Government by billionaires? Cuomo names former Google CEO to join Gates & Bloomberg in drafting post-pandemic ‘reforms’
RT | May 6, 2020
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has appointed ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt to lead a panel on post-pandemic “reform” of health and education systems, despite criticism for taking other billionaires with conflicts of interest on board.
Schmidt will head a ‘Blue Ribbon Commission’ tasked with “reimagining” New York’s existing systems of healthcare and education, Cuomo announced on Wednesday during his daily coronavirus briefing. The decision to place such power in the hands of another unelected billionaire has riled critics already uneasy about the governor’s post-Covid-19 plans.
The panel’s initial priorities will be “tele-health, remote learning and broadband,” Schmidt announced, dropping into Cuomo’s broadcast. The former Google exec still receives a paycheck from parent company Alphabet in an advisory capacity, raising questions of conflict of interest given Google’s leading role in developing a digital contact-tracing platform for Covid-19. While Cuomo confirmed in the same presser that the state is partnering with former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg – another billionaire – in building a human contact-tracing network, any digital component will likely involve the participation of Google. At the same time, the tech giant’s insatiable hunger for health data, as evinced by initiatives like Project Nightingale and Google’s acquisition of Fitbit, is unlikely to sit well with New Yorkers concerned about the company’s privacy record.
Cuomo was previously deluged by criticism after announcing on Tuesday that he would place the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in charge of developing a “blueprint to reimagine education in the new normal,” praising former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates as a “visionary” and calling for state schools to be “revolutionized.” Public schooling groups slammed the billionaire, accusing him of promoting “one failed educational initiative after another, causing huge disaffection in districts throughout the state.”
The Gates Foundation poured nearly half a billion dollars of its own money into the notorious Common Core program, which while pitched as a way to improve floundering educational performance in mathematics has actually caused the US to drop even lower in international rankings since its nationwide implementation in 2013. After steering over $4 trillion of taxpayer dollars into the government-funded program, the Foundation tacitly admitted failure in 2016, acknowledging in a letter to donors that it had “underestimated the level of resources and support required for our public education systems to be well-equipped to implement [Common Core].”
Cuomo himself has landed in hot water in the past for his efforts to unilaterally refashion New York’s admittedly dilapidated public school system. In 2015, he was accused of “unconstitutional interference in education policy” by New York State Allies for Public Education, which highlighted his “cozy relationships” with charter school advocates and education technology businesses. One of those education technology businesses was Google. In 2014, Schmidt, then the company’s executive chairman, was appointed to a three-person commission to advise on a ‘Smart Schools’ bond issue, setting off alarm bells among consumer advocates who pointed out that Google would directly benefit from system-wide adoption of Google Apps and Chromebook laptops.
The New York governor’s history with his state’s healthcare system is equally checkered, marked by a long string of budget cuts, hospital consolidations, and layoffs, and his pledge to “revolutionize” the chronically strapped system has already gotten off on a bad foot. On Wednesday, Cuomo announced that out-of-state nurses who had come to New York to help out with the coronavirus epidemic would be required to pay state income tax on whatever compensation they had received, even if they were being paid by companies located in their home state.
Cuomo’s decision to appoint private equity bigwigs, including Bill Mulrow of Blackstone Group and Steven Cohen of MacAndrews & Forbes, to the economic advisory team charged with reopening New York has also come in for criticism, given that private equity firms often benefit from the same bankruptcies the state’s businesses are hoping to avoid.
New Bombshell Documents Raise the Question Why Obama Feared Michael Flynn So Much
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 07.05.2020
As a result of AG William Barr’s decision to review Michael Flynn’s case new bombshell documents were unearthed and unsealed on 29 April shedding light on a potential FBI plot against the general. The exposure has triggered new questions about the anti-Trump “spygate” effort by FBI and DOJ officials, says Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel.
The newly unveiled written notes openly ask whether the bureau’s goal was “to get” General Michael Flynn “to lie”, so that the FBI could “prosecute him or get him fired”. The files also indicate that the FBI’s operation Crossfire Razor targeting Flynn had found nothing implicating the general in the “collusion” with Russia and would have been closed if then-FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok not intervened to keep the case open.
On 24 January 2017, Strzok and FBI Special Agent Joe Pietka conducted an interview with Flynn, who at that time was Trump’s national security adviser, about his December phone talks with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The interview played out ugly as in February 2017 Flynn resigned while several months later he pleaded guilty to making “false statements” to FBI agents over his conversation with the ambassador.
Seeking Truth & Connecting the Dots
Having taken the job of Flynn’s defence lawyer in 2019, Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor, pushed for the revision of the case despite DOJ prosecutors considering the general’s sentencing a done deal. The lawyer argued more dots needed to be connected and requested all the material that could potentially vindicate her client.
Powell argued that the prosecutors intentionally hid the exculpatory information stressing that the purported egregious misconduct by the government would justify the dismissal of Flynn’s case by the court. For their part, Justice Department attorneys have repeatedly rebutted Powell’s requests as “irrelevant” and even dubbed the defence’s supposition that Flynn was targeted by the FBI as part of a broader plot against Trump a “conspiracy theory”.
