Senate chairman subpoenas FBI Director, ex-State official as Russia-Ukraine probe intensifies
John Solomon Reports | August 17, 2020
A powerful Senate committee chairman has subpoenaed FBI Director Chris Wray and a former State Department official in an intensifying investigation into possible U.S. corruption in Russia and Ukraine and declared there is evidence Joe Biden’s family engaged in a “glaring conflict of interest.”
Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson announced the actions Monday, strongly accusing Democrats of levying false allegations against him and other GOP investigators to distract from the evidence his committee has gathered about Joe and Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine.
“We didn’t target Joe and Hunter Biden for investigation; their previous actions had put them in the middle of it,” Johnson wrote in a letter released Monday that provided a detailed timeline of Joe Biden’s Ukraine policy actions and his son’s hiring with the Ukraine natural gas company Burisma Holdings.
“Many in the media, in an ongoing attempt to provide cover for former Vice President Biden, continue to repeat the mantra that there is ‘no evidence of wrongdoing or illegal activity’ related to Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma’s board,” the senator wrote. “I could not disagree more.”
Johnson noted evidence gathered by his committee showed Joe Biden met with his son’s business partner, Devon Archer, in April 2014 and within a month the vice president then visited Ukraine and both his son Hunter and the business partner were put on the Burisma board as the firm faced multiple corruption investigations.
“Isn’t it obvious what message Hunter’s position on Burisma’s board sent to Ukrainian officials?” Johnson asked. “The answer: If you want U.S. support, don’t touch Burisma. It also raised a host of questions, including: 1) How could former Vice President Biden look any Ukrainian official (or any other world leader) in the face and demand action to fight corruption? 2) Did this glaring conflict of interest affect the work and efforts of other U.S. officials who worked on anti-corruption measures?”
You can read Johnson’s letter here:
File 2020-08-09 RHJ letter re Investigation history purpose goals 1805.pdf
Sources familiar with Johnson’s investigation say the committee has secured testimony from at least one State Department official who worked in Ukraine saying the Bidens’ conduct created the appearance of a conflict of interest and undercut U.S. efforts to fight corruption in Kiev.
Johnson also divulged that late last week he issued a formal subpoena to Wray demanding he immediately surrender records from the Russia collusion probe that the committee has been seeking for months.
The subpoena gives Wray until 5 p.m. on Aug. 20 to comply and demands all records from the probe known as Crossfire Hurricane, including those provided for a damning report by the Justice Department inspector general.
You can view the subpoena here:
Johnson also announced his committee has prepared a subpoena for Jonathan Winer, a former Obama State Department official who had extensive contact with British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, the author of a flawed dossier that helped propel the FBI probe into now disproven Trump-Russia collusion.
“Mr Winer‘s counsel has not responded since Thursday as to whether he would accept service of the subpoena,” Johnson said. “If he does not respond by tomorrow, we will be forced to effect service through the U.S. Marshals. More subpoenas can be expected to be issued in the coming days and weeks.”
Johnson and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley have been pursuing a two-track investigation for more than two years, examining both failures and corruption in the FBI’s Russia probe as well as the issue of the Bidens’ conflicts in Ukraine.
As the 2020 election draws nearer and the committee’s evidence mounts in the Biden portion of the probe, Democrats have repeatedly attacked Johnson and Grassley accusing them of accepting evidence with Ukrainian officials tied to Russia.
In his letter, Johnson adamantly denies he has talked with or received documents from the Russian-tied Ukrainians, accusing Democrats like Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut of knowingly fomenting disinformation.
“The only problem with their overblown handwringing is that they all knew full well that we have been briefed repeatedly, and we had already told them that we had NOT received the alleged Russian disinformation,” Johnson wrote. “The very transparent goal of their own disinformation campaign and feigned concern is to attack our character in order to marginalize the eventual findings of our investigation.”
Johnson’s letter identifies 14 questions he believes Joe Biden should answer and said the dealings documented by his committee — all from U.S. government documents — follow a larger pattern of family members appearing to cash in on the vice president’s policymaking.
“The appearance of family profiteering off of Vice President Biden’s official responsibilities is not unique to the circumstances involving Ukraine and Burisma,” the senator wrote. “Public reporting has also shown Hunter Biden following his father into China and coincidentally landing lucrative business deals and investments there.
“Additionally, the former vice president’s brothers and sister-in-law, Frank, James and Sara Biden, also are reported to have benefited financially from his work as well. We have not had the resources to devote investigatory time to these other allegations, but I point them out to underscore that Ukraine and Burisma seem more of a pattern of conduct than an aberration.”
Johnson’s announcement follows one day after Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham released a document Sunday he says shows the FBI misled senators on the Intelligence Committee during the Russia probe by falsely suggesting Steele’s dossier was backed up by one of his key sources.
“Somebody needs to go to jail for this,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) the panel’s chairman, told the Fox News program Sunday Futures with Maria Bartiromo. “This is a second lie. This is a second crime. They lied to the FISA court. They got rebuked, the FBI did, in 2019 by the FISA court, putting in doubt all FISA applications.”
The document in question contains the draft talking points the FBI used to brief the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2018, including an assessment that the primary sub-source of the information contained in the Steele dossier had backed up the former MI-6 agent’s reporting.
The primary sub-source “did not cite any significant concerns with the way his reporting was characterized in the dossier to the extent he could identify it,” the FBI memo claimed. “… At minimum, our discussions with [the Primary Sub-source] confirm that the dossier was not fabricated by Steele.”
In fact, by the time the FBI provided senators the briefing, agents had already interviewed Steele’s primary sub-source, who disavowed much of what was attributed to him in the dossier as in “jest” or containing uncorroborated allegations.
You can read the FBI memo Graham released here:
The Abyss of Disinformation Gazes Into Its Creators
By Patrick Armstrong | Startegic Culture Foundation | August 17, 2020
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. – Friedrich Nietzsche
The other day the U.S. State Department published “Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem“. The report should have a disclaimer like this:
Everything you read in the NYT or hear Rachel Maddow say about Russia is true: Putin is a murderer, a thief and a thug, he shot down MH17, poisoned the Skripals, elected Trump, invaded Georgia and stole Crimea. If you question any part of this, you are controlled and directed by Russian Disinformation HQ.
Freedom of speech does not entitle you to doubt The Truth.
The methodology of all of these things – this is one of several – is uncomplicated. Paul Robinson has commented on the dependence of so much comment about Russia, and this report in particular, on the myth of central control.
- Anything anywhere on Russian social media, whether sensible or crazy, was personally put there by Putin to sow discord and weaken us. All social media or websites based in Russia are 100% controlled by Putin.
- The Truth about Russia is found in the West’s official statements and in the “trusted source media”. Anyone who questions it benefits Putin, who wants to bring us down, and is therefore acting as a servant of Russian Disinformation HQ.
The argument really is that simple and can be found in its baldest (and stupidest) version on the EU vs DiSiNFO site, The NATO Centre of Excellence is pretty bad while The Integrity Initiative seems to have been embarrassed into silence. Note the “disinfo”, “excellence” and “integrity” bits – that’s called gaslighting. Who funds these selfless truth seekers? The EU, NATO and the British government. But they’re good and truthful, unlike those tricky Russians.
In this particular effusion they look at seven websites, six of which are registered in Russia and one in Canada. The report declares that they are in an ecosystem directed from Russian Disinformation HQ. In reality they are sites which publish writers who – to take one example – think that it is a bit unusual that a deadly nerve agent smeared on a door handle requires the roof of the house to be replaced. But doubt, these days, is the outward sign of an inward Putinism.
Door handle!
Yeah, OK, but why the roof?
Putinbot!
One of the websites mentioned in the report is the one you’re reading now – Strategic Culture Foundation.
Could these be the officials who told the NYT about the bounties? Or gave it the photos it had to walk back a few days later? Or said their sources had “mysteriously gone quiet?” Or told it all 17? Or said it was probably microwave weapons? Or gave us years of scoops about how Mueller was just about to lock him up? Or told the NYT that Russia’s “economy suffers from flat growth and shrinking incomes“? Probably, but you’re not supposed to ask these questions.
The report has a good deal of speculation about who backs Strategic Culture Foundation (p 15). Personally I don’t much care who runs it (and I very much doubt that the Kremlin understands the point of running an opinion website). I’ve been in the USSR/Russia business for some time and what I think hasn’t changed much since 1986 or so. I’ve written for a number of sites which have faded away and I will not permit having what I write changed; the one time it happened twelve years ago, I immediately switched my operations elsewhere. Strategic Culture Foundation has never changed anything I’ve submitted and only twice suggested a topic – this one and Putin’s weaponised crickets. (And the warning is still up at the U.S. State Department site!) The other writers on the site whom I know haven’t changed their views either. Strategic Culture Foundation hasn’t created something that didn’t exist before, it’s collected something that already existed. What do we writers have in common? Well, Dear Reader, look around you. Certainly we question The Truth. Or maybe SCF is a place where people “baffled by the hysterical Russophobia of the MSM and the Democratic Party since the 2016 election” can find something else? Or maybe it’s part of Madison’s “general intercourse of sentiments”?
There was a theory in the Cold War that the two sides would eventually converge. I often think that they met and then kept on going and passed each other. In those days the Soviets did their best to block what they considered to be – dare I suggest it? – disinformation. And so RFE/RL, BBC, Radio Canada and so on were jammed. We, on our side, didn’t care who listened to Radio Moscow or read Soviet publications. Today it’s the other way round. Which fact prompts the easy deduction that the side that’s confident that it has a better connection to reality and truth doesn’t waste effort trying to block the other. In a fascinating essay, the Saker describes Russian propaganda for its home audience: “give as much air time to the most rabid anti-Kremlin critiques as possible, especially on Russian TV talkshows”. They even took the trouble to dub Morgan Freeman’s absurd “we are at war” video. That’s brilliant – we won’t tell you they hate you, we’ll let them tell you they hate you.
