While the mainstream media has, by and large, dismissed the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was created and leaked from a high-security biocontainment lab in Wuhan, China, a number of high-ranking U.S. officials are sticking to it, and there’s probably good reason for this.
On the whole, if the virus was actually a natural occurrence, a series of improbable coincidences would have had to transpire. Meanwhile, a series of highly probable “coincidences” point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) being the most likely source, and to dismiss them as a whole simply doesn’t make sense.
Media Struggle to Prop Up Unproven Zoonotic Theory
I first mentioned that the outbreak had the hallmarks of a laboratory escape in an article we posted February 4, 2020. On the upside, some members of the media are now finally starting to inch toward more honest reporting on this — probably because U.S. officials keep leaning that way.
That doesn’t mean some aren’t still trying to defend the official narrative. Take The New York Times, for example. The original headline of its March 26, 2021, article about Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, read: “Ex-CDC Director Favors Debunked Covid-19 Origin Theory.”1
Three days later, that headline was toned down to: “The CDC’s Ex-Director Offers No Evidence in Favoring Speculation That the Coronavirus Originated in a Lab,”2 with a correction notice noting that the earlier headline “referred incorrectly to a theory on the origins of the coronavirus. The theory is unproven, not debunked.”
Well, the truth is, all other theories are equally unproven — and are riddled with far more holes. The theory that the virus arose through natural mutation, for example, looks like Swiss cheese in comparison to the lab-leak theory.
In a February 16, 2021, article3 in Independent Science News, molecular biologist and virologist Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., and Allison Wilson, Ph.D., a molecular biologist, reviewed the evidence for a laboratory origin and the reasons why a zoonotic origin “will never be found.” I also summarized their review in March 2021 article, which explains that:
The chance of a person from Wuhan being patient zero is approximately 1 in 630, based on calculations that take into account the population size of Wuhan, the global population and the fact that coronavirus-carrying animals are found virtually all over the world
Taking into account that there are 28 Alpha- and Beta-coronavirus species with members that affect humans, the chance of Wuhan hosting a SARS-related coronavirus outbreak is 17,640 to 1
No credible theory for natural zoonotic spillover has been presented, to date
There are at least four distinct lab origin theories, including the serial passage theory (which proposes the virus was created by serial passaging through an animal host or cell culture). There’s also a variety of evidence for genetic manipulation
A third theory is that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of vaccine development, and the fourth is the Mojiang miners passage theory, which proposes a precursor to SARS-CoV-2 sickened the miners, and once inside these patients, it mutated into SARS-CoV-2
No matter which way you look at it, the half-baked idea brought forth by the World Health Organization’s investigative team, that the virus somehow naturally evolved in some unknown part of the world and then piggy-backed into Wuhan on top of frozen food, is held together by even fewer facts.
Among the more compelling “coincidences” that hint at lab-origin are the facts that the WIV has admitted storing and working with bat coronaviruses collected significant distances away from the lab, and that it’s the only biosafety lab in China that studies human coronaviruses. These viruses include RaTG13,4 the closest known ancestor to SARS-CoV-2, obtained from miners who fell ill with severe respiratory illness after working in a Mojiang mine in 2012.
WHO COVID Report ‘Totally Flawed’
In a March 30, 2021, opinion piece in The Washington Post,5 Josh Rogin accurately points out that the WHO’s report6 on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is so flawed, “a real investigation has yet to take place.” We simply cannot count that report as the result of a true investigative effort.
“Determining the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus should have nothing to do with politics,” he writes.7 “It is a forensic question, one that requires thorough investigation of all possible theories, and one that should encompass both the scenario that the virus jumped from animals to humans in nature as well as one related to human error in a Wuhan lab.
But a fatally flawed investigation by the World Health Organization and Chinese officials and experts only muddies the waters, and it places the WHO further at odds with the U.S. government and the Biden administration.”
As noted by Rogin and many others, the investigation was far from independent and transparent, as China was allowed to select its members, who then relied on their Chinese counterparts when it came to data collection. It’s no surprise then that this team decided the natural origin theory is the most credible, while the lab-accident theory is summarily dismissed as unworthy of further consideration and study.
In a March 25, 2021, CNN interview,8 Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated, “We’ve got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in Beijing apparently helped to write it.” Rogin adds:9
“Specifically, declassified U.S. intelligence, confirmed by Blinken’s own State Department,10 alleges that the WIV was conducting undisclosed research on bat coronaviruses, had secret research projects with the Chinese military, and failed to disclose that several lab workers got sick with COVID-like symptoms in autumn 2019.”
Someone’s Not Telling the Truth
According to the WHO report, the labs “were well-managed, with a staff health monitoring program with no reporting of COVID-19 compatible respiratory illness during the weeks/months prior to December 2019.” “In other words, the WHO is saying the U.S. intelligence is wrong,” Rogin writes.11
Not a word is mentioned in the report about U.S. government claims that the WIV engaged in the very research required to create a novel coronavirus with the specific affinity to infect human cells.
Recently, Shi Zhengli, who heads bat coronavirus research at the WIV, spoke at a Rutgers University seminar, calling the WIV’s research “open” and “transparent.” Former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger disagrees. In an interview with Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes,” he said:12
“There was a direct order from Beijing to destroy all viral samples — and they didn’t volunteer to share the genetic sequences. There is a body of research that’s been taking place, conducted by the Chinese military in collaboration with the WIV, which has not been acknowledged by the Chinese government.
We’ve seen the data. I’ve personally seen the data. We don’t know [why the military were in that lab]. It is a major lead that needs to be pursued by the press, certainly by the WHO.”
As noted by Pottinger, Shi published studies showing how bat coronaviruses were manipulated to render them more infectious to humans, and the U.S. government has in the past received reports of safety concerns due to lax standards at the WIV.
“They were doing research specifically on coronaviruses that attach to the ACE2 receptors in human lungs just like the COVID-19 virus,” Pottinger told Stahl.13 “It’s circumstantial evidence. But it’s a pretty potent bullet point when you consider that the place where this pandemic emerged was a few kilometers away from the WIV.”
US State Department Suspects Lab Leak
In a March 21, 2021, interview with Sky News Australia,14 David Asher, former lead investigator for the U.S. State Department’s task force that looked into the origins of COVID-19, also stated that the data they collected “made us feel the Wuhan Institute was highly probably the source of the COVID pandemic.”
According to Asher, three workers at the WIV who worked with the RatG13 coronavirus — the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 identified to date — appear to have actually been the first cluster of cases of COVID-19. They fell ill with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 as early as October 2019. At least one of the workers required hospitalization.
He also pointed out there is evidence in the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 suggesting it’s been synthetically altered. It has the backbone of a bat coronavirus, combined with a pangolin receptor and “some sort of humanized mice transceptor.” “These things don’t naturally make sense,” Asher said, adding that experts around the world agree that the odds of this configuration occurring naturally are “very low.”
Another troubling indicator that something was amiss at the WIV was the Chinese government’s taking down of a WIV database in September 2019. According to the Chinese, this was done because of “thousands of hacking attempts.”
However, Asher pointed out many other databases were taken offline around the same time as well.15 The Chinese even tried to remove data posted in a European database containing viral sequencing from patients exhibiting COVID-19-related symptoms. Interestingly, those sequences included adenovirus, which is a vaccine vector. This, Asher said, could indicate that SARS-CoV-2 is part of a vaccine developed in response to a biological weapon.
In an earlier article16 by The Sun, Asher is quoted saying the WIV “was operating a secret, classified program,” and that “In my view … it was a biological weapons program.” He stops short of accusing China of intentional release, however, which also would not make sense from a bioweapon point of view. Instead, he said he believes it was a weapon vector that, during development, “somehow leaked.”17
A March 27, 2020, assessment report by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency also concluded SARS-CoV-2 was likely an accidental release from an infectious diseases laboratory, but stops short of calling it a biological weapon.18 Asher also told Sky News19 he’s never seen a more systematic cover-up, and The Sun 20 quotes him as saying that “Motive, cover-up, conspiracy, all the hallmarks of guilt are associated with this.”
Former FDA Commissioner Weighs in on Lab Origin
March 28, 2021, former FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb, now a board member of Pfizer (producer of one of the COVID vaccines), weighed in on the origin of the pandemic in a “Face the Nation” interview, saying:21
“It looks like the WHO report was an attempt to try to support the Chinese narrative … You know, the lab leak theory doesn’t seem like a plausible theory unless you aggregate the biggest collection of coronaviruses and put them in a lab, a minimum-security lab in the middle of a densely-populated center and experiment on animals, which is exactly what the Wuhan Institute of Virology did.
They were using these viruses in a BSL-2 lab and, we now know, infecting animals. So that creates the opportunity for a lab leak. It might not be the most likely scenario on how this virus got out, but it has to remain a scenario. And I think at the end of the day, we’re never going to fully discharge that possibility. What we’re going to have here is a battle of competing narratives.”
WHO Enters Damage Control Mode
In response to growing critiques, WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and 13 other world leaders have joined the U.S. government in expressing “frustration with the level of access China granted an international mission to Wuhan.” As reported by The Washington Post, March 30, 2021:22
“Ghebreyesus said in a briefing to member states … that he expected ‘future collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing’ — the most pointed comments to date from an agency that has been solicitous toward China through most of the pandemic.
He said there is a particular need for a ‘full analysis’ of the role of animal markets in Wuhan and that the report did not conduct an ‘extensive enough’ assessment of the possibility the virus was introduced to humans through a laboratory incident …
The United States, Britain, South Korea, Israel, Japan and others issued a joint statement23 … expressing concern. ‘Together, we support a transparent and independent analysis and evaluation, free from interference and undue influence,’ it reads …
Tedros said24 … that mission team members raised concerns to him about access to raw data needed for the report … ‘The team reports that the first detected case had symptom onset on the 8th of December 2019. But to understand the earliest cases, scientists would benefit from full access to data, including biological samples from at least September 2019,’ he said.”
WHO Investigation Team Accused of Spreading Disinformation
In a March 2020 interview with Independent Science News,25 molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., laboratory director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology and member of the Institutional Biosafety Committee of Rutgers University and the Working Group on Pathogen Security of the state of New Jersey, called out the members of the WHO-instigated investigative team as “participants in disinformation.”
Ebright was one of 26 scientists who signed an open letter26 demanding a full and unrestricted forensic investigation into the origins of the pandemic, published in the Wall Street Journal and French Le Monde, March 4, 2021. When asked to describe the shortcomings of the WHO-China team’s investigation, he responded:
“A credible investigation would have had Terms of Reference that: 1) Acknowledged the possibility of laboratory origin, 2) Ensured access of investigators to records, samples, personnel, and facilities at the Wuhan laboratories that handle bat SARS-related coronaviruses,
3) Enabled collection of evidence, not mere meet-and-greet photo-ops, 4) Authorized an investigation of months, not mere days, and 5) A credible investigation also would have had conflict-of-interest-free investigators, not persons who were subjects of the research and/or closely associated with subjects of the investigation …
It is crucial that any team reviewing the issues include not only research scientists, but also biosafety, biosecurity, and science policy specialists.”
Ebright, who has repeatedly called the WHO mission “a charade,” stated that “its members were willing — and, in at least one case, enthusiastic — participants in disinformation.” Importantly, the terms of reference for the investigation were prenegotiated, and did not include even the possibility of a laboratory origin. He’s also highly critical of the inclusion of Peter Daszak, whose conflicts of interest alone are enough to invalidate the investigation.