Nevertheless, Flynn’s legal team managed to expose a set of inconsistencies in the bureau’s handling of the case including edits in the general’s FD-302s – forms used by FBI personnel to report or summarise the interviews that they conduct. The newly discovered documents apparently indicate that the bureau intentionally set a perjury trap for Flynn.
Following the disclosure the general’s defence ramped up calls to throw the case out.
”More concerning than the perjury trap is that the FBI launched an investigation into a person – Michael Flynn – rather than a crime, under President Obama’s watch, and that this evidently unlawful investigation continues to this day”, opines Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel.
He recollects that former President Barack Obama warned Trump against hiring Mike Flynn as his national security adviser.
“Why does Barack Obama fear Michael Flynn so much? Why do so many people still in the Trump administration obstruct the process of terminating the Flynn prosecution? Let us hope US Attorney John Durham asks and answers these questions”, the analyst notes referring to the special investigator appointed by AG William Barr to look into the origins of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane targeting Donald Trump’s aides over their alleged ties with Russian officials.
A year ago Barr clearly articulated his concern that the US intelligence community spied on the Trump campaign during the previous election cycle adding that “spying on a political campaign is a big deal”. The newly released documents appear to back Barr’s concerns, according to the analyst.
“I suspect Barr’s focus has much to do with these and looming revelations”, Ortel presumes. “But I question why Barr and the president have not yet replaced FBI Director Christopher Wray and all who had anything to do with the Flynn prosecution and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. The FBI has a stunning array of resources that should be trained on investigating crimes, rather than instigating potential crimes to exact political retribution”.
Trump ‘Should Consider Full Pardon’ of All Deep State Victims
One might hope that FBI agents involved in the alleged framing of General Flynn as well as their backers will be held responsible, according to Ortel.
“Across the political spectrum, most thoughtful people must demand full disclosure of the extent to which FBI and other ‘public servants’ crossed a key line to become political hit men and women”, he highlights. “The FBI is supposed to investigate objectively and apolitically, while the Department of Justice is supposed to uphold the law, neutrally”.
According to him, “under Robert Mueller, James Comey, and Christopher Wray at the FBI, and under Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch and Jeff Sessions at the Justice Department, corrupt political motives seem to have overwhelmed obligations to support and defend the US Constitution”.
In the aftermath of the recent disclosure Donald Trump suggested that the newly unveiled documents “essentially exonerated” Michael Flynn.
“They tormented him – dirty cops tormented Gen. Flynn”, Trump told reporters on 30 April. “If you look at those notes from yesterday, that was total exoneration”.
The president earlier signalled that he was “strongly considering pardoning” former national security adviser Michael Flynn. One might wonder whether it’s time for the president to pick up this option. According to Ortel, Trump “should consider full pardons for all targets of any Mueller instigated prosecutions as these seem to have started in the absence of solid predicates of criminal activity”.
As for Flynn, the analyst hopes that Barr “would direct prosecuting attorneys to cease their efforts, while referring any evidence of criminal behaviour by prosecutors in the Flynn case to new teams of prosecutors who then should seek indictments”. He believes that such a path might be deemed a form of exoneration.
“General Flynn and many others have suffered too much for too long”, Ortel says. “President Trump and Attorney General Barr must unequivocally prove that government employees will suffer grievous punishment when they subvert the rule of law to serve corrupt political masters”.
OPCW head FALSELY described Syria whistleblower inspectors to discredit them, new documents show
RT | May 6, 2020
New documents leaked from the global chemical watchdog show that two inspectors blowing the whistle about the 2018 Douma incident in Syria were right, and the director seeking to discredit them was wrong.
Two inspectors with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) have challenged the organization’s final report on the April 2018 incident, which they say was altered to dismiss their findings and validate after the fact the US, UK and French missile strikes against the government in Damascus.
OPCW Director General Fernando Arias responded earlier this year by describing them as “rogue” inspectors who weren’t even members of the mission. Documents obtained by investigative journalist Aaron Mate at Greyzone, however, show that Arias’ statements were false or misleading.
Arias claimed that South African inspector Ian Henderson was “not a member” of the fact-finding mission (FFM) dispatched to Douma, and that he had played a “minor supporting role.” However, the documents from April 2018 obtained by the Grayzone show that OPCW directors were “happy” to have Henderson lead the visits to the most important locations in Douma: the hospital and the sites of alleged chlorine cylinder impact, for instance.
Another document, described as a sensitive security-planning memorandum known as CONOPS, lists Henderson as part of the FFM under the section “Mission Personnel.”
Last, but not least, the “F038” memorandum to the Syrian government lists Henderson as “part of the team conducting the technical secretariat visits,” notifying Damascus of his role. Henderson has previously explained publicly that he was on a mission in Nepal, and was assigned to Douma immediately upon his return.
Moreover, another OPCW document shows that Henderson took over the OPCW Damascus command post on May 3, 2018 – two days after returning from Douma. This goes directly against Arias’ version of events, according to which Henderson was already in Damascus, happened to play a minor role in the Douma mission, and then went “rogue” to sabotage the organization for reasons unknown.
