NPR Embarrasses Itself With Misinformation and Blatant Lies About Dr. Mercola
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | September 23, 2021
In a broadcast rife with disinformation, misinformation and outright lies, National Public Radio has embarrassed itself while maligning Dr. Mercola.
The broadcast opens with NPR host Robin Young calling Dr. Mercola “the biggest disseminator of COVID lies,” and then proceeding to call America’s Frontline Doctors, an independent organization of which Dr. Mercola is not a member and with which he has zero affiliation, “his” group that “he created.”
Young then interviews Dr. Humayun Chaudhry, president and CEO of the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) about FSMB’s recommendation to state medical boards to fine, suspend and revoke the licenses of doctors who don’t follow the mainstream COVID narrative.
Together, Young and Chaurdhry repeatedly show that they’re either ignorant or deliberately spreading their own misinformation and disinformation when it comes to vaccine hesitancy, COVID treatments such as ivermectin (referring to it as an animal drug that has shown “absolutely no ability” to treat COVID) and medical professionals who are questioning the vaccines.
Asking whether Dr. Mercola still has his license to practice, Young claims a second time that he’s the “biggest distributor of misinformation” and that he doesn’t seem to care about that, as he’s making a lot of money by “selling alternatives to traditional standard care.”
Obviously, Young is only getting her news from the dark money-funded Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which analyzed 483 pieces of social media content over six weeks to come up with what they called the “Misinformation Dozen,” with Dr. Mercola at the top of their list. The thing is Young is spreading more misinformation herself, seeing that Facebook’s vice president of content policy Monika Bickert issued a statement saying that there not only is no evidence that CCDH’s list is accurate, but that the people named by CCDH were responsible for only 0.05% of all vaccine content on Facebook’s site, not the 73% CCDH claims.
Young and Chaudhry conclude their show by calling on social media companies to better watch their forums to censor COVID and vaccine “misinformation” and for individual states to take a more active role in investigating and revoking the licenses of doctors who don’t toe the COVID line.
SOURCES:
My front-row view of the Covid drug corruption scandal
This is an open letter from Dr Steven J Hatfill – June 10, 2021
Dear America,
This is the story of possibly the greatest corruption scandal in our country’s history.
This is the story of how petty bureaucrats and drug companies unjustly discredited an inexpensive FDA-approved drug that would have prevented Covid-19 hospitalisations and deaths for political spite and financial gain. These perpetrators, who now hold more significant positions in government, need to be held accountable for over 500,000 American deaths and the disruption of our economy.
This is the story of how a few key government officials failed to implement our well-formulated National Pandemic Plan and their weaponisation of a dangerously complicit mainstream media.
I tell this story because we, the People, deserve answers – those responsible need to be held accountable for their actions. The Covid-19 pandemic was a proverbial ‘warning shot across our bow’. Therefore we must forever prioritise pandemic preparedness as critical to our national security.
We deserve better. We deserve the truth. We deserve answers. We deserve JUSTICE.
I hope my words and timeline will help clarify what has happened, who is involved, and what action must be taken to protect our health and freedom.
I am Dr Steven Hatfill. I am a specialist physician, recognised virologist, biological weapons expert and I worked as an outside adviser to the Executive Office of the President of the United States from February 2020 through the inaugural transition period of 2021. My statements are not speculation because I had a front-row seat from the very beginning of the pandemic. My subsequent published papers and articles have been painstakingly referenced and fact-checked.
Some will tell you this is just another conspiracy theory, so I ask you to read on and judge for yourselves.
Factual events
2005 The United States creates its first National Pandemic Plan, outlining the actions to combat a serious respiratory viral disease pandemic. This is based on the previous Biological Weapons Improved Response Plan.
2008 President Obama closes the White House Global Health Security Office.
2013 After the SARS and MERS outbreaks, Chinese virologists collect hundreds of samples from bats for study at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Collaborative research begins on the coronaviruses, including gain of function (GOF) experiments (research which involves increasing the capacity of a pathogen to cause illness) in China and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
2014 The West Africa Ebola virus outbreak occurs. Dr Anthony Fauci MD [director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)] promotes a single layer of gloves for nursing Ebola patients and other inadequate protective measures. His instructions endanger the lives of health care workers, and national guidelines for protection must be urgently updated.
2014 United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) ban GOF research. The ban was implemented for 2014-2017.
2015 Chinese virologists and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill conduct unauthorised GOF experiments on coronaviruses.
2017 The 2005 Health and Human Services (HHS) National Pandemic Plan is updated. The specific responsibilities of local authorities, states and the federal government have been clearly stated. The national plan is to use early, outpatient antiviral drug treatment, home quarantine, and case contact tracing to cover the ‘vaccine gap’ (the time needed to develop a vaccine to combat any pathogen).
December 2019 Chinese authorities report the first outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan. On January 21, 2020, the first recognised case of Covid-19 occurs in the United States.
February 2020 Dr Steven Hatfill MD, a specialist physician and recognised virologist, is brought into the White House as an outside medical adviser.
Some members of the Covid-19 Task Force are considering the use of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a safe and effective FDA-approved drug, to control the rapidly spreading pandemic. The drug proves to prevent hospitalisation if taken when early symptoms of Covid-19 arise. The drug is cost-effective at 60 cents per tablet with Covid-19 treatment consisting of 11 tablets taken over five days. The FDA considers HCQ to be a safer drug than Tylenol.
March 23, 2020 The director of the Biological Advanced Research Development Authority (BARDA), Rick Bright PhD, is instructed by his superiors to work with the FDA to establish an Investigational New Drug (IND) authorisation for HCQ.
March 24, 2020 The next day, the director of Drug Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Dr Janet Woodcock MD, contacts Rick Bright at BARDA. Dr Woodcock wrongly advises Bright that HCQ is a dangerous drug requiring an Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA). Its use should be limited to hospital patients. Bright and Dr Woodcock promote this course of action, despite the early clinical data showing HCQ was the most effective in outpatients if given early during the initial infection, in effect eliminating hospitalisation. The FDA issues a EUA for HCQ for hospital use only.
In a legal document, Rick Bright makes a blatant admission of insubordination to multiple layers of leadership, including the White House, HHS Secretary Azar, and Dr Robert Kadlec, MD, the Assistant HHS Secretary for Preparedness and Readiness. Bright states the following in his whistleblower complaint: ‘. . . instead of a Nationwide Expanded Access IND protocol. Implementing the EUA was a compromise position, to rein in HHS leadership’s initial campaign to make the drugs available to the public outside of a hospital setting’. Question: When is it ever acceptable to ‘compromise’ public health during a rampaging pandemic?
April 4, 2020 Dr Anthony Fauci MD, the member of the Covid-19 Task Force responsible for informing the President of the best course of action for pandemic control, appears to be unaware of the National Pandemic Plan. In a heated White House Situation Room meeting, Dr Fauci refused to consider the use of HCQ for Covid-19 treatment. He dismisses the ever-accumulating HCQ efficacy reports from China, South Korea and France as simply ‘anecdotal’.
April 22, 2020 Rick Bright is fired as BARDA director for his insubordination. Before his dismissal, he falsely informed the press that HCQ is a dangerous drug.
