, the “incompetence” theory of “failures” and “missed opportunities” is not only not supportable, it is a transparent falsehood. There is only one conclusion possible: These “terrorists” were deliberately aided.
This is not fringe conspiracy thinking. Even Richard Clarke eventually came to this conclusion.
CLARKE: For me, to this day it is inexplicable why, when I had every other detail about everything related to terrorism, that the director didn’t tell me, that the director of the Counterterrorism Center didn’t tell me, that the other 48 people in CIA who do about it never mentioned it to me or anyone in my staff in a period of over 12 months.
DUFFY: They were stopped from getting to you and stopped from getting to the White House.
CLARKE: And stopped from getting to the FBI and the Defense Department. We therefore conclude that there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share that information.
NOWOSIELSKI: How high level?
CLARKE: I would think it would have to be made by the director.
[. . .]
JOHN DUFFY: Have you asked George Tenet or Cofer Black or Richard Blee about any of this after the fact?
CLARKE: No.
RAY NOWOSIELSKI: It kind of—the facts dripped out to you over time, right? Over these investigations? And then you started to—
CLARKE: It took a while.
NOWOSIELSKI: Yeah
DUFFY: You’ve never approached them . . .?
NOWOSIELSKI: You used to be kind of buddies with Tenet, right? So . . .
CLARKE: Look at it this way: they’ve been able to get through a joint house investigation committee and get through the 9/11 Commission and this has never come out. They got away with it. They’re not going to tell you even if you waterboard them.
That the former top-ranking counterterrorism official in the United States has publicly accused the former director of the CIA and other top CIA officials of running an operation involving the accused 9/11 hijackers and then covering up that operation and information about it up to and through 9/11—an incredible accusation recorded by two independent filmmakers and freely viewable on YouTube for the past decade—is apparently of so little importance that it has never been followed up on by any major media outlet.
But Clarke’s version of the story, explosive as it is—that these accused terrorists really were terrorists, that they, like Ali Mohamed, managed to triple cross the intelligence agencies that were trying to use them as double agents against Al Qaeda, and that the highest ranks of those intelligence agencies up to and including the director of the CIA engaged in a cover up of the entire affair, indirectly allowing 9/11 to take place purely to save their own skin—demonstrably cannot be the full story.
As we now know, these nineteen men were no devout Islamic fundamentalists driven by their devotion into striking against the infidels. These alcohol-drinking, strip club-attending bumblers who, at one point, lived with an FBI informant and who left what investigators described as a deliberate trail behind them were not master spies capable of triple crossing the CIA.
They did not coordinate their plan to coincide precisely with the live fly highjacking exercises, military war games and planes-into-buildings training drills that were taking place on the day of 9/11.
They did not overpower the military-trained pilots on four separate planes before a single one of them could so much as send out a hijack signal.
They did not know to commit those hijackings precisely in the highly-classified radar gaps that made their planes’ movements opaque to flight traffic controllers.
They did not pilot those planes through maneuvers that even experienced pilots called “tough for any airline pilot” despite never having sat in the cockpit of a jumbo jet before.
They did not cause three buildings to pulverize themselves in mid-air, falling directly through the path of most resistance at freefall gravitational acceleration with two planes.
They did not decide to fly around the Pentagon to miss the Defense Secretary’s office and instead hit the section of the building where bookkeepers and budget analysts were working on the problem of the $2.3 trillion that Donald Rumsfeld had just 24 hours earlier admitted could not be accounted for in the Defence Department’s budget.
They did not commit the informed trading that three separate academic studies have proven did take place in the run up to 9/11.
They did not engage in the decades-long cover up of these facts in the wake of that attack.
And they did not launch the war of terror that sometimes saw the US and its allies using Al Qaeda as a convenient excuse for aggression in foreign countries and other times saw them actively collaborating with Al Qaeda to achieve their geopolitical goals.
No. Richard Clarke’s story is itself a cover up. The spectacular, catalyzing terror attack of 9/11 was not allowed to happen. It was made to happen.