The report talks as if this “ecosystem” were big and influential. But it’s a tiny mouse next to a whale. Total followers on Twitter of all seven sites are 156 thousand (p65). That’s nothing: the NYT has 47.1 million Twitter followers, BBC Breaking News 44.8, WaPo 16.1. Why even Rachel Maddow has ten million followers eager to hear her explain how Russia is going to turn off your furnace next winter. So the rational observer has a choice to make after reading this report: either the report ludicrously over-exaggerates the influence of this “ecosystem” or 156,000 website followers are astonishingly influential and I, with my Strategic Culture Foundation pieces, personally control several Electoral College votes.
The real message of “Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem“, to someone who isn’t invested in spinning – ahem – theories about a Kremlin disinformation conspiracy, is that the “pillars” are feeble and the “ecosystem” small: Maddow alone has three times the followers of these seven plus the RT (3 million) the “all 17” report spent nearly half its space irrelevantly ranting about. Or maybe it’s saying that American voters are so easily influenced that “the Lilliputian Russians, spending a pittance compared to the Goliaths of the Clinton and Trump campaigns, was the deciding factor in 2016“.
Ironically this thing appeared at the same time as two that suggest Washington’s view of Moscow needs some work: It’s Time to Rethink Our Russia Policy and The Problem With Putinology: We need a new kind of writing about Russia. Good to see titles like that but they aren’t really rethinking anything: they still agree that Putin’s guilty of everything that Maddow says he is. Real re-thinking might get a toehold, for example, were people to contemplate why it is imbecilic to say that Moscow holds military exercises close to NATO’s borders. But you’ll only see that sort of thing on Strategic Culture Foundation and the others.
But now the abyss gazes back
Clinton loses an election, blames Russia, the intelligence agencies pile on, the media shrieks away. Americans are told patriotic Americans don’t doubt. And now we arrive at the next stage of insanity. William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, informs us that “Russia is backing Donald Trump, China is supporting Joe Biden and Iran is seeking to sow chaos in the U.S. presidential election…”. I guess that means that Russia and China will cancel each other out and that he’s telling us that Iran will choose the next POTUS. Who would have thought that the fate of the “greatest nation in earth” (as Presidents Trump, Obama, Bush Jr, Clinton, Bush Sr and Reagan like to call it) would be hidden under a turban somewhere in Iran?
So, American, know this: your “trusted sources” are telling you not to bother to vote in November – it’s not your decision.
COVID-19: Who’s Scheming?
By Dr. Pascal Sacré | Global Research | August 16, 2020
In order for us to be on the same wavelength, I have to define that word. Conspiracy Theorist: An advocate of Conspiracy theory.
It’s like saying, racist: defender of a theory of racism. We don’t get very far with that. A synonym is conspiracy theorist.
What is a conspiracy theory or conspiracy theorist? One thing’s for sure, these words are pejorative, bad. Nobody likes this label: “conspiracy theorist”, “conspiracy theory”.
Since September 11, 2001, this ancient word [1] has been used to disqualify anyone who makes statements which go against the official narrative.
Let’s analyze this sentence because every word is important.
By official, many mean governmental.
That’s not quite right.
If you say that Donald Trump, who is the “official” president and elected head of the U.S. government, is full of BS, who has used the support of the Russians to get elected [2] or that he wants to cancel the next U.S. elections [3], i.e. which constitute conspiracy theories against Trump, Western journalists in chorus will applaud. They won’t call you a conspiracy theorist even if, according to the definition, that’s what you have being doing.
In the case of COVID-19 in 2020, if you say that all the doctors (and there are not two, ten or a hundred, but thousands around the world) who say that hydroxychloroquine is a cure to COVID-19 and that these crazy doctors have escaped from a lunatic asylum [4], once again the journalists will congratulate you. In any case, even without proof of what you say, no one will call you a conspiracy theorist.
Yet, it is a conspiracy theory and it is directed against qualified doctors.
By doing so, you are accusing doctors [5], some of whom work at the University or in recognized hospitals for decades, such as Professor Harvey Risch [6] of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, Professor Didier Raoult, Director of the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection in Marseille, and Dr Christian Perronne [7], a professor of French university hospital practitioners, specialized in the field of tropical pathologies and emerging infectious diseases and former president of the specialized commission “Communicable Diseases” of the High Council of Public Health, in addition to many less known but equally reliable and serious doctors, family doctors, field doctors, general practitioners or specialists [8 to 13].
You are a real “conspiracy theorist” if you think that all these highly qualified doctors are lying or want to manipulate you, Yet, no one will treat you like that.
The truth is that you will be labeled a “conspiracy theorist” if and only if you say things against the official narrative or official consensus, which is sustained and acknowledged by:
- international institutions (World Trade Organization, World Health Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Economic Forum, United Nations, European Commission, European Medicines Agency…).
- By national relays who report to these international institutions in all important fields, health, medical, educational, media, economic… [14].
All this forms a coherent, transnational, supranational system (a consensus), driven by common goals and using a precise and studied language.
It must be understood that this system is independent of politicians and survives electoral changes. It perpetuates itself, whatever happens, not through a president, a particular person, but through these institutions that go through all the scandals [15 to 18] and all the attacks without taking a scratch.
Who runs this system?
I won’t answer here first because this is another task which deserves a full report and second, because many researchers have already successfully identified this topic [19 to 22].
Therefore, being a president, head of government, a medical graduate and representing a valid and serious authority is not enough to protect you from being challenged on the grounds that the challenger is a conspirator.
No.
To benefit from this protection, you must belong to the system, speak its language and pursue its goals.
Thus, Anthony Fauci, with his criticizable and contradictory remarks [23], will never be called a conspirator.
Professor Harvey Risch will.
Thus, newspapers that claim that Remdesivir (produced by Big Pharma) is effective in treating COVID-19, contrary to hydroxychloroquine, will never be called conspiracy theorists.
Those who say otherwise, with studies and doctors to back them up, yes.
The problem is that Trump said he was in favour of hydroxychloroquine as well, and he is discredited each time he says it.
It is said that Remdesivir proved its effectiveness against Covid-19, in a Belgian newspaper of August 11, 2020 [24].
Words are important.
The word “proven“, in this case, is false.
But who will notice it, if you are neither a doctor nor aware of the studies in question?
In the meantime, a lie is taken for granted, it becomes a truth.
A single treatment with Remdesivir will bring Gilead Science Inc. $2,500 per patient [25].
In contrast, Hydroxychloroquine, nothing or almost nothing. It is a very inexpensive drug.
The terms “conspiracy” or “conspiracy theory” have nothing to do with truth or credibility, they have to do with conformity to dominant ideas, dictated by the system that relentlessly pursues its goals.
Another important word is “theory“. Conspiracy theories.
This implies ramblings without foundation, without evidence.
Yet many claims labeled “conspiracy theories” are not theoretical.
It is rare to have formal proof at the time of the claim. It may be the result of research, reflections or presumptions.
In forensic medicine or criminal science, you will not always have irrefutable evidence but a set of solid presumptions (motive, indirect and coherent facts) that is sufficient to convict an accused person, according to the law.
Consider the “conspiracy theory” that the pharmaceutical industry is pushing to discredit hydroxychloroquine in favour of its expensive products, antivirals such as Remdesivir or vaccines.
It would be nice to have irrefutable proof of this, but I can’t see an industry leader writing such an admission and then leaving it lying around to fall into the hands of an honest journalist. That would be really suicidal, don’t you think? And in any case, we would discredit that executive, or that journalist, until their words become worthless.
However, as we would do in any police investigation, is there a strong circumstantial body of evidence?
1) Does this industry have a motive?
Yes.
This industry has a famous motive for doing this: money.
It’s not thousands or hundreds of thousands of euros that would push a lot of people to commit murder, but billions of euros [26-27].
2) Does this industry have the means to do this?
Yes.
We know it thanks to the testimony of people from inside, like John Virapen, former CEO of Eli Lilly & Company in Sweden [28], or former editors of major medical journals like Marcia Angell [29] (New England Journal of Medicine) or Richard Horton [30] (Lancet).
3) Has the industry ever done it?
Yes.
There are proven cases that illustrate the corruption of doctors by the pharmaceutical industry, such as the case of anaesthetist Scott Reuben who falsified data concerning the efficacy of the antidepressant Effexor (venlafaxine), produced by Wyeth (merged with Pfizer) in neuropathic and postoperative pain [31].
This is just one example [32]. More recently, you have the Lancet-Gate: “Scientific Corona Lies” and Big Pharma Corruption
Even when the evidence is there, have you ever seen a journalist who accused someone of being a “conspiracy theorist” make his mea culpa, apologize for his misunderstanding and restore the reputation of the “theorist” in question? And above all, restore the truth?
For just one example, I will take the story of the Kuwaiti babies torn from their incubator and thrown to the ground by Iraqi soldiers to justify the American intervention in Iraq in 1990. President George H. Bush senior used it on several occasions in several inflammatory speeches.
It was a lie [33]. We know that.
Yet anyone who would have known or understood this, and said so at the time, would have been called a “conspiracy theorist” in collusion with Saddam Hussein.
For the record, and to show you that these techniques did not stop in 1991 or after the proof of this lie, the dishonest PR firm behind this Kuwaiti babies myth is the same firm that in 2020 helped the World Health Organization (WHO) to make the World Health Organization (WHO) believe in the COVID-19 pandemic and to enforce its diktats: the firm Hill & Knowlton [34].
So, what does this mean, conspiracy, and who is really a conspirator?
We can see that it means nothing.