Henderson and another whistleblower inspector – who remains anonymous – have said for months that they had not gone rogue, but were sidelined by OPCW because they produced evidence suggesting the Douma incident had been staged by the Army of Islam militants who controlled the area at the time. The final OPCW report, they contend, was doctored to retroactively justify the US, UK and French missile strikes and enable them to blame Damascus.
The OPCW responded to their revelations by painting them as disgruntled employees who breached confidentiality and lacked expertise and access to all the evidence. Their own documents now clearly show those statements to be false.
Russia Probe Testimonies Reveal There Was No Collusion Between Moscow & Trump Campaign, Report Says
By Lilia Dergacheva – Sputnik – May 7, 2020
As part of an earlier declared bipartisan effort to approve the public release of files pertaining to the Russia probe, Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell announced that 53 of them had been cleared to this end.
The due-to-be-released transcripts of House Intelligence Committee interviews feature top law enforcement and intelligence officials asserting they had no evidence of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia , senior administration and intelligence community officials told Fox News.
The findings are reportedly entirely in line with the results of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which found no evidence of illegal or criminal coordination between President Trump, his presidential campaign, and Russia in 2016. However, the interviews, which are eligible for release, cast a heavy doubt on committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s previous statements about “direct evidence” of close coordination.
“Schiff is in panic mode”, a senior administration official recounted to Fox News.
The 53 transcripts reportedly include interviews with Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s ex-campaign manager Steve Bannon, adviser Jared Kushner, Trump aide Hope Hicks, former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, and others.
“The transcripts show a total lack of evidence, despite Schiff personally going out saying he had more than circumstantial evidence that there was collusion”, one source involved in House Russia investigations told Fox News.
Only one of the 53 is said to have implied there is some evidence of alleged coordination.
Earlier this week, House Republicans combed through over 6,000 pages of transcripts pertaining to interviews conducted by the committee in 2017 and 2018, after the the partisan vote in September 2018 approved their public release.
Newly sworn-in Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell notified Schiff that the redaction and declassification process was complete, and that the records were ready for release, thereby implying that Schiff is welcome to act next. Grenell directed a letter to Schiff on 4 May reporting that the review of 43 of the 53 transcripts “was completed in June 2019″, and that the “interagency review of the remaining ten transcripts has been completed”. “Pursuant to your guidance, these transcripts have not been shared with the White House”, Grenell further pointed out.
Grenell went on to inform Schiff that he was “willing” to release the transcripts directly from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [ODNI] “as to ensure we comply with the unanimous and bipartisan vote to release the transcripts”. However, he didn’t specify when he would release the transcripts.
Intelligence officials told Fox News that Schiff had had his subcommittee staff director reaching out to intelligence community agencies asking how Grenell was involved and what role Grenell, who is known to be a Trump ally, could have played in the declassification and review he had reported on.
Fox News was told, however, that the review was completed before Grenell took the helm as acting director a little over two months ago, in February.
The process, according to an intelligence source, took place under both former directors Dan Coates and Joseph Maguire, and was conducted by career intelligence officials. The official also told Fox News that the relevant heads of appropriate agencies were consulted on the declassifications and redactions of all 53 transcripts.
Adam Schiff made headlines when he dramatically read into the congressional record some of the most explosive claims from Christopher Steele’s controversial dossier. His claims, in common with ones by the “former British intelligence officer who is reportedly held in high regard by US intelligence”, as Schiff put it, have since been directly contradicted by intelligence evidence in recently declassified and released FBI and Justice Department memos and reports.
Mueller, similarly, rounding off of his nearly two-year-long investigation, found insufficient evidence and produced no charges of criminal conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. At the same time, the Special Counsel’s team did not reach a conclusion on obstruction of justice, which current Attorney General Bill Barr ultimately decided not to pursue.
Google & Apple set some lucky programmers up for lucrative monopoly with new rules for contact-tracing app
RT | May 4, 2020
Google and Apple have set out ground rules for public health authorities looking to develop contact-tracing apps on their platform, and the guaranteed monopolies they enable could make some lucky developers very rich.
The tech behemoths unveiled a library of reference code on Monday, along with a list of rules that public-sector partners will have to follow in order to use their proprietary contact-tracing platform, which uses anonymized Bluetooth IDs to alert the user if they’ve come into contact with anyone who has tested positive for the coronavirus. As befits a platform whose privacy safeguards have been hyped to the heavens despite the checkered privacy histories of its creators, the contact-tracing interface will ban apps from using targeted advertising and accessing Location Services, theoretically preventing the tracking of users through space.
Google and Apple will also limit access to their platform to a single app per country – creating a guaranteed (and potentially lucrative) monopoly for whichever lucky developer gets the nod to develop a given country’s app. Their stated aim of picking one app per country (or state – the platform has made allowance for state-by-state differences in policy) is avoiding “fragmentation,” a seemingly logical reason. If hundreds of developers unleash their products on the market at the same time, vetting them for compliance would be all but impossible and delay the roll-out, while governments are clamoring for a standalone version of the platform ready in weeks, not months. Guaranteeing a monopoly on the product may also be a way to soften the blow of banning targeted advertising, typically a huge moneymaker for app developers.