But why? Who, other than the devout Muslim suicide warriors posited by the official 9/11 conspiracy theorists, would do such a thing? And for what purpose?
To answer these questions, we need to return to Operation Susannah and the false flag terror ruse that has been employed by the British, the Israelis and the US throughout the past century. As we shall see, just eight years after Operation Susannah failed in Egypt, the highest-ranking officials in the US military drafted plans to stage terror attacks, blow up airliners and even kill Americans in order to blame their political enemies. And in the lead up to 9/11 a cadre of political operatives brought those plans into the 21st century, paving the way for a new Pearl Harbor that would begin a worldwide war of terror and a clash of civilizations.
GEORGE W. BUSH: Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there.
It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.
SOURCE: President Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001
Max Boot, a conservative who has long favored regime-change operations on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment, is going after Hollywood producer and director Oliver Stone. His beef with Stone? He’s upset because Stone has long maintained that the U.S. national-security establishment employed one of its patented regime-change operations here at home, against President John F. Kennedy.
Interestingly, Boot makes a reference to Stone’s accusation “that Kennedy’s autopsy reports were falsified.”
Actually, the more accurate way to put it is that the U.S. national-security establishment conducted a fraudulent autopsy. That fraud was reflected in both the autopsy photographs as well as the final autopsy report.
But like many other proponents of the official lone-nut theory of the assassination, Boot doesn’t address any of the main features of the autopsy fraud in his rant against Stone.
For 30 years, the national-security establishment had falsely claimed that there was only one brain examination in the Kennedy autopsy.
It was a lie. And when people are lying about something that important, you know that they are up to something that is rotten and no good.
In the 1990s, the Assassination Records Review Board determined that there were two different brain examinations in the JFK autopsy, the second of which involved a brain that did not belong to Kennedy.
How did they determine this? The official photographer for the autopsy, John Stringer, was at the first brain exam. He stated that at that brain exam, the brain was “sectioned” or cut like a loaf of bread is cut. That’s standard procedure with an autopsy that involves a gunshot to the head. Stringer took photographs of the brain, which also is standard procedure.
One of the three military pathologists who conducted the autopsy, Col. Pierre Finck, stated that he attended the brain examination. But he was not at the brain exam that Stringer attended. Stringer verified that. That means that there was a second brain exam. At that second brain exam, a different photographer was present taking photographs. The brain at the second brain exam was not “sectioned.”A sectioned brain cannot be reconstituted into a non-sectioned brain. That’s how we know that the brain at the second brain exam had to be a brain of someone other than Kennedy.
It’s also worth mentioning two other things about the brain exam. First, when Stringer was asked to examine the official photographs of Kennedy’s brain, he specifically denied that those were the photographs he took. Second, the autopsy report reflects that Kennedy’s brain weighed 1500 grams. An average brain weighs around 1350 grams. Everyone agrees that an extremely large portion of Kennedy’s brain was blown out by the shot that hit him in the head. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, there is no possibility that Kennedy’s brain could have weighed 1500 grams after having a large portion of it blown away by the gunshot.
What does Boot say about the two brain exams? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
There is something else worth noting. If it hadn’t been for Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, we would never have learned about this fraud. That’s because the national-security establishment would have continued lying about there being only one brain exam. It was Stone’s movie that led directly to the JFK Records Act and the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) whose job it was to enforce it. That’s how we learned about the fraud relating to the two brain exams.
The ARRB also discovered the existence of a woman named Saundra Spencer. She was a chief petty officer at the Navy’s photography laboratory in Washington in November 1963. She had a top-secret security clearance. She had worked closely with President Kennedy on both classified and unclassified photographs. She told a remarkable story to the ARRB.
On the weekend of the assassination, Spencer was asked to develop the Kennedy autopsy photographs. Since she was led to believe that the operation was classified, she had kept her secret for some 30 years. When the ARRB showed her the official autopsy photographs, she said that those were not the photographs she developed on the weekend of the assassination. The ones she developed showed a massive exit-sized hole in the back of JFK’s head. The official autopsy photographs show the back of JFK’s head to be intact — i.e., no massive exit-sized hole.
