Seth Rich, Julian Assange and Dana Rohrabacher – Will We Ever Know the Truth About the Stolen DNC Files?
Seth Rich, Julian Assange and Dana Rohrabacher. Credit: Public domain/Gage Skidmore/ Flickr
By Philip Giraldi | American Herald Tribune | February 29, 2020
The media is doing its best to make the story go away, but it seems to have a life of its own, possibly due to the fact that the accepted narrative about how Rich died makes no sense. In its Iatest manifestation, it provides an alternative explanation for just how the information from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer somehow made its way to Wikileaks. If you believe that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide and that he was just a nasty pedophile rather than an Israeli intelligence agent, read no farther because you will not be interested in Rich. But if you appreciate that it was unlikely that the Russians were behind the stealing of the DNC information you will begin to understand that other interested players must have been at work.
For those who are not familiar with it, the backstory to the murder of apparently disgruntled Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, who some days before may have been the leaker of that organization’s confidential emails to Wikileaks, suggests that a possibly motiveless crime might have been anything but. The Washington D.C. police investigated what they believed to be an attempted robbery gone bad but that theory fails to explain why Rich’s money, credit cards, cell phone and watch were not taken. Wikileaks has never confirmed that Rich was their source in the theft of the proprietary emails that had hitherto been blamed on Russia but it subsequently offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to resolution of the case and Julian Assange, perhaps tellingly, has never publicly clarified whether Rich was or was not one of his contacts, though there is at least one report that he confirmed the relationship during a private meeting.
Answers to the question who exactly stole the files from the DNC server and the emails from John Podesta have led to what has been called Russiagate, a tale that has been embroidered upon and which continues to resonate in American politics. At this point, all that is clearly known is that in the Summer of 2016 files and emails pertaining to the election were copied and then made their way to WikiLeaks, which published some of them at a time that was damaging to the Clinton campaign. Those who are blaming Russia believe that there was a hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) server and also of John Podesta’s emails that was carried out by a Russian surrogate or directly by Moscow’s military intelligence arm. They base their conclusion on a statement issued by the Department of Homeland Security on October 7, 2016, and on a longer assessment prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on January 6, 2017. Both government appraisals implied that there was a U.S. government intelligence agency consensus that there was a Russian hack, though they provided little in the way of actual evidence that that was the case and, in particular, failed to demonstrate how the information was obtained and what the chain of custody was as it moved from that point to the office of WikiLeaks. The January report was particularly criticized as unconvincing, rightly so, because the most important one of its three key contributors, the National Security Agency, had only moderate confidence in its conclusions, suggesting that whatever evidence existed was far from solid.
An alternative view that has been circulating for several years suggests that it was not a hack at all, that it was a deliberate whistleblower-style leak of information carried out by an as yet unknown party, possibly Rich, that may have been provided to WikiLeaks for possible political reasons, i.e. to express disgust with the DNC manipulation of the nominating process to damage Bernie Sanders and favor Hillary Clinton.
There are, of course, still other equally non-mainstream explanations for how the bundle of information got from point A to point B, including that the intrusion into the DNC server was carried out by the CIA which then made it look like it had been the Russians as perpetrators. And then there is the hybrid point of view, which is essentially that the Russians or a surrogate did indeed intrude into the DNC computers but it was all part of normal intelligence agency probing and did not lead to anything. Meanwhile and independently, someone else who had access to the server was downloading the information, which in some fashion made its way from there to WikiLeaks.
Both the hack vs. leak viewpoints have marshaled considerable technical analysis in the media to bolster their arguments, but the analysis suffers from the decidedly strange fact that the FBI never even examined the DNC servers that may have been involved. The hack school of thought has stressed that Russia had both the ability and motive to interfere in the election by exposing the stolen material while the leakers have recently asserted that the sheer volume of material downloaded indicates that something like a higher speed thumb drive was used, meaning that it had to be done by someone with actual physical direct access to the DNC system. Someone like Seth Rich.
What the many commentators on the DNC server issue choose to conclude is frequently shaped by their own broader political views, producing a result that favors one approach over another depending on how one feels about Trump or Clinton. Or the Russians. Perhaps it would be clarifying to regard the information obtained and transferred as a theft rather than either a hack or a leak since the two expressions have taken on a political meaning of their own in the Russiagate context. With all the posturing going on, the bottom line is that the American people and government have no idea who actually stole the material in question, though the Obama Administration was extraordinarily careless in its investigation and Russian President Vladimir Putin has generally speaking been blamed for what took place.
The story currently bouncing around the media concerns an offer allegedly made in 2017 by former Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher to imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. According to Assange’s lawyers, Rohrabacher offered a pardon from President Trump if Assange were to provide information that would attribute the theft or hack of the Democratic National Committee emails to someone other than the Russians. He was presumably referring to Seth Rich.