However, the tech giants have already vowed to allow only those apps released by public health authorities to use their platform, and public health authorities aren’t required to turn a profit for shareholders. While the developers those authorities partner with will no doubt be cashing in, they’re unlikely to expect the same level of profits per download as a blockbuster private-sector app. Their payday would come based on the sheer volume of downloads, not high profit margins per user. Google and Apple have pledged to discontinue the platform once the virus has been sufficiently contained – a disturbingly vague endpoint, to be sure, but an endpoint nonetheless, indicating the gravy-train won’t be running forever.
Restricting access to a single app per country also opens the door to the kind of abuse (alleged) monopolies like Apple and Google are intimately familiar with – absent competition, an app developer has no reason to listen to users’ complaints.
While apps using the joint platform are prevented under the new rules from accessing location services, there are loopholes to be exploited – the US has already been using location data from mobile ads to track its citizens for weeks, for example.
Preexisting apps that use targeted advertising or access location services must turn those systems off to access Google and Apple’s platform, but it’s unclear how the tech giants expect to monitor those apps to make sure the offending snoop-ware isn’t switched back on.
Just tested: Apple’s Exposure Notification ‘Service’ is enabled by default in iOS 13.5 beta — meaning phones will be broadcasting Proximity ID’s even without an app installed.Hopefully @Apple will change this to be opt-in in the final iOS 13.5 release?https://t.co/sWLyP6p6t7pic.twitter.com/gYG89Ek7eU
— ashkan soltani (@ashk4n) May 4, 2020
Apps are also required to secure “opt-in” consent before accessing the platform or sharing a positive Covid-19 diagnosis. However, what’s good for the goose is apparently not good for the gander – an eagle-eyed coder perusing Apple’s code found that its “Exposure Notification” service was enabled by default, requiring no opt-in consent from the user.
Apple and Google hope to have the contact-tracing function integrated into their own operating systems within the next few months, meaning users won’t have a choice of whether or not they want the app – it will be integrated into the software that runs their phones by default. If Apple’s sneaky ‘always-on’ notification is any indication, smartphones are about to get a lot more intrusive.
Five questions Washington needs to answer on coronavirus pandemic

Photo taken on March 10, 2020 shows a plane approaching to land at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, the United States. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)
Xinhua | 2020-05-04
Five questions Washington needs to answer:
– Where did the virus in U.S. originate?
– Did U.S. fail to notice virus transmission at an early stage?
– Was the U.S. slow in early response to the pandemic?
– Did U.S. response lead to wider spread worldwide?
– What is the intention behind buck-passing?
The United States has confirmed over 1 million COVID-19 cases in just some 100 days after it reported the first case on Jan. 21, making itself the new epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic worldwide.
Facing criticism at home, some U.S. politicians have been irresponsibly attacking a certain country and the World Health Organization (WHO), hampering global efforts against the pandemic.
Their actions have drawn questions from around the world, and Washington should provide clear answers.
WHERE DID THE VIRUS IN U.S. ORIGINATE?
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has restored the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, a military center for biological research in Maryland State, to full operation, local media reported in late March.
The institution was ordered by the CDC to halt research involving biological select agents or toxins last summer. An online petition was later submitted on the White House petition site demanding the U.S. government clarify the shutdown of the institution.
The public is waiting for Washington to provide a clear explanation to the sudden halt and resumption of the research.
According to a report by the CDC in late February, there have been at least 32 million flu illnesses in the country in the 2019-2020 flu season.
On March 11, CDC Director Robert Redfield told a hearing on Capitol Hill that some COVID-19 deaths have been diagnosed as flu-related in the United States.
Washington needs to clarify the number of COVID-19 cases previously diagnosed as the flu, and make public the samples and genetic sequence of the influenza virus in the country.
DID U.S. FAIL TO NOTICE VIRUS TRANSMISSION AT AN EARLY STAGE?
In late April, health authorities of Santa Clara County in California State confirmed that two patients had died of COVID-19 at least three weeks before the first known U.S. death from the virus on Feb. 29.
Jeffrey V. Smith, Santa Clara county executive, told Xinhua that the patients “apparently contracted the illness from community spread. This suggests that the virus was circulating in the Bay Area in January at least, probably earlier.”
Neeraj Sood, a professor at the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, was quoted by the Los Angeles Times as saying that the virus has been in the community for a long time.
“When you start seeing the first death, actually, the number of cases in the population is probably pretty high already,” Sood said.
Washington needs to answer if it failed to notice community spread of the virus.
WAS THE U.S. SLOW IN EARLY RESPONSE TO THE PANDEMIC?
According to a report by The Washington Post on April 4, the CDC “learned of a cluster of cases in China on Dec. 31,” and the U.S. side received a call from the Chinese side on Jan. 3 warning against the disease.
On Jan. 8, heads of Chinese and U.S. CDCs talked over phone to discuss technological exchanges and cooperation, a detailed timeline of China’s response to COVID-19 showed.