Dr Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, who is not a virologist, disregards the National Pandemic Plan, which included outreach programmes with physicians using HCQ for outpatient treatment and prevention to bring the Covid-19 pandemic under control.
Dr Fauci brushes off the accumulating evidence and diverts millions of federal funds into a programme to test and manufacture an experimental drug named Remdesivir.
Remdesivir must be administered via IV and only in hospital, instead of early community treatment as prescribed in the original pandemic plan. Dr Fauci changes the plan to promote ‘societal lockdowns’ and push the development of highly experimental mRNA vaccines by multinational pharmaceutical corporations.
Note: Members of Fauci’s Covid-19 treatment panel have ties to Gilead Sciences, Inc. (Foster City, CA), the company that holds the patent for Remdesivir.
May 16, 2020 In Phase 1 clinical trials conducted by Gilead Sciences in co-operation with China and Japan, Remdesivir failed: ‘No statistically clinical effect, with severe adverse reactions’.
Note: On October 16, 2020, the WHO concludes that Remdesivir is an ineffective drug and does not recommend its use to treat Covid-19.
May 20, 2020 Shortly after becoming Senior Medical Adviser to the FDA Commissioner, Dr Janet Woodcock recused herself over future decisions concerning vaccines, citing a conflict of interest.
June 15, 2020 Dr Fauci ignores the data that HCQ works if the drug is administered during the first five days of infection. Its EUA is revoked, despite the overwhelming evidence of its effectiveness. The FDA claims that HCQ is causing fatal heart rhythms in hospitalised patients when the Covid-19 virus itself is the cause.
June 29, 2020 Dr Fauci recommends a $1.6 billion purchase of Remdesivir despite the drug’s Phase 1 failure in China. Question: Why did Dr Fauci discredit HCQ, leaving us defenseless, and order $1.6 billion of an ineffective and toxic drug?
Note: Dr Fauci’s actions pave the way for the fast-track development of experimental mRNA vaccines (and their subsequent patents), which can receive a EUA only if there are no other approved and effective medicines, like outpatient HCQ.
After widespread lockdowns and millions of global deaths, the experimental mRNA vaccines are granted a EUA and released to the public. As of the date of this letter, the pandemic still prevails, and there is no FDA approved outpatient treatment for Covid-19.
A call to action for prevention, justice and reform
The actions of Dr Anthony Fauci, Dr Janet Woodcock and Rick Bright, PhD, must be independently investigated, and they must be held accountable.
All conflicts of interest and the interactions between government officials and pharmaceutical companies, including the publication of faulty research papers in respected medical journals, must be investigated, and they must be held accountable.
Immediately reinstate HCQ as an FDA-approved drug for Covid-19.
The US Pandemic Plan must be immediately reinstated as initially crafted.
Establish an outside independent United States Pandemic Response Department, with board powers including oversight.
On June 2, 2021, the distribution of my content was cancelled by PR NEWSWIRE, and I have been banned from further distribution. Their action is a brazen attempt to censor and block the true story and silence our voice as citizens.
What can you do?
1. Contact your local, state, and federal representatives and demand answers. They would have you believe that you serve them, but you employ them. Hold them accountable.
2. Cancel biased media subscriptions. Your money fuels their disinformation campaigns.
3. Read the references for this letter and the complete uncensored and referenced articles at www.drstevenhatfill.com.
Please ACT NOW, and together we can create a better future for America and the world.
Sincerely,
Dr Steven J Hatfill
New Proof Emerges of the Biden Family Emails: a Definitive Account of the CIA/Media/BigTech Fraud
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer warns that emails and other documents reported on by The NY Post about Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine and China may be “Russian disinformation,” Oct. 16, 2020.
By Glenn Greenwald | September 22, 2021
A severe escalation of the war on a free internet and free discourse has taken place over the last twelve months. Numerous examples of brute and dangerous censorship have emerged: the destruction by Big Tech monopolies of Parler at the behest of Democratic politicians at the time that it was the most-downloaded app in the country; the banning of the sitting president from social media; and the increasingly explicit threats from elected officials in the majority party of legal and regulatory reprisals in the event that tech platforms do not censor more in accordance with their demands.
But the most severe episode of all was the joint campaign — in the weeks before the 2020 election — by the CIA, Big Tech, the liberal wing of the corporate media and the Democratic Party to censor and suppress a series of major reports about then-presidential frontrunner Joe Biden. On October 14 and then October 15, 2020, The New York Post, the nation’s oldest newspaper, published two news reports on Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine and China that raised serious questions about his integrity and ethics: specifically whether he and his family were trading on his name and influence to generate profit for themselves. The Post said that the documents were obtained from a laptop left by Joe Biden’s son Hunter at a repair shop.
From the start, the evidence of authenticity was overwhelming. The Post published obviously genuine photos of Hunter that were taken from the laptop. Investigations from media outlets found people who had received the emails in real-time and they compared the emails in their possession to the ones in the Post‘s archive, and they matched word-for-word. One of Hunter’s own business associates involved in many of these deals, Tony Bobulinski, confirmed publicly and in interviews that the key emails were genuine and that they referenced Joe Biden’s profit participation in one deal being pursued in China. A forensics analyst issued a report concluding the archive had all the earmarks of authenticity. Not even the Bidens denied that the emails were real: something they of course would have done if they had been forged or altered. In sum, as someone who has reported on numerous large archives similar to this one and was faced with the heavy burden of ensuring the documents were genuine before risking one’s career and reputation by reporting them, it was clear early on that all the key metrics demonstrated that these documents were real.
Despite all that, former intelligence officials such as Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan and his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper led a group of dozens of former spooks in issuing a public statement that disseminated an outright lie: namely, that the laptop was “Russian disinformation.” Note that this phrase contains two separate assertions: 1) the documents came from Russia and 2) they are fake (“disinformation”). The intelligence officials admitted in this letter that — in their words — “we do not know if the emails are genuine or not,” and also admitted that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.” Yet it repeatedly insinuated that everyone should nonetheless believe this:
Letter from 60 former intelligence officials about the New York Post reporting, Oct. 19, 2020
But the complete lack of evidence for these claims — that even these career CIA liars acknowledged plagued their assertions — did not stop the corporate media or Big Tech from repeating this lie over and over, and, far worse, using this lie to censor this reporting from the internet. One of the first to spread this lie was the co-queen of Russiagate frauds, Natasha Bertrand, then of Politico and now promoted, because of lies like this, to CNN. “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” blared her headline in Politico on October 19, just five days after the Post began its reporting. From there, virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.
On October 21 — exactly one week after the Post‘s first report — The Intercept published a false story under the melodramatic headline “We’re Not a Democracy” about these materials from former New York Times reporter James Risen. This propaganda assault masquerading as “news” mindlessly laundered the CIA’s lies about the laptop. This is what appeared in this outlet that still claims to do “adversarial” reporting:
Their latest falsehood once again involves Biden, Ukraine, and a laptop mysteriously discovered in a computer repair shop and passed to the New York Post…. This week, a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation.