Assange did not accept the offer, but it should be noted that he has repeatedly stated in any event that he did not obtain the material from a Russian or Russian-linked source. In reality, he might not know the original source of the information. Since Rohrabacher’s original statement, both he and Trump have denied any suggestion that there was a firm offer with a quid pro quo for Assange. Trump claims to hardly know Rohrabacher and also asserts that he has never had a one-on-one meeting with him.
The U.S. media’s coverage of the story has emphasized that Assange’s cooperation would have helped to absolve Russia from the charge of having interfered decisively in the U.S. election, but the possible motive for doing so remains unclear. Russian-American relations are at their lowest point since the Cold War and that has largely been due to policies embraced by Donald Trump, to include the cancellation of START and medium range missile agreements. Trump has also approved NATO military maneuvers and exercises right up to the Russian border and has provided lethal weapons to Ukraine, something that his predecessor Barack Obama balked at. He has also openly confronted the Russians in Syria.
Given all of that back story, it would be odd to find Trump making an offer that focuses only on one issue and does not actually refute the broader claims of Russian interference, which are based on a number of pieces of admittedly often dubious evidence, not just the Clinton and Podesta emails. Which brings the tale back to Seth Rich. If Rich was indeed responsible for the theft of the information and was possibly killed for his treachery, it most materially impacts on the Democratic Party as it reminds everyone of what the Clintons and their allies are capable of. It will also serve as a warning of what might be coming at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee in July as the party establishment uses fair means or foul to stop Bernie Sanders. How this will all play out is anyone’s guess, but many of those who pause to observe the process will be thinking of Seth Rich.
Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests.
Washington Post Admits OAS Bolivia Election Report It Defended During Coup Was ‘Deeply Flawed’
By Morgan Artyukhina | Sputnik | February 27, 2020
The Washington Post reported Thursday on a study concluding the Organization of American States’ claims of voter fraud in the October 2019 Bolivian election “appear deeply flawed.” However, the paper’s editorial board consistently pushed the narrative that Evo Morales was “undermin[ing] Bolivia’s democracy” during the crisis leading to his ouster.
‘Deeply Flawed’ Conclusions
“Bolivia dismissed its October elections as fraudulent. Our research found no reason to suspect fraud,” reads a Thursday headline in the Washington Post’s analysis section. Penned by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Data and Science Lab researchers John Curiel and Jack R. Williams, the piece based on their study closely examines data from the October 20 Bolivian election and methods used by the Organization of American States (OAS) to determine the vote count had been fraudulent.
“There is not any statistical evidence of fraud that we can find – the trends in the preliminary count, the lack of any big jump in support for Morales after the halt, and the size of Morales’s margin all appear legitimate,” the duo concluded. “All in all, the OAS’s statistical analysis and conclusions would appear deeply flawed.”
MIT Graph showing Morales’ Movement for Socialism steadily gained ground as votes were tallied, explaining Evo Morales’ late victory
According to the researchers, the OAS’ conclusion relies on an undemonstrated assumption: that actual voting results are accurately reflected by unofficial counts and by reported voter preferences, and that deviation between these heavily points to voter fraud by the Bolivian government once official counting was resumed the day after election day. La Paz had previously promised to count four-fifths of preliminary votes on election night and count the rest the next day, but when Morales’ standing began to improve after the resumption of counting, the OAS cried foul.
“Our results were straightforward. There does not seem to be a statistically significant difference in the margin before and after the halt of the preliminary vote,” Curiel and Williams wrote. “Instead, it is highly likely that Morales surpassed the 10-percentage-point margin in the first round.”
MIT Graph showing correlation margin of voting precincts’ results before and after tallying was paused, demonstrating no new irregularities
The researchers ran 1,000 simulations to see if the difference between votes for Morales and his closest competitor, Carlos Masa, could be predicted. “In our simulations, we found that Morales could expect at least a 10.49 point lead over his closest competitor, above the necessary 10-percentage-point threshold necessary to win outright. Again, this suggests that any increase in Morales’s margin after the stop can be explained entirely by the votes already counted.”
MIT Graph showing Evo Morales’ margin of victory in 1,000 simulations of the October 20, 2019 Bolivian election
The study was reprinted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), which noted in a disclosure that it “contracted with the authors to see if the numerical and statistical results of CEPR’s November 2019 study could be independently verified. Any analysis and interpretation of findings in this report express the sole views of the authors, researchers at MIT Election Data and Science Lab.”
“The OAS greatly misled the media and the public about what happened in Bolivia’s elections, and helped to foster a great deal of mistrust in the electoral process and the results,” economist and CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot said in a Thursday statement about the MIT report. “The OAS needs to explain why it made these statements and why anyone should trust it when it comes to elections.”