If Spencer’s testimony was true and accurate, then that could mean only one thing: the national-security establishment’s autopsy photograph was fraudulent.
What does Boot say about Saundra Spencer? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Spencer’s testimony matched what Dr. Robert McClelland, who was one of JFK’s treating physicians at Parkland Hospital, said. He stated that Kennedy had a massive exit-sized wound in the back of his head. McClelland wasn’t the only one who said that. So did the other treating physicians, nurses, a Secret Service agent, two FBI agents, and others.
What does Boot say about Dr. McClelland and all those other witnesses who stated that JFK had a massive exit-sized wound in the back of his head? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
It’s again worth noting that If Oliver Stone had not come out with his movie JFK, we would never have learned about Saundra Spencer and the role she played on the weekend of the assassination.
What does a fraudulent autopsy have to do with the assassination? It tells us that the assassination was a regime-change operation, no different from other regime-change operations carried out by the national-security establishment, in places like Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958), Congo (1961), Cuba (1960 to date), Chile (1970-73), and others.
That’s because, as I have repeatedly emphasized in the past, there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy, especially when the scheme for a fraudulent autopsy was launched the minute that Kennedy was declared dead. That was when a team of Secret Service agents, operating on orders and brandishing guns, screaming and yelling profanities, and exercising violence, forced their way out of Parkland Hospital with Kennedy’s body, so that they could get it in the hands of new President Johnson, who, in turn, would dutifully deliver it into the hands of the national-security establishment. In the process, that Secret Service team refused to permit the Dallas County Medical Examiner to conduct the autopsy, which was required by state law.
Thus, there is but one reason that the national-security establishment would carry out a fraudulent autopsy — to cover up its own regime-change operation. There is no other reasonable conclusion that can be drawn.
After the U.S. government was converted from a limited-government republic into a national-security state, conservatives as well as liberals reveled in the regime-change operations, including assassinations and assassination attempts, that were being carried about by the U.S. national-security establishment. The Cold War notion was that the national-security establishment was protecting “national security” by keeping us safe from the communists, who were supposedly coming to get us (much like the terrorists, the Muslims, the drug dealers, and the illegal immigrants are supposedly coming to get us today).
What they still have a hard time accepting is that the little monster they love when it regime-changes foreign leaders is the same little monster that regime-changed John Kennedy for doing precisely what those foreign leaders were doing during the Cold War racket — reaching out to those horrible Russians and to Cuban communist Fidel Castro in a spirit of peace and friendship.
If regime-changed foreign leaders like Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, and Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, posed a grave threat to “national security” for reaching out to the Reds in a spirit of peace and friendship, why wouldn’t a U.S. president who was doing the same thing pose an even graver threat to “national security”? (See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment; Why Kennedy Was Assassinated.) Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Max Boot doesn’t answer that question.
Almost two years in, the “Great Reset” has reached a certain stage of maturity. Years of planning, infiltration, manipulation, and social engineering have come to fruition. The many simulations are now being tested in the real world. The actors who trained and rehearsed for their parts as presidents, prime ministers, health officials, trusted doctors, and media personalities have taken their place on stage, miraculously prepared to save humanity from a catastrophe never experienced by mankind. The operation was always too big to go on covertly, so eventually the perpetrators had to announce their plans, the war had to be declared, and troops assembled on the field of battle.
We know more or less who the perpetrators are — the globalists, the central bankers, a certain megalomaniac software developer, eugenicists, pharmaceutical companies, Vanguard, Blackrock, the CIA, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Illuminati, the Freemasons, Satanists, aliens working on other wavelengths, and so on.
But what about the other side? Here we see people across the spectrum, very few wealthy or holding power, often oriented toward nation, home, family, personal responsibility, and religion — in other words, conservatives. Conspicuously absent from any resistance to the Reset are liberals and leftists, the anti-war and anti-imperialist left, so-called “progressives”, socialists, anarchists, and union leaders — the very people one thought would be the first to stand up against corporate tyranny and totalitarian control. Leftists opposing the Reset quickly became former leftists. This group spent the past two years dealing with what seemed the betrayal of a lifetime, as they watched their ideals of liberation from oppression carried to the point of absurdity. They watched anti-racism turn into racism, sexual liberation into gender chaos, anti-fascism into fascism. Opposition to all forms of discrimination gave way to support for discrimination . . . against the “unvaccinated.” Belief in “my body, my choice” somehow turned into support for no-choice medical mandates. The new radicals came like puppets of the state to disrupt medical freedom rallies, wearing face masks and calling people “Nazis” for not wearing them.