On Feb. 16, the China-WHO joint expert team started a nine-day field visit in China. The team consists of 25 experts, including Cliff Lane, a researcher with the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The U.S. government, however, repeatedly downplayed the severity of the epidemic to the public at that time. U.S. media reported that the U.S. administration had squandered more than two months’ time since it received initial notification on the virus.
Washington needs to explain why it took so long to take action to combat the virus.
DID U.S. RESPONSE LEAD TO WIDER SPREAD WORLDWIDE?
The Washington Post said that the U.S. National Security Council had pushed for a travel ban restricting travelers from Italy and other countries in the European Union, but was met with resistance from some officials from the administration.
When the ban was finally issued over a month later, “hundreds of thousands of people crossed the Atlantic during that interval,” it said.
A report published on April 11 in The New York Times also revealed that the U.S. government’s plan to establish a surveillance system in some cities to measure the spread of the virus was delayed for weeks, leaving officials “with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading.”
In March, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the United States has been the country of origin for most of COVID-19 cases in his country.
Washington must respond to the concern that the belated and chaotic U.S. response has actually accelerated the spread of the virus to more places around the world.
WHAT IS THE INTENTION BEHIND BUCK-PASSING?
The U.S. government has criticized a so-called lack of transparency from China regarding the information on COVID-19. However, the facts speak otherwise.
The CDC said on its website that Chinese health officials reported cases of acute respiratory illness in persons associated with a seafood and animal market in the city of Wuhan on Dec. 31.
Since Jan. 3, China began to inform the United States of the outbreak and response measures on a regular basis, the timeline of China’s response to COVID-19 showed.
On Jan. 24, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted that China “has been working very hard to contain the coronavirus,” and that “the United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency.”
Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also told a coronavirus briefing in late January that China has been “quite transparent” with the world on the virus.
However, some U.S. politicians have stigmatized China with racist remarks, fabricated lies on China’s role in the global fight against the virus, and disrupted global solidarity and cooperation in combatting the disease.
The world needs a clear explanation from Washington on why it chose to pass the buck.
‘Bluffing’: China demands ‘enormous evidence’ Pompeo cited regarding Covid-19 origin
RT | May 4, 2020
China has responded to Pompeo’s claim that he has evidence that the novel coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab, saying that his claims were a “bluff,” as the war of words continues to escalate between Washington and Beijing.
The Global Times newspaper – an outlet owned by the Chinese Communist Party – published an editorial dismissing Pompeo’s claims as “groundless accusations.”
This comes in response to claims made by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in an interview with ABC that he has “enormous evidence” proving that the novel coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab.
The theory that the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has been repeatedly promoted by the US administration. President Donald Trump also claimed earlier that he is confident the virus originated there, in an ongoing exchange of accusations between the two countries.
The editorial published by the Global Times called on Pompeo to publicly reveal his evidence – if it really exists – and that failure to do so would prove that he was “bluffing” all along.
“What was originally a scientific question, has been transformed into a vicious attack fueled by politics, intelligence, and diplomacy,” the editorial claims. It also accused the Trump administration of conducting “unprecedented propaganda warfare” against China in order to divert away attention from its own “incompetence” in handling the Covid-19 outbreak domestically.
Iran Under Siege from Humanitarian Imperialism amid Pandemic

NDI’s former President Kenneth Wollack and Chairman Madeleine K. Albright pose with Nazanin Boniadi. Credit: Margot Schulman/ Facebook)
By Danny Haiphong | American Herald Tribune | May 3, 2020
Iran is once again under siege from humanitarian imperialism. The United Nations (UN) has released multiple reports in recent weeks criticizing the Iranian government for supposed human rights violations in relation to the treatment of prisoners and its lockdown procedures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nazanin Boniadi, a board of director at the Center for Human Rights in Iran, authored a piece in The Washington Post that exploits the pandemic to paint Iran as a human rights catastrophe. An examination of just one of Boniadi’s claims exposes how far the U.S. and its imperialist allies will go to build the case for regime change in Iran.
Boniadi claims that Iran’s failure to maintain a humane release policy of prisoners within the country has contributed to undue suffering from COVID-19. Yet the individual she chooses to defend all but reduces her credibility to zero. Boniadi claims that several prisoners have been returned to prison prematurely, and names Samaneh Norouz Moradi as a victim of this policy. Sameneh Norouz Moradi is a leading activist in the campaign to return Prince Reza Pehlavi to Iran. Prince Reza Pehlavi is the eldest son of Mohammad Reza Pehlavi, otherwise known as the Shah of Iran. This is indeed the same monarch that butchered Iranians in the tens of thousands to ensure the country’s assets remained the property of the West. In just one sentence, Nazanin Boniadi reveals that the purpose of her article and her struggle for human rights is to reinstall the U.S. and Western friendly puppet regime that once reigned over Iran.