Parallel Findings Prior to Coup Ignored
However, at the time of the crisis, Washington Post editors seemed uninterested in CEPR’s analysis, deferring instead to the OAS, whose faults CEPR had already seen through even before Morales was ousted.
The day after the OAS statement and two days after the election, Weisbrot called on the body to retract its “irresponsible” statement on the election.
“The OAS statement implies that there is something wrong with the vote count in Bolivia because later-reporting voting centers showed a different margin than earlier ones,” Weisbrot said. “But it provides absolutely no evidence – no statistics, numbers, or facts of any kind – to support this idea. And in fact, a preliminary analysis of the voting data at all of the more than 34,000 voting tables – which is all publicly available and can be downloaded by anyone – shows no evidence of irregularity.”
“This kind of change in voting results, due to later-reporting areas being politically or demographically different than earlier ones, is quite common in election returns – as anyone who has watched election returns come in on CNN in the United States knows,” Weisbrot continued. “That is why it is wrong to draw conclusions from a change in the voting pattern without any statistical analysis or even looking closely at the data.”
“As this narrative gets repeated in the media, it will take on a life of its own, and will be difficult to correct, even as more people look at the data, or produce statistical analysis,” he warned.
CEPR’s formal report was published on November 8, titled, “No Evidence That Bolivian Election Results Were Affected by Irregularities or Fraud, Statistical Analysis Shows.” Two days later, opposition forces, urged on by supportive western powers including the United States, forced Morales from office, and the opposition and began a violent and bloody purge against the Movement for Socialism–Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (MAS-IPSP), Morales’ indigenous-working class umbrella party.
Newspaper Beat Coup Drums During Crisis
As Weisbrot predicted, the media did perpetuate this narrative – and the Washington Post played a key role in building momentum for Morales’ ouster.
On October 14, six days before the election, the Post ran a story titled “How Evo Morales running again – and again – undermines Bolivia’s democracy,” which warned that “depending on how the election goes,” Morales’ next term “could place democracy itself at risk in the Andean country.”
“In a tight race, international scrutiny and a strong, unified response to any electoral irregularities could be what allows Bolivians to salvage their democracy from the brink,” the opinion piece warns.
.@washingtonpost now reports fraud allegations in Morales’ October 2019 reelection had no basis – but its editorial board wasted no effort demonizing @evoespueblo & claiming he was “undermining democracy” in #Bolivia in the crucial weeks between the election & coup. pic.twitter.com/sDuEO2LQbT
— Morgan Artyukhina (@LavenderNRed) February 27, 2020
However, four days after the election, on October 24, the Washington Post’s editorial board made its official voice known, declaring that “There’s still time for Bolivia’s president to right the path to democracy.” The article justifies its position using the OAS La Paz observer statement from October 21 and a similar one by the US State Department, which was adamantly pro-coup.
Then on November 10, the coup came, and Morales was forced to resign and flee the country. After pro-opposition police forces and far-right militias acted to block MAS senators from attending a key Senate session on November 12, the highest-ranking opposition senator, Jeanine Añez, declared herself the country’s interim president. Añez moved quickly to prepare de facto martial law, and the army and police massacred dozens of Morales supporters who rallied against the seizure of power.
© AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko A backer of former President Evo Morales scuffles with police in La Paz, Bolivia, Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2019.
The opposition senator who has claimed Bolivia’s presidency, Jeanine Anez, faces the challenge of stabilizing the nation and organizing national elections within three months at a time of political disputes that pushed Morales to fly off to self-exile in Mexico after 14 years in power.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, built a bulwark of pro-coup support for its readers in the nation’s capital and around the world. On November 11, during the interregnum, the Post’s editorial board once again made its voice heard: “Bolivia is in danger of slipping into anarchy. It’s Evo Morales’s fault.”
“Mr. Morales, who had grown increasingly autocratic in nearly 14 years in office, insisted on running for a fourth term even after he lost a national referendum on whether he could seek it. The electoral tribunal, which he controls, then moved to falsify the results of the Oct. 20 vote so as to hand him a first-round victory,” the paper’s editors wrote, stating as fact what had previously been merely warned to be suspected. “The result was predictable: Angry Bolivians took to the streets all over the country. They had been demonstrating for weeks when, on Sunday, an audit released by the Organization of American States reported massive irregularities in the vote count and called for a fresh election.”
Two days later, the day after Añez seized power, the Post ran another story by the title “It’s not just a ‘coup’: Bolivia’s democracy is in meltdown.” Then on the 15th came the laconically titled piece, “The Bolivian ‘coup’ that wasn’t.” While the two stories quibble over what to call the opposition’s seizure of power, the underlying point is the same: Morales tried to steal the election and went against world opinion and domestic popular will by clinging to power.
