The Pandora Papers: Same old nonsense in a new box
The MSM is trying to trick people into thinking they’re still journalists, by telling us things we already know.
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | October 5, 2021
The Pandora Papers are out! Following the riveting Panama Papers in 2016, and the astounding Paradise Papers of 2017, the latest entry in the trilogy of financial “leaks” is finally here, and I couldn’t be more excited.
THE “LEAKS”
So let’s get right down to it… what do the “leaks” say? Well, according to The Guardian…
The files reveal how wealthy individuals can shield their income and their assets from taxation and scrutiny by hiding them in offshore jurisdictions, more commonly known as “tax havens”.
Mind. Blown.
Rich people don’t pay tax! WHAT?!
It’s groundbreaking stuff. But that’s the kind of world-changing exposes you get when you read the work of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
THE SOURCE
Just as with the Panama Papers in 2016 and the Paradise Papers of 2017, the ICIJ are here to tell you that off-shore accounts exist, and that rich people use them.
The big “revelations” include politicians from Ecuador, the Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Kenya. The King of Jordan, the Prime Ministers of the UAE and the Czech Republic. Hardly a Who’s Who of hard hitters and political A-listers, instead – just as with the previous “leaks” – a collection of disposable lizard tails.
The biggest name mentioned is Tony Blair, who already has an unsalvageable public image, and is only accused of legally avoiding £300,000 in stamp duty. Or roughly 30p per Iraqi he murdered.
The papers don’t even allege any actual crimes took place, and they don’t name-and-shame any noteworthy politicians at all (largely because America has domestic tax havens), but still… they are apparently a huge deal.
Now a real investigative journalist might, at this point, ask “well who leaked these papers?” and “what did they stand to gain?”, but that’s not the ICIJ’s bag, they’re just here to unquestioningly publish documents sent to them by intelligence agencies and billionaires, and call them “leaks”.
You see, despite the name, the “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists” are not really journalists. In fact, they’re a “special project” of the creepily-named Centre for Public Integrity, a non-profit funded by various foundations and billionaires (including George Soros).
PUTIN? AGAIN? REALLY?
In a startlingly old-fashioned move, the press is pitching the angle that this “leak” reveals Vladimir Putin’s “secret wealth”, despite admitting that:
The Russian president Vladimir Putin does not appear in the files by name.
This exactly mirrors the Panama Papers, where Putin’s picture was everywhere despite the admitted fact “the president’s name does not appear in any of the records.” At the time I wrote that the Guardian had collapsed into self-parody.
The whole thing was darkly funny at the time, it is decidedly stale now. Like an actor who’s played the same role for years and has started phoning it in.
Speaking of the Guardian… our old friend Luke Harding had 2000 words about Putin’s wealth in that paper over the weekend. He alleges an illicit affair, hidden billions and a secret Monaco flat… all based on literally nothing. He cites no evidence that the woman in question ever MET Putin except – quite seriously – that they might have been on the same aeroplane.
Still, though, the need to make stuff up in order to publish it has never stopped Luke before. And he’s writing “from Monaco” so he at least managed to wrangle a tax-deductible holiday out of it. Good job Luke.
And he’s probably already halfway through a new book called something like “Red Money: The secret lives and loves of Vladimir Putin”. If he hurries he might get it done before Christmas, (especially if he plagiarizes other people’s work again).
CONCLUSION
In short, the Pandora Papers are a non-story.
“Rich people avoid taxes and lie about it” is not breaking news, and when the newspapers like the Guardian and Washington Post report it as if it is… well, it’s because it must serve some other purpose.
Possibly just a distraction, sound and fury signifying nothing. Possibly some as-yet-unrevealed plans for “financial reform” or “stricter regulations”.
Maybe a simple pantomime, trying to pretend that the world is still the same as it was pre-Covid. That we’re still good, and Russia is still bad, and that there really are different sides and they’re not all joined together behind the scenes.
Maybe just an exercise in pretending mainstream news does any kind of journalism at all. A little bit of lipstick up on a very ugly pig.
The world is corrupt, no kidding. But it’s far more corrupt than the Paradise Papers show, or that the ICIJ would ever actually admit.
I wrote a long and detailed response to this nonsense back in 2016, which you can read here. It’s nearly five years old now, but if the ICIJ can recycle old material then so can I.
Absolutely no evidence in Pandora papers leak to back up assertions about ‘hidden riches of Putin’s inner circle’
By Jonny Tickle | RT | October 4, 2021
Assertions by the publishers of the Pandora papers that the entourage of Russian President Vladimir Putin has secretly enriched itself have no substance and aren’t backed up by proof, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has claimed.
The Pandora papers are 11.9 million leaked documents published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which worked with journalists from over 117 countries, including outlets like The Washington Post and the BBC. It is said to be the biggest ever leak exposing tax evasion.
In the papers, several Russians are named, and according to the ICIJ, the country is “disproportionately represented” in the leaked documents. Two of the people named include Konstantin Ernst, the head of Russia’s most-watched broadcaster Channel One; and German Gref, the CEO of Sberbank, the country’s biggest financial institution.
However, despite his name not appearing in the documents, some of the journalists investigating the papers say that they show the great wealth of the president’s entourage, with London-based newspaper the Guardian claiming that it reveals the “hidden riches of Putin’s inner circle.”
However, according to the Kremlin, there is absolutely no evidence for this assertion.
Speaking to journalists on Monday, Peskov said that Moscow has not seen any “hidden wealth.”
“We haven’t seen anything in particular so far,” he explained. “So far, it’s just about some assertions, and it’s not clear what they are based on. This is certainly not a reason for an investigation.”
In fact, according to Peskov, the investigation simply proves that the US is the world’s most prominent location for tax evasion.
The Pandora paper authors also name Svetlana Krivonogikh, the woman claimed by investigative website Proekt to be the mother of one of Putin’s children. The Kremlin has never responded to the allegations. In 2021, Proekt was labeled as a foreign agent.
Outside of Russia, the paper also names Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Czech President Andrej Babiš, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as those storing money offshore.
Could the CIA be behind the leak of the Pandora Papers, given their curious lack of focus on US nationals?
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | October 4, 2021
Hailed as shedding new light on the global elite’s complex financial arrangements, the Pandora Papers pose many questions – not least where are the Americans? Are the authors unwilling to bite the hidden hand that fed them?
On October 3, the Washington, DC-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) announced the leak of almost three terabytes of incriminating data on the use of offshore financial arrangements by celebrities, fraudsters, drug dealers, royal family members, and religious leaders the world over.
The ICIJ led what it called “the world’s largest-ever journalistic collaboration,” involving over 600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countries, to comb through the trove of 12 million documents, dubbed the ‘Pandora Papers’.