November 7, 2021, Boston Common.”Anarchists” protesting against a rally for medical freedom.
But then the disillusioned leftist realized that all this was actually consistent with socialism, in which the needs of the collective come before individual rights, and that the left actually has more in common with the utopian leaders of the World Economic Forum than it does with the virus-spreading working class who, afterall, were always too thick to understand the higher goals of socialism. In the surprise ending of the Great Reset, Act I the left revealed its true identity — they were the real authoritarians all along! But even with this revelation, the left lost none of its insufferable self-righteousness.
As devastating as the Great Reset operation could be for the future of humanity, it’s a wonder that we still carry our old grievances and prejudices with us. Millions of people have already been killed or injured by mRNA injections, yet different sides in the freedom movement can’t seem to get over their differences. The left has to come to terms with its delusions, but so does the right.
First of all, let’s acknowledge that with all the power the globalists have, it is inconceivable that both sides would not already be heavily infiltrated. The oligarchs would no doubt agree with their former client Vladimir Lenin when he said, “the best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.” We can assume that many in the ranks of Antifa, for example, are undercover cops, FBI agents, informants, and temp work thugs. From Charlottesville in 2017 to the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020 to Boston Common in 2021, we saw them all in action, working in silent agreement with their supposed sworn enemy, the police.
We can also assume that people who look and talk just like Trump-supporting MAGA conservatives are also on the job, as witnessed in the obvious manipulation by agents working with police to entrap protesters in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021. The left has been familiar with FBI infiltration since the COINTELPRO days of the ’60s. Conservatives becoming active in politics today may not have this experience. They could maybe learn a few things about agents provocateurs and, for that matter, be cautious about “backing the blue”, until they find out just which side “the blue” are actually on. Cops are generally known to serve the powerful. But conservatives don’t consult the left about their experience with the police. Nor is the left talking to conservatives about why wokeness isn’t providing any solutions. The two sides are not talking.
Anti-imperialists have been opposing US foreign wars since the Mexican War in 1846. The list of wars initiated by the US from then to now — criminal wars that had nothing to do with self-defense — is too long to list. Conservatives have generally supported US warmaking and, because of their patriotism, they honor and support the soldiers who fight the wars. But where was the honor in decimating Afghanistan and Iraq, to mention just two? Love of one’s country does not justify starving and bombing people in another country who never harmed the US. Anti-imperialists would not be surprised that the American empire may be about to pay a moral debt for its wars of aggression. They opposed the wars while patriots supported them, and there are some hard feelings there. The reckoning that seems to be coming to America will be hard for the patriots. But it will also be hard for the left when they realize that all along they have been the shameless dupes of the ruling class, who seduced them with high-sounding goals only to put them and everyone else into a prison where they the guards will have control of not only our bodies but our minds. If there was ever a time to fight fascism, this is it. But the left has been AWOL in this struggle, and that is a shame they may never live down.
The control of most of humanity by machines projected by the Great Reset will, if it comes true, make the disputes between left and right seem quaint. We’re going to have much worse problems if we don’t end this soon.
For quite some time the British have accepted that British Jewish organizations have hijacked the political discourse. As has happened in other Western countries, the British political establishment has engaged is a relentless rant against antisemitsm. Sometime the focus drifts for a day or two. An alleged ‘Russian nerve gas attack’ provided a 48 hour pause. Occasionally we bomb Arabs in the name of ‘human intervention’ only to realize a day or two later that we have, once again, followed a premeditated foreign agenda. But, somehow, we always return to the antisemitism debate, as if our media and politicians are a herd of flies gravitating to a pile of poop. … continue
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