“Daszak was the contractor who funded the laboratory at WIV that potentially was the source of the virus (with subcontracts from $200 million from the US Department of State and $7 million from the US National Institutes of Health), and he was a collaborator and co-author on research projects at the laboratory,” Ebright noted.
What Do We Know?
While another signer of the open letter, Dr. Steven Quay, claims to have calculated27 the lab-origin hypothesis as having a 99.8% probability of being correct, Ebright is unwilling to assign relative probabilities to either theory. Rather, he insists a truly thorough forensic investigation and analysis is what is required, as there is biological evidence going in both directions. He explains:
“The genome sequence of the outbreak virus indicates that its progenitor was either the horseshoe-bat coronavirus RaTG13, or a closely related bat coronavirus.
RaTG13 was collected by Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2013 from a horseshoe-bat colony in a mine in Yunnan province, where miners had died from a SARS-like pneumonia in 2012, was partly sequenced by WIV in 2013-2016, was fully sequenced by WIV in 2018-2019, and was published by WIV in 2020.
Bat coronaviruses are present in nature in multiple parts of China. Therefore, the first human infection could have occurred as a natural accident, with a virus passing from a bat to a human, possibly through another animal. There is clear precedent for this. The first entry of the SARS virus into the human population occurred as a natural accident in a rural part of Guangdong province in 2002.
But bat coronaviruses are also collected and studied by laboratories in multiple parts of China, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Therefore, the first human infection also could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with a virus accidentally infecting a field collection staffer, a field survey staffer, or a laboratory staffer, followed by transmission from the staffer to the public.
There also is clear precedent for this. The second, third, fourth and fifth entries of the SARS virus into human populations occurred as a laboratory accident in Singapore in 2003, a laboratory accident in Taipei in 2003, and two separate laboratory accidents in Beijing in 2004.
At this point in time, there is no secure basis to assign relative probabilities to the natural-accident hypothesis and the laboratory-accident hypothesis. Nevertheless, there are three lines of circumstantial evidence that are worth noting.
1. First, the outbreak occurred in Wuhan, a city of 11 million persons that does not contain horseshoe-bat colonies; that is tens of kilometers from, and that is outside the flight range of, the nearest known horseshoe-bat colonies. Furthermore, the outbreak occurred at a time of year when horseshoe bats are in hibernation and do not leave colonies.
2. Second, the outbreak occurred in Wuhan, on the doorstep of the laboratory that conducts the world’s largest research project on horseshoe bat viruses, that has the world’s largest collection of horseshoe-bat viruses, and that possessed and worked with the world’s closest sequenced relative of the outbreak virus …
3. Third, the bat-SARS-related-coronavirus projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology used personal protective equipment (usually just gloves; sometimes not even gloves) and biosafety standards (usually just biosafety level 2) that would pose very high risk of infection of field-collection, field-survey, or laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2.”
Who’s Qualified to Opine on Viral Origin?
When asked “What would you say to the scientists who declined to comment on the open letter because it does not come from virologists?” Ebright responded:28
“The claim is unsound. There were virologists among the signers of the Open Letter. There even were coronavirologists among the signers of the Open Letter. More important, COVID-19 affects every person on the planet. Not just virologists …
Microbiologists and molecular biologists are as qualified as virologists to assess the relevant science and science policies. Virology is a subset, not a superset, of microbiology and molecular biology. The sequencing, sequence analysis, cell culture, animal-infection studies and other laboratory procedures used by virologists are not materially different from the procedures used by other microbiologists and molecular biologists.”
Is Gain-of-Function Research Ever Justifiable?
Clearly, getting to the bottom of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is crucial if we are to prevent a similar pandemic from erupting in the future. If gain-of-function research was in fact involved, we need to know, so that steps can either be taken to prevent another leak (which is not likely possible) or to dismantle and ban such research altogether for the common good.
As long as we are creating the risk, the benefit will be secondary. Any scientific or medical gains made from this kind of research pales in comparison to the incredible risks involved if weaponized pathogens are released, and it doesn’t matter if it’s by accident or on purpose. This sentiment has been echoed by others in a variety of scientific publications.29,30,31,32
Considering the potential for a massively lethal pandemic, I believe it’s safe to say that BSL 3 and 4 laboratories pose a very real and serious existential threat to humanity.
Historical facts tell us accidental exposures and releases have already happened, and we only have our lucky stars to thank that none have turned into pandemics taking the lives of tens of millions, as was predicted at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Seeing how scientists have already figured out a way to mutate SARS-CoV-2 such that it evades human antibodies, having a frank, open discussion about the scientific merits of this kind of work is more pertinent than ever before.
If SARS-CoV-2 really was the result of zoonotic spillover, the easiest and most effective way to quash “conspiracy theories” about a lab origin would be to present compelling evidence for a plausible theory. So far, that hasn’t happened, and as noted by Latham and Wilson, the most likely reason for that is because the virus does not have a natural zoonotic origin, and you cannot find that which does not exist.
Summary
Ideally, we need to reevaluate the usefulness of the WHO. Strong evidence indicates it is heavily influenced, if not outright controlled by Bill Gates. On the whole, it seems it would be far wiser to decentralize pandemic planning from the global and federal levels to the state and local levels. Both medicine and government work best when individualized and locally applied.
Sadly, even though this is clearly the best strategy for successfully addressing any truly serious infectious threat, the likelihood of this happening is very close to zero.
This is largely due to decades of careful planning by the technocrats that have carefully placed their surrogates in virtually every arena of global government, finances and media, which allows them to easily dictate their propaganda campaigns and censor or deplatform virtually anyone who disagrees and seeks to provide a balanced counter-narrative.
Somewhere a brilliant but troubled biotech engineer is doing CRISPR in his garage. He has all he needs: a computer, a fridge, a centrifuge, some animal cages, and an assortment of microorganisms in tubes, which he has labeled and stored until he’s ready. Today he will use a gene-editing technique to make a deadly, fast-spreading bacterium. Oh, and he plans to unleash it upon the world tomorrow. He just needs to make a few finishing touches.
Why is he doing this?
Maybe he’s gone mad. Maybe he’s lonely and wants to get revenge on the world. Maybe he read Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto and thinks humans are a plague. In some sense, it doesn’t matter. Out of a thousand other brilliant gene researchers, he has broken bad. And nobody really knows what he’s working on in that garage. He is as invisible to his neighbors as he is to the girls he likes.
What on earth are we going to do about this young man?
How do we stop people like him from unleashing mass death?
And if we are going to stop him, who is the “we?”
Today, more and more people have access to technological means to wreak havoc on the world. As more people have access to exponential technologies, some subset of them could be out there in the dark working on the next existential threat.
So what are we going to do?
Reasonable Regulations
For most people, the answer is linear, even logical: regulation. It’s plausible enough. Certain kinds of activities are riskier than others, so ordinary people are going to have to trust and empower authorities to provide regulatory oversight. Sounds simple. Advocates of this kind of regulation are not arguing that risky research should be banned. As we stipulated in our own scenario, 999 out of 1,000 are not monsters at all but up to good things. Some of their work will be welcome medical breakthroughs.
So maybe some people should be allowed to engage in activities that create existential risks. Otherwise, such activities should be tightly controlled by regulators in licensed, transparent environments. And, of course, government ought to supply that regulatory oversight; or so goes that rationale.
Turnkey Totalitarianism
A handful of people have begun to study existential threats like the ones described above. One such individual is philosopher Nick Bostrom who in the policy summary of his “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis”, writes:
“In order for civilization to have a general capacity to deal with “black ball” inventions of this type, it would need a system of ubiquitous real-time worldwide surveillance. In some scenarios, such a system would need to be in place before the technology is invented.”
After a unipolar surveillance regime is put in place, Bostrom thinks that dangerous materials that could go to the development of existential threats would have to be supplied by a “small number of closely monitored providers.”
So, we get ubiquitous surveillance plus tight regulation, which some such as privacy policy analyst Julian Sanchez have referred to as “turnkey totalitarianism.” The question before us then, is, would it work?
Regulating the Regulators
In a separate article titled “Fawning Over Fauci,” I suggested the media better investigate a situation that is not very different from the one I imagined in the opening vignette. However, the major difference is that there wasn’t some kid in a garage in this real-world scenario. There were government-sanctioned scientists in a research center — The Wuhan Institute of Virology — who used largesse dispensed by our own government.
Indeed, one of the best ways to provide oversight in various research endeavors is to control the funding sources for such research. I have suggested that it is plausible that the infectious diseases branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH/NIAID), run by none other than Anthony Fauci, was responsible for funding research into zoonotic viruses of the sort that includes Covid-19.
In other words, without Fauci and his agency’s regulatory failure, there might have been no pandemic.
Let’s assume that Anthony Fauci and the functionaries at the NIAID presided over the funding of dangerous research, which was to be tightly controlled and regulated (if not outright banned). Let’s stipulate that such research did lead to a pandemic that has already killed millions of people. And as the virus mutates, it evades not only vaccines, but all manner of bureaucratic mandates. It could soon be endemic.
In this scenario, though, all of the criteria for reasonable regulation ought to have been satisfied. Yet we still got mass death. In other words, there was neither a mad scientist nor a monstrous incel, at least not as far as we know. It could have been as simple as bureaucratic incompetence combined with negligence at one of the labs serving at the NIH’s behest.
For now, I’ll leave aside questions about whether or to what extent the Chinese government knew about the research and could have co-opted it for nefarious purposes. Despite the Communist Party’s sorry track record, the most likely explanation is that this was a terrible accident. We simply can’t say. Nor are we ever likely to find anything but lies coming out of Beijing (or Washington for that matter).
But one thing is clear: there is currently no way to regulate the regulators. Instead, we have no choice but to live with them. Otherwise, they are entirely unaccountable. They alone hold power to take such enormous risks, presumably in the name of science.
The Problem of Power
When it comes to the idea of government, most people suffer from both a great blind spot and a failure of imagination.
The blind spot is a refusal to believe the state is itself the greatest of all existential threats to humanity. Whether in Hollywood’s depiction of corporate baddies or general concerns about gigantism, most people can’t or won’t appreciate the fact that nation-states hold all the records for mass killing. Compare individuals and corporations to that record. It ain’t even close. Yet most people want desperately to believe the state’s job is to protect us. Unicorn governance. Again, the state is the greatest source of violence in human history.
The failure of imagination lies in a widespread inability to see how it might be possible for humanity to mitigate existential threats without the linear model of state control. Whether we’re talking about “reasonable regulation” or “turnkey totalitarianism,” the linear model originates in Hobbes’s Leviathan rationale, which holds most people in its thrall. Simply put, the Leviathan rationale prompts us to entrust a powerful monopoly to protect us and work in our interests.
But then, somehow, we have to oblige that powerful monopoly to stay in its place. The problem is, it rarely does. As Edmund Burke wrote:
In vain you tell me that [government] is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! The Thing itself is the abuse! Observe, my Lord, I pray you, that grand Error upon which all artificial legislative Power is founded. It was observed, that Men had ungovernable Passions, which made it necessary to guard against the Violence they might offer to each other. They appointed Governors over them for this Reason; but a worse and more perplexing Difficulty arises, how to be defended against the Governors?
Checks and balances last for a while. But as soon as they fail, the proxies of that powerful monopoly seize yet more power. Any remaining checks and balances are crushed under Leviathan’s weight, well, unless Leviathan can no longer swim in an ocean of red ink. By then, it might be too late.