With the publication of Curiel’s and Williams’ findings, the Post has helped to unring the bell it shook so hard during the election crisis. However, it doesn’t change the fact that the paper helped provide ideological cover for the ouster of yet another democratically elected leader in a Third World nation by uncritically accepting and repeating the US State Department’s positions and those of international bodies like the OAS that help forward its policies.
Rohrabacher, Mueller, and Assange
By Daniel Lazare | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 26, 2020
Reports that Donald Trump offered to pardon WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange if he could prove that Russia didn’t hack Democratic National Committee caused a good-sized media storm when they came out in a British court last week. But then Dana Rohrabacher, the ex-US congressman supposedly serving as a go-between, issued an all-points denial, and the tempest blew over as fast as it arose.
But that doesn’t mean that the Russia-WikiLeaks story is kaput. To the contrary, it’s still brimming with unanswered questions no matter how much the corporate media wishes they would go away.
The most important question is the simplest: why didn’t Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller sit down with Julian Assange and ask him about the 20,000 DNC emails himself?
It’s not as if Assange would have said no. According to Craig Murray, the former British diplomat who serves as an unofficial WikiLeaks spokesman, he “was very willing to give evidence to Mueller, which could have been done by video-link, by interview in the [Ecuadorean] Embassy, or by written communication.” While Assange refuses as a matter of policy to disclose his sources, he had already made a partial exception in the case of the DNC by declaring, “Our source is not a state party.” Conceivably, he had more to say along such lines, information that Mueller might have then used to determine what role, if any, Russia played in the email release.
But he didn’t bother. Without making the slightest effort to get Assange’s side of the story, he assembled page after page of evidence purporting to show that WikiLeaks had collaborated with Russian intelligence in order to disseminate stolen material. Rather than an organization dedicated to exposing official secrets so that voters could learn what their government was really up to, WikiLeaks, in the eyes of the special prosecutor, was the opposite: an organization seeking to help Russia pull the wool over people’s eyes so they would vote for Donald Trump.
This is the super-sensational charge that has roiled US politics since 2016. Yet there is little to back it up.
Even though Mueller is confident that the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU routed the emails to WikiLeaks, for instance, he still hasn’t figured out how. “Both the GRU and WikiLeaks sought to hide their communications, which has limited the [Special Prosecutor’s] Office’s ability to collect all of the communications between them,” his report confesses on page 45. “The Office cannot rule out that stolen documents were transferred to WikiLeaks through intermediaries who visited during the summer of 2016,” it adds on page 47. “For example, public reporting identified Andrew Müller-Maguhn as a WikiLeaks associate who may have assisted with the transfer of these stolen documents to WikiLeaks.”
But Müller-Maguhn, a German cyber-expert who has worked with WikiLeaks for years, dismisses any such suggestion as “insane,” a claim the Mueller report makes no effort to rebut. The public is thus left with a blank where a dotted trail the GRU and WikiLeaks ought to be. Then there’s the issue of chronology. The Mueller report says that a GRU website known as DCLeaks.com reached out to WikiLeaks on June 14, 2016, with an offer of “sensitive information” related to Hillary Clinton. Considering that WikiLeaks would release a treasure trove of DNC emails on July 22, less than seven weeks later, the implication that the GRU was the source does not, at first glance, seem implausible.
But hold on. Although the report doesn’t mention it, Assange told a British TV station on June 12: “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton, which is great.” Either he was amazingly clairvoyant in foreseeing an offer that the GRU would make two days hence or he got the material from someone else.
To be sure, the Mueller report adds that an alleged Russian intelligence “cutout” known as Guccifer 2.0 sent WikiLeaks an encrypted data file on July 14, which is to say eight days prior to publication. But since WikiLeaks didn’t confirm opening the file until July 18, this means that it would have had just four days to vet thousands of emails and other documents to insure they were genuine and unaltered. If just one had turned out to be doctored, its hard-earned reputation for accuracy would have been in shreds. So the review process had to be painstaking and thorough, and four days would not be remotely enough time.
Nothing about the Mueller account – timing, plausibility, the crucial question of how the stolen DNC emails made their way to WikiLeaks – adds up. Yet Mueller went public with it regardless. Which leads to another question: why?
One reason is because he knew he could get away with it, at least temporarily, since it was clear that corporate media howling for Trump’s scalp would accept whatever he put out as gospel. But another is that he’s a dutiful servant of the ruling class. After all, Mueller is the person who, as FBI director from 2001 to 2013, spent much of his time covering up Saudi Arabia’s not-inconsiderable role in 9/11, as investigative reporter James Ridgeway has pointed out on a number of occasions. Mueller is also the man who assured the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2003 that “Iraq’s WMD program poses a clear threat to our national security,” a claim that the upcoming Iraqi invasion would reveal as fraudulent to the core.