The discovery of what is thought to be the mummified body of #RezaShah could be seen as somewhat of an omen for Iranians who were chanting “Reza Shah Rest In Peace” in the recent #IranProtests https://t.co/zIyaMGUmTd https://t.co/kXyffRR3l5
— Nazanin Boniadi (@NazaninBoniadi) April 24, 2018
The human rights industry offers lucrative careers for the likes of Boniadi. Boniadi is a Hollywood star and an Iranian exile with extensive experience in the human rights industry. She served as a spokesperson for Amnesty International for six years from 2009 to 2015. Her service to Amnesty International coincides with the organization’s outright support for U.S.-led regime change wars. The so-called “human rights” organization defended the overthrow of Libya in 2011 and the ongoing invasion of Syria led by the U.S. and its Israeli, Gulf, and Western allies.
It is no surprise, then, that Boniadi now serves on the board of the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), a dubious human rights organization which fails to disclose its funding sources. A cursory look at Boniadi’s colleagues reveals how deeply the CHRI is embedded in the humanitarian imperialist agenda led by the United States. Chairwoman of the board Minky Worden is also the Director of Global Initiatives at Human Rights Watch. Throughout the 1990s, Worden served as an adviser to Hong Kong’s Martin Lee, a staunch anti-China proxy who has called for the British to recolonize Hong Kong. Lee has given deep support to the rightwing movement currently waging a violent campaign to separate Hong Kong from China under the guise of “human rights.” The rest of the CHRI’s staff is a who’s who of former NED-funded functionaries such as executive director Hadi Ghaemi or advisers to U.S. government and private sector posts such as Michael Eisner.
Humanitarian imperialist think-tanks and NGOs such as CHRI are not interested in human rights in Iran or anywhere else. Their selective focus on nations under siege from the U.S. and its imperial allies reveal that so-called “human rights” organizations are nothing but proxies of regime change. The U.S. military state has viewed the spread of COVID-19 in Iran as an opportunity to build upon this long-standing geopolitical objective. CHRI’s clamor for Iran to correct its alleged human rights abuses comes as the U.S. has escalated its forty-plus year war on Iran. Since mid-March, the U.S. has intensified sanctions on Iran, threatened outright U.S. naval aggression, and reinforced an arms embargo outlined in the nuclear agreement that the U.S. exited in 2018. For the architects of regime change, COVID-19 represents nothing more than opportunity to strike when their target is weakest.
What humanitarian imperialists fail to mention is that Iran has waged a largely successful campaign to reduce the spread of COVID-19 despite the presence of crippling sanctions and the threat of a U.S.-led war. Iran temporarily released seventy-thousand prisoners to prevent the virus’ spread behind prison walls. The World Health Organization’s envoy to Iran praised the country’s initiatives for bringing down the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in a relatively short period. Such initiatives include mandatory social distancing, the redirection of production toward masks and testing kits, and detailed contact tracing to isolate infected individuals. COVID-19 deaths have declined by around seventy percent since it was announced in mid-March that one Iranian every ten minutes was dying from the virus.
If humanitarian imperialists cared about the Iranian people, then they wouldn’t attempt to use the spread of a deadly pandemic to achieve the U.S.’ geopolitical objective of overthrowing the Iranian government. Furthermore, targeting Iran at this vulnerable time only exposes the truly hypocritical “human rights” framework employed by NGOS such as the Center for Human Rights in Iran. The United States has failed to institute any significant release program for its 2.3 million prisoners. This has led to a countless number of deaths in prisons across the country. Furthermore, the U.S. currently leads the world in the number of deaths from COVID-19 and has allowed the virus to genocidally murder Black Americans at rates upward of three times their percentage of the general population in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin.
COVID-19 has exposed the United States as a human rights train wreck which has no right to tell nations such as Iran how to conduct its domestic affairs. The U.S. is an expert at mass murder for the sake of private profit and found itself unprepared when COVID-19 began to spread within its borders. Instead of fostering cooperation with China, Iran, and the rest of the world in the fight against COVID-19, the U.S. has pirated medical supplies, threatened Iran and Venezuela with outright war, and refused to heed the call of the United Nations for a global ceasefire. That there is no NGO to address the ongoing war crimes of the United States is a lesson into the function of the “human rights” industry. NGOs represent the public relations arm of humanitarian imperialism, which is why their work is most prominently featured in the corporate media when Washington is escalating wars of regime change abroad.
Police brutality, incarceration, and state repression are serious human rights issues. Many people are rightfully concerned about human rights as they witness the horrifying and needless consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide. The U.S. and West have demonstrated in their response to COVID-19 that their societies are organized to stifle human rights in order to maximize the profits of a tiny capitalist class and the hegemony of the military state that protects this class. Activists and journalists must reject the humanitarian imperialists currently politicizing trendy social justice issues to undermine the self-determination of nations such as Iran. Iran is under siege as it battles a pandemic, and peace and social justice-loving people in the U.S. should demand that their government stops making the situation worse.
With apparently fabricated nuclear documents, Netanyahu pushed the US towards war with Iran
By Gareth Porter | The Grayzone | April 29, 2020
President Donald Trump scrapped the nuclear deal with Iran and continued to risk war with Iran based on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim to have proven definitively that Iran was determined to manufacture nuclear weapons. Netanyahu not only spun Trump but much of the corporate media as well, duping them with the public unveiling of what he claimed was the entire secret Iranian “nuclear archive.”