Note that even the intelligence officials, who acknowledged they had no evidence to support this claim, were more honest than The Intercept, which omitted that critical admission. Days later, this very same outlet — which I co-founded seven years earlier to be adversarial, not subservient, to evidence-free assertions from the intelligence community, and which was designed to be an antidote to rather than a clone of The New York Times — told me that I could not publish the article I had written about the Biden archive because it did not meet their lofty and rigorous editorial standards: the same lofty and rigorous editorial standards that led to uncritical endorsement of the CIA’s lies just days earlier. It was that episode, as Matt Taibbi recounted at the time, that prompted my resignation from the outlet I created in protest of this censorship, in order to report instead only on free speech platforms such as this one.
But the media disinformation about the Post‘s documents — obviously designed to protect Joe Biden in the lead-up to the election — were not the worst aspect of what happened here. Far worse was the decision by Twitter to prohibit any discussion of this reporting or posting of links to the story both publicly and privately on the platform. Worse still was the immediate announcement by Facebook through its communications executive Andy Stone — a life-long Democratic Party operative — that it would algorithmically suppress the story pending a “fact check” by “Facebook’s third-party fact-check partners.” Despite multiple requests from me and others, Facebook never published the results of this alleged fact-check and still refuse to say whether it ever conducted one. Why? Because the documents they blocked millions of Americans from learning about were clearly true and authentic.
As indicated, there was ample proof from the start that these documents were genuine and that the only ones engaged in “disinformation” and lies was this axis of the CIA, corporate media, and Big Tech. Yet the most dispositive proof yet emerged on Tuesday — not from a right-wing news outlet that liberals have been trained to ignore and disbelieve but from one of the most mainstream news institutions in the country.
A young reporter for Politico, Ben Schreckinger, has published a new book entitled “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power.” To his great credit, he spent months investigating the key documents published by The New York Post and found definitive proof that these emails and related documents are indisputably authentic. His own outlet, Politico, was the first to publish the CIA lie that this was “Russian disinformation,” but on Tuesday — without acknowledging their role in spreading that lie — they summarized Schreckinger’s findings this way: the book “finds evidence that some of the purported Hunter Biden laptop material is genuine, including two emails at the center of last October’s controversy.” In his book, the reporter recounts in these passages just some of the extensive work he did to obtain this proof:
A person who corresponded with Hunter in late 2018 confirmed to me the authenticity of an email in the cache. Another person who corresponded with Hunter in January 2019 confirmed the authenticity of a different email exchange with Hunter in the cache. Both of these people spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fears of being embroiled in a global controversy.
A third person who had independent access to Hunter’s emails confirmed to me that the emails published by the New York Post related to Burisma and the CEFC venture matched the substance of emails Hunter had in fact received. (This person was not in a position to compare the published emails word-for-word to the originals.)
The National Property Board of Sweden, part of the Swedish Finance Ministry, has released correspondence between Hunter and House of Sweden employees to me and to a Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, under the country’s freedom of information law. Emails released by the property board match emails in the cache.
Excerpts from POLITICO reporter Ben Schreckinger’s new book: “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power”, Sept. 2020
Given what I regard as the unparalleled gravity of what was done here — widespread media deceit toward millions of American voters in the weeks before a presidential election based on a CIA lie, along with brute censorship of the story by Big Tech — and given that so much of what was done here took place on television, we produced this morning what I regard as the definitive video report of this scandal. I realize this report is longer than the standard video — it is just over an hour — but I really believe that it is vital, particularly with the emergence of this new indisputable proof, to take a comprehensive look at how the intelligence community, in partnership with Big Tech and the corporate media, disseminated massive lies and disinformation, using censorship and other manipulative techniques, to shape the outcome of what was a close election. (We will very shortly institute our new feature of producing transcripts for all videos above ten minutes in length, but I really hope that as many people as can do so will watch this video report).
After observing what they did, I hope and believe you will have a similar reaction to the one I had after spending the day compiling and reporting it all. No matter how much you despise this sector of the corporate media, it is nowhere near close enough to the level of contempt and scorn they deserve. You can watch our video report on my Rumble page.
Lomborg criticizes medical journals for alarm about climate change
clintel.org
Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg has reacted sharply on the claim of over 200 medical journals, earlier this month, that there are significant health risks to any temperature rise. He concludes that there are very basic mistakes underlying the alarmist claims and sent the following letter to the editor of The Lancet, one of the journals involved. Lomborg posted his letter on twitter.
Below the full letter.
Malmö, September 8, 2021
Dear Dr. Horton,
I read with interest your co-authored editorial “Call for emergency action to limit global temperature increases, restore biodiversity, and protect health” published in BMJ (2021;374:n1734) and many other international journals. As a core argument you write that there are significant health risks to any temperature rise and document it with “In the past 20 years, heat related mortality among people aged over 65 has increased by more than 50%.” However, this mortality increase [i] is a simple count, not a rate. The overwhelming part of the increase is due to the fact that the global population of people aged over 65 increased more than 40% in the same time period. Indeed, the increase in heat mortality rate is a much lower 9.4%. I am sure you agree that making a causal claim without adjusting for a dramatically changed population is fundamentally unsound. In fact, I am positive that you and your journal would demand a rewrite of any paper making such an argument. It is analogously flawed to claiming that Brexit led to better health for the European Union because total deaths overnight dropped 600,000 per year when the UK left. Given the enormous attention that your paper received, I therefore reach out to you to hear what action you will take to ensure that this unsound argument is rectified.
Yours truly,
Bjorn Lomborg President, Copenhagen Consensus, and Visiting fellow, Hoover Institution at Stanford University
I hope it might be useful to visualize the issue.
Below, the left box illustrates your editorial’s claim that temperature rises have increased the number of heat deaths of people aged 65+ by 53.7% while disregarding a 40% increase in the relevant population. The middle box shows the rate of heat deaths for the same population group, which takes into account the rapid increase in the population. I hope you will also find the right box interesting: it compares the heat deaths (which are slowly rising) with the much greater risk from cold deaths (declining much faster) from the Global Burden of Disease study. It highlights the problem with only looking at more heat death but neglecting the much greater fall in cold deaths.
This result is comparable with a new Lancet study that shows global warming increased heat deaths of all deaths by 0.21% (from 0.83% in 2000-03 to 1.04% in 2016-19) and decreased cold deaths by 0.51% (from 8.70% to 8.19%).[ii]
[i] Your reference is indicator 1.1.3, which shows a 53.7% increase in heat mortality from 165,000 annual deaths in 2000-04 to 253,000 annual deaths in 2014-18, from “The 2020 report of The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: responding to converging crises” in the Lancet (https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32290-X).
[ii] Table S5&6, “Global, regional, and national burden of mortality associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study” Lancet Planet Health 2021; 5:e415–25.
“THESE PATIENTS DESERVE TO BE HEARD” – VAERS WHISTLEBLOWER
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | September 18, 2021
In a Highwire exclusive, Deborah Conrad, a hospitalist physician’s assistant on the frontlines of the pandemic, pulls back the curtain on the complete lack and disregard in her hospital for reporting Covid vaccine injury to VAERS, this country’s only mechanism to track the safety of these rushed-to-market, mandated products.