The Nihilism of the Vulnerable World
Thinkers such as Nick Bostrom aren’t wrong about the world’s vulnerability to exponential technologies in the hands of bad actors. What they too often forget is that politics selects for arrogance and sociopathy. Politicians and technocrats are no angels, despite how badly we might wish them to be. Even if we find the occasional wise leader to hold the ring, the ring invariably gets passed along. There is always a sociopath waiting. And that’s why the upshot of Turnkey Totalitarianism is deeply problematic, even though there are evil geniuses among the citizenry. Acknowledging all this threatens to leave us in nihilism. After all, wasn’t it very likely a small group of government technocrats and regulators who unleashed the Covid-19 pandemic?
My friend and mentor, entrepreneur Chris Rufer reminds us that the best defense against violence isn’t a panopticon or a global superstate.
“The best defense against violence is to minimize the number of people in the world who are willing to use it,” Rufer said. And I think he’s right.
I suspect it can’t hurt to have more people of basic morality checking up on each other, too. I admit, though, that preemptive morality can only reduce the number of black balls in the existential threat bucket. But that’s something. So we must start to think of morality not as a set of abstract rules but rather as an active, continuous practice to be set alight in everyone.
And we must practice morality even as we admit to ourselves that the risks of our extinction will never be zero.
Max is also co-founder of the event experience Future Frontiers and founder of Social Evolution, an organization dedicated to liberating humanity and solving social problems through innovation.
Contrast Covid’s impact on four East Asian countries (Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and South Korea) with its impact on four US Northeastern states (New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Connecticut).
All eight jurisdictions host high-tech societies with market-orientated economies and democratic constitutions.
All boast ultra-modern hospitals, medical colleges and public health programs.
Two differences: a) compared to the US Northeast, the East Asian countries engage in more trade and travel with Covid’s epicentre, China; and, b) Covid toured East Asia before debuting in the US Northeast.
New York state’s population (19.5 million) is slightly smaller than Taiwan’s (23.8 million). Covid has killed 837 Taiwanese, and 54,895 New Yorkers.
Massachusetts’ population (6.9 million) is comparable to Singapore’s (5.9 million). Covid fatalities in Massachusetts – 18,272. Covid fatalities in Singapore – 55.
The combined population of our four Northeastern states (38.7 million) is well below South Korea’s (51.3 million). Covid’s death toll in our Northeastern states is 108,480. Only 2,303 South Koreans have died from Covid.
Our four East Asian countries (207 million) register a total of 19,308 Covid deaths. New Jersey (8.9 million) claims 26,919 Covid deaths.
Per capita, Covid has proven 341 times deadlier to New Jersians than Singaporeans!
Regarding Covid testing rates, Singapore is East Asia’s outlier. By conducting 17.8 million tests Singaporeans have achieved 3 tests per citizen. This still falls short of New York’s 3.3 tests per citizen and Massachusetts’ 3.8 tests per citizen. (You’ve read correctly. Certain people get tested again and again.)
Most East Asian countries, following Japan’s lead, test only patients exhibiting pneumonia-like symptoms. Japan tests 174,000 per 1 million inhabitants. Our four East Asian countries cumulatively have conducted 58 million tests. New York has conducted 66 million.
Massachusettsans test for Covid at 22 times Japan’s rate!
Medical tyranny boosters attribute East Asia’s “success” to harsh public health regimes; but Northeastern states imposed notorious lockdowns, often more Draconian than those deployed in East Asia.
Testing strategies are key. Testing only symptomatic patients is sounder than mass testing.
Asymptomatic Sars-CoV-2 carriers are extremely unlikely to be contagious.
Most people who contract Sars-CoV-2 become neither sick nor contagious.
PCR tests detect: a) miniscule infections that will not take hold; b) dead viruses from infections defeated by natural immune responses; and c) random genetic flotsam resembling Sars-CoV-2.
Mass testing yields positive results from persons who are neither sick nor contagious, and who are unlikely to become so.
By inflating case counts, mass testing makes Covid appear worse than it is.
Likewise, declaring all those who die after testing positive to be “Covid fatalities” – co-morbidities be damned – inflates death tallies; again, making Covid appear worse than it is.
Testing-based legerdemain doesn’t fully explain the whopping discrepancy between Covid’s impact in East Asia and the US Northeast.
This discrepancy also arises from the fact that the US Northeast was one of several areas following Milan’s lead i.e., during the pandemic’s early months health authorities allowed the contagion to rage unchecked through long-term care facilities.
Senior’s homes became Sars-CoV-2 incubators.
Milan, Montreal, the US Northeast et al became continental super-spreaders evidenced by supersized body counts.
Covid-19 is one matter; government response to Covid-19 is quite another.
Sources
Covid fatality and testing stats were extracted from Worldmeter’s Covid database on September 2, 2021.
Unfortunately there’s a problem with this narrative: it is itself misinformation. Bizarrely and ironically, universities are propagating an untrue conspiracy theory while simultaneously claiming to be defending the world from the very same.
The visualization above comes from “The Rise and Fall of Social Bot Research” (also available in talk form). It was quietly uploaded to a preprint server in March by Gallwitz & Kreil, two German investigators, and has received little attention since. Yet their work completely destroys the academic field of bot research to such an extreme extent that it’s possible there are no true scientific papers on the topic at all.
The authors identify a simple problem that crops up in every study they looked at. Unable to directly detect bots because they don’t work for Twitter, academics come up with proxy signals that are asserted to imply automation but which actually don’t. For example, Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project – responsible for the first paper in the diagram above – defined a bot as any account that tweets more than 50 times per day. That’s a lot of tweeting but easily achieved by heavy users, like the famous journalist Glenn Greenwald, the slightly less famous member of German Parliament Johannes Kahrs – who has in the past managed to rack up an astounding 300 tweets per day – or indeed Donald Trump, who exceeded this threshold on six different days during 2020. Bot papers typically don’t provide examples of the bot accounts they claimed to identify, but in this case four were presented. Of those, three were trivially identifiable as (legitimate) bots because they actually said they were bots in their account metadata, and one was an apparently human account claimed to be a bot with no evidence. On this basis the authors generated 27 news stories and 323 citations, although the paper was never peer reviewed.
In 2017 I investigated the Berkley/Swansea paper and found that it was doing something very similar, but using an even laxer definition. Any account that regularly tweeted more than five times after midnight from a smartphone was classed as a bot. Obviously, this is not a valid way to detect automation. Despite being built on nonsensical premises, invalid modelling, mis-characterisations of its own data and once again not being peer reviewed, the authors were able to successfully influence the British Parliament. Damian Collins, the Tory MP who chaired the DCMS Select Committee at the time, said: “This is the most significant evidence yet of interference by Russian-backed social media accounts aroundthe Brexit referendum. The content published and promoted by these accounts is clearly designed to increase tensions throughout the country and undermine our democratic process. I fear that this may well be just the tip of the iceberg.”
But since 2019 the vast majority of papers about social bots rely on a machine learning model called ‘Botometer’. The Botometer is available online and claims to measure the probability of any Twitter account being a bot. Created by a pair of academics in the USA, it has been cited nearly 700 times and generates a continual stream of news stories. The model is frequently described as a “state of the art bot detection method” with “95% accuracy”.
That claim is false. The Botometer’s false positive rate is so high it is practically a random number generator. A simple demonstration of the problem was the distribution of scores given to verified members of U.S. Congress:
In experiments run by Gallwitz & Kreil, nearly half of Congress were classified as more likely to be bots than human, along with 12% of Nobel Prize laureates, 17% of Reuters journalists, 21.9% of the staff members of UN Women and – inevitably – U.S. President Joe Biden.
But detecting the false positive problem did not require compiling lists of verified humans. One study that claimed to identify around 190,000 bots included the following accounts in its set:
Taken from a dataset shared by Dunn et al.
The developers of the Botometer know it doesn’t work. After the embarrassing U.S. Congress data was published, an appropriate response would have been retraction of their paper. But that would have implied that all the papers that relied upon it should also be retracted. Instead they hard-coded the model to know that Congress are human and then went on the attack, describing their critics as “academic trolls”:
Root cause analysis
This story is a specific instance of a general problem that crops up frequently in bad science. Academics decide a question is important and needs to be investigated, but they don’t have sufficiently good data to draw accurate conclusions. Because there are no incentives to recognize that and abandon the line of inquiry, they proceed regardless and make claims that end up being drastically wrong. Anyone from outside the field who points out what’s happening is simply ignored, or attacked as “not an expert” and thus inherently illegitimate.
Although no actual expertise is required to spot the problems in this case, I can nonetheless criticize their work with confidence because I actually am an expert in fighting bots. As a senior software engineer at Google I initiated and designed one of their most successful bot detection platforms. Today it checks over a million actions per second for malicious automation across the Google network. A version of it was eventually made available to all websites for free as part of the ReCAPTCHA system, providing an alternative to the distorted word puzzles you may remember from the earlier days of the internet. Those often frustrating puzzles were slowly replaced in recent years by simply clicking a box that says “I’m not a bot”. The latest versions go even further and can detect bots whilst remaining entirely invisible.
Exactly how this platform works is a Google trade secret, but when spammers discuss ideas for beating it they are well aware that it doesn’t use the sort of techniques academics do. Despite the frequent claim that Botometer is “state of the art”, in reality it is primitive. Genuinely state-of-the-art bot detectors use a correct definition of bot based on how actions are being performed. Spammers are forced to execute polymorphic encrypted programs that detect signs of automation at the protocol and API level. It’s a battle between programmers, and how it works wouldn’t be easily explainable to social scientists.
Spam fighters at Twitter have an equally low opinion of this research. They noted in 2020 that tools like Botometer use “an extremely limited approach” and “do not account for common Twitter use cases”. “Binary judgments of who’s a “bot or not” have real potential to poison our public discourse – particularly when they are pushed out through the media …. the narrative on what’s actually going on is increasingly behind the curve.”
Many fields cannot benefit from academic research because academics cannot obain sufficiently good data with which to draw conclusions. Unfortunately, they sometimes have difficulty accepting that. When I ended my 2017 investigation of the Berkeley/Swansea paper by observing that social scientists can’t usefully contribute to fighting bots, an academic posted a comment calling it “a Trumpian statement” and argued that tech firms should release everyone’s private account data to academics, due to their capacity for “more altruistic” insights. Yet their self-proclaimed insights are usually far from altruistic. The ugly truth is that social bot research is primarily a work of ideological propaganda. Many bot papers use the supposed prevalence of non-existent bots to argue for censorship and control of the internet. Too many people disagree with common academic beliefs. If only social media were edited by the most altruistic and insightful members of society, they reason, nobody would ever disagree with them again.
The battle lines over mandatory COVID-19 vaccines are now going full steam ahead in the U.S. as the Biden Administration is announcing today that all federal employees must now get a COVID-19 shot as a condition for employment, and that they are eliminating the testing opt-out.
The argument that only COVID-19 shots will end the endless “pandemic” and the lie that hospitals are over 90% full of unvaccinated people are being used as justification for mandatory mass vaccination.
It doesn’t take much research on one’s own to bypass the corporate media and find out that they are lying, and that there are numerous reports that the exact opposite situation is now happening in the U.S. and around the world, which is that the hospitals are full of people who have already been vaccinated with COVID-19 shots and that the ones who have survived are now filling our hospitals.
This is evident from the last release of data into the government Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database, which as of last Friday shows that following COVID-19 shots, there have been 13,911 deaths, 18,098 permanent disabilities, 76,160 ER visits, 56,912 hospitalizations, 2,933,377 injury symptoms, and 14,327 life threatening events.
And these are just the cases that have been reported and that the CDC has allowed to be released to the public. Many healthcare workers have stated that there is pressure from doctors and hospital administrations to NOT relate injuries to the COVID-19 shots and to not report them in VAERS, which one nurse stated takes over 30 minutes to do for a single case and is very time consuming.