Among other things, the data reveals the use of tax and financial secrecy havens “to purchase real estate, yachts, jets and life insurance; their use to make investments and to move money between bank accounts; estate planning and other inheritance issues; and the avoidance of taxes through complex financial schemes.” Some documents are also said to be tied to “financial crimes, including money laundering.”
While the publication of articles related to the documents’ bombshell contents is only in its early stages, the Consortium promises that the records contain “an unprecedented amount of information on so-called beneficial owners of entities registered in the British Virgin Islands, Seychelles, Hong Kong, Belize, Panama, South Dakota and other secrecy jurisdictions,” with over 330 politicians and 130 Forbes billionaires named.
Despite the voluminous haul, many critics have pointed out that ICIJ maps of where these “elites and crooks” hail from and/or reside are heavily weighted towards Russia and Latin America – for example, not a single corrupt politician named is based in the US. The organization itself notes that the most significantly represented nations in the files are Argentina, Brazil, China, Russia and the UK – which seems odd, when one considers the Consortium identified over $1 billion held in US-based trusts, key instruments for tax avoidance, evasion, and money laundering.
Then again, past blockbuster releases by the ICIJ, and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), its chief collaborator, have contained similarly incongruous omissions. For instance, in March 2019, the latter exposed the ‘Troika Laundromat’, through which Russian politicians, oligarchs, and criminals allegedly funnelled billions of dollars.
The OCCRP published numerous reports on the connivance, and detailed information on the many millions laundered via major Western financial institutions in the process, including Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase. However, not once was HSBC ever mentioned – despite the Troika having openly advertised the bank as its “agent partner,” and then-OCCRP data team head Friedrich Lindberg publicly conceding that HSBC was “incredibly prominent” in “all” of the Troika’s corrupt schemes.
The reason for this extraordinary oversight has never been adequately explained, although one possible answer could be that the OCCRP’s reporting partners on the story were the BBC and The Guardian. The former was headed by Rona Fairhead from 2014 to 2017, who also served as non-executive director of HSBC between 2004 and 2016. Meanwhile, the latter has long enjoyed a lucrative commercial relationship with the bank, which is surely vital to keeping the struggling publication’s lights on.
The April 2016 Panama Papers investigation, jointly led by the ICIJ and OCCRP, revealed how the services of Panamanian offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca had been exploited by wealthy individuals and public officials for fraud, tax evasion, and to circumvent international sanctions. The pair’s reporting, and resultant media coverage, focused heavily on high-profile individuals such as then-UK prime minister David Cameron, who profited from a Panama-based trust established by his father.
A key promoter of the Papers’ most lurid contents was billionaire Bill Browder. What the convicted fraudster, and indeed a vast number of news outlets that featured his comments about the leak, have consistently failed to acknowledge was that he himself is named in Mossack Fonseca’s papers, linked to a large number of shell companies in Cyprus used to insulate his clients from tax on vast profits he amassed for them while investing in Russia during the tumultuous 1990s, and disguise ownership of lavish properties he owns abroad.
As Browder has testified, he enjoys an intimate relationship with the OCCRP, having engaged them in his global crusade against Russia since his unceremonious ban from entering the country in 2005. Furthermore, many other mainstream outlets, including Bloomberg and the Financial Times, which he has likewise used as pawns in his Russophobic propaganda blitz, have reportedly declined to publish stories about his dubious financial dealings.
Such evident reluctance to bite the hand that feeds could well explain why the Pandora Papers appear largely silent on the offshore dealings of wealthy US nationals and US-based individuals.
Take for instance the fortunes of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and investor George Soros, which reportedly total at least $11.6 billion and $7.5 billion respectively – no information implicating them in any questionable scheme has yet been unearthed. It may not be a coincidence that both provide funding to the ICIJ and OCCRP via their highly controversial Luminate and Open Society ‘philanthropic’ enterprises.
The OCCRP’s roll call of financiers offers other reasons for concern – nestled among them are the National Endowment for Democracy and United States Agency for International Development, both of which avowedly serve to further US national security interests, and have been embroiled in numerous military and intelligence operations to destabilize and displace foreign “enemy” governments since their very inception. Moreover, though, there are disturbing indications that the OCCRP itself was created by Washington for this very purpose.
In June, a White House press conference was convened on the subject of “the fight against corruption.” Over the course of proceedings, a nameless “senior administration official” announced that the US government would place “the anti-corruption plight at the center of its foreign policy,” and wished to “prioritize this work across the board.”
They went on to state the precise dimensions of this anti-corruption push “[remained] to be seen,” but it was expected that “components of the intelligence community,” including the director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency, would be key players therein.
Their activities would supplement existing, ongoing US efforts to “identify corruption where it’s happening and take appropriate policy responses,” by “[bolstering] other actors” such as “investigative journalists and investigative NGOs” already receiving support from Washington.
“We’ll be looking at what more we can do on that front… There are lines of assistance that have jump-started [investigative] journalism organizations,” they stated. “What comes to my mind most immediately is OCCRP, as well as foreign assistance that goes to NGOs.”
These illuminating words, completely ignored at the time by Western news outlets, have gained an even eerier resonance in light of recent developments. Indeed, they seem to establish a blueprint for precisely what has transpired, courtesy of the OCCRP, the very organization it “jump-started” and financially supports to this day.
For its part, the media merely state that the ICIJ “obtained” the documents, their ultimate source unspecified. As such, it’s only reasonable to ask – is the CIA behind the release of the Pandora Papers?
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
436 Randomly Generated ‘Peer Reviewed’ Papers Published by Springer Nature
By Mike Hearn • The Daily Sceptic • October 3, 2021
The publisher Springer Nature has released an “expression of concern” for more than four hundred papers they published in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences. All these papers supposedly passed through both peer review and editorial control, yet no expertise in geoscience is required to notice the problem:
The paper can’t decide if it’s about organic pollutants or the beauty of Latin dancing, and switches instantly from one to the other half way through the abstract.
The publisher claims this went through about two months of review, during which time the editors proved their value by assigning it helpful keywords:
If you’re intrigued by this fusion of environmental science and fun hobbies, you’ll be overjoyed to learn that the full article will only cost you about £30 and there are many more available if that one doesn’t take your fancy, e.g.
- Distribution of earthquake activity in mountain area based on embedded system and physical fitness detection of basketball
- Detection of rare earth elements in groundwater based on SAR imaging algorithm and fatigue intervention of dance training
- Detection of PM2.5 in mountain air based on fuzzy multi-attribute and construction of folk sports activities
- Characteristics of heavy metal pollutants in groundwater based on fuzzy decision making and the effect of aerobic exercise on teenagers
Background
Peer-reviewed science is the type of evidence policymakers respect most. Nonetheless, a frequent topic on this site is scientific reports containing errors so basic that any layman can spot them immediately, leading to the question of whether anyone actually read the papers before publication. An example is the recent article by Imperial College London, published in Nature Scientific Reports, in which the first sentence was a factually false claim about public statistics.