In riveting detail, including emails & recorded phone conversations, Conrad exposes the internal push to turn a blind eye to injuries and “tow the company line” that this vaccine is safe.
What did he know and when? Biden’s National Security advisor implicated in Alfa Bank Russiagate scam
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | September 21, 2021
The indictment of lawyer Michael Sussmann promises to shed more light on what really went on during Russiagate. And it also raises questions about the possible involvement of Jake Sullivan – now National Security Advisor.
On September 16, Special Counsel John Durham charged Sussmann, a partner at Perkins Coie, the law firm which represented the Democrats and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, with making false statements to the FBI over the course of its Trump-Russia probe.
Sussmann met with counsel James Baker in September 2016, and claimed the Trump Organization had used a secret server of Russia’s Alfa Bank as a communications channel with the Kremlin. What he didn’t mention, according to the indictment, was that he was conducting “opposition research” on Trump, and “coordinating” with the Clinton campaign to present that information to the FBI and mainstream media. In fact, the indictment suggests Sussmann lied, stating he said outright he wasn’t conducting work “for any client.”
This led Baker to “understand that Sussmann was acting as a good citizen merely passing along information, not as a paid advocate or political operative,” when in fact, Durham asserts, he was acting on behalf of three specific clients – an unnamed US tech industry executive, a US internet company, and the Clinton campaign.
Sussmann denies any wrongdoing, and has pleaded not guilty, claiming the charges are politically motivated – his defense lawyers argue that he didn’t make any false statements, and who he was representing was not a material fact. However, in December 2017, the defendant told the Congressional committee on intelligence that information on Alfa Bank was given to him “by a client” and “absolutely” not by “any other source,” and that his client had explicitly directed him to speak to Baker and others.
In any event, dossiers outlining the incendiary allegations were passed anonymously to every major US news outlet over the course of the 2016 presidential election campaign, with many eagerly seizing upon them. However, not all journalists were convinced, and several organizations refused to publish anything on the material. The Intercept issued a withering report on the charges a week prior to the vote, documenting how DNS records provided by the anonymous source “can’t really prove anything at all, and certainly not ‘communication’ between Trump and Alfa,” and no one “can show that a single message was exchanged between Trump and Alfa.”
That same day however, Clinton drew attention to the “covert server” on social media, sharing a statement on the subject by her senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan, acting as if the information her team had passed to the media was new to her.
“This could be the most direct link yet between Trump and Moscow… This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia. It certainly seems the Trump Organization felt it had something to hide,” he boldly asserted. “We can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia as part of their existing probe into Russia’s meddling in our elections.”
The indictment makes clear that Sullivan was a key player in the Clinton campaign’s efforts to publicize the Alfa Bank disinformation. It records how Sussmann was “alerted” to the Alfa Bank allegations by his tech executive client in July 2016, and “over the ensuing weeks, as part of their lawyer-client relationship,” the pair engaged with a Clinton campaign lawyer and individuals acting on the candidate’s behalf to share the false charges “with the media and others.”
In mid-September, that lawyer exchanged emails with the “campaign’s manager, communications director, and foreign policy advisor” concerning the false charges, and Sussmann’s success to date with cultivating media interest. This contact was so significant, the lawyer specifically billed the Clinton campaign for the correspondence, an accompanying entry – titled “re: Alfa Bank Article” – naming Sullivan, the campaign’s manager and its communications director.
Sullivan went on to be appointed Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor in November 2020. Now there must be questions as to whether his position remains tenable, given that Durham set up a dedicated grand jury to investigate the Alfa Bank fraud, and several other individuals involved may also subsequently face charges of giving false information to federal officials – the indictment can only raise questions about whether Sullivan was one of them, what he knew, and when.
Durham’s investigative hypothesis is that the Clinton campaign consciously used Perkins Coie to submit dubious information to the FBI about Trump’s non-existent Kremlin ties in order to “gin up” the agency’s investigative activity in that regard, and damage his electoral prospects. If true, Sussmann certainly seems central to these cloak-and-dagger efforts – he was the Democratic National Committee representative who contracted cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, personally reaching out to its president Shawn Henry for his company’s assistance in investigating the leak of internal emails from the DNC’s servers.
CrowdStrike concluded that the emails had been hacked by Russian intelligence services, which has informed the universally received mainstream wisdom on the subject. Henry’s repeated admissions in December 2017 to the House Intelligence Committee that his company possessed no “concrete evidence” the files were hacked, let alone by Russia, went entirely unreported upon their public release in May 2020. That the CIA maintains technology, dubbed the Marble Framework, which can falsely attribute cyberattacks to foreign countries – including Russia – has likewise never been acknowledged by a Western media outlet.
Another strand of Perkins Coie’s informational assault was the hiring of Fusion GPS, which infamously enlisted the services of former MI6 operative Christopher Steele to compile a dossier on ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow. The August 2017 testimony of the company’s cofounder Glenn Simpson to the Senate Judiciary Committee would appear to reinforce Durham’s hypothesis, given he revealed that Fusion GPS engaged in a number of insidious schemes to ensure the dossier reached the “leadership level” of the FBI, as it was felt senior operatives would “treat [the information] very seriously.”
One subterfuge involved Steele briefing the Bureau on the allegations, whereupon Fusion GPS “encouraged” journalists to ask the FBI whether they were investigating Trump’s connections with Russia. Another, which proved decisive, saw Steele’s associate Andrew Wood, former UK Ambassador to Russia, speak with John McCain about the dossier at the November 2016 Halifax International Security Forum in Canada. Suitably concerned, McCain arranged for a copy of the dossier to be provided to him, which he then passed to FBI Director James Comey. In turn, it reached President Barack Obama’s desk in the first week of January the following year.
Other schemes may be unearthed over the course of Sussmann’s trial. Fusion GPS alone clearly has much to hide – in 2017, the owners of Alfa Bank sued Fusion GPS and Simpson for publication of false statements accusing the organization of “bribery, extortion, and interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election.” In May this year, the bank’s lawyers filed a motion to compel the disclosure of around 500 documents wrongfully withheld over the course of the trial.
Fusion GPS and Simpson have fought tooth and nail to prevent their release ever since, questionably arguing that they are subject to “attorney-client privilege” and thus should not be subject to production. Among the communications the pair seek to keep secret are those between Fusion GPS and Perkins Coie, including correspondence with Sussmann mere weeks before he met with Baker. Watch this space.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
Reuters and BBC Caught Taking Money for Propaganda Campaign
This article was previously published March 10, 2021, and has been updated with new information.
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | September 20, 2021
Operation Mockingbird,1,2 publicly revealed during a 1975 Congressional hearing, was a clandestine CIA media infiltration campaign launched in 1948 under the Office of Special Projects.3
The CIA reportedly spent $1 billion a year (about one-third of its entire budget4) on under-the-table bribes to hundreds of American journalists who in return published fake stories at the CIA’s request. CIA-recruited journalists worked in most major news organizations, including CBS News, Time, Life, Newsweek and The New York Times, just to name a few.5 Later on, the campaign expanded to include foreign media as well.6 As reported by the Free Press :7
“In 1976, Senator Frank Church’s investigation into the CIA exposed their corruption of the media. The Church Committee reported: ‘The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda.