It’s a pejorative, bad label, which will not be given to you if you lie, or if you criticize a person or a government that justly disturbs the system.
It will be given to you if what you say, even if it is true, plausible, proven, goes against the authorized discourse of the system.
Check it out for yourself.
Criticize the doctors who defend the use of hydroxychloroquine in VIDOC-19, and you won’t be charged with conspiracy.
You will be listened to, approved.
Criticize Anthony Fauci or the national security councils regarding Covid-19, then yes, you will be accused of conspiracy, indeed of all evils.
Very often it has nothing to do with theories.
The facts that are put forward are sometimes proven, very often supported by many solid and plausible arguments.
Words are very important. Do not underestimate their importance. They direct our thoughts.
I know this as a doctor, but I also know it as a passionate advocate of therapeutic communication.
Like the very first doctors of the Antiquity, I know that words can heal.
They can also make people docile or sick.
The words “conspiracy theorist”, “conspiracy theorist”, “conspiracy theorist” only serve to cut short any debate.
Only to have the person the dominant system wants to discredit rejected, so that person is no longer listened to.
That is what is dangerous, not “conspiracy theories”.
What is really dangerous is to not even want to debate and to exclude ideas, people and opinions on the pretext that they are disturbing.
That is what sows the seeds of a totalitarian society; not conspiracy theories.
It is by refusing any debate, any discussion and by brandishing this kind of disqualifying expression that threatens humanity.
Dr Pascal Sacré
Translation from French by Maya for Global Research
Notes :
[1] Théorie du complot, Wikipédia
[2] Ingérence : comment la Russie a biaisé la campagne de 2016 au profit de Trump
[3] Comment Trump pourrait saboter l’élection pour la remporter
[4] Hydroxychloroquine: Goliath contre David, acte I : les détracteurs
[5] Covid-19 – Hydroxychloroquine, David contre Goliath, acte II : les supporteurs
[6] L’hydroxychloroquine agit chez les patients à haut risque, et dire le contraire est dangereux, Harvey Risch M.D., Ph.D., professeur d’épidémiologie à la Yale School of Public Health.
[7] Christian Perronne : “À Garches, nous avons de bons résultats avec l’hydroxychloroquine”, April 15, 2020, Fervent defender of the treatment with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, for Pr Christian Perronne the question of its effectiveness no longer arises. Head of the Infectious Diseases Department at the Raymond-Poincaré Hospital in Garches, he has seen it every day since the beginning of the epidemic: Professor Raoult’s treatment cures and considerably reduces the need for intensive care.
[8] Riposte à la covid-19 : la saine colère du Dr BELLATON, Source : page Facebook de Silviane Le Menn, 20 avril 2020.
[9] Coronavirus : le bilan très positif d’un praticien lorrain qui prescrit l’hydroxychloroquine, the Lorrain Republican, Philippe Marque, April 6, 2020. The results are more than positive: “I have used this protocol on a dozen hospitalized patients, who therefore have a Covid-19 that is already relatively worrying, and I have had neither death nor any evolution towards a serious stage requiring resuscitation.”
[10] Un médecin mosellan constate l’efficacité d’un protocole à base d’azithromycine, the Lorrain Republican, Thierry Fedrigo, April 11, 2020. Two Moselle doctors and one of their Belgian colleagues seem to have developed a drug combination effective against coronavirus. Relying on azithromycin without resorting to the hydroxychloroquine advocated by the infectiologist Didier Raoult, they have noted a clear drop in hospitalizations of their treated patients.
[11] Un médecin néerlandais soigne les patients atteints de coronavirus, mais le gouvernement néerlandais n’est pas content, Amari Roos, 10 avril 2020
[12] Des médecins algériens attestent de l’«efficacité quasi totale» de l’hydroxychloroquine contre le Covid-19,April 27, 2020. The heads of infectious disease departments of a hospital in Blida and another in Algiers say that the hydroxychloroquine protocol followed in the treatment of patients with coronavirus gives a “near-total” positive result.
[13] Après l’Algérie, le Maroc encense l’efficacité de l’hydroxychloroquine contre le Covid-19, May 1, 2020. The therapeutic protocol based on hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin used against Covid-19 “has given positive results” in Morocco, the Health Minister said, adding that “side effects are minimal”.
[14] Ordres nationaux tels que l’Ordre des Médecins, l’Ordre des Pharmaciens, Hautes Autorités de Santé, Sciensano en Belgique…
[15] Agence européenne du médicament : des experts sous influence ?, 12 décembre 2017.
[16] Covid-19: les conseillers du pouvoir face aux conflits d’intérêts, paru le 31mars 2020, écrit par Rozenn Le Saint et Annton Rouget.
[17] Coronavirus : des liens troubles entre labos et conseils scientifiques, Valeurs actuelles, 3 avril 2020.
[18] L’Assemblée parlementaire du Conseil de l’Europe va enquêter sur l’OMS et le scandale « pandémique », Mondialisation.ca, F. William Engdahl, 6 janvier 2010
[19] Anthony C Sutton: British economist, historian and writer. Sutton was a Stanford scholar at the Hoover Foundation from 1968 to 1973. He taught economics at UCLA. He studied in London, Göttingen and UCLA and received a PhD in science from the University of Southampton, England. In 1972, at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, he was awarded a Ph.D : Wall Street et l’ascension de Hitler , Wall Street et la révolution bolchévique
[20] Carroll Quigley: American historian and professor of history at Georgetown University from 1941 to 1976. Quigley was born in Boston, where he later studied and earned two degrees and a doctorate in history from nearby and highly regarded Harvard University. At Georgetown University: Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time
[21] Pierre Hillard : essayiste français, docteur en science politique : La marche irrésistible du nouvel ordre mondial , Chroniques du mondialisme
[22] Michael Parenti, American historian, political scientist and cultural critic. He has taught in American and foreign universities. A must read: L’Horreur impériale
[23] Lancet-Gate: « Mensonges scientifiques sur le coronavirus » et corruption des grandes sociétés pharmaceutiques., Mondialisation.ca, Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, 15 July 2020. Dr Anthony Fauci, Donald Trump’s adviser, described as “America’s top infectious disease expert”, played a key role in smearing the HCQ cure that had been approved years earlier by the CDC, as well as in legitimizing Gilead’s Remdesivir.
[24] Le remdesivir, médicament qui a prouvé son efficacité face au Covid-19, 11 août 2020.
[25] Le traitement au remdesivir coûtera 2.340 dollars, selon Gilead, 29 juin 2020
[26] COVID-19 : au plus près de la vérité. Vaccins., Mondialisation.ca, Dr Pascal Sacré, 2 août 2020
[27] COVID-19: au plus près de la vérité – Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), Mondialisation.ca, Dr Pascal Sacré, 29 juillet 2020
[28] Médicaments effets secondaires : la mort, les laboratoires nous trompent. John Virapen, le cherche midi éditions, 2014
[29] The truth about drug companies, how they cheat us, how to thwart them, Marcia Angell, MD, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, French translation, les éditions le mieux-être, 2005.
[30] COVID-19 : le côté obscur de la science révélé, Mondialisation.ca, Dr Pascal Sacré, 26 mai 2020
[31] Top Pain Scientist Fabricated Data in Studies, Hospital Says, 11 Mars 2009
[32] Du Nujol au Tamiflu : la guerre menée par l’industrie pharmaceutique contre nos santés, Mondialisation.ca, Dr Pascal Sacré, 16 juin 2010
[33] l’affaire des Couveuses de la Mort et le début de la Guerre du Golfe
[34] COVID 19 – Contrat de l’OMS avec la société de relations publiques Hill & Knowlton
Mail-in Voting Leaves Window for ‘Significant Fraud’ & ‘Logistical Challenges’, Observers Say
By Aleksandra Serebriakova – Sputnik – 16.08.2020
Election officials in nearly all US states were warned by the US Postal Service officials back in July about possible delays resulting from voting via mail-in ballots , according to documents published last week. More American states are now moving to either introduce universal vote-by-mail or ease restrictions associated with absentee voting.
US President Donald Trump reiterated his harsh remarks on Saturday towards the universal mail-in-voting system that has been introduced in nine American states now, with California, Vermont, New Jersey and Nevada, recently joining the ranks.
For the president, who indicated his support for “absentee balloting”, which requires a request for a ballot in advance, the universal mail-in ballot system, where ballots are sent to all registered voters automatically, looked “catastrophic”.
“It’s going to make our country a laughing stock all over the world”, the president said on Saturday.His comments come following the news that the US Postal Service (USPS) previously warned election officials in 46 American states, including those in such heated battlegrounds as Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan, that there were risks that not all of the ballots would be delivered to the office on time for Election Day. But several other American states are also now mulling the possibility of resorting to this system in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Yes, mail-in-voting does pose new logistical challenges for election offices that previously dealt with few mail ballots”, says Anthony Fowler, a political scientist from the University of Chicago.
Fowler recognizes the clear advantages the postal voting presents to those willing to safely cast their vote during the health crisis, but still believes that there are some instances of fraudulent behavior that are associated with it:
“Mail voting raises the possibility that the person who filled out the ballot is not who they say they are or that the person who filled out the ballot was coerced in some way”, he explains.
An analysis of the risks associated with postal voting should be carried out without the “distraction” associated with the endless Trump-versus-Democrats debate, says Brian Gaines, an elections expert with the University of Illinois.
“Ballots filled out away from the security and privacy of a booth at an official polling station are inherently less secure”, he believes. “They are more subject to coercion, and they are more prone to be ‘lost’ without being properly processed”.
“The more steps there are in the voting process, the more occasions for error”, the election expert notes, comparing procedures surrounding mail-in voting to those when a person simply goes to a polling station.
However, Gaines says that’s not the only issue.