We have previously exposed the government’s lies on who it is filling the hospitals today. See:
And just this past week, the Toronto Sun ran a story reporting that more than 100 Ontario youth were sent to the hospital for vaccine-related heart problems.
A report quietly released last week by Public Health Ontario (PHO) tallies the number of people in the province who have presented to hospital with heart inflammation following mRNA vaccination, and it skews heavily towards young people.
As of Aug. 7, there were 106 incidents of myocarditis/pericarditis in Ontarians under the age of 25. That’s slightly more than half of the total of all such incidents. (Full article.)
Here is a video report I put together with testimony from nurses, a doctor, and an occupational therapist explaining what they are currently seeing in the hospitals, so you can hear it yourself from the frontline workers.
MANY of us in the UK who have been writing about the Covid-19 vaccines (and have declined them) have found ourselves fighting what I call ‘data wars’.
Although it is necessary to engage in these wars, in this article I explain why we need an additional tactic to defeat those who are using highly selective scientific data to impose a political will and a ‘new normal’ of social control.
We need to start with the obvious, for which we do not need the nitty-gritty of data, such as this tweet from the editor of TCWDefending Freedom:
As a scientific technical writer, I am very aware that scientific data – and language, terminology, jargon and marketing copywriting – can be used to ‘prove’ almost anything. It is easy to blind people, including scientists, with science.
Much scientific data today is dubious. In our times of huge proliferation of science, the majority of published studies cannot be replicated independently by peers. In other words, published science is not necessarily true. The journal Nature calls this situation a ‘crisis’.
Furthermore, much data that is passed off as science cannot, by its very nature, be replicated and tested, such as so-called behavioural science and data modelling, that we might call crystal-ball science.
Equally concerning is that most scientific experiments fail, and details are hardly ever published, meaning that science does not properly learn from its failures. This is sometimes called ‘publication bias’. Science, of all academic disciplines, is vulnerable to the pressure of ‘publish or perish’. In other words, we must always be cautious of scientists armed with data.
Commerce (not least Big Pharma), government, and the colluding mainstream media can simply pick the scientific data they want to believe or they want the public to believe. At no time has this been more obvious than since early 2020, when large corporations were given political permission and public funding to do ‘warp speed’ science despite, as noted, the knowledge that there was already a crisis of scientific integrity.
Hence we suddenly see the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ditching its credibility by giving unprecedented licenced approval-to-market of a vaccine still undergoing clinical trials, trials which themselves have been short-cut (such as no blinded control group).
There is much commercial incentive and political pressure now to do novel science, such as novel testing methods and novel vaccines. And there is much disincentive to publish experiments and data on treating Covid-19 with existing treatments. Experts advocating treatments such as ivermectin and asthma inhalers are easily hidden from public view by the mainstream media and by the social media barons.
In the data wars, each side picks its experts. For instance, in the last week of August one could have picked a Japanese report claiming that the Delta variant will acquire complete resistance to the mRNA vaccines, or an Oxford University report telling you that the vaccines are effective against the Delta variant.
Powerful tyrants and sophists in the governments of Canada, USA, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Israel etc, have agreed with the most powerful media on which data are to prevail in the new and internationalist political movement sloganised ‘Build Back Better’.
Politicians know they need the approval of the social media barons, who are internationalist, secularist and woke, convinced that the meaning of life is climate change and utopian science, including, in the words of the UK government, ‘genetic engineering and brain-computer interfaces’.
Israel is one of several highly vaccinated nations – with Iceland, Gibraltar and Seychelles – that, despite initial claims of success, now rank amongst the most diseased nations. Common sense, therefore, informs us that the vaccines don’t work, and have not achieved what the vaccine designers, manufacturers and promoters said they would achieve a year ago (including herd immunity). We do not need sophisticated data to make the point. It is obvious that the situation today in Israel is unexpected, and contrary to what Big Pharma and the world’s political leaders told us to expect. We have the right to start asking whether mass vaccination has caused augmented virulence of the virus in their society.
In the meantime, Israeli scientists, politicians and journalists blindly offer data insisting the vaccines are working. We are told that people simply need to be ‘topped up’ with more of the synthetic spike-protein toxin. According to Israeli PM Naftali Bennett, the double-jabbed are now considered unvaccinated (and denied the Green Pass). Worse, Bennett blames ‘vaccine refusers’ for endangering the whole nation. And as the triple-jabbed Israelis find themselves hospitalised with Covid-19, the plan now is quadruple jabbing.
Denial of the obvious in politics and the media typically begins, ‘We always knew the vaccinations were not 100 per cent effective, but . . .’ Then public figures of science – such as the UK’s Jonathan Van-Tam – make spurious, implausible and wildly inconsistent claims such as that the vaccines have saved 100,000 lives, and 60,000 lives, and 10,000 lives. Even the implausible data are inconsistent!
In many advanced nations, we are now witnessing extreme political and intellectual face-saving. Expect more lies. This lack of truth, honour and honesty in public life is extremely dangerous, as I wrote here for TCW Defending Freedom. Science and medicine have lost their integrity. Health authorities have lost their integrity. Politics has lost its integrity. Trust between doctors and patients has become very fragile.
Over the next few months I expect the UK government and its henchmen at Sage to produce data to prove that we need triple jabs, then quadruple jabs . . .
I suggest that it is time for everyone, regardless of profession and expertise, to challenge all this scientific nonsense with truth and common sense.
In an August 31, 2021, substack article,1 Paul Thacker, an investigative reporter and former investigator with the U.S. Senate, reviews evidence he claims shows Dr. Anthony Fauci lied to Congress, an offense punishable by up to five years in prison, provided the false statements are materially relevant and knowingly false.
“A new investigative documentary by the U.K.’s Channel 42 detailed some of the strongest evidence to date that the COVID19 pandemic may have started from a lab leak in Wuhan, China,” Thacker writes.3
“At the very least, the documentary’s interviews with experts and review of documents made explicit how China has misled the world about its research with dangerous pathogens …
The documentary clarified one other point: Anthony Fauci lied before Congress and the American public when he claimed during a congressional hearing that he has not funded gain-of-function research conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology …
President Biden has campaigned on honesty and decency. The question now for President Biden is, ‘What will you do with Fauci now that he has broken the law and violated the public trust by lying before Congress?’”
Fauci Redefines Scientific Terms on the Fly
In what appears to be an attempt to extricate himself from blame for the COVID pandemic, Fauci — director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), an arm of the National Institutes for Health (NIH), since 1986 — denied ever having funded gain-of-function research at the WIV or elsewhere when questioned by members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in May 2021.4
According to Thacker, the evidence clearly refutes this. One “smoking gun” is a research article written by WIV scientists titled “Discovery of a Rich Gene Pool of Bat SARS-Related Coronaviruses Provides New Insights Into the Origin of SARS Coronavirus.”5 This research was funded by the NIH and meets the Department of Health and Human Services’ definition of gain-of-function research.6,7
The Channel 4 documentary addressed this paper. When asked whether the NIH ever funded gain-of-function research at the WIV, David Relman, a research physician at Stanford University, replies, “Yes. Indirectly, but yes. How do we know? The paper says, right on the front page, ‘Supported by NIAID, NIH.’” The clip featuring Relman is included below.
As previously reported by the National Review,8 we know the WIV received NIAID/NIH funding to create novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses capable of infecting both human cells and lab animals. “Chimeric viruses” refers to artificial man-made viruses, hybrid organisms created through the joining of two or more different organisms.
This is precisely what gain-of-function research is all about. According to a 2016 report9 from the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, “The term ‘gain-of-function’ is generally used to refer to changes resulting in the acquisition of new, or an enhancement of existing, biological phenotypes.”
Fauci now wants to adopt a far narrower definition of gain-of-function research that takes into account the supposed intent behind the research, but that really doesn’t make sense. Just because you don’t set out with intent to harm doesn’t mean your creation can’t cause harm or might inadvertently cause harm.
US Funding of Gain-of-Function Research Was Well-Established
According to Thacker, “Fauci certainly knew that the WIV he was helping to fund conducted gain-of-function studies, because it has been common knowledge.”10 For example, a year before Fauci was queried by Congress, Newsweek reported that:11
“In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million …
The NIH research consisted of two parts. The first part12 began in 2014 and involved surveillance of bat coronaviruses … The program funded Shi Zheng-Li, a virologist at the Wuhan lab … to investigate and catalogue bat coronaviruses in the wild. This part of the project was completed in 2019.
A second phase13 of the project, beginning that year, included … gain-of-function research for the purpose of understanding how bat coronaviruses could mutate to attack humans. The project was run by EcoHealth Alliance … under the direction of President Peter Daszak … NIH canceled the project … April 24 [2020] …
Many scientists have criticized gain of function research, which involves manipulating viruses in the lab to explore their potential for infecting humans, because it creates a risk of starting a pandemic from accidental release.”
Around that same time, former Acting Director of the CIA Michael Morell told Politico14 that “if the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab, the U.S. would shoulder some of the blame since it funded research at that lab through government grants from 2014 to 2019.”
Mid-January 2021, the U.S. State Department published a fact sheet accusing the Chinese government of being obsessively secretive about gain-of-function research at the WIV, and that it was collaborating with the Chinese military on secret projects.
The fact sheet has since been removed from the State Department’s website, but was reported by a number of outlets at the time. Among them, Life Site News, which wrote:15
“In a ‘Fact Sheet’ posted online … the Department of State (DOS) presented three distinct elements about the origin of the virus, which ‘deserve greater scrutiny’ … The first of the three issues needing further investigation, was the outbreak of illness inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The DOS revealed it had ‘reason to believe’ that ‘several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses’ …
Additionally, the DOS noted that researchers in the WIV had been performing experiments on ‘RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar)’ since at least ‘2016.’
The laboratory also ‘has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses.’ Such research, gain-of-function research, is a kind which ‘improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.’”
Additional Reports Citing Gain-of-Function Research
March 6, 2021, the editorial board of The Washington Post published an article16 calling for an independent investigation into the origin of SARS-CoV-2. In that article, the board pointed out that:
“… a senior researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli, was working on ‘gain-of-function’ experiments, which involve modifying viral genomes to give them new properties, including the ability to infect lung cells of laboratory mice that had been genetically modified to respond as human respiratory cells would.”
The board also noted that Shi was “working with bat coronaviruses that were genetically very similar to the one that caused the pandemic.” A few months later, in a June 22, 2021, essay,17 professor Jeffrey Sachs, head of The Lancet’s commission tasked with investigating COVID’s origin, also described how the NIAID has funded gain-of-function research at the WIV:
“It is in fact common knowledge in the U.S. scientific community that NIH has indeed supported genetic recombinant research on SARS-like viruses that many scientists describe as GOFROC [gain-of-function research of concern].
The peer-reviewed scientific literature reports the results of such NIH-supported recombinant genetic research on SARS-like viruses. More specifically, it is clear that the NIH co-funded research at the WIV that deserves scrutiny under the hypothesis of a laboratory-related release of the virus.”
‘Fauci’s COVID-19 Treachery’
Someone who has taken a particular interest in Fauci’s potential role in this pandemic is Dr. Peter Breggin, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and former consultant for the National Institute of Mental Health. In October 2020, he published the report18 “Dr. Fauci’s COVID-19 Treachery,” detailing Fauci’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its military.
Breggin is convinced Fauci “has been the major force” behind research activities that enabled the CCP to manufacture lethal SARS coronaviruses, which in turn led to the release — whether accidental or not — of SARS-CoV-2 from the WIV.