These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets’ …
The tactic was straightforward. False news reports or propaganda would be provided by CIA writers to knowing and unknowing reporters who would simply repeat the falsehoods over and over again.”
Reuters and BBC News Were Paid for Propaganda Campaign
While Operation Mockingbird may sound like ancient history, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest it’s still in full swing. During the Cold War, CIA propaganda disparaged communist ideologies. Today, it promotes radical socialist ideas that support a technocratic economic system instead.
While the propaganda messages change with the times, the basic modus operandi of their dissemination remains the same. If anything, the system has only gotten more efficient and effective, as the number of major media outlets has shrunk over these past decades, and a vast majority of journalists and news anchors simply parrot what’s reported by the three global news agencies.
The CIA also isn’t the only intelligence agency using the media for its own propaganda purposes. Leaked documents8 reveal Reuters and BBC News have been involved in a covert program by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to weaken Russia’s influence on its neighbors. In his extensive February 20, 2021, GrayZone article, Max Blumenthal writes:9
“Working through a shadowy department within the UK FCO known as the Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD), the media organizations operated alongside a collection of intelligence contractors in a secret entity known simply as ‘the Consortium.’
Through training programs of Russian journalists overseen by Reuters, the British Foreign Office sought to produce an ‘attitudinal change in the participants,’ promoting a ‘positive impact’ on their ‘perception of the UK’ …
In effect, the British government was seeking to infiltrate Russian media and propagate its own narrative through an influence network of Russian journalists trained in the UK …
‘These revelations show that when MPs were railing about Russia, British agents were using the BBC and Reuters to deploy precisely the same tactics that politicians and media commentators were accusing Russia of using,’ Chris Williamson, a former UK Labour MP who attempted to apply public scrutiny to the CDMD’s covert activities and was stonewalled on national security grounds, told The Grayzone.
‘The BBC and Reuters portray themselves as an unimpeachable, impartial, and authoritative source of world news,’ Williamson continued, ‘but both are now hugely compromised by these disclosures. Double standards like this just bring establishment politicians and corporate media hacks into further disrepute.'”
Reuters, BBC Hired to Promote Pro-NATO Narratives
The leaked documents show both Reuters and the BBC received “multimillion-dollar contracts to advance the British state’s interventionist aims.” The FCO funded:
- The cultivation of Russian journalists
- The establishment of “influence networks” in and around Russia
- The promotion of pro-NATO narratives in Russian-speaking regions
In its proposals, Reuters stated it has 15,000 journalists and staff within its global network, including 400 journalists within Russia. Reuters and BBC carried out their covert influencing mission in partnership with other high-profile media companies, including Bellingcat, Meduza and Mediazona.
Overseeing the operation was the Zinc Network, an intelligence contractor, which was also responsible for the establishment of a network of Russian and Central Asian YouTubers who were not registered as external sources. The Zinc Network also claimed to have the ability to “activate a range of content; to support anti-government protests inside Russia.”
This isn’t the first time Reuters and the BBC have been implicated in a Mockingbird-type media influencing operation. Documents declassified in January 2020 showed the British government funded Reuters “throughout the 1960s and 1970s to assist an anti-Soviet propaganda organization run by the MI6 intelligence agency,” Blumenthal writes.10 The BBC, meanwhile, was used as “a pass-through to conceal payments” to Reuters.
180-Degrees From the Truth
It’s no small irony that most of the organizations claiming to promote truth and counter disinformation are in fact doing the exact opposite. The Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD) group sounds very much like the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).
The CCDH is an opaquely funded group run by Imran Ahmed, who is also a member of the Steering Committee on the Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force under the British government’s Commission for Countering Extremism.
Ahmed has gone on record saying he considers anti-vaxxers “an extremist group that pose a national security risk,”11 and admits tracking and spying on 425 vaccine-related Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter accounts.12
In addition to stating that medical and scientific professionals must “convince the public that COVID is dangerous and give them confidence that a vaccine is safe and effective,”13 the CCDH is also calling for deplatforming anyone who questions vaccines,14 and to “hold platforms accountable” through fines, criminal sanctions and other measures that can impact the platform’s bottom line.
So, just as the CDMD is actually not countering disinformation but, rather, creating it, the CCDH is not in the business of countering digital hate; it’s actively creating and promoting online hate by baselessly labeling millions of law-abiding parents — whose only crime is to be concerned about their children’s health — as extremist threats and enemies of the state.
Media Have Become Integral Part of Intelligence Spy Network
Other media reports15,16,17 have also highlighted the role of intelligence agencies in the global effort to eliminate “anti-vaccine propaganda” from public discussion, and the fact that they’re using sophisticated cyberwarfare tools to do so. For example, independent investigative journalist Whitney Webb writes:18
“British and American state intelligence agencies are ‘weaponizing truth’ to quash vaccine hesitancy as both nations prepare for mass inoculations, in a recently announced ‘cyber war’ to be commanded by AI-powered arbiters of truth against information sources that challenge official narratives …
The UK’s GCHQ [Government Communications Headquarters19] ‘has begun an offensive cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by hostile states’ and ‘is using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State’ to do so.20
In addition, the UK government has ordered the British military’s 77th Brigade, which specializes in ‘information warfare,’ to launch an online campaign to counter ‘deceptive narratives’ about COVID-19 vaccine candidates.
The newly announced GCHQ ‘cyber war’ will not only take down ‘anti-vaccine propaganda’ but will also seek to ‘disrupt the operations of the cyberactors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.’
The effort will also involve GCHQ reaching out to other countries in the ‘Five Eyes’ alliance (U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Canada) to alert their partner agencies in those countries to target such ‘propaganda’ sites hosted within their borders.”
Intelligence-Led Information Warfare Against the Public
Clues that U.S. intelligence agencies — not just the CIA but also the FBI — support this cyberwar against the public can also be found in a white paper21 published in the InfraGard Journal in June 2019. InfraGard, a nonprofit national security group, collaborates with the FBI22 on educational and information-sharing initiatives “that help mitigate threats” to national security.23
The InfraGard paper24 claims the American anti-vaccine movement is being orchestrated by Russian government-aligned organizations seeking to “sow discontent and distrust in topics and initiatives that serve U.S. interests,”25 and that “The biggest threat in controlling an outbreak comes from those who categorically reject vaccination.”26
Other evidence includes the fact that the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Special Operations Command have awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to the U.S.-based “machine intelligence” company Primer, to develop “the first-ever machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation.”27
According to Webb, “Primer’s ultimate goal is to use their AI to entirely automate the shaping of public perceptions and become the arbiter of ‘truth,’ as defined by the state.”28
The self-appointed arbiter of truth NewsGuard — which rates websites on criteria of “credibility” and “transparency” — is also partnered with both the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Defense,29 which strongly suggests government support (if not direct involvement) of censorship.
NewsGuard is also funded by the PR firm Publicis, which also appears to have an important role in this information war.
Most Mainstream Media Are Now Propagandists
Were it not for the mainstream media pumping out misleading if not flat-out false information on a daily basis for months on end, the COVID-19 pandemic would have been a mere blip on the public’s radar. None of the draconian, freedom-robbing measures would have been remotely possible.