“Beyond errors and coercion, there are more opportunities for fraud when ballots are away from polling stations and effort is required to get them back to the vote counters”, he explains. “Most states do not allow so-called ‘third parties’ to collect absentee ballots (‘bundle’ or ‘harvest’ them), but some do”.
It is the campaign, church or some other organizations collecting ballots for delivery that can potentially intervene in the election process, Gaines explains, as they can “selectively discard ballots on the basis of guesses about how people might be voting, or can tamper with the ballots”.
“None of this means that vote-by-mail is a source of ‘massive’ fraud or error, but I think that, partisan politics apart, it is plainly more vulnerable to fraud and mistakes than in-person voting”, the expert adds.
“In most elections, fraud and error are negligible or marginal, but in a very close election, they can be decisive. This time, with many more states pushing voters to vote by mail, there may be a bit more confusion and maybe a bit more small-scale fraud”, Gaines concludes.
With the USPS delivery systems being overloaded with “millions of ballots” in the course of the November election, logistics indeed becomes “an enormous issue”, says Mitchell Feierstein, CEO of the Glacier Environmental Fund Limited.
“It is highly probable that there be significant fraud with the mail-in ballots”, the hedge-fund manager argues.
Following the news from the US postal authorities that they cannot guarantee that all the mail-in ballots would arrive on time, protesters gathered outside the house of USPS Postmaster General Louis Dejoy, demanding his resignation. But according to Feierstein, “no matter what happens, the result of the 2020 election will not be accepted by one side”.
CIA Behind Guccifer & Russiagate – a Plausible Scenario
Strategic Culture Foundation | August 14, 2020
William Binney is the former technical director of the U.S. National Security Agency who worked at the agency for 30 years. He is a respected independent critic of how American intelligence services abuse their powers to illegally spy on private communications of U.S. citizens and around the globe. Given his expert inside knowledge, it is worth paying attention to what Binney says.
In a media interview this week, he dismissed the so-called Russiagate scandal as a “fabrication” orchestrated by the American Central Intelligence Agency. Many other observers have come to the same conclusion about allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections with the objective of helping Donald Trump get elected.
But what is particularly valuable about Binney’s judgment is that he cites technical analysis disproving the Russiagate narrative. That narrative remains dominant among U.S. intelligence officials, politicians and pundits, especially those affiliated with the Democrat party, as well as large sections of Western media. The premise of the narrative is the allegation that a Russian state-backed cyber operation hacked into the database and emails of the Democrat party back in 2016. The information perceived as damaging to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was subsequently disseminated to the Wikileaks whistleblower site and other U.S. media outlets.
A mysterious cyber persona known as “Guccifer 2.0” claimed to be the alleged hacker. U.S. intelligence and news media have attributed Guccifer as a front for Russian cyber operations.
Notably, however, the Russian government has always categorically denied any involvement in alleged hacking or other interference in the 2016 U.S. election, or elections thereafter.
William Binney and other independent former U.S. intelligence experts say they can prove the Russiagate narrative is bogus. The proof relies on their forensic analysis of the data released by Guccifer. The analysis of timestamps demonstrates that the download of voluminous data could not have been physically possible based on known standard internet speeds. These independent experts conclude that the data from the Democrat party could not have been hacked, as Guccifer and Russiagaters claim. It could only have been obtained by a leak from inside the party, perhaps by a disgruntled staffer who downloaded the information on to a disc. That is the only feasible way such a huge amount of data could have been released. That means the “Russian hacker” claims are baseless.
Wikileaks, whose founder Julian Assange is currently imprisoned in Britain pending an extradition trial to the U.S. to face espionage charges, has consistently maintained that their source of files was not a hacker, nor did they collude with Russian intelligence. As a matter of principle, Wikileaks does not disclose the identity of its sources, but the organization has indicated it was an insider leak which provided the information on senior Democrat party corruption.
William Binney says forensic analysis of the files released by Guccifer shows that the mystery hacker deliberately inserted digital “fingerprints” in order to give the impression that the files came from Russian sources. It is known from information later disclosed by former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the CIA has a secretive program – Vault 7 – which is dedicated to false incrimination of cyber attacks to other actors. It seems that the purpose of Guccifer was to create the perception of a connection between Wikileaks and Russian intelligence in order to beef up the Russiagate narrative.
“So that suggested [to] us all the evidence was pointing back to CIA as the originator [of] Guccifer 2.0. And that Guccifer 2.0 was inside CIA… I’m pointing to that group as the group that was probably the originator of Guccifer 2.0 and also this fabrication of the entire story of Russiagate,” concludes Binney in his interview with Sputnik news outlet.
This is not the first time that the Russiagate yarn has been debunked. But it is crucially important to make Binney’s expert views more widely appreciated especially as the U.S. presidential election looms on November 3. As that date approaches, U.S. intelligence and media seem to be intensifying claims about Russian interference and cyber operations. Such wild and unsubstantiated “reports” always refer to the alleged 2016 “hack” of the Democrat party by “Guccifer 2.0” as if it were indisputable evidence of Russian interference and the “original sin” of supposed Kremlin malign activity. The unsubstantiated 2016 “hack” is continually cited as the “precedent” and “provenance” of more recent “reports” that purport to claim Russian interference.
Given the torrent of Russiagate derivatives expected in this U.S. election cycle, which is damaging U.S.-Russia bilateral relations and recklessly winding up geopolitical tensions, it is thus of paramount importance to listen to the conclusions of honorable experts like William Binney. The American public are being played by their own intelligence agencies and corporate media with covert agendas that are deeply anti-democratic.
The US contracts out its regime change operation in Nicaragua
By John Perry | COHA | August 4, 2020
Masaya, Nicaragua – An extraordinary leaked document gives a glimpse of the breadth and complexity of the US government’s plan to interfere in Nicaragua’s internal affairs up to and after its presidential election in 2021.
The plan,[1] a 14-page extract from a much longer document, dates from March-April this year and sets the terms for a contract to be awarded by USAID (a “Request for Task Order Proposal”). It was revealed by reporter William Grigsby from Nicaragua’s independent Radio La Primerisima[2] and describes the task of creating what the document calls “the environment for Nicaragua’s transition to democracy.” The aim is to achieve “an orderly transition” from the current government of Daniel Ortega to “a government committed to the rule of law, civil liberties, and a free civil society.” The contractor will work with the “democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) sub-sectors” which in reality is an agglomeration of NGOs, think tanks, media organizations and so-called human rights bodies that depend on US funding and which – while claiming to be independent – are in practice an integral part of the opposition to the Ortega government.
To justify such blatant interference, a considerable rewriting of history is needed. For example, the document claims that the ruling Sandinista party manipulated “successive” past elections so as to win “without a majority of the votes.” Then after “manipulating the 2016 presidential elections” to similar effect, it was warned by the Organization of American States (OAS) that there had been various “impediments to free and fair elections” as a result of which the OAS requested “technical electoral reforms.” What the document omits, however, are the overall conclusions of the OAS on the last elections. Although it identified “weaknesses typical of all electoral processes,” the OAS explicitly said that these had “not affected substantially the popular will expressed through the vote.” In other words, the nature of Daniel Ortega’s victory (he gained 72% of the popular vote) made any minor irregularities irrelevant to the result: he won by an enormous margin. The leaked document makes clear that the US is worried that the same might happen again and aims to stop it.
Not surprisingly, the document also rewrites recent history, saying that the “uprising” in 2018 (which had strong US backing) was answered by “the government’s brutal repression” of demonstrations, while it ignores the wave of violence and destruction that the opposition itself unleashed. The economic disruption it caused is still damaging the country, even though (pre-pandemic) there were strong signs of recovery. USAID, however, has to paint a picture of a country in crisis “… broadening into an economic debacle with the potential to become a humanitarian emergency, depending on the impact of the COVID-19 contagion on Nicaragua’s weak healthcare system.” Someone casually reading the document, unaware of the real situation, might get the impression that, in Nicaragua’s “crisis environment,” regime change is not only desirable but urgently required. The reality – that Nicaragua is at peace, has so far coped with the COVID-19 pandemic reasonably well, and hasn’t suffered the severe economic problems experienced by its neighbors El Salvador and Honduras – is of course incompatible with the picture the US administration needs to present, in order to give some semblance of justification for its intervention.
A long history of US intervention
Given the long history of US interference in Nicaragua, going back at least as far as William Walker’s assault on its capital and usurption of the presidency in 1856, the existence of a plan of this kind is hardly surprising. What’s unusual is that someone has made it publicly available and we can now see the plan in detail. Of course, the US has long developed a tool box of regime change methods short of direct military intervention, such as when it sent in the marines in the 1920s and 1930s or illegally funded and provided logistical support for the “Contra” forces in the 1980s. It now has more sophisticated methods, using local proxies, which are deniable in the unlikely event that they will be exposed by the international media (which normally displays little interest, being much more interested in electoral interference by Russia than it is in Washington’s disruption of the democratic processes).
The latest escalation in intervention began under the Obama presidency and continued under Trump, although the motivation probably has more to do with the US administration’s ongoing concerns about the success of the Ortega government’s development model since it returned to power in 2007 and began a decade of renewed social investment. Oxfam summarized the problem in the memorable title it gave to a 1980s report about Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example. Between 2005 and 2016, poverty was reduced by almost half, from 48 percent to 25 percent according to World Bank data. Nicaragua had a low crime rate, limited drug-related violence, and community-based policing. Over the 11 years to 2017, Nicaragua’s per-capita GDP increased by 38 percent—more than for any of its neighbors. Its success contrasted sharply with the experience of the three “Northern Triangle” countries closely allied to the US. While Nicaragua became one of the safest countries in Latin America, neighboring Guatemala, El Salvador and particularly Honduras saw soaring crime levels, rampant corruption and rapid growth in the drug trade that prevented social progress and produced the “migrant caravans” that began to head north towards the US in 2017.