Evidence is now accruing that it’s indeed possible for “peer reviewed” scientific papers to be published which have not only never been reviewed by anybody at all, but might not have even been written by anybody, and that these papers can be published by well known firms like Springer Nature and Elsevier. In August we wrote about the phenomenon of nonsensical “tortured phrases” that indicate the usage of thesaurus-driven paper rewriting programs, probably the work of professional science forging operations called “paper mills”. Thousands of papers have been spotted using this technique; the true extent of the problem is unknown. In July, I reported on the prevalence of Photoshopped images and Chinese paper-forging efforts in the medical literature. Papers are often found that are entirely unintelligible, for example this paper, or this one whose abstract ends by saying, “Clean the information for the preparation set for finding valuable highlights to speak to the information by relying upon the objective of the undertaking.” – a random stream of words that means nothing.
Where does this kind of text come from?
The most plausible explanation is that these papers are being auto-generated using something called a context-free grammar. The goal is probably to create the appearance of interest in the authors they cite. In academia promotions are linked to publications and citations, creating a financial incentive to engage in this sort of metric gaming. The signs are all there: inexplicable topic switches half way through sentences or paragraphs, rampant grammatical errors, the repetitive title structure, citations of real papers and so on. Another sign is the explanation the journal supplied for how it occurred: the editor claims that his email address was hacked.
In this case, something probably went wrong during the production process that caused different databases of pre-canned phrases to be mixed together incorrectly. The people generating these papers are doing it on an industrial scale, so they didn’t notice because they don’t bother reading their own output. The buyers didn’t notice – perhaps they can’t actually read English, or don’t exist. Then the journal didn’t notice because, apparently, it’s enough for just one person to get “hacked” for the journal to publish entire editions filled with nonsense. And finally none of the journal’s readers noticed either, leading to the suspicion that maybe there aren’t any.
The volunteers spotting these papers are uncovering an entire science-laundering ecosystem, hiding in plain sight.
We know randomly generated papers can get published because it’s happened hundreds of times before. Perhaps the most famous example is SCIgen, “a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations” using context-free grammars. It was created in 2005 by MIT grad students as a joke, with the aim to “maximize amusement, rather than coherence“. SCIgen papers are buzzword salads that might be convincing to someone unfamiliar with computer science, albeit only if they aren’t paying attention.
Despite this origin, in 2014 over 120 SCIgen papers were withdrawn by leading publishers like the IEEE after outsiders noticed them. In 2020 two professors of computer science observed that the problem was still occurring and wrote an automatic SCIgen detector. Although it’s only about 80% reliable, it nonetheless spotted hundreds more. Their detector is now being run across a subset of new publications and finds new papers on a regular basis.
Root cause analysis
On its face, this phenomenon is extraordinary. Why can’t journals stop themselves publishing machine-generated gibberish? It’s impossible to imagine any normal newspaper or magazine publishing thousands of pages of literally random text and then blaming IT problems for it, yet this is happening repeatedly in the world of academic publishing.
The surface level problem is that many scientific journals appear to be almost or entirely automated, including journals that have been around for decades. Once papers are submitted, the reviewing, editorial and publishing process becomes handled by computers. If the system stops working properly editors can seem oblivious – they routinely discover they published nonsense only because people who don’t even subscribe to their journal complained about it.
Strong evidence for this comes from the “fixes” journals present when put under pressure. As an explanation for why the 436 “expressions of concern” wouldn’t be repeated the publisher said:
The dedicated Research Integrity team at Springer Nature is constantly searching for any irregularities in the publication process, supported by a range of tools, including an in-house-developed detection tool.
The same firm also proudly trumpeted in a press release that:
Springer announces the release of SciDetect, a new software program that automatically checks for fake scientific papers. The open source software discovers text that has been generated with the SCIgen computer program and other fake-paper generators like Mathgen and Physgen. Springer uses the software in its production workflow to provide additional, fail-safe checking.
A different journal proposed an even more ridiculous solution: ban people from submitting papers from webmail accounts. The more obvious solution of paying people to read the articles before they get published is apparently unthinkable – the problem of fake auto-generated papers is so prevalent, and the scientific peer review process so useless, that they are resorting to these feeble attempts to automate the editing process.
Diving below the surface, the problem may be that journals face functional irrelevance in the era of search engines. Clearly nobody can be reading the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, including its own editors, yet according to an interesting essay by Prof Igor Pak “publisher’s contracts with [university] libraries require them to deliver a certain number of pages each year“. What’s in those pages? The editors don’t care because the libraries pay regardless. The librarians don’t care because the universities pay. The universities don’t care because the students and granting bodies pay. The students and granting bodies don’t care because the government pays. The government doesn’t care because the citizens pay, and the citizens DO care – when they find out about this stuff – but generally can’t do anything about it because they’re forced to pay through taxes, student loan laws and a (socially engineered) culture in which people are told they must have a degree or else they won’t be able to get a professional job.
This seems to be zombie-fying scientific publishing. Non-top tier journals live on as third party proof that some work was done, which in a centrally planned economy has value for justifying funding requests to committees. But in any sort of actual market-based economy many of them would have disappeared a long time ago.
“Natural Immunity” Is a Political Problem for the Regime
By Ryan McMaken – Mises Wire – 09/21/2021
Since 2020, public health technocrats and their allies among elected officials have clung to the position that absolutely every person who can possibly get a covid vaccine should get one.
Both the Mayo Clinic website and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, for example, insist that “research has not yet shown” that people who have recovered from covid have any sort of reliable protection. Moreover, the CDC page points to a single study from Kentucky claiming that people with natural immunity are more than twice as likely to contract covid again, compared to people who have been vaccinated.
This narrative is reflected in the fact that the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates are a one-size-fits-all policy insisting that virtually all adults, regardless of whether or not they’ve already had the disease, receive a covid vaccine. The official position is apparently this: nothing except the vaccine can provide any sort of resistance or immunity. So get a vaccine. No exceptions!
Health technocrats have repeatedly insisted that “the science” points unambiguously toward everyone receiving a vaccine, even to the point of pushing vaccines for children. All this in spite of the fact the risk to children from covid is far less than a dozen common daily risks, such as riding in an automobile.
The regime has attached itself closely to a vaccinate-everybody-no-matter-what policy, and a sudden u-turn would be politically problematic. So it’s no wonder there’s so little interest in the topic.