He claims Fauci has helped the CCP obtain “valuable U.S. patents,” and that he, in collaboration with the CCP and the WHO, initially suppressed the truth about the origins and dangers of the pandemic, thereby enabling the spread of the virus from China to the rest of the world.
Fauci has, and continues to, shield the CCP and himself, Breggin says, by “denying the origin of SARS-CoV-2” and “delaying and thwarting worldwide attempts to deal rationally with the pandemic.”
In the executive summary of the report, Breggin documents 15 questionable activities that Fauci has been engaged in, starting with the fact that he funded dangerous gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, both by individual Chinese researchers and the WIV in collaboration with American researchers. This research, Breggin says, allowed the CCP and its military to create their own bioweapons, including SARS-CoV-2.
Will Fauci Be Held Accountable?
According to Thacker, “it’s obvious” Fauci “broke the law and misled Congress.” He adds:19
“This is not my personal opinion; I was required to know and enforce the relevant provisions of the law during the three years I ran investigations in the Senate. On two occasions I had to consult with Senate Legal Counsel and then warn people about lying to Congress …
Fauci lied while testifying before Congress. Fauci lied to the American people. Several lines of evidence make this clear. But catching Fauci lying and breaking the law does little good, because the Department of Justice prosecutes people for lying to Congress, and the Department of Justice is run … by the Biden administration. So what is President Biden going to do about this?”
During an appearance on the Hannity Show, July 20, 2021, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul — who has grilled Fauci about his research funding in two separate hearings this year — announced he would indeed ask the DOJ for a criminal referral.20
Paul specifically asked the DOJ to investigate whether Fauci violated 18 U.S. Code § 100121 — which makes it a federal crime to make “any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation” as part of “any investigation or review” conducted by Congress — or any other statute. Time will tell if it amounts to anything.
Gain-of-Function Research Is the Real Threat
Regardless of what happens to Fauci, at the end of the day, the key issue that needs to be addressed is whether we should allow research that involves making pathogens more dangerous to humans at all, regardless of what the intent behind it might be, or the specific technology used.
Lab leaks have occurred on multiple occasions, so it’s really only a matter of time before something far more devastating than SARS-CoV-2 gets out. World leaders need to realize that funding gain-of-function research is the real threat here, and take action accordingly to forestall another pandemic. As long as researchers are allowed to mutate and create synthetic pathogens, they’re creating the very risk they claim they’re trying to prevent.
When Facebook acquired WhatsApp, it promised to respect the privacy of its users. That hasn’t been the case, and the firm now employs thousands of staff to read supposedly-encrypted chats.
Social media behemoth Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg promising to keep the stripped-down, ad-free messaging app “exactly the same.” End-to-end encryption was introduced in 2016, with the app itself offering on-screen assurances to users that “No one outside of this chat” can read their communications, and Zuckerberg himself telling the US Senate in 2018 that “We don’t see any of the content in WhatsApp.”
Allegedly, none of that is true. More than a thousand content moderators are employed at shared Facebook/WhatsApp offices in Austin, Texas, Dublin, Ireland, and Singapore to sift through messages reported by users and flagged by artificial intelligence.
Based on internal documents, interviews with moderators, and a whistleblower complaint, ProPublica explained how the system works in a lengthy investigation published on Wednesday.
When a user presses ‘report’ on a message, the message itself plus the preceding four messages in the chat are unscrambled and sent to one of these moderators for review. Moderators also examine messages picked out by artificial intelligence, based on unencrypted data collected by WhatsApp. The data collected by the app is extensive, and includes:
“The names and profile images of a user’s WhatsApp groups as well as their phone number, profile photo, status message, phone battery level, language and time zone, unique mobile phone ID and IP address, wireless signal strength and phone operating system, as a list of their electronic devices, any related Facebook and Instagram accounts, the last time they used the app and any previous history of violations.”
These moderators are not employees of WhatsApp or Facebook. Instead they are contractors working for $16.50 per hour, hired by consulting firm Accenture. These workers are bound to silence by nondisclosure agreements, and their hiring went unannounced by Facebook.
Likewise, the actions of these moderators go unreported. Facebook releases quarterly ‘transparency reports’ for its own platform and subsidiary Instagram, detailing how many accounts were banned or otherwise disciplined and for what, but does not do this for WhatsApp.
Many of the messages reviewed by moderators are flagged in error. WhatsApp has two billion users who speak hundreds of languages, and staff sometimes have to rely on Facebook’s translation tool to analyze flagged messages, which one employee said is “horrible” at decoding local slang and political content.
Aside from false reports submitted as pranks, moderators have to analyze perfectly innocent content highlighted by AI. Companies using the app to sell straight-edge razors have been flagged as selling weapons. Parents photographing their bathing children have been flagged for child porn, and lingerie companies have been flagged as forbidden “sexually oriented business[es].”
“A lot of the time, the artificial intelligence is not that intelligent,” one moderator told ProPublica.
WhatsApp acknowledged that it analyzes messages to weed out “the worst” abusers, but doesn’t call this “content moderation.”
“We actually don’t typically use the term for WhatsApp,” Director of Communications Carl Woog told ProPublica. “The decisions we make around how we build our app are focused around the privacy of our users, maintaining a high degree of reliability and preventing abuse.”
Facebook has lied about its commitment to user privacy before. Two years after Zuckerberg assured users that his company would keep WhatsApp ad-free and let the company “operate completely autonomously,” he revealed plans to link WhatsApp accounts to Facebook for the purposes of ad targeting. This move earned Facebook a $122 million fine from EU antitrust regulators, who said the Facebook CEO had “intentionally or negligently” deceived them.
Despite Zuckerberg’s assurances of privacy, WhatsApp shares more user metadata (data that can identify a user without the content of their messages) with law enforcement than rival messaging services from Apple and Signal. This metadata, which can reveal phone numbers, location, timestamps, and more, is valuable to law enforcement and intelligence agencies, with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s 2013 leaks revealing a large-scale operation by the agency to capture the metadata of millions of Americans’ communications.
“Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life,” former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker once said. “If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.”
Across all of its platforms, Facebook complies with 95% of requests for metadata. While it is unknown what law enforcement has been able to glean from WhatsApp metadata, the US Department of Justice has requested this metadata more than a dozen times since 2017 and likely far more frequently, given many of these requests are not made public. WhatsApp metadata has been used to jail Natalie Edwards, a former Treasury Department official who leaked confidential banking reports about suspicious transactions to BuzzFeed News.
Inside WhatsApp, the company stresses the importance of promoting itself as a privacy-focused operation. A marketing document obtained by ProPublica states that WhatsApp should portray itself as “courageous,” taking a “strong, public stance that is not financially motivated on things we care about,” such as defending encryption and user privacy.
However, another line in the same document states that “future business objectives” mean that “while privacy will remain important, we must accommodate for future innovations.”
Who Were the Israelis Living Next to Mohammed Atta?
What was in the Van on the New Jersey Shore?
How did Two Hijackers Land on Watch List Weeks Before 9/11?
Who Shut Down Fox News’ Carl Cameron?
On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a BOLO – “be on lookout” – was issued with regard to three suspicious men who that morning were seen leaving the New Jersey waterfront minutes after the first plane hit World Trade Center 1. Law enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area were warned in the radio dispatch to watch for a “vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack”:
White, 2000 Chevrolet van… with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center… Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals.
At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the FBI BOLO, officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the police report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli approached the stopped van, demanding that the driver exit the vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan Kurzberg, refused and “was asked several more times [but] appeared to be fumbling with a black leather fanny pouch type of bag”. With guns drawn, the police then “physically removed” Kurzberg, while four other men – two more men had apparently joined the group since the morning – were also removed from the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their Miranda rights. They had not been told the reasons for their arrest. Yet, according to DeCarlo’s report, “this officer was told without question by the driver [Sivan Kurzberg], ‘We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.’” Another of the five Israelis, again without prompting, told Officer DeCarlo – falsely – that “we were on the West Side Highway in New York City during the incident”.
From inside the vehicle the officers, who were quickly joined by agents from the FBI, retrieved multiple passports and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a sock. According to New Jersey’s Bergen Record, which on September 12 reported the arrest of the five Israelis, an investigator high up in the Bergen County law enforcement hierarchy stated that officers had also discovered in the vehicle “maps of the city … with certain places highlighted. It looked like they’re hooked in with this”, the source told the Record, referring to the 9/11 attacks. “It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park.”
The five men were indeed Israeli citizens. They claimed to be in the country working as movers for Urban Moving Systems Inc., which maintained a warehouse and office in Weehawken, New Jersey. They were held for 71 days in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York, during which time they were repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA counterterrorism teams, who referred to the men as the “high-fivers” for their celebratory behavior on the New Jersey waterfront. Some were placed in solitary confinement for at least forty days; some were given as many as seven liedetector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to take a lie-detector test for ten weeks. Then he failed it.
Meanwhile, two days after the men were picked up, the owner of Urban Moving Systems, Dominik Suter, a 31- year-old Israeli national, abandoned his business and fled the United States for Israel. Suter’s departure was abrupt, leaving behind coffee cups, sandwiches, cell phones and computers strewn on office tables and thousands of dollars of goods in storage. Suter was later placed on the same FBI suspect list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijackers and suspected al-Qaeda sympathizers, suggesting that U.S. authorities felt Suter may have known something about the attacks. The suspicion, as the investigation unfolded, was that the men working for Urban Moving Systems were spies. Who exactly was handling them, and who or what they were targeting, was as yet uncertain.
It was New York’s venerable Jewish weekly The Forward that broke this story in the spring of 2002, after months of footwork. The Forward reported that the FBI had finally concluded that at least two of the men were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the five Israelis, was a front operation. Two former CIA officers confirmed this to me, noting that movers’ vans are a common intelligence cover. The Forward also noted that the Israeli government itself admitted that the men were spies. A “former high-ranking American intelligence official”, who said he was “regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials”, told reporter Marc Perelman that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem at the end of 2001, the Israeli government “acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington”. Today, Perelman stands by his reporting. I asked him if his sources in the Mossad denied the story. “Nobody stopped talking to me”, he said. In June 2002, ABC News’ 20/20 followed up with its own investigation into the matter, coming to the same conclusion as The Forward. Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the CIA, told 20/20 that some of the names of the five men appeared as hits in searches of an FBI national intelligence database. Cannistraro told me that the question that most troubled FBI agents in the weeks and months after 9/11 was whether the Israelis had arrived at the site of their “celebration” with foreknowledge of the attack to come. From the beginning, “the FBI investigation operated on the premise that the Israelis had foreknowledge”, according to Cannistraro. A second former CIA counterterrorism officer who closely followed the case, but who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that investigators were pursuing two theories. “One story was that [the Israelis] appeared at Liberty State Park very quickly after the first plane hit. The other was that they were at the park location already”. Either way, investigators wanted to know exactly what the men were expecting when they got there.
Before such issues had been fully explored, however, the investigation was shut down. Following what ABC News reported were “high-level negotiations between Israeli and U.S. government officials”, a settlement was reached in the case of the five Urban Moving Systems suspects. Intense political pressure apparently had been brought to bear. The reputable Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported that by the last week of October 2001,some six weeks after the men had been detained, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two unidentified “prominent New York congressmen” were lobbying heavily for their release. According to a source at ABC News close to the 20/20 report, high-profile criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz also stepped in as a negotiator on behalf of the men to smooth out differences with the U.S. government. (Dershowitz declined to comment for this article.) And so, at the end of November 2001, for reasons that only noted they had been working in the country illegally as movers, in violation of their visas, the men were flown home to Israel.