In early April 2018, Netanyahu briefed Trump privately on the supposed Iranian nuclear archive and secured his promise to leave the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That April 30, Netanyahu took the briefing to the public in a characteristically dramatic live performance in which he claimed Israel’s Mossad intelligence services had stolen Iran’s entire nuclear archive from Tehran. “You may well know that Iran’s leaders repeatedly deny ever pursuing nuclear weapons…” Netanyahu declared. “Well, tonight, I’m here to tell you one thing: Iran lied. Big time.”
However, an investigation of the supposed Iranian nuclear documents by The Grayzone reveals them to be the product of an Israeli disinformation operation that helped trigger the most serious threat of war since the conflict with Iran began nearly four decades ago. This investigation found multiple indications that the story of Mossad’s heist of 50,000 pages of secret nuclear files from Tehran was very likely an elaborate fiction and that the documents were fabricated by the Mossad itself.
According to the official Israeli version of events, the Iranians had gathered the nuclear documents from various locations and moved them to what Netanyahu himself described as “a dilapidated warehouse” in southern Tehran. Even assuming that Iran had secret documents demonstrating the development of nuclear weapons, the claim that top secret documents would be held in a nondescript and unguarded warehouse in Central Tehran is so unlikely that it should have raised immediate alarm bells about the story’s legitimacy.
Even more problematic was the claim by a Mossad official to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman that Mossad knew not only in what warehouse its commandos would find the documents but precisely which safes to break into with a blowtorch. The official told Bergman the Mossad team had been guided by an intelligence asset to the few safes in the warehouse which contained the binders with the most important documents. Netanyahu bragged publicly that “very few” Iranians knew the location of the archive; the Mossad official told Bergman “only a handful of people” knew.
But two former senior CIA official, both of whom had served as the agency’s top Middle East analyst, dismissed Netanyahu’s claims as lacking credibility in responses to a query from The Grayzone.
According to Paul Pillar, who was National Intelligence Officer for the region from 2001 to 2005, “Any source on the inside of the Iranian national security apparatus would be extremely valuable in Israeli eyes, and Israeli deliberations about the handling of that source’s information presumably would be biased in favor long-term protection of the source.” The Israeli story of how its spies located the documents “does seem fishy,” Pillar said, especially considering Israel’s obvious effort to derive maximum “political-diplomatic mileage” out of the “supposed revelation” of such a well-placed source.
Graham Fuller, a 27-year veteran of the CIA who served as National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia as well as Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, offered a similar assessment of the Israeli claim. “If the Israelis had such a sensitive source in Tehran,” Fuller commented, “they would not want to risk him.” Fuller concluded that the Israelis’ claim that they had accurate knowledge of which safes to crack is “dubious, and the whole thing may be somewhat fabricated.”
No proof of authenticity
Netanyahu’s April 30 slide show presented a series of purported Iranian documents containing sensational revelations that he pointed to as proof of his insistence that Iran had lied about its interest in manufacturing nuclear weapons. The visual aides included a file supposedly dating back to early 2000 or before that detailed various ways to achieve a plan to build five nuclear weapons by mid-2003.
Another document that generated widespread media interest was an alleged report on a discussion among leading Iranian scientists of a purported mid-2003 decision by Iran’s Defense Minister to separate an existing secret nuclear weapons program into overt and covert parts.
Left out of the media coverage of these “nuclear archive” documents was a simple fact that was highly inconvenient to Netanyahu: nothing about them offered a scintilla of evidence that they were genuine. For example, not one contained the official markings of the relevant Iranian agency.
Tariq Rauf, who was head of the Verification and Security Policy Coordination Office at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 2001 to 2011, told The Grayzone that these markings were practically ubiquitous on official Iranian files.
“Iran is a highly bureaucratized system,” Rauf explained. “Hence, one would expect a proper book-keeping system that would record incoming correspondence, with date received, action officer, department, circulation to additional relevant officials, proper letterhead, etc.”
But as Rauf noted, the “nuclear archive” documents that were published by the Washington Post bore no such evidence of Iranian government origin. Nor did they contain other markings to indicate their creation under the auspices of an Iranian government agency.
What those documents do have in common is the mark of a rubber stamp for a filing system showing numbers for a “record”, a “file” and a “ledger binder” — like the black binders that Netanyahu flashed to the cameras during his slideshow. But these could have easily been created by the Mossad and stamped on to the documents along with the appropriate Persian numbers.
Forensic confirmation of the documents’ authenticity would have required access to the original documents. But as Netanyahu noted in his April 30, 2018 slide show, the “original Iranian materials” were kept “in a very safe place” – implying that no one would be allowed to have any such access.
Withholding access to outside experts
In fact, even the most pro-Israeli visitors to Tel Aviv have been denied access to the original documents. David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security and Olli Heinonen of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies – both stalwart defenders of the official Israeli line on Iranian nuclear policy – reported in October 2018 that they had been given only a “slide deck” showing reproductions or excerpts of the documents.