Indeed, in a September 10 interview, senior covid technocrat Anthony Fauci claimed that the matter of natural immunity was not even being discussed at government health agencies. Fauci’s response suggested that the facts of natural immunity warranted discussion at some point in the future. But the comment certainly fit the dominant regime narrative nonetheless: the facts of natural immunity don’t matter for now. Everyone should just get vaccinated:
CNN’s Sanjay Gupta asked if people who have already recovered from COVID-19 should still be required to get the vaccine.
“I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that,” [Fauci] said Thursday on CNN. “I think that is something that we need to sit down and discuss seriously.”
Maybe someday they’ll get to talking about it.
But some physicians aren’t as obsessed with pushing vaccine mandates as Anthony Fauci, and the evidence in favor of natural immunity is becoming so undeniable that even mainstream publications are starting to admit it.
In an op-ed for the Washington Post last week, Marty Makary of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine argues that the medical profession has hurt its credibility in pretending that natural immunity is virtually irrelevant to the covid equation. Moreover, the dogmatic “get vaccinated” position constitutes a lack of honesty about the data. Rather, Makary concludes:
[W]e can encourage all Americans to get vaccinated while still being honest about the data. In my clinical experience, I have found patients to be extremely forgiving with evolving data if you are honest and transparent with them. Yet, when asked the common question, “I’ve recovered from covid, is it absolutely essential that I get vaccinated?” many public health officials have put aside the data and responded with a synchronized “yes,” even as studies have shown that reinfections are rare and often asymptomatic or mild when they do occur.
And what are these studies? Makary continues:
More than 15 studies have demonstrated the power of immunity acquired by previously having the virus. A 700,000-person study from Israel two weeks ago found that those who had experienced prior infections were 27 times less likely to get a second symptomatic covid infection than those who were vaccinated. This affirmed a June Cleveland Clinic study of health-care workers (who are often exposed to the virus), in which none who had previously tested positive for the coronavirus got reinfected. The study authors concluded that “individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from covid-19 vaccination.” And in May, a Washington University study found that even a mild covid infection resulted in long-lasting immunity.
The policy bias in favor of vaccines ignores many other facts as well, such as the relative risks of vaccines, especially for the young:
The current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention position about vaccinating children also dismisses the benefits of natural immunity. The Los Angeles County School District recently mandated vaccines for students ages 12 and up who want to learn in person. But young people are less likely to suffer severe or long-lasting symptoms from covid-19 than adults, and have experienced rare heart complications from the vaccines. In Israel, heart inflammation has been observed in between 1 in 3,000 and 1 in 6,000 males age 16 to 24; the CDC has confirmed 854 reports nationally in people age 30 and younger who got the vaccine.
A second dose of the two-shot mRNA vaccine like that produced by Pfizer and Moderna may not even be necessary in children who had covid. Since February, Israel’s Health Ministry has been recommending that anyone, adult or adolescent, who has recovered from covid-19 receive a only single mRNA vaccine dose, instead of two. Even though the risk of severe illness during a reinfection is exceedingly low, some data has demonstrated a slight benefit to one dose in this situation. Other countries use a similar approach. The United States could adopt this strategy now as a reasonable next step in transitioning from an overly rigid to a more flexible vaccine requirement policy. For comparison, the CDC has long recommended that kids do not get the chickenpox vaccine if they had chickenpox infection in the past.
The nonscientific, ideology-induced blind spot for natural immunity also prompted The BMJ (the journal of the British Medical Association) to note that “[w]hen the vaccine rollout began in mid-December 2020, more than one quarter of Americans—91 million—had been infected with SARS-CoV-2…. As of this May, that proportion had risen to more than a third of the population, including 44% of adults aged 18–59.”
And yet, the authors note this fact doesn’t appear to be a part of any policy discussion at all:
The substantial number of infections, coupled with the increasing scientific evidence that natural immunity was durable, led some medical observers to ask why natural immunity didn’t seem to be factored into decisions about prioritising vaccination.
This problem is reflected in the Biden administration’s drive for booster shots—announced in mid-August—even before there was any clinical research on booster shots at all. Even by mid-September, as one hospital’s chief medical officer put it, “the data is not compelling one way or another.”
But those sorts of details don’t trouble federal “public health” officials, and the Biden administration quickly moved toward pushing booster shots for everyone.
This Is Why There Should Be No Mandatory Medical Treatment
Of course, mandating vaccines—like mandating any medical treatment—would still be immoral even if we could list a dozen studies suggesting boosters are a boon and that natural immunity is no good.
What if there were twenty-five studies “proving” vaccines are better than natural immunity, but only twenty studies “proving” natural immunity is better? Would coercive vaccine mandates then suddenly be justified? Unfortunately, that’s exactly how many advocates for repressive covid policies think the world should work. For these people, policy is just a matter of adding up the number of studies “proving” their side is right, and then claiming this justifies forcing mandatory medications on millions of human beings.
(It never works in reverse, of course. The fact that there’s a lot of evidence—as Makary points out—against vaccines for those who have natural immunity, the dominant narrative is nonetheless that vaccines are “necessary” and “worth it” for everybody, always and everywhere.)
In the real world, however, many medications—including these new vaccines—come with risks that must be weighed against potential benefits. These decisions can only be made at the individual level, where patients must make their own decisions about what substances to put into their own bodies. In other words, blanket policies proclaiming “everyone must receive this medical treatment immediately, or else” contradicts the realities of the uncertainties and varying risk levels that affect individuals. The facts of uncertainty and informed consent were once considered a mainstay of medical ethics—and of any political ideology that actually respects self-determination and basic human rights. Unfortunately, the philosophy of “public health” appears to be uninterested in such trivialities.
At this point, it would be embarrassing for the regime to admit what actual scientific inquiry has shown: that natural immunity is generally superior to receiving the vaccine. The regime doesn’t like to be embarrassed, and neither do the countless doctors and nurses who have long toed the regime’s political line. So expect more of the same.
Journal Rebuked for Publishing Biased Letter Signed by EcoHealth President
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | October 2, 2021
In July 2021 and February 2021 the medical journal The Lancet printed letters signed by 24 scientists, physicians, epidemiologists and virologists that denied the possibility that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, originated in a lab.
One of those signers was Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, which received grant funds from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for gain-of-function research. The information on Daszak’s, EcoHealth Alliance’s and the NIAID’s involvement in research that possibly could have led to a lab origin was revealed in late-summer, 2021.
Previously, any suggestion that a lab leak could have occurred was resoundly proclaimed a conspiracy theory.