Toeing the official line is therefore more important in his book than telling the truth. This is why he didn’t sit down with Assange – because he was afraid of what he might tell him. In January 2017, the CIA, NSA, and FBI officially reported that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016” and “that Russian military intelligence … used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com” to relay stolen computer data to WikiLeaks. Four months later, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo went even farther by describing WikiLeaks as “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”
This was the official narrative that Mueller felt dutybound to defend when he was appointed special prosecutor a month after Pompeo made his remarks. Even though the CIA account would not hold up to close inspection, his self-perceived mission was to disregard certain facts and cherry-pick others in order to convince the public that it was true.
This leads us to a third question: how do Americans get themselves out of the hole that Mueller has dug for them? Not only does Assange face 170 years in prison for espionage, but the impact in terms of freedom of the press will be devastating. The prosecution’s case rests on an explosive theory that receiving inside information is effectively the same thing as supplying it. Just as a fence encourages people to steal, the idea is that a journalist encourages insiders to hack computers and rifle through file cabinets by offering to publish what they come up with. If upheld, it means that journalists would have to think twice before even talking to an inside for fear of incurring a similar penalty. Armed with such a legal instrument, Richard Nixon would have had no trouble dealing with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. He would merely have charged them with espionage and locked them away until the break-in was forgotten.
If Assange goes down, in other words, democracy will take a major hit. Yet by labeling him a Russian agent, Mueller has seen to it that liberals are as unsympathetic to his plight as the most militant conservative, if not more so. He transformed Assange into the perfect scapegoat for Democrats and Russians to bash with bipartisan glee.
This is why a defense based purely on the First Amendment will not do. Rather, it’s important to deal with the charge of Russian collaboration that – completely unjustly – has turned him into an object of public opprobrium. It’s time to give the Mueller report the scrutiny it deserves before its collective falsehoods undermine democracy even more than they already have.
South Carolina Debate Attended by Elite ‘Sponsors’, Featured Syria War Propaganda
CBS News’ Margaret Brennan pushing Syria war propaganda with Pete Buttigieg
21st Century Wire | February 26, 2020
The Democratic Party held its 10th presidential debate Tuesday night in Charleston, South Carolina, as candidates continued their attacks on national frontrunner Bernie Sanders in front of a live audience of elite ‘sponsors’ who paid over a thousand dollars to attend the event.
A local Charleston TV news station confirmed earlier this month that a “guaranteed ticket” at the debate required a sponsorship to be paid at levels between $1750 to $3200, prompting the trending hashtag, #WineCaveDebate, during the live broadcast.
CBS News carried the debate and featured a foreign policy question to be asked by Twitter users.
Debate moderator Margaret Brennan then read the selected tweet and directed the question to Pete Buttigieg:
The city of Idlib in Syria is facing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. The Syrian regime and Russia are targeting schools, bakeries, and hospitals. What would you do as President to push back Regime and Russian forces and stop the killing of innocent civilians?
It was apparent that CBS News did not verify the dubious claims made in the tweeted question, and thus was able to present a false narrative about the war in Syria to its viewing audience.
The Syrian Arab Army and its Russian military partners have actually been advancing on Idlib to liberate it from the jihadi terrorists that have taken control of it from peaceful Syrians.
Buttigieg responded to the question by saying “I stand with the people of Idlib…”
Later, Brennan direct the same question to Elizabeth Warren, but rephrased it as “What would you do to stop the mass murder?”
Taxpayer Funded NGO Releases Yet Another Climate Doomsday Report
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | February 26, 2020
According to MSM you can trust the “THE CENTER FOR CLIMATE & SECURITY” because they are non partisan experts.
Report warns climate change could become ‘catastrophic’ global, national security threat
BY REBECCA KLAR – 02/24/20 09:16 AM EST
National security and intelligence experts warn that climate change could become a “catastrophic” threat to security and recommended quick action to be taken to mitigate risks, according to a new report released Monday.
“Even at scenarios of low warming, each region of the world will face severe risks to national and global security in the next three decades,” experts wrote in the report released by the National Security, Military and Intelligence Panel of the Center of Climate and Security, a nonpartisan security policy institute.
“Higher levels of warming will pose catastrophic, and likely irreversible, global security risks over the course of the 21st century.”
The security threat assessment of global climate change warns that all levels of warming of climate change will pose “significant and evolving threats” to global security environments, infrastructure and institutions.
The report itself is available here.
I think the most ridiculous part of the report is a suggestion 1-2C of warming in Russia would cause serious problems.
… At 1-2°C/1.8-3.6°F of global average warming, the EUCOM area of responsibility will experience severe weather that threatens destabilization of its key economic sectors, rising regional inequality, and impacts on civil and military infrastructure. In this scenario, rising ethno- nationalist sentiments alongside rising migration waves pose serious threats to the alliances underlying existing security institutions.