Considering the consistency of the narratives across the world this past year, it’s inconceivable that there isn’t some central “agency” of sorts directing it all. And, if so, there clearly must be a reason behind it. One does not fear-monger for no reason whatsoever. It has a purpose.
Historically, fear has been used by every would-be authoritarian and totalitarian regime you can think of, so there’s every reason to suspect the same applies now. The main difference is that today’s totalitarian ruler is more or less wholly unknown.
Who is it that wants to rule the world’s population through fear? Who is trying to take control over the whole globe? Who is guiding and instructing virtually all government leaders? Intelligence agencies and their media partners undoubtedly play key roles, but they’re unlikely to be the true core of the power structure behind it all.
No, the real power and leadership resides with the technocratic elite, the members of which have quietly and diligently worked to forward the agenda of a New World Order (NWO) for decades. What was once known as the NWO is now referred to as the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with a public focus on a “green” carbon-based economy to “build back better” by reinventing capitalism, as defined by the World Economic Forum.30
The not-so-public focus is technological surveillance and control over every facet of everyone’s life, from health and civic involvement to labor, education and economy. Unfortunately, members of the technocracy no longer carry member cards or pay membership dues, which obscures their affiliation, but certain organizations are so intimately involved in furthering the Great Reset agenda that you can safely assume a majority of their members play some role in this scheme.
The Council on Foreign Relations
Aside from intelligence agencies, another key player behind the Great Reset is the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). As explained by Swiss Policy Research, “Executives and top journalists of almost all major U.S. media outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations.”31
Not to be confused with the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations or the European Council on Foreign Relations, CFR is a nonprofit think tank, the 5,000-plus members of which also include past and present presidents, politicians, secretaries of state, CIA directors, bankers, lawyers, academic professors and corporate leaders, just to name a few.32
CFR also operates the David Rockefeller Studies Program, which in turn advises the White House on foreign policy matters. Overall, the CFR wields incredible power and influence over the U.S. White House and its policies. As reported by Swiss Policy Research:33
“In his famous article about ‘The American Establishment,’ political columnist Richard H. Rovere noted: ‘The directors of the CFR make up a sort of Presidium for that part of the Establishment that guides our destiny as a nation …
[I]t rarely fails to get one of its members, or at least one of its allies, into the White House. In fact, it generally is able to see to it that both nominees are men acceptable to it.’ It was not until the 2016 election that the Council couldn’t, apparently, prevail.”
The Synchronization of Fake News
CFR has two international affiliates: the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, both of which were established by CFR leaders “to foster elite cooperation at the global level.”
Well-known names in the Trilateral group’s U.S. branch include David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Michael Bloomberg and Google heavyweights Eric Schmidt and Susan Molinari, vice president for public policy at Google. Many of its board members are also members of the Aspen Institute, which grooms and mentors executives from around the world about the subtleties of globalization.
As you can see in the graphic below, major media are well represented in all three groups. As mentioned, CFR members also include current and former CIA directors. In his book, “American War Machine,”34,35 Peter Dale Scott also documents the ties between CFR, the CIA, the national security apparatus and the banking industry. Taken together, these ties explain how a false narrative (whatever it might be) can be so widely coordinated and synchronized.
Richard Stengel — Technocracy Poster Boy
Knowing what you now know about the CFR, comments by Richard Stengel, the top state media appointee for President Biden’s transition team, will probably make a lot more sense.
During a 2018 CFR forum on fake news, Stengel — a CFR member and Atlantic Council fellow, former State Department official for the Obama administration, former managing editor for Time magazine, strategic adviser to Snap Inc., which runs Snapchat and Bitmoji and a political analyst on MSNBC — insisted governments must use propaganda on their citizens.36
He repeated this sentiment in November 2020, after being appointed to President Biden’s transition team, saying he’s “not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”37 As reported by The GrayZone :38
“A committed crusader in what he openly describes as a global ‘information war,’ Stengel has proudly proclaimed his dedication to the careful management of the public’s access to information.”
Stengel has even proposed abolishing — “rethinking” — the First Amendment, which guarantees the freedom of speech and press, “for practical reasons in society.”39
Stengel’s presence in the Biden administration may be an augury of things to come, considering he created a nonclassified government entity during his Obama years, specifically to combat Russian disinformation.40 This entity, the Global Engagement Center, now facilitates the U.S. government’s efforts to spread its own propaganda around the world.
Stengel, with his close ties to several key centers of technocratic power — the U.S. government, the CFR, the Atlantic Council, mainstream media and Big Tech — is a veritable poster boy for modern technocracy, which makes his shameless promotion of censorship and propaganda more than a little understandable.
Pre-Mockingbird Media Manipulation
While Operation Mockingbird has earned a place in history as a point at which the free press was compromised, in reality, the infiltration of the press occurred long before the 1950s.
In his February 9, 1917, Congressional remarks, Congressman Oscar Callaway, D-Texas, explained the origin and execution of the plan to control and manipulate public opinion and mindset through media, which had taken shape just two years earlier:41
“In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press.
They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.”
Operation Mockingbird was essentially the CIA’s effort to consolidate, while simultaneously expanding, this secret hold over the media some three decades later. It’s a sobering thought to realize that virtually no one alive today has ever been informed by a truly free and independent press.
While the situation has surely deteriorated in more recent years, the covert use of mainstream media to manipulate and misdirect the public to protect the interests of the elite few has been par for the course for over 100 years.
The Propaganda Multipliers
When it comes to the actual dissemination of fake news and propaganda, news agencies play a central role, and there’s only three of them: The Associated Press (AP), Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP). As explained in the Swiss Policy Research post, “The Propaganda Multiplier”:42
“The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.
A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles were based in whole or in part on agency reports … 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews were in favor of a U.S. and NATO intervention, while propaganda was attributed exclusively to the opposite side.”
In short, until or unless at least one of these news agencies sends out a notice, national and local media are unlikely to report on certain events. Even photos and videos are often sourced directly from these global news agencies. This way, people hear, see and read the exact same message everywhere.
“This dependency on the global agencies creates a striking similarity in international reporting: from Vienna to Washington, our media often report the same topics, using many of the same phrases — a phenomenon that would otherwise rather be associated with ‘controlled media’ in authoritarian states,” Swiss Policy Research writes.43
Even media outlets that have foreign correspondents on their payroll do not expect those correspondents to conduct independent investigations. They too simply report whatever the Big Three news agencies want covered, and from the angle they want it covered. What you end up with is a sort of echo-chamber where only one view is presented. As one might expect, this setup makes for a perfect propaganda machine.
As noted by Swiss Policy Research, “Due to the rather low journalistic performance of the mainstream media and their high dependence on a few news agencies, it is easy for interested parties to spread propaganda and disinformation in a supposedly respectable format to a worldwide audience.” Intelligence agencies and defense ministries are well aware of this and use it with regularity, as surely does the CFR and the rest of the technocratic apparatus.