The US administration’s efforts in 2016 and 2017, building on long experience of manipulating Nicaraguan politics, appeared to produce results in April 2018. The first catalyst for action by US-funded groups was an out-of-control forest fire in a remote reserve, inaccessible by road.[3] The tactics were clear: take an incident with potential to get young people onto the streets, blame the government for inaction (even though the fire was almost impossible to control), whip up people’s anger via social media, organize protests, generate critical stories in the local press, enlist support from neighboring allies (in this case, Costa Rica) and secure hostile coverage in the international media. All of these tactics worked, but before the next stage could be reached (protesters being repressed by the Ortega “regime”) the forest fire was extinguished by a rainstorm.
A week later, the opposition forces were unexpectedly given a second opportunity. The government announced a package of modest social security reforms, and quickly faced new protests on the streets. The same tactics were deployed, this time with much greater success. Violence by protesters on April 19 (a police officer, a Sandinista supporter and a bystander were shot) brought inevitable attempts by the police to control the protests, leading to rapid escalation. Media messages proliferated about students being killed, many of them false. Only a few days later the government cancelled the social security reforms, but by now the protests had (as planned) moved on to demanding the government’s resignation. The full story of events in April-July 2018, and how the government eventually prevailed, is told in Live from Nicaragua: Uprising or Coup?
A section of the report
Laying the groundwork for insurrection
How were the conditions for a coup created? The aims of US government funding in Nicaragua and the tactics they paid for in this period were made surprisingly clear in the online magazine Global Americans in 2018, which is partly funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).[4] Arguing (in May 2018, at the height of the violence) that “Nicaragua is on the brink of a civic insurrection,” the author Ben Waddell, who was in Nicaragua at the time, pointed out that “US support has helped play a role in nurturing the current uprisings.”
His article’s title, Laying the groundwork for insurrection,[5] was starkly accurate in describing the ambitions behind the NED’s funding program, which had financed 54 projects in Nicaragua over the period 2014-17 and has continued to do so since then. What did the projects do? Like the recently leaked document, NED promotes ostensibly innocuous or even apparently beneficial activities like strengthening civil society, promoting democratic values, finding “a new generation of democratic youth leaders” and identifying “advocacy opportunities.” To get behind the jargon and clarify the NED’s role, Waddell quotes the New York Times (referring to the uprisings in Egypt, where NED had also been active):[6]
“… the United States’ democracy-building campaigns played a bigger role in fomenting protests than was previously known, with key leaders of the movements having been trained by the Americans in campaigning, organizing through new media tools and monitoring elections.”
In the case of Nicaragua, the NED’s funding of groups opposed to the Sandinista government began in 1984, giving the lie to their aim being to “promote democracy” since that was the year in which Nicaragua’s revolutionary government held the country’s first-ever democratic elections. Waddell makes it clear that the NED’s efforts continued, years later:
“… it is now quite evident that the U.S. government actively helped build the political space and capacity in Nicaraguan society for the social uprising that is currently unfolding.”
The NED is not the only non-covert source of US funding. Another is USAID, which describes its role in the 2018 uprising in similar terms to the NED. Not long before he exposed the new document, William Grigsby was able to publish lists of groups and projects in Nicaragua funded by USAID and by the National Democratic Institute (NDI).[7] He showed that upwards of $30 million was being distributed to a wide range of groups opposed to the government and involved in the violence of 2018, and that in the case of the NDI at least this funding continued into 2020.
Last year, Yorlis Gabriela Luna recounted for COHA her own experiences of how US-funded groups trained young people, in particular, and influenced their political beliefs in the build-up to 2018.[8] She explained how social networks and media outlets were “capable of fooling a significant portion of Nicaragua’s youth and general population.” She explained how the groups used scholarships to learn English, diploma programs, graduate studies, and courses with enticing names like “democratic values, social media activism, human rights and accountability” at private universities, “to attract and lure young people.” She went on to explain how exciting events were organised in expensive hotels or even involving trips abroad, so that young people who had never before been privileged in these ways developed a sense of “pride,” belonging, and “group identity,” and as a result “wound up aligning themselves with the foreign interests” of those who funded the courses and activities.
The new task during and after the pandemic
Two years after the failed coup attempt, what are the organizations that receive US funding now supposed to do? The new document is full of jargon, requiring the contractor (for example) to engage in “targeted short-term technical and analytical activities during Nicaragua’s transition that require rapid response programming support until other funds, mechanisms, and actors can be mobilized.” The work also requires “longer-term programs, which will be determined as the crisis evolves.” Preparation is required for the possibility that “transition [to a new government] does not happen in an orderly and timely manner.” The contractor will have to prepare “a roster of subject matter experts in Nicaragua” to provide short term technical assistance, “regardless of the result of the 2021 election, even in the event of the Sandinistas ‘winning fairly’.” The document is full of requirements like being able to offer “a rapid response” and “seize new opportunities,” emphasizing the urgency of the task. In other words, a fresh attempt is underway to destabilize Daniel Ortega’s government and, in the event that this doesn’t work, and even should the Sandinistas win the next election fairly, as the document admits is a possibility, US attempts at regime change are stepping up a gear.
Who will carry this out? The document places much emphasis on “maintaining” and “strengthening” civil society and improving its leadership, which appears to refer to the numerous NGOs, think tanks and “human rights” bodies which receive US funding. At one point the document asks “what should donor coordination, the opposition, civil society, and media focus on?” – clearly implying that the contractor has a role in influencing not just these civil society groups but also the media and political parties.
Not surprisingly, the document has been interpreted as a new plan to destabilize the country. Writing in La Primerísima, Wiston López argues that the plan’s purpose is “to create the conditions for a coup d’état in Nicaragua.”[9] Brian Wilson, the VietNam veteran severely injured in the 1980s when attempting to stop a freight train carrying supplies to the “Contra,” and who lives in Nicaragua, concludes that the US now realizes that Ortega will win the coming election.[10] In response, the “US has launched a brazen, criminal and arrogant plan to overthrow Nicaragua’s government.”
Supposing that there is a clear Sandinista victory in 2021, will the US nevertheless refuse to accept the result? Having implied that the OAS had serious criticisms of the last election when this was not the case, the document implies that it will be pressured to take a different attitude next time, saying that “whether the OAS decides to pick up the pressure on electoral reform again will be an important international pressure point.” No doubt the US will try to insist that the OAS must be election observers, and if this is refused it will allow the legitimacy of the election to be called into question, if the result is unfavorable to US interests. Many question whether the OAS is even qualified to have an observer role any longer, however, after the serious harm it did to Bolivian democracy in 2019 by casting doubts on what experts considered a fair election and, in effect, instigating a coup.[11] This document creates legitimate concern that the US government would like to use the OAS to prevent another government that is not to its liking from winning an election, as it did so recently in Bolivia.
Not only must conditions be created to replace the current government, but once this is achieved the changes must extend to “rebuilding” the institutions of government, including the judicial system, police and armed forces. After the widespread persecution of government officials, state and municipal workers and Sandinista supporters that occurred in 2018, it is not surprising that this is interpreted as requiring a purge of all the institutions and personnel with Sandinista sympathies. As Wilson says, “the new government must immediately submit to the policies and guidelines established by the United States, including persecution of Sandinistas, dissolving the National Police and the Army, among other institutions.”
USAID makes it clear that it is internal pressure in Nicaragua that might eventually provoke a coup d’état, so it calls on its agents to deepen the political, economic and also the health crisis, taking into account the context of COVID-19. The US State Department recently awarded an extra $750,000 to Nicaraguan non-government bodies as part of its global response to COVID-19, and this includes “support for targeted communication and community engagement activities.”[12] As López points out in Popular Resistance, “Since March the US-directed opposition has focused 95% of their actions on attempting to discredit Nicaragua’s prevention, contention, and Covid treatment. However, this only had some success in the international media and is now backfiring since Nicaragua is the country with one of the lowest mortality rates in the continent.”[13] The Johns Hopkins University’s world map of coronavirus cases currently shows Nicaragua with 3,672 cases compared with 17,448 in El Salvador, 42,685 in Honduras and 51,306 in Guatemala.[14] Even though higher figures produced by Nicaragua’s so-called Citizens’ Observatory[15] are regularly cited in the international media, they currently show just 9,044 “suspected” cases, still far below the numbers in the “Northern triangle” countries.
What will the opposition do next?
COHA has already documented the disinformation campaign taking place against Nicaragua during the pandemic and how this has been repeated in the international media. So far, however, warnings of the health system’s collapse have proved to be unfounded.[16] If, as happened with the Indio Maíz fire and the social security protests in 2018, the opposition fails in its attempt to use the pandemic to destabilize the Ortega government, what will it do next? A recent incident shows that attempts to seize on events to spur a crisis will continue. On July 31, a fire occurred in Managua’s cathedral. The fire department responded quickly and put out the blaze within ten minutes, but a crucifix and the chapel where it stood were badly damaged. Within minutes opposition newspaper La Prensa reported that “an attack” had occurred involving a “Molotov cocktail” and that the government or its supporters were implicated.[17] This was echoed by other local and international media, opposition parties, the Archbishop of Managua, and by one of the NGOs which received USAID funding.[18] Despite the lack of any evidence to back up the media stories, the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights (UNHCR) also condemned the incident, obviously implying that it was an attack on human rights.[19]
Yet a police investigation quickly established that there was no evidence at all of any foul play, or that petrol or explosive materials were involved.[20] Their investigations pointed instead to a tragic accident involving lighted candles and the alcohol spray being used as a disinfectant as part of the cathedral’s anti-COVID-19 precautions. The Catholic Church has already announced that the damaged chapel will be restored to its former state. However, the damage that has been done to the government’s national and international reputation, and to its highly politicized relationship with the Catholic Church, will be more difficult to repair.