Today, the crucial questions raised by this matter remain unanswered. There is sufficient reason – from news reports, statements by former intelligence officials, an array of circumstantial evidence, and the reported acknowledgment by the Israeli government – to believe that in the months before 9/11, Israel was running an active spy network inside the United States, with Muslim extremists as the target. Given Israel’s concerns about Islamic terrorism as well as its long history of spying on U.S. soil, this does not come entirely as a shock. What’s incendiary is the idea – supported, though not proven, by several pieces of evidence – that the Israelis did learn something about 9/11 in advance but failed to share all of what they knew with American officials. The questions are disturbing enough to warrant a Congressional investigation.
Yet none of this information found its way into Congress’s joint committee report on the attacks, and it was not even tangentially referenced in the nearly 600 pages of the 9/11 Commission’s final report. Nor would a single major media outlet track the revelations of The Forward and ABC News to investigate further. “There weren’t even stories saying it was bullshit”, says The Forward’s Perelman. “Honestly, I was surprised”. Instead, the story disappeared into the welter of anti-Israel 9/11 conspiracy theories.
It’s no small boon to the U.S. government that the story of 9/11-related Israeli espionage has been thus relegated: the story doesn’t fit in the clean lines of the official narrative of the attacks. It brings up concerns not only about Israel’s obligation not to spy inside the borders of the United States, its major benefactor, but about its possible failure to have provided the U.S. adequate warning of an impending devastating attack on American soil.
Furthermore, the available evidence undermines the carefully cultivated image of sanctity that defines the U.S.- Israel relationship. These are all factors that help explain the story’s disappearance – and they are compelling reasons to revisit it now.
Torpedoing the FBI Probe
All five future hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which rammed the Pentagon, maintained addresses or were active within a six-mile radius of towns associated with the Israelis employed at Urban Moving Systems. Hudson and Bergen counties, the areas where the Israelis were allegedly conducting surveillance, were a central staging ground for the hijackers of Flight 77 and their fellow al-Qaeda operatives. Mohammed Atta maintained a mail-drop address and visited friends in northern New Jersey; his contacts there included Hani Hanjour, the suicide pilot for Flight 77, and Majed Moqed, one of the strongmen who backed Hanjour in the seizing of the plane. Could the Israelis, with or without knowledge of the terrorists’ plans, have been tracking the men who were soon to hijack Flight 77?
In public statements, both the Israeli government and the FBI have denied that the Urban Moving Systems men were involved in an intelligence operation in the United States. “No evidence recovered suggested any of these Israelis had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attack, and these Israelis are not suspected of working for Mossad”, FBI spokesman Jim Margolin told me. (The Israeli embassy did not respond to questions for this article.)
According to the source at ABC News, FBI investigators chafed at the denials from their higher-ups. “There is a lot of frustration inside the bureau about this case”, the source told me. “They feel the higher echelons torpedoed the investigation into the Israeli New Jersey cell. Leads were not fully investigated.” Among those lost leads was the figure of Dominik Suter, whom the U.S. authorities apparently never attempted to contact.
Intelligence expert and author James Bamford told me there was similar frustration within the CIA: “People I’ve talked to at the CIA were outraged at what was going on. They thought it was outrageous that there hadn’t been a real investigation, that the facts were hanging out there without any conclusion.”
However, what was “absolutely certain”, according to Vincent Cannistraro, was that the five Israelis formed part of a surveillance network in the New York – New Jersey area. The network’s purpose was to track radical Islamic extremists and/or supporters of militant Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The former CIA counterterrorism officer who spoke anonymously told me that FBI investigators determined that the suspect Israelis were serving as Arabic speaking linguists “running technical operations” in northern New Jersey’s extensive Muslim communities.
The former CIA officer said the operations included taps on telephones, placement of microphones in rooms and mobile surveillance. The source at ABC News agreed: “Our conclusion was that they were Arab linguists involved in monitoring operations, i.e., electronic surveillance. People at FBI concur with this”. The ABC News source added, “What we heard was that the Israelis may have picked up chatter that something was going to happen on the morning of 9/11”. The former CIA counterterrorism officer told me: “There was no question but that [the order to close down the investigation] came from the White House. It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis would not be implicated in any way in 9/11. Bear in mind that this was a political issue, not a law enforcement or intelligence issue. If somebody says we don’t want the Israelis implicated in this – we know that they’ve been spying the hell out of us, we know that they possibly had information in advance of the attacks, but this would be a political nightmare to deal with.”
Israel’s “Art Student Spies”
There is a second piece of evidence that suggests Israeli operatives were spying on al-Qaeda in the United States. It is writ in the peculiar tale of the Israeli “art students”, detailed by this reporter for Salon.com in 2002, following the leaking of an internal memo circulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Office of Security Programs. The June 2001 memo, issued three months before the 9/11 attacks, reported that more than 120 young Israeli citizens, posing as art students and peddling cheap paintings, had been repeatedly – and seemingly inexplicably – attempting to penetrate DEA offices and other law enforcement and Defense Department offices across the country. The DEA report stated that the Israelis may have been engaged in “an organized intelligence gathering activity”, but to what end, U.S. investigators, in June 2001, could not determine. The memo briefly floated the possibility that the Israelis were engaged in trafficking the drug ecstasy. According to the memo, “the most activity [was] reported in the state of Florida” during the first half of 2001, where the town of Hollywood appeared to be “a central point for these individuals with several having addresses in this area”.
In retrospect, the fact that a large number of “art students” operated out of Hollywood is intriguing, to say the least. During 2001, the city, just north of Miami, was a hotbed of al-Qaeda activity and served as one of the chief staging grounds for the hijacking of the World Trade Center planes and the Pennsylvania plane; it was home to fifteen of the nineteen future hijackers, nine in Hollywood and six in the surrounding area. Among the 120 suspected Israeli spies posing as art students, more than thirty lived in the Hollywood area, ten in Hollywood proper. As noted in the DEA report, many of these young men and women had training as intelligence and electronic intercept officers in the Israeli military – training and experience far beyond the compulsory service mandated by Israeli law. Their “traveling in the U.S. selling art seem[ed] not to fit their background”, according to the DEA report.
One “art student” was a former Israeli military intelligence officer named Hanan Serfaty, who rented two Hollywood apartments close to the mail drop and apartment of Mohammed Atta and four other hijackers. Serfaty was moving large amounts of cash: he carried bank slips showing more than $100,000 deposited from December 2000 through the first quarter of 2001; other bank slips showed withdrawals for about $80,000 during the same period. Serfaty’s apartments, serving as crash pads for at least two other “art students”, were located at 4220 Sheridan Street and 701 South 21st Avenue. Lead hijacker Mohammed Atta’s mail drop was at 3389 Sheridan Street – approximately 2,700 feet from Serfaty’s Sheridan Street apartment. Both Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, the suicide pilot on United Airlines Flight 175, which smashed into World Trade Center 2, lived in a rented apartment at 1818 Jackson Street, some 1,800 feet from Serfaty’s South 21st Avenue apartment.
In fact, an improbable series of coincidences emerges from a close reading of the 2001 DEA memo, the 9/11 Commission’s staff statements and final report, FBI and Justice Department watch lists, hijacker timelines compiled by major media and statements by local, state and federal law enforcement personnel. In at least six urban centers, suspected Israeli spies and 9/11 hijackers and/or al-Qaeda–connected suspects lived and operated near one another, in some cases less than half a mile apart, for various periods during 2000–01 in the run-up to the attacks. In addition to northern New Jersey and Hollywood, Florida, these centers included Arlington and Fredericksburg, Virginia; Atlanta; Oklahoma City; Los Angeles; and San Diego.
Israeli “art students” also lived close to terror suspects in and around Dallas, Texas. A 25-year-old “art student” named Michael Calmanovic, arrested and questioned by Texas-based DEA officers in April 2001, maintained a mail drop at 3575 North Beltline Road, less than a thousand feet from the 4045 North Beltline Road apartment of Ahmed Khalefa, an FBI terror suspect. Dallas and its environs, especially the town of Richardson, Texas, throbbed with “art student” activity. Richardson is notable as the home of the Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic charity designated as a terrorist funder by the European Union and U.S. government in December 2001. Sources in 2002 told The Forward, in a report unrelated to the question of the “art students”, that “Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, last December [2001]”. It’s plausible that the intelligence prompting the shutdown of the Holy Land Foundation came from “art student” spies in the Richardson area.
Others among the “art students” had specific backgrounds in electronic surveillance or military intelligence, or were associated with Israeli wiretapping and surveillance firms, which prompted further concerns among U.S. investigators. DEA agents described Michael Calmanovic, for example, as “a recently discharged electronic intercept operator for the Israeli military”. Lior Baram, questioned near Hollywood, Fla., in January 2001, said he had served two years in Israeli intelligence “working with classified information”. Hanan Serfaty, who maintained the Hollywood apartments near Atta and his cohorts, served in the Israeli military between the ages of 18 and 21. Serfaty refused to disclose his activities between the ages of 21 and 24, including his activities since arriving in the U.S.A. in 2000. The French daily Le Monde meanwhile reported that six “art students” were apparently using cell phones that had been purchased by a former Israeli vice consul in the U.S.A.
Suspected Israeli spy Tomer Ben Dor, questioned at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport in May 2001, worked for the Israeli wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping company NICE Systems Ltd. (NICE Systems’ American subsidiary, NICE Systems Inc., is located in Rutherford, New Jersey, not far from the East Rutherford site where the five Israeli “movers” were arrested on the afternoon of September 11.) Ben Dor carried in his luggage a print-out of a computer file that referred to “DEA Groups”. How he acquired information about so-called “DEA Groups” – via, for example, his own employment with an Israeli wiretapping company – was never determined, according to DEA documents.
“Art student” Michal Gal, arrested by DEA investigators in Irving, Texas, in the spring of 2001, was released on a $10,000 cash bond posted by Ophir Baer, an employee of the Israeli telecommunications software company Amdocs Inc., which provides phone-billing technology to clients that include some of the largest phone companies in the United States as well as U.S. government agencies. Amdocs, whose executive board has been heavily stocked with retired and current members of the Israeli government and military, has been investigated at least twice in the last decade by U.S. authorities on charges of espionage-related leaks of data that the company assured was secure. (The company strenuously denies any wrong-doing.)
According to the former CIA counterterrorism officer with knowledge of investigations into 9/11-related Israeli espionage, when law enforcement officials examined the “art students” phenomenon, they came to the tentative conclusion that “the Israelis likely had a huge spy operation in the U.S. and that they had succeeded in identifying a number of the hijackers”. The German daily Die Zeit reached the same conclusion in 2002, reporting that “Mossad agents in the U.S. were in all probability surveilling at least four of the 19 hijackers”.
The Fox News Channel also reported that U.S. investigators suspected that Israelis were spying on Muslim militants in the United States. “There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it”, Fox correspondent Carl Cameron reported in a December 2001 series that was the first major exposé of allegations of 9/11-related Israeli espionage. “A highly placed investigator said there are ‘tie-ins’. But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, ‘evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.’”