When a team of six specialists from Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs visited Israel in January 2019 for briefings on the archive, they too were offered only a cursory browse of the supposedly original documents. Harvard Professor Matthew Bunn recalled in an interview with this writer that the team had been shown one of the binders containing what were said to be original documents relating to Iran’s relations with the IAEA and had “paged through a bit of it.”
But they were shown no documents on Iran nuclear weapons work. As Bunn admitted, “We weren’t attempting to do any forensic analysis of these documents.”
Typically, it would be the job of the U.S. government and the IAEA to authenticate the documents. Oddly, the Belfer Center delegation reported that the U.S. government and the IAEA had each received only copies of the entire archive, not the original files. And the Israelis were in no hurry to provide the genuine articles: the IAEA did not receive a complete set of documents until November 2019, according to Bunn.
By then, Netanyahu had not only already accomplished the demolition of the Iran nuclear deal; he and Trump’s ferociously hawkish CIA-director Mike Pompeo had maneuvered the president into a policy of imminent confrontation with Tehran.
The second coming of fake missile drawings
Among the documents Netanyahu flashed on the screen in his April 30, 2018 slide show was a schematic drawing of the missile reentry vehicle of an Iranian Shahab-3 missile, showing what was obviously supposed to represent a nuclear weapon inside.

Technical drawing from David Albright, Olli Heinonen, and Andrea Stricker’s “Breaking Up and Reorienting Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program,” published by the Institute for Science and International Security on October 28, 2018.
This drawing was part of a set of eighteen technical drawings of the Shahab-3 reentry vehicle. These were found in a collection of documents secured over the course of several years between the Bush II and Obama administrations by an Iranian spy working for Germany’s BND intelligence service. Or so the Israeli official story went.
In 2013, however, a former senior German Foreign Office official named Karsten Voigt revealed to this writer that the documents had been initially provided to German intelligence by a member of the Mujaheddin E-Khalq (MEK).
The MEK is an exiled Iranian armed opposition organization that had operated under Saddam Hussein’s regime as a proxy against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. It went on to cooperate with the Israeli Mossad beginning in the 1990s, and enjoys a close relationship with Saudi Arabia as well. Today, numerous former US officials are on the MEK’s payroll, acting as de facto lobbyists for regime change in Iran.
Voigt recalled how senior BND officials warned him they did not consider the MEK source or the materials he provided to be credible. They were worried that the Bush administration intended to use the dodgy documents to justify an attack on Iran, just as it exploited the tall tales collected from Iraqi defector codenamed “Curveball” to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
As this writer first reported in 2010, the appearance of the “dunce-cap” shape of the Shahab-3 reentry vehicle in the drawings was a tell-tale sign that the documents were fabricated. Whoever drew those schematic images in 2003 was clearly under the false impression that Iran was relying on the Shahab-3 as its main deterrent force. After all, Iran had announced publicly in 2001 that the Shahab-3 was going into “serial production” and in 2003 that it was “operational.”
But those official claims by Iran were a ruse aimed primarily at deceiving Israel, which had threatened air attacks on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. In fact, Iran’s Defense Ministry was aware that the Shahab-3 did not have sufficient range to reach Israel.
According to Michael Elleman, the author of the most definitive account of the Iranian missile program, as early as 2000, Iran’s Defense Ministry had begun developing an improved version of the Shahab-3 with a reentry vehicle boasting a far more aerodynamic “triconic baby bottle” shape – not the “dunce-cap” of the original.
As Elleman told this writer, however, foreign intelligence agencies remained unaware of the new and improved Shahab missile with a very different shape until it took its first flight test in August 2004. Among the agencies kept in the dark about the new design was Israel’s Mossad. That explains why the false documents on redesigning the Shahab-3 – the earliest dates of which were in 2002, according to an unpublished internal IAEA document – showed a reentry vehicle design that Iran had already discarded.
The role of the MEK in passing the massive tranche of supposed secret Iranian nuclear documents to the BND and its hand-in-glove relationship with the Mossad leaves little room for doubt that the documents introduced to Western intelligence 2004 were, in fact, created by the Mossad.
For the Mossad, the MEK was a convenient unit for outsourcing negative press about Iran which it did not want attributed directly to Israeli intelligence. To enhance the MEK’S credibility in the eyes foreign media and intelligence agencies, Mossad passed the coordinates of Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility to the MEK in 2002. Later, it provided to the MEK personal information such as the passport number and home telephone number of Iranian physics professor Mohsen Fakhrizadh, whose name appeared in the nuclear documents, according to the co-authors of a best-selling Israeli book on the Mossad’s covert operations.
By trotting out the same discredited technical drawing depicting the wrong Iranian missile reentry vehicle – a trick he had previously deployed to create the original case for accusing Iran of covert nuclear weapons development – the Israeli prime minister showed how confident he was in his ability to hoodwink Washington and the Western corporate media.
Netanyahu’s multiple levels of deception have been remarkably successful, despite having relied on crude stunts that any diligent news organization should have seen through. Through his manipulation of foreign governments and media, he has been able to maneuver Donald Trump and the United States into a dangerous process of confrontation that has brought the US to the precipice of military conflict with Iran.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012. His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.