At 2-4+°C/3.6-7.2+°F of global average warming, the EUCOM area of responsibility will likely experience prolonged drought and rising seas, leading to significant internal displacement, as well as an influx of migrants from neighboring areas. In this scenario, a breakdown in regional political, institutional, and security cohesion becomes likely. …
Read more: Same link as above
1-2C of warming in Russia might mean Northern Russia is slightly more habitable. Like Canada, most Russians live on the warm southern edge of their nation, because the North is simply too cold.
The section on human health quotes The Lancet;
… Climate change will pose serious challenges to human health, mainly by affecting delicate natural systems that make bodies more susceptible to stress and disease. Medical research increasingly demonstrates links between warming temperatures and increased vulnerability to heat stress, infectious diseases, extreme events, and pollution, as summarized by the now annual report on health and climate change published by the leading journal, The Lancet.67 …
Read more: Same link as above
The suggestion that warm weather compromises people’s immune systems is absurd. Humans are extreme tropical monkeys, we don’t have fur because our ancestors evolved in one of the hottest places on Earth. Across most of the Earth, humans need clothes to stay warm enough to survive. So it seems reasonable to infer that the human immune system is mostly still optimised to the hot tropical weather our ancestors experienced.
The report was likely paid for with US taxpayer’s money. The authors acknowledge the generous support of the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, which was set up by Congress in 1983. The Henry M Jackson foundation does a lot of good work supporting the medical needs of veterans, and also performs HIV research, so it seems a real shame they decided to waste some of their endowment and goodwill on yet another climate report.
When Is A Pandemic Not A Pandemic?
The World Health Organization is playing games
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | February 26, 2020
In 2010, the World Health Organization (WHO) explained on its website:
A pandemic is the worldwide spread of a new disease.
An influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus emerges and spreads around the world, and most people do not have immunity.
A WHO document advising countries how to respond to such outbreaks used the word ‘pandemic’ 485 times across 64 pages back in 2009. That same document contained a table describing the six phases of a pandemic:
click to enlarge
In 2013, an update used ‘pandemic’ 413 times across 60 pages. Then came the 2017 edition, which employed the term 408 times across 59 pages.
But two days ago, a spokesperson told Reuters the WHO no longer recognizes this term. ‘Pandemic’ has apparently been struck from its vocabulary.
click image to read full story
According to Tarik Jasarevic, people may use this term colloquially to describe the spread of a new pathogen, but that’s their private affair. Say what?
There’s a new, highly contagious, stealth virus out there. Some people who contract it will end up in ICU with serious complications. This isn’t a run-of-the-mill flu. It began killing people in China several weeks ago, and has now spread to 40 countries. A dozen Italian towns are currently in lock-down, complete with police roadblocks. Hong Kong has closed schools until late April. The deputy health minister of Iran has tested positive.
Take another look at Phase 6, above. Sustained outbreaks in at least three countries, in two different parts of the world. We’re well beyond that.
Yet the WHO is playing word games. It says this isn’t a pandemic. It’s merely a PHEIC – which stands for a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
Does that make you feel safe?
Iran: Dubowitz’s coronavirus remarks ‘shameful and inhuman’
Press TV – February 26, 2020
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Political Affairs Abbas Araqchi says the remarks by Mark Dubowitz, Chief Executive of Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), about the spread of coronavirus in Iran are “shameful and downright inhuman.”
Dubowitz claimed on Twitter Tuesday that coronavirus has halted Iran’s non-oil exports, achieving “what American economic sanctions could not.”
Araqchi, in response, said Wednesday that cheering for a deadly virus to spread is shameful, noting that at least Dubowitz “understands that the American economic sanctions were not — and will not be — as effective as a Covid-19 Virus.”
In another outrageous and unfounded claim, Dubowitz said that Tehran has “spread terrorism” in the Middle East and “now it’s spreading the coronavirus.”
Nearly 140 people have been tested positive for coronavirus in Iran since the infection was identified in a city in central country last week. The government has put the number of deaths at 19 as of Wednesday noon local time.
Dubowitz’s remarks come as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Tuesday issued warnings about the virus, urging Americans to prepare and take precautionary measures.
“The data over the past week about the spread in other countries has raised our level of concern and expectation that we are going to have community spread here,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the CDC’s head of respiratory diseases, told reporters in a conference call.
The warning came as President Donald Trump tried to play down fears and said in a tweet Monday that the coronavirus was “very much under control in the USA.”
Meanwhile, growing economic pressure on Iran has hampered the country’s efforts to confront the outbreak of coronavirus as health bodies face restrictions importing test kits to detect the infection.