But now, in a rebuke of The Lancet for allowing the letters to be published when there “is so far no scientifically validated evidence that directly supports a natural origin,” 16 other scientists are calling for The Lancet to “open their columns to in-depth analyses of all hypotheses.”
“As scientists, we need to evaluate all hypotheses on a rational basis, and to weigh their likelihood based on facts and evidence, devoid of speculation concerning possible political impacts” they add. “More importantly, science embraces alternative hypotheses, contradictory arguments, verification, refutability, and controversy. Departing from this principle risks establishing dogmas, abandoning the essence of science, and, even worse, paving the way for conspiracy theories.”
SOURCES:
The Dangerous Myth of Health Service ‘Collapse’
By Will Jones | The Daily Sceptic | September 30, 2021
In the U.K. we are facing threats once again of restrictions and vaccine passports being imposed over winter should the prospect of an ‘overwhelmed’ NHS be sounded by the Government’s medical advisers in the coming weeks.
But how realistic is this threat of health service ‘collapse’? South Korea is currently providing an object lesson in how the concept appears to be very much in the eye of the beholder.
The South East Asian country has been experiencing a spike in reported infections in recent weeks as the Delta variant has become dominant, hitting over 3,000 in one day for the first time on September 24th.
Three thousand ‘cases’ is very low, of course, compared to our 30,000 or so since early July, and the country is similar in size to the U.K., with a population of 52 million to our 67 million.
While the country does do less testing, deaths are also very low, with daily confirmed deaths currently between just five and 10 a day.
Excess mortality has also remained low throughout the pandemic, currently sitting at around 6% having been negative over the winter.
Despite these enviable Covid stats, though, the country is currently living under various Covid restrictions and the Government has said that while it plans to reopen, it will reverse course should ‘cases’ go above 4,000 per day. Why? According to the Government’s Minister of Health, Kwon Deok-cheol, the South Korean “healthcare system would not be able to cope with 4,000 or 10,000 new confirmed cases per day”.
At a Korea Broadcasting Journalists Club roundtable on Tuesday, Minister of Health and Welfare Kwon Deok-cheol said that South Korea’s medical response system would be “sufficiently capable” of handling a daily caseload of 3,000 or more confirmed cases and that the country would be able to proceed with a gradual return to everyday life, provided that the Government’s late-October targets of fully vaccinating 80% of adults and 90% of senior citizens are met.
He also said that the shift toward a “living with Covid” approach was not hasty, noting that while the U.K. began its gradual return to normal life while its full vaccination rate was just 1.6%, whereas South Korea had a full vaccination rate of 46.6% as of Tuesday.
But he also noted that observation of basic disease prevention guidelines such as wearing masks indoors and regularly ventilating indoor spaces would remain necessary, saying that “our healthcare system would not be able to cope with 4,000 or 10,000 new confirmed cases per day.”
“For that reason, we are considering a phased easing [of restrictions] – based on business types, for example – rather than a full-scale elimination [of said restrictions],” he added.
Vaccine passports are also being considered, apparently in order to protect the unvaccinated.
The South Korean government similarly explained that with the 976 critical care beds and 10,212 beds for patients with moderate symptoms that it had secured as of Tuesday, the South Korean healthcare system would be able to cope with as many as 3,500 new confirmed cases per day.
In addition to relaxing restrictions on private gatherings for fully vaccinated people and gradually removing restrictions on the use of multipurpose facilities, Kwon also said consideration was being given to the adoption of “vaccine passes,” where only fully vaccinated people or other restricted categories of people would be allowed to use certain establishments during the initial stages of the gradual return to everyday life.
He went on, saying that Germany grants permission for indoor events or use multipurpose facilities such as hospitals, long-term care facilities, nightlife establishments, and cinemas only to people who present a pass that certifies they have been either fully vaccinated, have tested negative for Covid, or have fully recovered from a previous Covid infection.
“With confirmed cases currently being observed among unvaccinated people – many of them leading to critical symptoms and even death – we are considering applying such an approach, if only to protect these people,” he said.
I have to say it is bizarre to read the same worries about ‘cases’ getting too high and putting unsustainable pressure on the health service in a country which is experiencing a fraction of our reported infections and an even smaller fraction of our deaths. How can we take this seriously when South Korea has more than three times the number of hospital beds that the U.K. has, 10 per 1,000 population compared to three per 1,000?
Nations whether in the East or West are now being held hostage by their health services and their supposed capacity to cope with coronavirus surges. But it’s clear from the very different scales of these supposed capacity threats in different countries that this spectre of an overwhelmed and collapsing health service is largely a figment of the political imagination.
No doubt a winter Covid wave can stretch a health service considerably. But if even England in January had thousands of empty hospital beds on January 18th, when the number of Covid hospital patients hit 39,254, and did not ‘collapse’ (and the Nightingale hospitals remained empty), then it’s difficult to see how the threat is in any way a realistic one. At that winter peak, Covid patients occupied less than a third of the total hospital beds (31%), while 8,696 beds remained unoccupied. Besides which, if winter hospital capacity is the crucial issue for lockdowns and other measures, would it not be a whole lot cheaper and more effective just to boost it more?
Lockdown proponents will claim that the U.K. winter wave was mitigated by restrictions. But the truth is the U.K. suffered one of the biggest winter surges in the world, regardless of what measures were in place in other countries. States in America with few or no restrictions such as Florida and South Dakota, and light-touch Sweden, did not suffer worse winters. There is thus nowhere that lockdown proponents can point to and say, look, that’s what would have happened here if we hadn’t locked down. There is no reason to think that without restrictions the U.K.’s winter surge would have ended up much worse.
While governments around the world continue to hold the threat of an overwhelmed health service over their populations as a kind of political blackmail (albeit often sincerely believed), the experience of South Korea shows that the threat is ill-defined, largely illusory, and not a sound basis for imposing illiberal measures and ruinous restrictions.
Crickets and psychosis account for ‘Havana Syndrome,’ says newly-declassified report by US scientists
RT | September 30, 2021
An elite team of scientists advising the State Department concluded in 2018 that the ‘Havana Syndrome’ afflicting spies and diplomats could not have been due to a microwave weapon, but their report has just now been declassified.
The report compiled by the JASON advisory group in November 2018 said that the sounds reported in eight of the original 21 incidents of the ‘Havana Syndrome’ were “most likely” caused by crickets, and that it was “highly unlikely” the reported symptoms were caused by microwaves or ultrasound beams.
While “the suffering reported by the affected individuals is real,” the group concluded “psychogenic effects may serve to explain important components of the reported injuries.”
The redacted and declassified version of the JASON report was published on Thursday by BuzzFeed. It was originally classified as “Secret,” and was not shared with the National Academies of Sciences panel whose report on the ‘Havana Syndrome’ was commissioned by Foggy Bottom last year.