In short, the current censoring and labeling of anything that threatens the technocratic agenda and the profiteering of its members as “misinformation” and “disinformation” is a top-down scheme. It’s not random, by any means, and it’s not driven by the opinions of private companies themselves. Social media companies, for example, are mere tools for the technocratic deep state, which operates worldwide.
The question then becomes, if propaganda is that deeply entrenched in our media structure, how do we know what is true and what is not? There’s no easy answer to this question, but the solution involves first becoming aware of the fact that media lies, and that there is a reason for why the media narrative is what it is. One way to evaluate the news is to ask yourself, “Why might they want me to think of this in this particular way?” Eventually, patterns begin to form.
Ultimately, to find the truth, you must be willing to look for it, and to look in places outside the mainstream media consortium. You have to ask questions and reason your way through the information you find. If something doesn’t make sense yet you’re told to accept it without question, it’s probably propaganda.
Any number of COVID-19 restrictions, for example, have been illogical in the extreme, which tells us they’re not about protecting people from infection. It’s about something else, and that something else has often been the purposeful destruction of small businesses to facilitate wealth transfer from the middle- and lower class to the top echelon. Ultimately, that is the plan, and to stop it, we have to stop believing the propaganda. It’s just that simple. And that challenging.
Sources and References
- 1, 6 ATI March 12, 2018
- 2, 4 SGT Report October 7, 2019
- 3, 5, 7 Free Press July 17, 2013
- 8 Telegraph Trojan Horse Undermining Russia
- 9, 10 The GrayZone February 20, 2021
- 11 The Independent July 7, 2020
- 12 The Anti-Vaxx Playbook (PDF), Page 9
- 13 The Anti-Vaxx Playbook (PDF), Page 10
- 14 The Anti-Vaxx Playbook (PDF), Page 43
- 15, 20 The Times November 9, 2020
- 16 UK Defense Journal November 10, 2020
- 17 The National News November 9, 2020
- 18, 28 Unlimited Hangout November 11, 2020
- 19 GCHQ.gov.UK
- 21, 24, 25, 26 The Infragard Journal June 2019; 2(1) (PDF)
- 22 InfraGard
- 23 InfraGard About Us
- 27 PR Newswire October 1, 2020
- 29 Dropbox NewsGuard Partners
- 30 World Economic Forum July 13, 2020
- 31, 33 Swiss Policy Research The American Empire and Its Media
- 32 Council on Foreign Relations: The Imperial Council of the US
- 34 Amazon.com American War Machine by Peter Dale Scott
- 35, 41 Global Research September 30, 2019
- 36 The New American July 16, 2018
- 37, 38, 39, 40 The GrayZone November 11, 2020
- 42, 43 Swiss Policy Research, The Propaganda Multiplier
Apologies and compensation are simply not good enough for the victims of drone attacks
By Yvonne Ridley | MEMO | September 20, 2021
Palestine Action is, as its name implies, involved in direct action against some of the arms trade’s most deadly production lines, notably Israel’s Elbit Systems. Since it burst onto the scene, quite a few members have been arrested at some of Elbit’s ten known factories and offices in Britain.
Elbit Systems is Israel’s largest arms company; it makes deadly “unmanned aerial vehicles”, known as drones. Palestine Action’s trademark calling card is deep red paint; it has used gallons since last year, symbolising the blood of innocents spilled in drone strikes.
Recently, the group has expanded its brief from targeting weapons factories to spraying the tented entrance of Britain’s biggest arms fair — DSEI at London’s ExCel Centre — to remind those seeking to buy weapons of the bloodshed caused by the products marketed within. Key exhibitors such as Elbit Systems, Raytheon, BAE Systems, and Lockheed Martin use arms fairs to market their deadly technology and products to governments from around the world. Perhaps they should be the focus of police interest rather than members of Palestine Action.
Palestine Action activists dyed security tent blood red and threw red and green flares on the Excel exhibition centre in London – Sunday, Sept 12, 2021 [VX Photo/ Vudi Xhymshiti]
Like many others, I am sick and tired of half-hearted apologies from the armed forces which use (or misuse) their weaponry. There’s nothing “smart” about a precision-guided missile which kills innocent civilians as — and I hate this term — collateral damage. There is no such thing as a clinical kill, a point agreed by several protest groups which have criticised the arms fair for its role in enabling the destructive US-UK war in Afghanistan over the past twenty years.
According to US policy, attacks by drones are not to go ahead if there is a probability that innocent civilians will be killed or injured. As we found out a few days ago, the US doesn’t really have a clue who it’s blowing up. Call me naïve, but it seems that the only certain thing when a drone takes to the air is, that innocent civilians will die, whether they’re Afghani, Iraqi, Pakistani, Yemeni, Syrian, or Palestinian.
Drone attacks were much favoured by Barack Obama who joked about their efficiency. One news story illustrated how much he ordered their use by pointing out that it would take the former US president more than three years to get through them all if he apologised to one innocent person a day. Human rights groups have demanded transparency from all US presidents since the Bush administration launched its drone wars, but there remains very little clarity on the number of civilians killed.
I’ve suspected this for many years. After the most recent US apology for killing civilians, I had a sense of déjà vu. In April 2003, I travelled solo to Paktika in Afghanistan after hearing rumours of an atrocity against innocent civilians in a district called Bermal. All eyes were focused on Iraq so even though I got the story, it was difficult to find someone to publish it. There’s only so much injustice against the people of Asia and the Middle East that the media is prepared to broadcast or publish.
While I was investigating the atrocity in southern Afghanistan, a senior US army officer was also in the district with hush money to keep Afghan villagers quiet. He did not want people talking to me in case I found out that America had killed eleven children in another deadly blunder.
The Pentagon had claimed that it destroyed a Taliban stronghold when, in fact, US forces had destroyed a house. The grieving mother — Sawara was her name —lost all of her nine children in the attack. She was like an empty shell when I finally spoke to her.
She and her husband Mawes Khan had put their children to bed in the family home they shared with his brother Sardar, and his wife and their seven children. By morning, the corpses of eleven brothers, sisters, and cousins lay in a neat row in the courtyard. The Americans realised the full extent of their mistake and gave the family the equivalent of £6,350 and an apology.
That happened two years into the war when the number of dead Afghan civilians was not deemed important enough to register. How much compensation will the Americans pay to Zemari Ahmadi after wiping out ten members of his family, including eight children? The admission of guilt and an apology were only forthcoming because the world’s media was in Kabul on the day of the attack and had access to the scene of devastation as well as eyewitnesses and survivors to interview.
The media in Washington was briefed about how an unnamed ISIS-Khorasan fighter had been in a vehicle with an associate at the time of the strike, which was carried out by an MQ-9 Reaper drone. Captain Bill Urban, spokesman for US Central Command, assured journalists that the military had used specially chosen precision munitions in order to minimise civilian casualties. In essence, the compliant media was being fed propaganda packed with deceptive euphemisms.
The drone attack on the eve of the departure of the last US troops had come three days after Isis-Khorisan terrorists killed dozens of Afghan civilians, nearly 30 Taliban soldiers, and thirteen members of the US military in a suicide bombing at the gates of Kabul Airport. Civilians always suffer when the US rushes in to wreak revenge.