Ramin Fallah, a board member at Iran’s Association of Medical Equipment Importers, said on Sunday that US sanctions as well as restrictions newly imposed on Iran by a global money laundering watchdog had made it increasingly difficult to access the kits.
Under mounting pressure from Washington, the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) decided on Friday to place Iran on its blacklist, making it more difficult for Iranian banks to settle payments with foreign counterparts.
Washington Post’s ‘relative quiet’ ignores Israeli violence against Palestinians
Nine-year-old Palestinian Malik Eissa, Feb. 20, 2020, after being shot in the face by Israeli police the previous week. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)
By Alison Weir | If Americans Knew | February 24, 2020
On February 24th, the Washington Post reported that a “flare up” of violence in Israel-Palestine “followed weeks of relative quiet.” This statement ignores massive Israeli violence against Palestinians. The following is a partial list of Israeli actions against Palestinians during the previous three and a half weeks:
- Israeli soldiers Shot and killed 4 Palestinian civilians, including a 19-year-old shot in the neck, a 17-year-old shot in the head, and a 24-year-old policeman shot in the stomach.
- Israeli soldiers shot an additional 100 Palestinians, including 15 minors, 3 fishermen, 3 journalists, and a photographer working for an Israeli human rights organization. One of the injured minors was a 9-year-old whose eye was shot out.
- Israeli forces conducted 418 military raids into the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem.
- Israeli forces abducted 190 Palestinian civilians, including 52 teens and children and 4 women.
- Israeli forces perpetrated 15 shootings against Palestinian farmers and farm structures.
- Israeli forces perpetrated 7 shootings against Palestinian fishing boats.
- Israel demolished 8 Palestinian homes.
- Israeli interrogators tortured a Palestinian mother imprisoned by Israel.
- Israeli forces escorted thousands of Israeli settlers while they stormed two Palestinian villages.
- Israeli forces perpetrated several airstrikes on the Gaza Strip.
- A fifteen-year-old Palestinian boy, who had been shot earlier by Israeli forces, died.
(For details on the above incidents go here. For information on additional actions that took place during this time go here. For a Timeline of Israelis and Palestinians killed in the conflict go here.)
Ruth Eglash, Israeli citizen
Reporter Ruth Eglash partisan
Ruth Eglash, lead author of the Washington Post report that ignored the above events, moved to Israel 20 years ago, became an Israeli citizen, and was an editor of a right-wing Israeli newspaper for 10 years before moving to the Post.
She has been a featured speaker at events by pro-Israel organizations in the U.S. and used to be listed on the speakers’ bureau of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), known for taking over Palestinian land for Israel. (Her listing by the JNF has since been removed from the Internet.)
Shortly before joining the Post, Eglash had served on a panel entitled “Telling Israel’s Story,” alongside an Israeli army spokesperson. The panel was chaired by a former advisor to the Israeli government.
According to the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, Eglash lives in a “spacious home in Mevessert Zion,” which is one of the wealthiest enclaves in the area. It was built in the 1950s on top of the destroyed Palestinian villages of Al Qastal and Qalunya, which had been ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces. Some parts of the town are in the West Bank, making the residents settlers. Settlements are illegal under international law.
Eglash’s husband, also an Israeli citizen, is originally from Milwaukee, where he “lived and breathed Israel” as a student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He started and continues to head a PR firm called “Upstart” that markets Israel to the US.
Media watchdog organization Fairness and Accuracy In Media (FAIR) reports: “Upstart’s clients include the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Tourism, the Jewish Agency for Israel and the World Zionist Organization. Other clients, like Hillel and Birthright for Israel, are active in promoting a pro-Israel message on college campuses.”
Martin Baron, Washington Post executive editor
FAIR states that the Washington Post seems to be violating its own ethics conflict of interest code by employing a reporter “whose spouse works for an Israeli government-linked public relations firm.”
Marty Baron
The Editor of the Post is Martin Baron, whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Israel. Baron says he has visited Israel often, where he has family connections. Baron sometimes gives talks on Israel.
(According to Israeli law, individuals who are born to a parent who is an Israeli citizen automatically are Israeli citizens themselves. It is unknown whether this is the case for Baron.)
A member of the Israel lobby once divulged to an undercover reporter that it was easy for the lobby to get stories onto the front page of the Washington Post.
Credibility of European Court of Human Rights lies in ruins after judges’ links to Soros revealed
By John Laughland | RT | February 25, 2020
A study by the European Center for Law and Justice in Strasbourg has revealed several conflicts of interest between judges at the European Court of Human Rights and NGOs funded by George Soros.
The European Center for Law and Justice is an NGO which often appears at the court to campaign on social, family and religion-related issues. I am proud to be listed as a research fellow at the ECHR but in reality I have written only one article for the center’s website and I receive no salary from it. I had no role in writing the report.