The NAS panel concluded microwaves were the “most plausible” cause of the symptoms, which purportedly include headaches, dizziness, tinnitus, hearing and vision impairment, nosebleeds, vertigo and memory loss, among others.
According to JASON, however, “No plausible single source of energy (neither radio/microwaves nor sonic) can produce both the recorded audio/video signals and the reported medical effects.” The recorded noise was either mechanical or biological in origin, rather than electronic, and the “most likely” source was Anurogryllis celerinictus, the “Indies short-tailed cricket.”
This exact species was identified by University of California Berkeley researchers in January 2019 as the source of the mysterious noise, based on a recording released by AP.
JASON experts ruled out pulsed microwaves and ultrasound, in part because electronics and Wi-Fi networks in the house where the noises were first recorded suffered no disruptions during the incident. They concluded the noises did not correspond to microwave or ultrasound frequencies by calculating the power that would be required.
The Trump administration used the ‘Havana syndrome’ as a pretext to scale back the recently re-established diplomatic presence in Cuba. It gained a life of its own in the CIA and the US media later on, with over 200 spies now reportedly claiming they had been affected – and rampant speculation that China or Russia may be using some kind of science-fiction superweapon to do this.
Just last week, the US House of Representatives voted 427-0 to pass the Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks (HAVANA) Act, giving the CIA millions of dollars to compensate the personnel affected.
In mid-September, a team of Cuban scientists announced that claims of secret sonic weapons were not “scientifically acceptable,” and there was “no scientific evidence of attacks.” Unaware of the JASON report, they attributed the symptoms to some kind of mass psychosis on part of the US spies.
Named after a hero from Greek mythology,JASON is an independent group of scientists that has advised the US government since the heyday of the Cold War.
“This is a high powered group of expert scientists,” former Los Alamos National Laboratory chemist Cheryl Rofer told BuzzFeed, adding that the declassified report “appears to be a very thorough scientific analysis, the kind which wasn’t done in the National Academies of Sciences report.”
“What is available in the report is pretty dubious about directed energy weapons, and pretty positive about crickets,” Rofer added.
Pfizer Says COVID Vaccine ‘Safe’ for Kids — But Pfizer Has Lied About Kids and Drugs Before
In 1996, Pfizer’s drug, Trovan, was still in the clinical stage of development when the drugmaker tested it, without parents’ consent, on about 200 children.
By Chelli Stanley | The Defender | September 30, 2021
Pfizer last week told the public and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) its new experimental COVID vaccine is safe for young children.
It’s a familiar story, similar to one the vaccine maker told in the past about another drug it tested on children — a story that had a terrible outcome.
Both stories began with this simple claim: “These drugs are safe for your children.”
In 1996, Pfizer, the transnational multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical company, was working to bring a new drug — Trovan — to market. The drug was still in the clinical stage of development, when Pfizer made a decision that reportedly cost the lives of many children, and triggered an international firestorm.
Pfizer took its unlicensed Trovan to Kano, Nigeria, during a meningitis outbreak — though Trovan had never been tested in children or against meningitis.
According to Pfizer whistleblower, Dr. Juan Walterspiel, Pfizer sent unskilled doctors to Kano, who were unlicensed to practice medicine in Nigeria, and who had limited experience treating meningitis in children.
Walterspiel also reported the staff were so unskilled they could not place IV lines, and quickly resorted to orally administering the drug to children.
In the short two weeks Pfizer was in Kano, staff worked with 200 children, and gave 99 of the children unlicensed Trovan, despite the children’s desperate state. Pfizer did this even though Doctors Without Borders was operating in the same Kano hospital, treating children for free, with medicine proven to work well against bacterial meningitis.
Doctors Without Borders realized what Pfizer was doing and in a statement said they “were shocked Pfizer continued the so-called scientific work in the middle of hell.” They “communicated their concerns to both Pfizer and the local authorities.”
Pfizer gave the other 101 children ceftriaxone, which is proven effective for meningitis. However, many children were “low-dosed,” with only one-third of the recommended amount. Because Pfizer didn’t have enough skilled medical personnel to administer ceftriaxone by IV, staff injected it directly into the children’s butts or thighs.
But “the shots were severely painful, leading to ‘great fear and sometimes dangerous struggles with children.’” So Pfizer lowered the dose significantly to ease the severe pain caused by the shots.
Pfizer said available data indicated the dose remained more than sufficient, but the drug’s manufacturer, Hoffmann-La Roche, said the reductions could have sapped the drug’s strength.
“A high dose is essential,” Mark Kunkel, Hoffmann-La Roche’s medical director, told the Washington Post. “Clinical failures … and perhaps deaths of children could have resulted from the low dosing.”
According to a lawsuit against Pfizer, “five of the children who received Trovan and six of the children who were ‘low-dosed’ with ceftriaxone died, and others treated by Pfizer suffered very serious injuries, including paralysis, deafness and blindness.”
Of the 200 children treated by Pfizer, 181 were gravely injured, and 11 died.
The Washington Post investigated Pfizer’s ethics, stating, “Some medical experts questioned why the company did not switch to the proven pills when it was clear the young patients were approaching death.”
“It could be considered murder,” said Evariste Lodi, the leading Doctors Without Borders physician in Kano, after reading a report that Pfizer kept a child solely on Trovan until the child died.
In a statement about the child’s death, a Pfizer spokeswoman said “researchers had no reason to suspect the experimental medicine was not working.” Pfizer also said Trovan was “at least as effective as the gold standard treatment,” despite it having never been used in children, or for meningitis.
Pfizer designed the clinical trial in Kano “in six weeks, though the risks and complications of such a trial would typically require a year to adequately assess,” The Atlantic reported.
The parents in Kano have maintained they were not notified of an experiment, and that Pfizer did not have their consent to use their children in a drug trial in the middle of a health crisis. They organized to sue the drugmaker, while caring for children injured during the experiment.
Pfizer maintains the Nigerian parents gave full consent for their critically ill children to be used in an experiment, though even Pfizer admits no parent ever signed a consent form.
The lawsuits dragged on for years, as Pfizer refused to admit to any wrongdoing. “We are fed up with this case,” said a father who lost his daughter. “Our children are dead and some are maimed.”
Pfizer said “the trial was conducted appropriately, ethically and with the best interests of patients in mind; and it helped save lives.”
However, even the approval letter Pfizer submitted to the FDA about the Kano trial was exposed by a Nigerian doctor, who “said that his office backdated an approval letter and this may have been written a year after the study had taken place.”
The community of Kano has been profoundly affected — “the experiment shaped public perception of Western drugs in the region. Parents told their children about it. Teachers lectured about Pfizer in classrooms. Pundits spoke of Western physicians seeking human guinea pigs.”