John Perry is a writer based in Nicaragua.
End notes
[1] Downloadable in English (pdf) at https://s3.amazonaws.com/rlp680/files/uploads/2020/07/31/aid-mayo-2020-ingles.pdf
[2] “EEUU lanza descarado plan intervencionista para tumbar al FSLN”, https://www.radiolaprimerisima.com/noticias/general/287264/eeuu-lanza-descarado-plan-intervencionista-A histotrypara-tumbar-al-fsln/
[3] “International Forces ‘Distorting’ Nicaragua’s Indio Maíz Fire,” https://www.telesurenglish.net/analysis/International-Forces-Distorting-Nicaraguas-Indio-Maiz-Fire-20180414-0019.html
[4] See details at https://www.ned.org/wp-content/themes/ned/search/grant-search.php (NED is nominally independent of the US administration, but is funded by Congress.)
[5] “Laying the groundwork for insurrection: A closer look at the U.S. role in Nicaragua’s social unrest,” https://theglobalamericans.org/2018/05/laying-groundwork-insurrection-closer-look-u-s-role-nicaraguas-social-unrest/
[6] “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/world/15aid.html
[7] “Asi financia EEUU a los terroristas,” http://www.radiolaprimerisima.com/noticias/general/286068/asi-financia-eeuu-a-los-terroristas/
[8] “The Other Nicaragua, Empire and Resistance,” https://www.coha.org/the-other-nicaragua-empire-and-resistance/
[9] “EEUU lanza descarado plan intervencionista para tumbar al FSLN,” http://www.radiolaprimerisima.com/noticias/general/287264/eeuu-lanza-descarado-plan-intervencionista-para-tumbar-al-fsln/
[10] “NIcaragua targeted for US overthrow in 2020-21,” https://popularresistance.org/nicaragua-targeted-for-us-overthrow-in-2020-21/
[11] “Bolivia’s Struggle to Restore Democracy after OAS Instigated Coup,” https://www.coha.org/bolivias-struggle-to-restore-democracy-after-oas-instigated-coup/
[12] See https://www.state.gov/update-the-united-states-continues-to-lead-the-global-response-to-covid-19/
[13] “US Launches Brazen Interventionist Plan to Overthrow the FSLN,” https://popularresistance.org/us-launches-brazen-interventionist-plan-to-overthrow-the-fsln/
[14] See https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
[15] See https://observatorioni.org/
[16] “Experts Warn about Possible Health System Collapse in Nicaragua,” https://www.voanews.com/episode/experts-warn-about-possible-health-system-collapse-nicaragua-4320606
[17] See https://www.laprensa.com.ni/2020/07/31/nacionales/2702954-lanzan-bomba-molotov-adentro-de-la-capilla-de-la-catedral
[18] See for example https://confidencial.com.ni/atentado-con-bomba-molotov-en-la-catedral-de-managua/ and https://elpais.com/internacional/2020-07-31/un-atentado-con-bomba-molotov-incendia-la-capilla-de-la-catedral-metropolitana-de-managua.html
[19] See https://twitter.com/OACNUDH/status/1289574031159488514?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1289574031159488514%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.laprensa.com.ni%2F2020%2F08%2F01%2Fnacionales%2F2703388-organismos-de-derechos-humanos-condenan-ataque-a-la-catedral-de-managua
[20] “Esclarecimiento de incendio en Capilla de la Sangre de Cristo, Catedral de Managua”, https://www.el19digital.com/articulos/ver/titulo:105922-esclarecimiento-de-incendio-en-capilla-de-la-sangre-de-cristo-catedral-de-managua-presentacion
‘All the Evidence’ Suggests Guccifer 2.0 is Linked to CIA, Not Russia, NSA Whistleblower Says
© Photo : Bill Binney
Sputnik | August 13, 2020
The internet is not capable of accommodating the download speeds necessary to validate the claims by Guccifer 2.0, that they hacked documents from across the Atlantic, according to a former technical director at the National Security Agency.
Guccifer 2.0, the cyber personality which claimed to have hacked documents belonging to members of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, is likely to be a front for the CIA, according to analysis conducted by members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Bill Binney, a cryptogropher and former technical director at the US National Security Agency (NSA), blew the whistle on the agency’s mass surveillance programmes after serving with them for 30 years. Mr Binney explains to Sputnik that despite Guccifer 2.0 claiming to have hacked documents which the cyber criminal later published, the download speeds necessary to have obtained the documents simply are not available across the World Wide Web.
Sputnik: What were the conclusions that you came to regarding a cyber personality known as Guccifer 2.0 and his claims that he had hacked a trove of documents?
Bill Binney: Guccifer 2.0, posted files from the 5th of July [2016], the 1st of September [2016] in batch mode. He also put files out in the 15th of June that had Russian fingerprints. So to go straight at those, we had some collaborating analysts looking in the UK, looking at the data also. And they came up with a match of five files out of the Guccifer 2.0 batch on the 15th of June, they found five of those files also posted by Wikileaks in the Podesta emails, the same files. Now, the difference is the Guccifer 2.0 posts had Russian fingerprints. You know, Cyrillic characters and things like that implanted in the file. The WikiLeaks files posted, of those same five emails, did not have Russian signature prints in it. So that told us that Guccifer 2.0 was inserting these Russian fingerprints. And we had some other fingerprint evidence of them using that.
Then, when we looked at the 5th of July 2016 and the September 2016 data that was posted by Guccifer 2.0, he would give a bio, we had extracted file names, number of characters and the timestamp at the end of the file. And he did the batch. So there was one file after the other. It was timestamped at the end of each file. So all we had to do was [assess the] difference in time between the files and see how many characters were passed and we calculate the transfer rate. And when we did that we got rates between 14 and 49.1 megabytes per second. That’s between 19 and 49.1 million characters per second. And we knew that the international web across the Atlantic to Europe, somewhere in Eastern Europe could not handle that kind of rate transfer.
Some people here thought we could. So we said, okay, we’ll try it. And we tried it from Albania, Serbia, Netherlands and the UK. The fastest we got with between two data centres, one in New Jersey and one in the United Kingdom in London. And that was 12 megabytes per second, which is slightly less than one fourth necessary capacity to transfer just the data, not counting overhead that goes with it and all of that… So all of that said to us, it was not there.
Sputnik: Was there anything else?
Bill Binney: There was another factor. We looked at the files again and if you ignored the date and the hour, the two [batches] shuffled together like a deck of cards. That is the times, [if you] looked only at a minutes, seconds and milliseconds, the data from the 1st of September merged into the time holes of the 5 July data. Which meant it was shuffling like one of cards. You have one file, he separated in two, then they had a range change on the date and the hour. You can’t do it on minutes and seconds because they keep changing. I mean, you’d have to go up there every minute and every second you got to know it’s not possible to do that, without extreme effort I’d say. What that said to us was this guy is fabricating the data, he’s playing with the data, he’s playing with us…
Vault 7
Then we went back and looked at the Vault 7 material (descriptions of CIA hacking tools published by WikiLeaks), which said that there’s a programme called Marble Framework, which [the CIA can use to] modify an attack and make it look like someone else did the attack, and the countries they had the capability to do that [to] were Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Arab countries. Also [Vault 7] said that the Marble Framework programme was [used] one time in 2016. Well, we think we found that one time. That one time came up and that fit very well with what was going on which we were finding out with the Guccifer 2.0 material. He was fabricating it. So that suggested us all the evidence was pointing back to CIA as the originator Guccifer 2.0. And that Guccifer 2.0 was inside CIA.
Sputnik: Just to clarify, the documents Guccifer 2.0 was publishing weren’t what is known as the DNC leaks or DNC hacks that WikiLeaks published in three batches?
Bill Binney: [Yes]. [Gucifer 2.0] claimed to have hacked [the documents he published].
The Hammer
There’s another whistleblower that we’re working with also and they’ve talked to us about a programme called The Hammer. This programme was set up inside CIA by, according to the whistleblower, by [former Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper and [former CIA chief John] Brennan. And it was done so that they could spy on anybody they wanted to, without anybody in the intelligence community or the US government or any other government knowing they were doing it. The programme actually goes… back to 2003, I believe, with you when they first set it up. But [the whistleblower] also said that after that they had a secret operation inside CIA, by this group of people inside CIA looking at the Trump campaign and anybody else they wanted to sign on.
And it was done in that way, because, see, if you go into the NSA data and which the Five Eyes can do that as well, if you do that, anybody going in there, you’re tracked and recorded [when you use the surveillance system]. It’s wherever you go and what you do. And that’s based on the network logs. And also if you do an unmasking, you have to make a request and that’s recorded, who did it, what time, what the subject was and what the justification was and what person they were after. So, you know, all that stuff is recorded to go there. But if you set up your own separate one, nobody knows what you’re doing. And that’s exactly what this [whistleblower] is claiming. I’m pointing to that group as the group that was probably the originator of Guccifer 2.0 and also this fabrication of the entire story of Russiagate.
This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
Trust the experts and take your pills, citizen! Meet the nerd who wants to force-feed you ‘morality pills’ to beat Covid
By Graham Dockery | RT | August 13, 2020
Swallowing mind-bending pills until you love your government and obey its orders might sound like science fiction. But there are scientists out there who want you to shut up and take your morality pills – by force if necessary.
People, or at least those with a spark of vitality and life in them, don’t like following orders. Months into the coronavirus pandemic, leaders have tried to enforce mandatory social distancing and mask wearing through a mixture of fines, snitching and public shaming. Still, some people refuse to toe the line, from lockdown protesters in the US to cheeky Brits sneaking off for an unlicensed picnic.