One element of the allegations has never been clearly understood: if the “art students” were indeed spies targeting Muslim extremists that included al-Qaeda, why would they also be surveilling DEA agents in such a compromising manner? Why, in other words, would foreign spies bumble into federal offices by the scores and risk exposing their operation? An explanation is that a number of the art students were, in fact, young Israelis engaged in a mere art scam and unknowingly provided cover for real spies. Investigative journalist John Sugg, who as senior editor for the Creative Loafing newspaper chain reported on the “art students” in 2002, told me that investigators he spoke to within FBI felt the “art student” ring functioned as a wide-ranging cover that was counterintuitive in its obviousness. DEA investigators, for example, uncovered evidence connecting the Israeli “art students” to known ecstasy trafficking operations in New York and Florida. This was, according to Sugg, planted information. “The explanation was that when our FBI guys started getting interested in these folks [the art students] – when they got too close to what the real purpose was – the Israelis threw in an ecstasy angle”, Sugg told me. “The argument being that if our guys thought the Israelis were involved in a smuggling ring, then they wouldn’t see the real purpose of the operation”. Sugg, who is writing a book that explores the tale of the “art students”, told me that several sources within the FBI, and at least one source formerly with Israeli intelligence, suggested that “the bumbling aspect of the art student thing was intentional.”
When I reported on the matter for Salon.com in 2002, a veteran U.S. intelligence operative with experience subcontracting both for the CIA and the NSA suggested a similar possibility. “It was a noisy operation”, the veteran intelligence operative said. The operative referred me to the film Victor, Victoria. “It was about a woman playing a man playing a woman. Perhaps you should think about this from that aspect and ask yourself if you wanted to have something that was in your face, that didn’t make sense, that couldn’t possibly be them”. The intelligence operative added, “Think of it this way: how could the experts think this could actually be something of any value? Wouldn’t they dismiss what they were seeing?”
U.S. and Israeli officials, dismissing charges of espionage as an “urban myth”, have publicly claimed that the Israeli “art students” were guilty only of working on U.S. soil without proper credentials. The stern denials issued by the Justice Department were widely publicized in the Washington Post and elsewhere, and the endnote from officialdom and in establishment media by the spring of 2002 was that the “art students” had been rounded up and deported simply because of harmless visa violations. The FBI, for its part, refused to confirm or deny the “art students” espionage story. “Regarding FBI investigations into Israeli art students”, spokesman Jim Margolin told me, “the FBI cannot comment on any of those investigations.” As with the New Jersey Israelis, the investigation into the Israeli “art students” appears to have been halted by orders from on high. The veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative told me in 2002 that there was “a great press to discredit the story, discredit the connections, prevent [investigators] from going any further. People were told to stand down. You name the agency, they were told to stand down”. The operative added, “People who were perceived to be gumshoes on [this matter] suddenly found themselves hammered from all different directions. The interest from the middle bureaucracy was not that there had been a security breach but that someone had bothered to investigate the breach. That was where the terror was”.
Choking Off the Press Coverage
There was similar pressure brought against the media venues that ventured to report out the allegations of 9/11- related Israeli espionage. A former ABC News employee high up in the network newsroom told me that when ABC News ran its June 2002 exposé on the celebratory New Jersey Israelis, “Enormous pressure was brought to bear by pro-Israeli organizations” – and this pressure began months before the piece was even close to airing. The source said that ABC News colleagues wondered, “how they [the pro-Israel organizations] found out we were doing the story. Pro-Israeli people were calling the president of ABC News. Barbara Walters was getting bombarded by calls. The story was a hard sell but ABC News came through – the management insulated [reporters] from the pressure”.
The experience of Carl Cameron, chief Washington correspondent at Fox News Channel and the first mainstream U.S. reporter to present the allegations of Israeli surveillance of the 9/11 hijackers, was perhaps more typical, both in its particulars and aftermath. The attack against Cameron and Fox News was spearheaded by a pro-Israel lobby group called the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which operated in tandem with the two most highly visible powerhouse Israel lobbyists, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (itself currently embroiled in a spy scandal connected to the Defense Department and Israeli Embassy). “CAMERA peppered the shit out of us”, Carl Cameron told me in 2002, referring to an e-mail bombardment that eventually crashed the Fox News.com servers. Cameron himself received 700 pages of almost identical e-mail messages from hundreds of citizens (though he suspected these were spam identities). CAMERA spokesman Alex Safian later told me that Cameron’s upbringing in Iran, where his father traveled as an archeologist, had rendered the reporter “very sympathetic to the Arab side”. Safian added, “I think Cameron, personally, has a thing about Israel” – coded language implying that Cameron was an anti-Semite. Cameron was outraged at the accusation.
According to a source at Fox News Channel, the president of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, telephoned executives at Fox News’ parent, News Corp., to demand a sit-down in the wake of the Cameron reportage. The source said that Foxman told the News Corp. executives, “Look, you guys have generally been pretty fair to Israel. What are you doing putting this stuff out there? You’re killing us”. The Fox News source continued, “As good old boys will do over coffee in Manhattan, it was like, well, what can we do about this? Finally, Fox News said, ‘Stop the e-mailing. Stop slamming us. Stop being in our face, and we’ll stop being in your face – by way of taking our story down off the web. We will not retract it; we will not disavow it; we stand by it. But we will at least take it off the web.’” Following this meeting, within four days of the posting of Cameron’s series on Fox News.com, the transcripts disappeared, replaced by the message, “This story no longer exists”.
What Did Mossad Know and Tell the U.S.?
Whether or not Israeli spies had detailed foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, the Israeli authorities knew enough to warn the U.S. government in the summer of 2001 that an attack was on the horizon. The British Sunday Telegraph reported on September 16, 2001, that two senior agents with the Mossad were dispatched to Washington in August 2001 “to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many as 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation”. The Telegraph quoted a “senior Israeli security official” as saying the Mossad experts had “no specific information about what was being planned”. Still, the official told the Telegraph, the Mossad contacts had “linked the plot to Osama bin Laden”. Likewise, Die Zeit correspondent Oliver Schröm reported that on August 23, 2001, the Mossad “handed its American counterpart a list of names of terrorists who were staying in the U.S. and were presumably planning to launch an attack in the foreseeable future”. Fox News’ Carl Cameron, in May 2002, also reported warnings by Israel: “Based on its own intelligence, the Israeli government provided ‘general’ information to the United States in the second week of August that an al-Qaeda attack was imminent”. The U.S. government later claimed these warnings were not specific enough to allow any mitigating action to be taken. Mossad expert Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon’s Spies, says German intelligence sources told him that as late as August 2001 Israeli spies in the United States had made surveillance contacts with “known supporters of bin Laden in the U.S.A. It was those surveillance contacts that later raised the question: how much prior knowledge did Mossad have and at what stage?”
According to Die Zeit, the Mossad did provide the U.S. government with the names of suspected terrorists Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who would eventually hijack the Pentagon plane. It is worth noting that Mihdhar and Hazmi were among the hijackers who operated in close proximity to Israeli “art students” in Hollywood, Florida, and to the Urban Moving Systems Israelis in northern New Jersey. Moreover, Hazmi and at least three “art students” visited Oklahoma City on almost the same dates, from April 1 through April 4, 2001. On August 24, 2001, a day after the Mossad’s briefing, Mihdhar and Hazmi were placed by the CIA on a terrorist watch list; additionally, it was only after the Mossad warning, as reported by Die Zeit, that the CIA, on August 27, informed the FBI of the presence of the two terrorists. But by then the cell was already in hiding, preparing for attack.
The CIA, along with the 9/11 Commission in its adoption of the CIA story, claims that Mihdhar and Hazmi were placed on the watch list solely due to the agency’s own efforts, with no help from Mossad. Their explanation of how the pair came to be placed on the watch list, however, is far from credible and may have served as a cover story to obscure the Mossad briefing [See accompanying story on page 8 – “The Kuala Lumpur Deceit”]. This brings up the possibility that the CIA may have known about the existence of the alleged Israeli agents and their mission, but sought, naturally, to keep it quiet. A second, more troubling scenario, is that the CIA may have subcontracted to Mossad, given that the agency was both prohibited by law from conducting intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and lacked a pool of competent Arabic-fluent field officers. In such a scenario, the CIA would either have worked actively with the Israelis or quietly abetted an independent operation on U.S. soil. In his 9/11 investigative book, The Looming Tower, author Lawrence Wright notes that FBI counterterrorism agents, infuriated at the CIA’s failure to fully share information about Mihdhar and Hazmi, speculated that “the agency was shielding Mihdhar and Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them”. The two al-Qaeda men, Wright notes, “must have seemed like attractive opportunities; however, once they entered the United States they were the province of the FBI…” Wright further observes that the CIA’s reticence to share its information was due to a fear “that prosecutions resulting from specific intelligence might compromise its relationship with foreign services”
When in the spring of 2002 the scenario of CIA’s domestic subcontracting to foreign intelligence was posed to the veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative, with whom I spoke extensively, the operative didn’t reject it out of hand. The operative noted that in recent years the CIA’s human intelligence assets, known as “humint” – spooks on the ground who conduct surveillances, make contacts, and infiltrate the enemy – had been “eviscerated” in favor of the NSA’s far less perilous “sigint”, or signals intelligence program, the remote interception of electronic communications. As a result, “U.S. intelligence finds itself going back to sources that you may not necessarily like to go back to, but are required to”, the veteran intelligence operative said. “We don’t like the fact, but our humint structures are gone. Israeli intel’s humint is as strong as ever. If you have an intel gap, those gaps are not closed overnight. It takes years and years of diligent work, a high degree of security, talented and dedicated people, willing management and a steady hand. It is not a fun business, and it’s certainly not one without its dangers. If you lose that capability, well… organizations find themselves having to make a pact with the devil. The problem [in U.S. intel] is very great”.
If such an understanding did exist between CIA and Mossad with regard to al-Qaeda’s U.S. operatives, the complicity would explain a number of oddities: it would explain the CIA’s nearly incoherent, and perhaps purposely deceptive, reconstruction of events as to how Mihdhar and Hazmi joined the watch list; it might even explain the apparent brazenness of the Israeli New Jersey cell celebrating on the morning of 9/11 (protected under the CIA wing, they were free to behave as they pleased). It would also explain the assertion in one of the leading Israeli dailies, Yedioth Ahronoth, that in the months prior to 9/11, when the Israeli “art students” were being identified and rounded up, the CIA “actively promoted their expulsion”. The implication in the Yedioth Ahronoth article was that the CIA was simply being careless, not trying to spirit the Israelis safely out of the country. At this point we cannot be certain.
Israeli spying against the U.S. is of course hotly denied by both governments. In 2002, responding to my own questions about the “art students”, Israeli embassy spokesman Mark Regev issued a blanket denial. “Israel does not spy on the United States”, Regev told me. The pronouncements from officialdom are strictly pro forma, as it is no secret that spying by Israel on the United States has been wide-ranging and unabashed. A 1996 General Accounting Office report, for example, found that Israel “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S. ally”. More recently, a former intelligence official told the Los Angeles Times in 2004 that “[t]here is a huge, aggressive, ongoing set of Israeli activities directed against the United States”. It is also routine that Israeli spying is ignored or downplayed by the U.S. government (the case of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, sentenced to life in prison in 1986, is a dramatic exception). According to the American Prospect, over the last 20 years at least six sealed indictments have been issued against individuals allegedly spying “on Israel’s behalf”, but the cases were resolved “through diplomatic and intelligence channels” rather than a public airing in the courts. Career Justice Department and intelligence officials who track Israeli espionage told the Prospect of “long-standing frustration among investigators and prosecutors who feel that cases that could have been made successfully against Israeli spies were never brought to trial, or that the investigations were shut down prematurely”.