This week we heard US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin apologise for a “horrible mistake” after he admitted: “We now know that there was no connection between Mr Ahmadi and Isis-Khorasan, that his activities on that day were completely harmless and not at all related to the imminent threat we believed we faced, and that Mr Ahmadi was just as innocent a victim as were the others tragically killed.”
Compare this with the narrative pushed out on 29 August when the US military claimed triumphantly to have taken out ISIS terrorists and that there had been “significant secondary explosions from the vehicle”, suggesting that explosives were on board. Journalists were told that there were “no indications” of civilian casualties. As I said, America would have got away with the lies had there not been so many foreign journalists on the ground.
It emerged that Zemari Ahmadi is an engineer for aid group Nutrition and Education International. He was observed placing large water bottles or jugs into the back of his white car. US intelligence (surely a contradiction in terms) interpreted this as an ISIS-K member packing explosives into a vehicle for another suicide mission.
It is time for the world to accept that there’s no such thing as a surgical strike and that unmanned drones are among the worst weapons for producing civilian casualties. It would, therefore, make more sense to listen to groups like Palestine Action rather than deploy deadly weapons which have a track record of killing innocent people.
The theme of the DSEI fair at the ExCel Centre was “Integrated Response to Future Threats”, with a focus on drone warfare and surveillance technology. Palestine Action says that this will mean a greater role for drones in British policing as the government enters new procurement and training contracts with the likes of Elbit Systems. According to the activists’ press release, the London fair and a similar exhibition in Liverpool “serve a similar purpose of normalising these firms’ operations and providing an open market for the exchange of the weapons of war. Palestine Action is calling for the cancellation of both events and the ceasing of these firms’ operations on British soil, failing which direct action will continue and will escalate.”
Drone strikes outside the declared war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq are the province of the CIA and the secretive US Joint Special Operations Command. Various US administrations have treated them as official secrets. In the absence of justice for the families of those killed accidentally and/or targeted in drone strikes, civil disobedience and resistance is thus the duty of all reasonable people in war zones like Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere.
It is easy for governments to demonise dead civilians as “terrorists” because most are killed in remote areas where the absence of justice or journalists makes it easier for the authorities to bury their mistakes. With governments prepared to lie or twist the facts, weapons manufacturers should be careful about those to whom they sell their arms, or be ready to be accused of complicity in war crimes.
We now suspect that the Palestinian children killed while playing on a beach in Gaza in 2014 were hit by an Israeli drone strike. The manufacturers are surely just as complicit as the Israeli soldiers who targeted young boys. Again, had journalists not been in an adjacent hotel when the strike took place, Israel might have got away with insulting everyone’s intelligence by claiming that Hamas “terrorists” were on active duty that day.
These are the sort of crimes that British police officers should be investigating, instead of arresting the people who draw attention to international war crimes and criminal negligence which led to the killing of Palestine’s 9-year-old Ismayil Bahar, 10-year-old Aed Bahar, 10-year-old Zacharia Bahar, and 11-year-old Muhammed Bahar on that Gaza beach; the Ahmadi family in Kabul earlier this month; and the Khan’s eleven children in Bermal in 2003, as well as the tens of thousands of others in-between. The law of universal jurisdiction exists to allow states to prosecute those responsible for international crimes committed elsewhere. The fact that few, if any such prosecutions go ahead, signals a degree of complicity at the highest levels of governments and judiciaries.
In such cases, it is not always the law that is an ass, but the people charged with implementing it and ensuring that justice is seen to be done for people like the Bahar, Ahmadi, and Khan families. Apologies and compensation are simply not good enough.
Ford ‘violating privacy law’ by storing driver’s private conversations and releasing them to cops and private company
New Class Action Lawsuit Filed
By Anna Bradley-Smith | Top Class Actions | September 15, 2021
Ford Motor Company uses its infotainment system to secretly download and store drivers’ private text conversations, and then turns them over to law enforcement and the private company Berla, a new class action lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit was filed in Washington on Sept. 10 by lead plaintiffs Mark Jones and Michael McKee, who allege the company violated the Washington Privacy Act. The act, they say in the suit, forbids any entity in the state of Washington from intercepting or pre-recording any private communication without first obtaining consent of all the participants in the communication.
But Ford, they allege, has been doing so illegally through software and hardware made by Berla Corporation. Berla then supplies those conversations to law enforcement, military, civil and regulatory agencies, and select private industry organizations, the lawsuit alleges. Berla does not give private citizens any means to access or delete their own conversations.
“On information and belief, vehicle infotainment systems in Ford vehicles automatically download a copy of every text message stored on any phone connected to the system and store that copy in computer memory on the vehicle in such a manner that the vehicle owner cannot access it,” the lawsuit reads.
Jones owns a 2021 Ford vehicle with an infotainment system he has used repeatedly. He says in the claim that he has never consented to Ford downloading and storing his text messages, and similarly did not consent to third parties such as Berla or law enforcement having access to copies of such text messages made by his Ford vehicle’s infotainment system.
McKee sent messages to Jones and his messages have also been stored without his consent, the lawsuit states.
Ford also Accused of Violating Privacy by Recording Conversations and Illegally Downloading Phone Data in Rental Cars
The same issue is true even with rental cars, the lawsuit says, with Ben LeMere, the CEO and founder of Berla, telling reporters the company has seen a number of messages stored in rental cars that were requesting drugs and sex. LeMere told the reporteres that as soon as a phone is plugged into a USB power port, the hardware and software will “start sucking all your data down into the car.”
Jones argues Ford has violated their customer’s privacy and they are suing on behalf of all Washington Ford owners for violations of the Washington Privacy Act. He seeks certification of the Class, injunctive relief, declaratory relief, damages, legal fees and costs, and a jury trial.
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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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- Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalist & Beloved Ecologist: 2 Articles
- Promoters of Israel: Leo Terrell, Ghana, Floyd Mayweather, Van Jones
- Gaza Soccer Player Who Dreamed of Competing in World Cup Can Now Barely Watch It
- Gaza baby loses mom and a leg; Palestinian prisoner tortured to death – Daily Update
- JNS Policy Summit to kick off in Israel
- No Tricks Zone
- 3 New Studies Find Increasing Trends In Solar Radiation Since The 1980s – Easily Explaining Warming
- THE TRANSCEIVER PARADOX: Why Organoid Intelligence (OI) Could Become Our Ultimate Alien Predator
- German Wind Turbines Face Regulatory Shutdown Due To Excessive Noise
- New Study: Chile’s Relative Sea Level Was 3.2 Meters Higher Than Today During The Mid-Holocene
- Beyond The Pitch: Why FIFA’s World Cup Is One Of Humanity’s Best Investments
- Climate Alarmists Now Using Natural Phenomena To Support Their Claims
- New Study: Significant CO2 Fluxes From Non-Volcanic Sources Are Largely Neglected In Carbon Budgets
- Women Climate Scientists Being Harassed, Insulted By Skeptics, Claims Berkeley Earth Researcher
- Germany’s Longterm Spring Climate Data Show “No Climate Trend”
- New Study: Solar Photovoltaic, Wind Power Fail To Meet Annual Energy Demands 62% Of The Time
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