The scientific experts, however, have a solution for that. Take Parker Crutchfield, a professor of medical ethics. According to a recent op-ed, he thinks that the ‘ethical’ solution to this rule breaking is to drug the population into compliance, using psychoactive drugs to “induce those who are noncooperative to get on board with doing what’s best for the public good.”
That’s right. A top-of-his-field ethicist at Western Michigan University wants to drug you into cooperation. Should you refuse, he thinks the government should force this “morality booster” on everyone, either by military power, or by administering it in secret, “perhaps via the water supply.”
Crutchfield’s article was retweeted – and later deleted – by the prestigious Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. However, he isn’t the only labcoat who dreams of drugging the proletariat. Late last month, a group of Cambridge academics suggested adding lithium to drinking water to lower suicide rates and mood disorders. Just like Crutchfield, they see this tyranny as serving the greater good.
Strongmen and dictators are reliable bogeymen in the West. After all, the entire origin story of Western liberalism centers around the struggle of the free world against the fascist axis. However, the tyranny of the nerd more often than not goes unnoticed. In some ways, it’s more terrifying than the tyranny of the dictator. When the despot forces you to obey his diktats at gunpoint, the power dynamic is clear. He’s in control. When the bespectacled professor slips morality pills into your water, you won’t even know you’re being dominated.
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve repeatedly heard the same refrains from our leaders. “Trust the experts,” they say. “Believe the science.” But scientists – who worship amoral empiricism above all else – see you as little more than a laboratory mouse, an imperfect specimen to be tweaked and molded until the desired result is achieved.
Perhaps that’s why these “experts” are so beloved by liberals. Jean- Jacques Rousseau considered man a “perfectible” creature, a view that would be refined in the 20th century by GWF Hegel, Karl Marx and Leo Strauss, and now underpins most left-wing thought. While religion saw man as trapped in a state of original sin, these leftists saw him as having boundless potential – if only the right scientific tools were used to shape him.
Changing behavior through science is the perfect method for modern liberalism to crush dissent. Doing so by force would invalidate its core tenet: it’s supposed respect for your human rights. Instead, its scientists dream up ways to silence malcontents quietly and peacefully.
Every now and then, an article like Crutchfield’s gives us a glimpse behind the mask.
Chemically rewiring the brains of the population seems far-fetched, but it’s a logical next step when one considers the social engineering projects foisted on the masses at present. From the endless tirades against masculinity, Christianity and the nuclear family one reads in liberal newspapers, to the bizarre push to convert the Western world to an insect-based diet, academics and their enablers in the media and government want to change your life – usually for the worse.
The latest racial conflagration tearing apart the USA has only served to give them a new angle of attack, with corporate bosses now subjecting white employees to mandatory brainwashing sessions in the name of stamping out their “whiteness.”
As easy as the transition to mass drugging would be, Crutchfield’s dream is unlikely to come true any time soon. The managers and bureaucrats who hold the levers of power lack the skill to pull off such a coup. However, remember that behind their university credentials and scientific clout lurk experts salivating at the prospect of turning you into a lab rat, and that the prototypical nerd can harbor a lust for power to rival even the most demented dictator.
Graham Dockery is an Irish journalist, commentator, and writer at RT. Previously based in Amsterdam, he wrote for DutchNews and a scatter of local and national newspapers.
‘No change’ of West Bank annexation plans after Israel-UAE deal, Netanyahu says
RT | August 13, 2020
Israel is still committed to annexing parts of the occupied West Bank, PM Benjamin Netanyahu said, after a peace deal with the UAE was reached. As part of the deal, Tel Aviv agreed to suspend the annexation.
The revelation was made by Netanyahu in a televised speech on Thursday.
“There is no change in my plans to apply sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, with full coordination with the US,” Netanyahu said, referring to parts of the West Bank region by their biblical names.
The remark came shortly after the peace deal between the United Arab Emirates and Israel was unveiled. Among other things, it contains a provision that Tel Aviv agrees to ‘suspend’ its annexation plans.
Netanyahu did not give any timeframe for when exactly his land-grabbing plans will go through, but apparently sought to reassure his hardline supporters, disappointed by the sudden U-turn on the annexation issue.
The Israel-UAE deal was first announced by US President Donald Trump on Twitter earlier in the day. Trump called the agreement a “HUGE breakthrough” and labeled the whole deal a “historic” achievement.
Most of the Arab world does not officially recognize the Jewish state, but countries like Saudi Arabia have enjoyed quite cozy relations with Tel Aviv for years.
Prince Peter Kropotkin and the Murder of the Liberator Tsar
By Martin Sieff | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 11, 2020
Why did London host a convention of anarchists in July 1881 less than three months after they had murdered the Liberator Tsar of Russia?
The International Anarchist Congress of London, from July 14 to July 20, 1881 was highly unusual in many ways, though it has almost totally been forgotten by history, save as a curiosity.
It was the last such gathering to be held for more than a quarter of a century until the International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam in August 1907. During that time, there were four other unsuccessful attempts to call international congresses, in Geneva in 1882, in Paris in 1889, in Chicago in 1890 and once again in Paris in 1900.
Those interested in the procedural minutiae of the congress can easily enough find obscure academic articles discussing theoretical intellectual positions held and debated at the Congress.
But as far as I have been able to find, no historians have given any serious study to the possibility that the Congress may have been used to coordinate or plan any program of “Propaganda of the Deed” – the assassination of important political leaders across Europe and the Americas, which was central to the achievement of the anarcho-syndicalist movement’s goals.
Nor is there any discussion anywhere – save in terms of abstruse and apparently harmless political theory – of the role that former Prince Peter Kropotkin, the most consistently high-profile and charismatic leader of the anarchist movement played in the convention.
Most striking of all, there appears never to have been any serious investigation conducted as to why the British government permitted its capital London, to be the host of the conference that on the surface stood for the destruction of everything that the British Empire, its traditions and institutions held dear.
The decision to permit the 1881 congress to gather in London was particularly striking – and from the Russian government’s point of view outrageous – because it opened only four months almost to the day after Tsar Alexander II, the Great Liberator who freed 24 million serfs from slavery and supported Abraham Lincoln and the Union through the U.S. Civil War, was assassinated by a specially designed shrapnel grenade thrown by Ignacy Hryniewiecki on Sunday, March 13, 1881.
That hideous crime was planned and committed by the Narodnaya Volya, “The People’s Will” itself a strange, tiny, conspiratorial group shrouded in mystery and unanswered questions to this day.
The name of the group suggests – as it was meant to – a mass popular movement, But the Narodnaya Volya was no such thing. The best estimates of Russian and Western historians alike put it at no more than 200 members. Almost none of these were from peasant backgrounds. They were almost all from favored, prosperous, professional middle class families and in some cases even from aristocratic backgrounds.
Interestingly, the followers of the late Osama Bin Laden in the first generation of al-Qaeda that carried out the destruction of the World Trade Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001 exhibit an almost identical set of profiles, as former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Feisal bin Abdelaziz ibn Saud has pointed out.
The Narodnaya Volya was only founded in 1879. But it was totally crushed by 1884. Yet in the first two years of its existence, it operated with apparent impunity carrying out no less than eight attempts on the life of Tsar Alexander. No other tsar in Russian history including Alexander’s son and grandson after him was ever hunted so mercilessly and relentlessly by assassins.
The Narodnaya Volya never lacked for any of the financing it needed for its murderous schemes. The Russian internal security services, who proved extremely efficient and energetic in smashing the group after it carried out its bloody deed, seemed utterly helpless and inept against it until that point. This may in large part have been because the group was so tiny and so novel in its operational techniques.
Who led the Narodnaya Volya? Its documented leaders were Andrey Zhelyabov and Sofya Perovskaya. Perovskaya came from an aristocratic background but showed little capability beyond her own murderously intense fanaticism and strange obsession with murdering the tsar. Other members of the group when arrested openly commented on her merciless hatred for the ruler who had liberated the serfs.
But Perovskaya from 1872 was personally very closely associated with the then handsome, dashing and charismatic anarchist leader Prince Peter Kropotkin. It is likely they were lovers.
The carefully (British) constructed image of Kropotkin that endures to this day is a tubby, kindly, smiling old, bearded Father Christmas. In his youth, however, he was darkly satanically handsome and was obsessed with Goethe’s devil figure Mephistopheles in “Faust.”
For Perovskaya, Kropotkin would have been the dashing, aristocratic brilliant love of her life. For Kropotkin, the rather plain Perovskaya would have been a means to an end: The hunting and murder of the tsar.
Kropotkin came from one of the most aristocratic eminent families in Russia. He claimed descent from the House of Rurik, the original ruling family of Russia. He had actually been a personal page of Tsar Alexander II in his early years in power. He had been brutally bullied (or so he later claimed) when entering the Imperial corps of pages. For ever after, he maintained an intense personal hatred of the tsar, intensified by the years he spent as a prisoner for his subversive activities in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg starting in 1872. His escape was engineered by friends in 1876.
Kropotkin’s relationship with Perovskaya starting in 1872 in the Tchaikovsky (not the great musical composer) Circle is the key documented fact that links Kropotkin directly to the murder of the great tsar he so intensely personally hated. The group’s leader Nikolai Tchaikovsky, like Kropotkin found protection in Britain for most of his later life.
Kropotkin was a noted scientist in his day who contested Darwin and argued a version of evolution based on natural cooperation rather than natural selection. In fact it was superficial and crackpot but interestingly has recently been revived, along with his scientific reputation in British academic circles.
During the remainder of his own long life (he died in 1921 at the age of 79), Kropotkin was allowed to live in complete peace and security in Britain. Not coincidentally, Britain was the only major country in Europe not to suffer from the mysterious outbreak of assassinations that swept the continent and even the United States in the last quarter of the 19th century.