The Questions That Await Answers
Remarkably, the Urban Moving Systems Israelis, when interrogated by the FBI, explained their motives for “celebration” on the New Jersey waterfront – a celebration that consisted of cheering, smiling, shooting film with still and video cameras and, according to the FBI, “high-fiving” – in the Machiavellian light of geopolitics. “Their explanation of why they were happy”, FBI spokesman Margolin told me, “was that the United States would now have to commit itself to fighting [Middle East] terrorism, that Americans would have an understanding and empathy for Israel’s circumstances, and that the attacks were ultimately a good thing for Israel”. When reporters on the morning of 9/11 asked former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the effect the attacks would have on IsraeliAmerican relations, he responded with a similar gut analysis: “It’s very good”, he remarked. Then he amended the statement: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans]”.
What is perhaps most damning is that the Israelis’ celebration on the New Jersey waterfront occurred in the first sixteen minutes after the initial crash, when no one was aware this was a terrorist attack. In other words, from the time the first plane hit the north tower, at 8:46 a.m., to the time the second plane hit the south tower, at 9:02 a.m., the overwhelming assumption of news outlets and government officials was that the plane’s impact was simply a terrible accident. It was only after the second plane hit that suspicions were aroused. Yet if the men were cheering for political reasons, as they reportedly told the FBI, they obviously believed they were witnessing a terrorist act, and not an accident.
After returning safely to Israel in the late autumn of 2001, three of the five New Jersey Israelis spoke on a national talk show that winter. Oded Ellner, who on the afternoon of September 11 had, like his compatriots, protested to arresting officer Sgt. Dennis Rivelli that “we’re Israeli”, admitted to the interviewer: “We are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event”. By his own admission, then, Ellner stood on the New Jersey waterfront documenting with film and video a terrorist act before anyone knew it was a terrorist act.
One obvious question among many comes to mind: If these men were trained as professional spies, why did they exhibit such outright oafishness at the moment of truth on the waterfront? The ABC network source close to the 20/20 report noted one of the more disturbing explanations proffered by counterintelligence investigators at the FBI: “The Israelis felt that in some way their intelligence had worked out – i.e., they were celebrating their own acumen and ability as intelligence agents”.
The questions abound: Did the Urban Moving Systems Israelis, ready to “document the event”, arrive at the waterfront before the first plane came in from the north? And if they arrived right after, why did they believe it was a terrorist attack? What about the strange tale of the “art students”? Could they have been mere hustlers, as they claimed, who ended up repeatedly crossing paths with federal agents and living next door to most of the 9/11 hijackers by coincidence? Did the Israeli authorities find out more about the impending attacks than they shared with their U.S. counterparts? Or did the Israeli spies on the ground only intercept vague chatter that, in their view, did not warrant breaking cover to share the information? On the other hand, did the U.S. government receive more advance information about the attacks from Israeli authorities than it is willing to admit? What about the 9/11 Commission’s eliding of reported Israeli warnings that may have led to the watchlisting of Mihdhar and Hazmi? Were the Israeli warnings purposely washed from the historical record? Did the CIA know more about pre-9/11 Israeli spying than it has admitted?
The unfortunate fact is that the truth may never be uncovered, not by officialdom, and certainly not by a passive press. James Bamford, who in a coup of reporting during the 1980s revealed the inner workings of the NSA in The Puzzle Palace, points to the “key problem”: “The Israelis were all sent out of the country”, he says. “There’s no nexus left. The FBI just can’t go knocking on doors in Israel. They need to work with the State Department. They need letters rogatory, where you ask a government of a foreign country to get answers from citizens in that country”. The Israeli government will not likely comply.
So any investigation “is now that much more complicated”, says Bamford. He recalls a story he produced for ABC News concerning two murder suspects – U.S. citizens – who fled to Israel and fought extradition for ten years. “The Israelis did nothing about it until I went to Israel, knocking on doors, and finally found the two suspects. I think it’d be a great idea to go over and knock on their doors”, says Bamford.
The suspects are gone. The trail is cold. Yet many of the key facts and promising leads sit freely on the web, in the archives, safe in the news-morgues at 20/20 and The Forward and Die Zeit. An investigator close to the matter says it reminds him of the Antonioni film “Blow-Up”, a movie about a photographer who discovers the evidence of a covered-up murder hidden before his very eyes in the frame of an enlarged photograph. It’s a mystery that no one appears eager to solve.
Christopher Ketcham is a freelance journalist who has written for Harper’s and Salon. Many of his writings, including his groundbreaking story on the Israeli art students, can be read on his website: christopherketcham.com, as can the Shea memo.
Top White House Covid adviser Anthony Fauci is facing calls to resign after newly released documents suggested his agency funded dangerous “gain-of-function” research in China, despite previous denials.
Demands for the health adviser’s firing come after the Interceptobtained more than 900 pages of material related to coronavirus research funded by Fauci’s agency – the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) – including previously unpublished grant requests from a US-based org that passed federal funds to the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.
Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), who has repeatedly sparred with Fauci throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, touted the document dump in a Tuesday tweet, saying the materials “make it abundantly clear that [Fauci] needs to be held accountable,” noting he had already asked the Justice Department to review the adviser for “lying” in previous congressional testimony.
The documents published by the Intercept show that the US-based organization, the EcoHealth Alliance, was granted some $3.1 million in funding approved by Fauci’s NIAID – later increased to exceed $3.7 million in total, according to other government records. Of that grant, $599,000 was funneled to the WIV, specifically to fund work to “identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans,” according to the Intercept.
The firm’s grant application acknowledged potential dangers posed by the project, noting that “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs [coronaviruses] while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled.”
The EcoHealth Alliance’s joint research with the WIV has raised other questions about potentially unsafe work at the Wuhan lab, and whether ‘gain-of-function’ research – which aims to increase the virulence and infectiousness of pathogens to better study them – was carried out there. The research was considered so risky that the government imposed a halt on federal funding in 2014, though that has since been lifted.
Fauci has repeatedly denied that his agency funded, directly or indirectly, any gain-of-function work at the WIV, including in high-profile confrontations with lawmakers such as Senator Paul.
However, according to Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who spoke to the Intercept after reviewing the documents, the research funded by EcoHealth included work to engineer novel viruses and test “their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human type receptors on their cell.”
In a lengthy Twitter thread posted following the Intercept story, Ebright went on to argue that the WIV work indeed constituted “gain-of-function research as defined in federal policies,” and that Fauci and other top health officials have lied to the public about it.
“The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.”
The revelations have prompted a number of Republican critics to demand Fauci’s resignation, or even his outright firing, while some called for further investigation into his ties to research at the WIV.
“Just months after Fauci testified the NIH has never funded gain-of-function in the Wuhan lab, newly released documents show that he LIED & there was funding,” the Arizona GOP wrote on Twitter, adding “Fauci must be fired & investigated immediately!”
Despite Fauci’s insistence in public that his agency did not fund gain-of-function research in China, he has suggested in private that such funding may have occurred, as was revealed in a trove of communications released in June after a FOIA request by several news agencies.
In a February 2020 email to his top deputy at NIAID, Hugh Auchincloss, Fauci attached a research paper about a gain-of-function study at the WIV funded by none other than the EcoHealth Alliance (whose involvement was only disclosed later, after the authors initially “omitted” the funding source). The message took on an urgent tone, telling Auchincloss to read the paper and get back to him, as “it is essential that we speak.”
Auchincloss replied that he read the attached paper, explaining that the research in question was performed “before the gain of function pause” – referring to the federal funding moratorium – and that another staffer would “try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.”
While the email trove does not appear to contain any follow-up from Auchincloss about the gain-of-function study, the exchange suggests there was concern among top NIAID officials, including Fauci himself, that the agency may have contributed to the controversial research.
Though Sen. Paul asked federal prosecutors to investigate Fauci’s testimony for perjury in July, to date it is unclear whether any probe has moved forward. The Joe Biden administration, meanwhile, continues to rely on Fauci as one of its top pandemic advisers, and is unlikely to heed Republican calls for his dismissal.
Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that the US government funded studies into coronavirus in bats in Wuhan long before the pandemic, with the proposal showing it was aware of the risk that researchers would be infected.
More than 900 pages of material related to this research were published on the non-profit media company’s website on Tuesday. The documents were acquired as part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation by The Intercept against the National Institutes of Health.
The documents detail the work of EcoHealth Alliance, a US-based organization specializing in protection against infectious diseases, and its work with Chinese partners on coronaviruses, specifically those originating in bats.
The papers detail that EcoHealth Alliance was granted a total of $3.1 million by the federal government, with $599,000 of that going to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The funding received in Wuhan was used in part to identify and genetically alter bat coronaviruses that might infect humans.
EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak led one of the studies, titled ‘Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence’, which screened thousands of bats for novel coronaviruses. The research also involved the screening of people who work with live animals.
However, the released documents include a recognition of the potential risks posed by the project. “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled,” the grant application reads.
“In this proposal, they actually point out that they know how risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting bitten – and they kept records of everyone who got bitten,” Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, in the US, told The Intercept in response to the release.
Another revelation was that experimental work with humanized mice (that is, with functioning human genes, cells, tissues, and/or organs) was conducted at the Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, a biosafety level-three lab, and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, mainland China’s first biosafety level-four lab, as originally thought.
The program ran from 2014 to 2019, and was renewed in 2019, only for former US president Donald Trump to cancel it. Robert Kessler, communications manager at EcoHealth Alliance, maintained there wasn’t a lot to say on the matter. “We applied for grants to conduct research. The relevant agencies deemed that to be important research, and thus funded it,” he noted.
While the US has blasted China for not releasing all the relevant information on Covid-19, The Intercept said it had requested the recently released documents back in September 2020.
Although they don’t provide conclusive evidence to support the theory that Covid-19 was leaked from a Chinese lab, it does highlight the fact that risky research into bat coronaviruses was being undertaken in the years leading up the pandemic, and the US was not only well aware of that, but also funded it. Bats have been identified as a possible zoonotic source for the virus.
World Health Organization experts spent around a month in China from January this year. Their report suggested that cases identified in Wuhan in 2019 were believed to have been acquired from “a zoonotic source, as many [of those initially infected] reported visiting or working in the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market.”
Beijing has refused to take part in a second probe, rejecting the lab leak theory while, in turn, calling for an investigation into US-based laboratories.
Only companies and individuals dealing with “Covered Countermeasures” have their liability waived. Below is the definition of a covered countermeasure. For a drug or vaccine to be a covered countermeasure, it has to be designated as an Emergency Use Authorized product. Licensed products, being used for their licensed indication, are not permitted to be authorized for emergency use, since they have a license to be used for that purpose.
This is the conundrum that Pfizer, FDA, DOD and the rest of the agencies that overplayed their hand, including my Governor, Janet Mills, find themselves in. If it is an EUA, there is no liability, BUT it is experimental, so cannot be mandated. If it is licensed for the same purpose, it cannot be an EUA. While it is no longer experimental, it will have attendant liability until (in a matter of weeks) it is moved into the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Program.
Here is the info on who gets their liability waived. And below is a description of the products.
covered countermeasure
(1) Covered countermeasure The term “covered countermeasure” means— (A) a qualified pandemic or epidemic product (as defined in paragraph (7)); (B) a security countermeasure (as defined in section 247d–6b(c)(1)(B) of this title ); (C) a drug (as such term is defined in section 201(g)(1) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act ( 21 U.S.C. 321(g)(1) ), biological product (as such term is defined by section 262(i) of this title ), or device (as such term is defined by section 201(h) of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act ( 21 U.S.C. 321(h) ) that is authorized for emergency use in accordance with section 564, 564A, or 564B of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act [ 21 U.S.C. 360bbb–3 , 360bbb–3a, 360bbb–3b]; or (D) a respiratory protective device that is approved by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health under part 84 of title 42, Code of Federal Regulations (or any successor regulations), and that the Secretary determines to be a priority for use during a public health emergency declared under section 247d of this title.
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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