Pfizer acknowledged the severe nature of the meningitis outbreak to a Nigerian investigative committee, then said, “Pfizer’s intervention was therefore strictly a humanitarian gesture aimed at saving lives. It was totally devoid of any commercial undertones.” The company called it “the humanitarian trial.”
“If I had the power, I would take away their medical licenses,” said Lodi.
Pfizer’s Trovan history gets worse
In the initial development of Trovan, Walterspiel reported that Pfizer tried another study and:
“ … the study failed and several patients developed severe post-operative infections and one woman had her uterus removed. Pfizer dispatched risk managers and asked affected patients and relatives to fill out checks for whatever amount they felt right against their signature to keep the payments confidential.”
Pfizer made no such offer in Kano. The families of Kano had to sue Pfizer repeatedly, and received no compensation until nearly 15 years after the incident occurred.
Pfizer did not let these mere setbacks of death, maiming and international scandals deter the company. Within a few short years, the drugmaker brought Trovan to market in both the United States and Europe.
Expecting to reap financial windfalls, Pfizer aggressively marketed Trovan — until it discovered the public in both the EU and U.S. was reeling from liver damage, liver failure and death as a result of taking Trovan.
Reports of adverse reactions grew until Europe took Trovan off the market completely, and the FDA severely restricted the public’s access in the U.S.
A New York Times article detailed how Trovan’s serious side effects became known only after it was given to the public. “The case showed how a new drug, marketed by an expert like Pfizer, could be swiftly prescribed to thousands of patients before all the side effects were known. Pfizer said its tests of Trovan had not revealed any serious problems.”
In 2000, William C. Steere Jr., then chairman of Pfizer, acknowledged some side effects only become known after a drug is approved, saying, ”You put the drug in the general population, and then everyone is taking it. We just hold our breath and wait to see if there is something unique with the drug.”
‘If I had an enemy, I would not let him take their drugs’
Pfizer was repeatedly sued in Nigeria and the U.S. for its actions in Kano. In 2009, Pfizer agreed to pay $75 million, despite initially being sued for $8.5 billion.
The company got involved in several more scandals that exploded when Wikileaks published several U.S. Embassy cables detailing Pfizer’s communications.
A Pfizer lawyer described in the cables that “Pfizer has worked closely with former Nigerian Head of State Yakubu Gowon. Gowan spoke with Kano State Governor Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau, who directed the Kano AG to reduce the settlement demand from $150 million to $75 million.”
In another cable, a top Pfizer representative in Nigeria said:
“Pfizer had hired investigators to uncover corruption links to Federal Attorney General Michael Aondoakaa to expose him and put pressure on him to drop the federal cases. Pfizer’s investigators were passing this information to local media. A series of damaging articles detailing Aondoakaa’s ‘alleged’ corruption ties were published in February and March.”
A cable showed a Pfizer representative commenting that “Doctors Without Borders administered Trovan to other children during the 1996 meningitis epidemic, and the Nigerian government has taken no action.”
The accusation prompted Doctors Without Borders to publish a strongly worded press release stating that they did not give anyone Trovan, and were in fact the first to speak out about Pfizer’s unethical actions.
Finally, the cables showed that “Pfizer was not happy settling the case, but had come to the conclusion that the $75 million figure was reasonable because the suits had been ongoing for many years, costing Pfizer more than $15 million a year in legal and investigative fees.”
The original lawsuit also sought prison terms for Pfizer officials.
Scandals continued even after the case was settled, when Pfizer demanded that anyone collecting the money give a sample of their DNA. Several people refused, distrusting what Pfizer may do with their DNA. They were not allowed to get compensation as a result.
Pfizer said it “always acted in the best interest of the children involved, using the best medical knowledge available.”
Najib Ibrahim of Kano said of Pfizer, “If I had an enemy, I would not let him take their drugs.” Abdul Murtala said, “Pfizer reminds me of recklessness with human lives.”
The pattern continues, with 12-year-old injured during Pfizer COVID trial
Maddie de Garay was 12 when she voluntarily participated in Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine trial for 12- to 15-year-olds in Ohio. After she took the second dose on January 20, 2021, her life changed.
Her mother, Stephanie de Garay, spoke at press conference in June, held by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), during which she described the maiming of her child and Pfizer’s disregard towards Maddie and the family — despite Maddie being part of the trial in order to determine whether Pfizer’s covid vaccine is safe for children.
Stephanie said:
“All we want is for Maddie to be seen, heard, and believed, because she hasn’t been. And we want her to get the care that she desperately needs so that she can go back to normal. She was totally fine before this. They’re not helping her.”
Stephanie said within 24 hours of the second dose, Maddie “developed severe abdominal and chest pain. She had painful electrical shocks down her neck and spine that forced her to walk hunched over. She had extreme pain in her fingers and toes.”
Maddie went to the ER immediately, as instructed by Pfizer’s vaccine trial administrator. After doctors ran few tests, she was sent home with a diagnosis: “Adverse effect of vaccine initial encounter.”
In the first five months after getting her second dose, Maddie would return to the ER eight more times.
“Over the next 2.5 months, her abdominal, muscle and nerve pain became unbearable. She developed additional symptoms that included gastroparesis, nausea and vomiting, erratic blood pressure and heart rate, memory loss, brain fog, headaches, dizziness, fainting, and then seizures.
“She developed verbal and motor tics, she had loss of feeling from the waist down and muscle weakness, drastic changes in her vision, urinary retention and loss of bladder control, severely irregular and heavy menstrual cycles, and eventually she had to have an NG tube put in to get nutrition. All of these symptoms are still here today. Some days are worse than others.”
Maddie’s doctors began to suggest she had “functional neurological disorder due to anxiety” and even tried to admit her to a mental hospital. Her family fought it.
It took five months for Maddie to get an MRI of her brain and appropriate blood tests, which she got when her family went elsewhere for medical advice after talking to others who were adversely affected by the COVID vaccines.
Stephanie said:
“What I want to ask is: Maddie volunteered for the Pfizer trial. Why aren’t they researching her to figure out why this happened so other people don’t have to go through this? Instead, they’re just saying it’s ‘mental.’”
The de Garay family has joined with emerging grassroots advocacy groups whose members’ lives suddenly changed after they got a COVID vaccine. They are asking the CDC and FDA to recognize their injuries, the medical community to believe and help them, the media to share their stories, for the public to know about these injuries as part of informed consent, and for their injuries to be studied so that solutions can be found.
Since being injured by new vaccines still in phase 3 trials, they have been subjected to stonewalling, cover-ups, bullying, refusal to collect the data and blanket denials.