As Matthew Ehret has noted, the anarchist assassinations seemed to disproportionately target major leaders who rejected free trade and a global economic order dictated by British financial interests from the City of London. Its victims included U.S. presidents James Garfield (1881) and William McKinley (1901), French President Sadi Carnot (1894), Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Canovas (1897) and King Umberto I of Italy (1900).
In addition, in 1878 alone, anarchists attempted to kill Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany twice as well as the Kings of Spain and Italy. Kropotkin hailed all these efforts at “the Propaganda of the Deed.” Not coincidentally, all of these leaders, especially the old Kaiser, Bismarck’s patron and protector stood like Tsar Alexander II squarely opposed to British efforts at global financial domination.
Yet despite all these outrages – or more likely because of them – Kropotkin, the guiding figure of anarcho-syndicalism and the great champion of the murder of national leaders continued to enjoy a charmed life protected by the British Empire.
To this day, British historians and other writers have unanimously continued to swallow the approved line that Kropotkin was a kindly, brilliant, pacifist saint – belonging to the company of Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King rather than that of Sergei Nechayev and Dostoyevsky’s “Devils.”
The hyper-energetic, much loved and woefully idiotic American popular historian Barbara Tuchman spread this Disneyworld fairy tale image of Kropotkin in her enormously popular and influential history of the pre-World War I world “The Proud Tower” in 1966. Typically, she won the Pulitzer Prize twice for writing other histories that got their central facts and theses wrong.
A serious study of the role of Kropotkin and his “Anarchist International” in the assassinations of the late 19th century is well over 100 years overdue.
But even in that age of carefully selected and discriminating terror, the hunting and murder of the great liberator Tsar Alexander stands out for its relentless nature and obsessive cruelty.
That age of assassinations and the Anarchists Congress that the British so incongruously hosted in July 1881 is not just a matter of abstract curiosity about a long forgotten and irrelevant past. It offers disquieting parallels to the use of targeted assassinations and the methodical destabilization of great nations in the name of free trade, democracy and human rights that continues at a feverish pace in our own time.
As the great American novelist William Faulkner rightly wrote in “Requiem for a Nun,” “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
‘We Have Absolute Proof’ DNC Leaks Were Not Hacked, NSA Whistleblower Says
Sputnik – 12.08.2020
Because the National Security Agency is tapped into data transfer points throughout the United States, via its mass surveillance programmes, if there was any evidence that the DNC servers were hacked then they would have the evidence to prove it, a former technical director at the agency explains.
Documents published by WikiLeaks that belonged to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) could not have been hacked via the internet and must have been initially downloaded from within the US, according to an investigation by members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Bill Binney, a cryptogropher and former technical director at the US National Security Agency (NSA), blew the whistle on the agency’s mass surveillance programmes after serving with them for 30 years. Mr Binney detailed for Sputnik why the forensic evidence proves that key claims of Russiagate (regarding Russian officials hacking the DNC servers) are a “farce”.
© Photo : Bill Binney
Sputnik: A recent investigation by you and some of your colleagues at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity determined that the Democratic National Committee documents published by WikiLeaks in 2016 could not have been hacked by actors outside the US and instead had to have been downloaded onto a USB or CD-ROM.
Bill Binney: Yes, that’s right. And we have forensic evidence to prove it.
Sputnik: Could you please break down, for the average layperson, exactly how you came to this conclusion?
Bill Binney: Well, we did it by looking at the published DNC emails by WikiLeaks. In other words, the original assertion was that the DNC data was hacked externally, from Russia or by the Russians in Europe or something, and then transferred to WikiLeaks to publish so they could influence the election.
We looked at the DNC emails that were documented by WikiLeaks on the web. And that came down in three groups. One came down on 23rd of May 2016 and the other 25th of May 2016 and then one on the 26th of August of 2016. All of those three batches of emails had last modified times ending in an even number and even second, rounding up to the second, not including milliseconds. So, that meant to us that that was the property of the FAT (file allocation table) format. It’s a programme that when you read data to a thumb drive or CD ROM, and the programme indexes stuff on the [CD] and the thumb drive, for example, it then also rounds off the last modified time to an even number. That tells us very simply that there is 35,813 emails, all with the same property FAT file formatting saying that hey this was read [ie downloaded] to a thumb drive or a CD ROM before WikiLeaks got it to publish. Which meant it was physically transported to WikiLeaks. So, for us, that meant it was not a hack. Period.
We also had [CEO of cyber security firm Crowdstrike] Shawn Henry give testimony, I think it was the 7th of January of 2017, the secret testimony that just came out, where he said ‘we had indications that the data was exfiltrated, but we didn’t see the data exfiltrated’. Well, the indications that it was [exfiltrated], is this a FAT file format, to my mind. I mean, Shawn Henry never said specifically why his people were saying that. So for us, the only thing he could be [basing] it on what was last modified time.
Sputnik: So, just to be clear, when information is downloaded onto a CD roam or thumb drive, you’re saying that there’s a particular process, which means that, the last modified time will be recorded in such a way onto those files that is different than if those files were hacked and taken from a server across international boundaries or across a very long distance.
Bill Binney: Right. And we had provided all this data to the courts. Also we’ve included the Podesta emails, which show how a hack could occur and what the last modified times looked like. And that’s a, that’s also published by WikiLeaks, I think on the 21st of September [2016], that’s the date for that, that they put it out there. And the modified times of those files… close to 10,000 of them I think, run through even and odd numbers and various times, including milliseconds, things of that nature. So all that stuff, all that data, we provided to several courts, and several sets of lawyers to introduce as evidence in court and we were prepared to testify to that in court.
Sputnik: And is it not possible for the last modified time to be changed somehow or modified itself?
Bill Binney: Sure, but I don’t know of a programme that does, other than FAT, I mean, keeping in mind, you’re talking about 35,813 files. If you want to change them, you can go in and do them individually one at a time. I don’t know of any other programme that does it automatically, which is what what’s happened here, because it’s just a straightforward consistency. Humans make errors. If they go in and do something like that, they’ll make errors somewhere in the files. We didn’t see any errors at all. So that’s a program doing [it].
Sputnik: How many people from VIPs would you say were involved in this investigation that you conducted?
Bill Binney: Probably about six and a couple of auxiliaries, as we call them, in the UK cooperating with us. And we had a couple other people from outside VIPS helping us because they were also interested in getting to it too. Also, people who retired from commercial companies, running fiber lines and things like that.
Sputnik: If you were still working at the NSA and you were tasked to investigate an alleged hack would you have additional technical resources if you worked for the government, then if you’re doing it independently?
Bill Binney: Yeah, absolutely. This is one of the reasons why I started in August of 2016 saying that this entire Russiagate story was a farce. And that basically came out by knowing the capacity of NSA. The capabilities of them being able to capture stuff on the web. I mean, [the NSA] have over almost a hundred tap points inside the United States, all loaded up with fiber optic lines… You know, it can take everything off those lines and capture it. [A]nd that was true across the US as well as all the external points exiting and entering where you exit and enter the US.
And you’ll notice that NSA never said they saw any of the data transferring anywhere on any line. And that’s because it didn’t, it went on a thumb drive, you know, that’s the difference. That was one of the main reasons I said that this was not a hack. Because if it was NSA would have it. Like they did when the Chinese hacked one of the places over here in the US about six years ago. The government said, the hack came from this building in Shanghai.
Sputnik: And is there any kind of a practical or legal consideration as to why the NSA can’t publish its findings regarding the DNC servers?
Bill Binney: Actually, there isn’t, if the president approves, I mean, he can declassify anything he wants.
Sputnik: So where do you go from here? Is there more to investigate in relation to this subject or is this the end of the matter for you?
Bill Binney: As far as I’m concerned, we have absolute proof that this whole thing […] Russiagate, is a fabrication. It was a fabrication of the FBI, CIA and the DOJ primarily, but also included the State Department and [Department for Homeland Security] and a number of other departments.
Sputnik: There are those that argue Julian Assange will have a fair trial in the US should he be extradited. What can you tell us about the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, where Mr Assange would be tried?
Bill Binney: That’s a court that’s pro CIA because it’s in that jurisdiction of CIA. This is why they picked that court because it’s pro CIA and whatever national security issues come up, they will always go with that national security. So, you have a prejudiced judge in a court to begin with.
Sputnik: Would there be a jury with 12 men and women?
Bill Binney: Pulled from the area and most of them work for the government. So, you know, you just look at it. I mean, that should be a disqualifier as a jury from my point of view. But also think of it this way: Julian Assange published data he was given. So has the New York Times, The Guardian, all the major publications, the Washington Post, they’ve all done that. So why aren’t they being charged also?
Sputnik: Well, the US government is claiming that the first amendment does not apply to foreign journalists.
Bill Binney: Well then why don’t they go after The Guardian ?
Sputnik: Maybe they’re next?
Bill Binney: [I]f you accept their premise – of the US government – that means that any journalist anywhere in the world, publishing any article that exposes crimes by the US government, the US government can charge them with conspiracy to violate national security. So, every reporter in the world is now liable based on that [premise].
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity
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World War II Didn’t End The Great Depression
Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey | April 4, 2024
A principal goal of Stark Realities is to “expose fundamental myths across the political spectrum” — and few myths are as universally embraced as the notion that US participation in World War II (1941-1945) lifted the American economy out of the Great Depression.
This myth is dangerous not only because it leads citizens and politicians to see a bright side of war that doesn’t really exist, but also because it helps foster a belief that government spending is essential to countering economic downturns. That belief, in turn, has helped propel us to a point where the national debt now exceeds $34.6 trillion, with interest payments alone on pace to reach $1 trillion a year in 2026, inviting financial catastrophe. … continue
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