Pfizer has not commented publicly on Maddie’s case.
At the September FDA advisory meeting on Pfizer COVID boosters in the U.S., Steve Kirsch, executive director of the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund, said Pfizer did not record Maddie’s extensive injuries in its clinical trial results. Kirsch also noted Pfizer marked the entirety of Maddie’s injuries as “abdominal pain.”
Kirsch reported Pfizer’s fraud to FDA acting Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock, but no investigation has been launched into Pfizer for allegedly erasing Maddie’s extensive injuries from its trial data for children.
© 2021 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
It appears the Canadian military’s covert Covid propaganda operation has made unjabbed citizens enemies of the state
By Rachel Marsden | RT | September 30, 2021
The shocking revelation that the armed forces implemented a secret information campaign in 2020 to brainwash people over the pandemic is proof of deliberate intent to quash critical and independent thought and freedoms.
As a Canadian citizen who recovered from Covid and acquired natural immunity and antibodies without the anti-Covid vaccine, the government doesn’t much appreciate my narrative.
Proof lies in the fact that when I arrived back home in Vancouver from my work base in Europe in August, the federal government demanded that I pay for my own three-day imprisonment in a government mandated facility at a cost of up to $2,000. Refusal resulted in being ordered in writing to immediately get back on a plane and leave my own country under threat of penalties up to and including imprisonment. All because my acquired immunity didn’t jibe with the government’s “one size fits all” two-jab narrative.
Now I’ve learned that the Canadian military was deployed against unconventional and inconvenient narratives like mine in favor of lockstep groupthink. Does that make me an enemy of the state?
The Canadian military’s Joint Operations Command implemented a propaganda campaign in April 2020 with the intent to manipulate unsuspecting Canadians into falling in line with the federal government’s official positions on Covid-19. The brainwashing operation’s termination was ordered a month later, but in the meantime, it “relied on propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war,” according to the Ottawa Citizen’s exclusive report on documents obtained under Access to Information.
The operation’s aim, according to the military, was to “head off civil disobedience by Canadians during the coronavirus pandemic and to bolster government messages about the pandemic.”
Generally, government intelligence operations rely on ear-bending friendly journalists and think-tank analysts to publish the state’s talking points in mainstream publications or online. Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein, best-known for breaking the Watergate scandal, wrote in a Rolling Stone magazine article titled “The CIA and the Media,” back in 1977, how the CIA used “journalist-operatives” to “plant subtly concocted pieces of misinformation.”
He further noted: “There are perhaps a dozen well known columnists and broadcast commentators whose relationships with the CIA go far beyond those normally maintained between reporters and their sources. They are referred to at the Agency as ‘known assets’ and can be counted on to perform a variety of undercover tasks; they are considered receptive to the Agency’s point of view on various subjects.”
Another known tactic used by military intelligence to manipulate its own country’s citizens is to send out retired generals to spew talking points on various media platforms. In 2008, the Los Angeles Times wrote of the Pentagon’s Iraq War era “message multipliers” program. At the time, Democratic Congressman Paul Hodes had introduced an amendment – overwhelmingly adopted – to investigate the Pentagon’s public opinion manipulation program, unveiled by the New York Times as “cultivating former military officers who became regulars on Fox News, CNN and the broadcast networks.”
“They were fed administration talking points, believing they were getting independent military analysis,” Hodes said at the time of the public manipulation campaign.
So despite the Ottawa Citizen’s reporting that the program was officially quashed one month after its deployment, we really don’t know how much damage was done and to what extent the propaganda distribution it sparked may have since become autonomous and taken on a life of its own.
Canadians now need to know exactly what “government messages” were propagandized and where, and what “enemy narratives” were targeted for smears. Only then is it possible for the public to assess how much of the current conventional wisdom is the result of deliberate boosting or suppressing.
It’s a sad fact that the Canadian military has seen fit to use similar techniques to those that US intelligence has long deployed on foreign opponents. Declassified US intelligence manuals drafted in 1987 show that both the Pentagon and the CIA used similar propaganda techniques in Latin America, with the aim of indiscriminately brainwashing both civilians and guerrillas to support the US-backed movements. And like with the Canadian military campaign, it involved monitoring innocent people for their thoughts and beliefs while minimizing consideration of both basic human rights and the rule of law.
Lest we forget that Canadians were also victims of some of the most egregious brainwashing experimentation under the CIA-led MK-Ultra program to test various mind control methods, including LSD, sensory deprivation, and electroshock therapy, on unwitting Canadians at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal between 1957 and 1964.
We really have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes with this recent revelation that Canadians were once again treated as experimental guinea pigs – this time in the interest of quashing critical thinking or dissent amid the pandemic. What we do see, however, it’s probably just the tip of the iceberg, and that its aim of creating a compliant citizenry has been successful.
More than three in four double-jabbed Canadians consider their unjabbed fellow citizens selfish and irresponsible, according to a new Leger poll. If they’re jabbed, and they have so much confidence in the jab preventing them getting ill, then what do they care what anyone else does? How much has the Canadian military and government propaganda played a role in shaping their views?
The whole truth about the extent of this psychological abuse of innocent Canadian civilians needs to come out – if only so the manipulated can see to what extent they were coerced into turning against their fellow citizens for simply making a different personal choice in what, after all, is supposed to still be a free and democratic country.
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of an independently produced French-language program that airs on Sputnik France. Her website can be found at rachelmarsden.com
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From the Archives
Neocons confess: “We did 9/11-anthrax”
By Kevin Barrett | Press TV | September 6, 2014
As the 13th anniversary of the crimes of September, 2001 approaches, the neoconservatives are shrieking from the rooftops – and effectively confessing that they were the real perpetrators of the 9/11-Anthrax false flag operation. (The neocons, you may recall, openly called for a “new Pearl Harbor” in September, 2000 – and got one exactly one year later.)
Every year at this time, the neocons orchestrate and hype a series of public relations stunts designed to magnify fears of “radical Islam” and reinforce their crumbling 9/11-Anthrax cover story. But this year’s propaganda campaign is so extreme that it represents a tacit confession: The neocons know that the truth about the 9/11-Anthrax operation is slowly closing in on them; so they are over-reacting by desperately trying to stoke the dying embers of the so-called War on Terror, in order to maintain the myth that Muslims (rather than neoconservative Zionists) attacked America in the autumn of 2001.
When a hysterical person exhibits guilty demeanor by trying too hard to blame a crime on someone else, that person is almost certainly the real perpetrator. As the neocons try much too hard to blame Islam for 9/11 and “terrorism” in general, their hysteria inadvertently reveals their own culpability. Like Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth, the neoconservative movement has blood on its hands and “doth protest too much.” … continue
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