The study has found that, out of the 100 judges who have served on the bench of the European Court of Human Rights in the period 2009-2019, nearly a quarter (22) have strong links to George Soros’ Open Society Foundation or to NGOs like Amnesty International and others which are funded by it. Human Rights Watch, for instance, has received $100 million from the Open Society Foundation since 2010.
Some of the NGOs receive so much of their budget from Soros that they are in effect wholly owned subsidiaries of his foundation.
The links between the judges and the NGOs are substantial. They include working for years as members of the board of directors or executive council of these NGOs; having teaching posts at institutes funded by them; being a salaried director of programs for the Open Society Foundation or associated NGOs; and undertaking other forms of paid work for them. The full list of these links can be found on pages seven and eight of the report.
A good example is that of the Bulgarian Yonko Grozev who, as leader of the Open Society Justice Initiative, defended the Pussy Riot case against Russia in 2018 before being elected as a judge of the court shortly thereafter.
The study does not include less formal forms of collaboration with NGOs, such as occasional work for them (see note 15 of the report). This means that the links are even greater than those specifically addressed in the study.
The report also covers other human rights officers, such as the commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe from 2012-2018 (Nils Muiznieks), who does not sit as a judge but who was for years a salaried activist of the Open Society Foundation in Latvia and who has used his official position to campaign against the so-called “anti-Soros” legislation in Hungary.
These NGOs are extremely active at the ECHR. The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Poland filed 16 applications, and defended 32 cases, in 2017 alone. Very often the role played by the NGOs does not appear in the court’s records but has to be discovered from the NGOs’ own reports instead. For instance, a case can be defended by lawyers from one NGO with pleas heard from other NGOs as third parties, even though the other organizations are in fact financed by the same source as the applicant, usually Soros.
There would not be anything wrong with judges having exercised a salaried activity for an NGO prior to becoming a judge if these same organizations were not themselves active as parties who bring cases to the ECHR, either as applicants themselves, as lawyers for applicants, or as third parties giving supposedly expert evidence (but in reality lobbying for a cause), and if those judges did not then hear those cases.
Indeed, the report’s worst finding is that in 88 cases judges sat on the bench ruling on cases brought to the court by NGOs they had previously worked for, without declaring a conflict of interest and without withdrawing from hearing the cases (see page 15 of the report and annexes 1 and 2.) In one case, ruled on in 2018, 10 out of the 14 NGOs that had brought the case were funded by the Open Society Foundation, while six out of the 17 judges who heard the case themselves had links to the same Soros-funded group.
The judges’ refusal to withdraw is a disgraceful professional failing which shows that Europe’s supreme human rights body is not, in fact, independent but is instead part of veritable “human rights industry” – a pyramid of money and a tight network of professional relationships, at the top of which sits George Soros with his billions. NGOs are supposed to represent “civil society” independent of states; in reality, a very large number of them are the creation of actors with no democratic legitimacy, like the Open Society Foundation.
The fact that this corrupt system has been able to flourish has several causes. The first is that Soros and the NGOs he finances dominate the human rights industry across the Balkans and in the Baltic states. His millions flood these small, poor countries (he has spent $131 million in Albania since 1992, for instance) and they in turn appoint judges to the ECHR which rules on human rights issues for the 47 member states of the Council of Europe. Indeed, the report finds that the total spending of the Open Society Foundation in Europe, $90 million a year, actually exceeds the annual budget of the European Court of Human Rights ($70 million).
Second, new procedures introduced in 2012 specifically provide for NGOs to take part in the selection procedure for judges at the ECHR. These NGOs can propose candidates and they can lobby for their selection. They have done this on many occasions, as the report shows. In the case of Albania in 2018, for instance, two out of the three candidates were executives of the Open Society Foundation; one of them was elected.
Finally, there is no requirement that people appointed to be judges at the ECHR have any judicial experience at all. Some 51 out of the 100 judges who have sat on the ECHR bench since 2009 had never been judges or magistrates before. Instead, they were very often human rights activists working for Soros or one of his front organisations.
This is a structural weakness which also affects international war crimes tribunals. As I showed in my book, ‘Travesty,’ and it means that people can wield judicial power who are not, in fact, trained judges or magistrates or even necessarily lawyers, but instead political activists. In some very egregious cases, people have become judges on the benches of these tribunals without even having a law degree.
The result is that the judges who sit on these bodies do not, in fact, behave as judges should. The role of the judge is to say what the law is, not to say what he or she thinks the law should be. Unfortunately, this is exactly what judges at the ECHR, and at the new international tribunals, do. In 1978, the ECHR proclaimed that the Convention was “a living instrument which must be interpreted in the light of present-day conditions” and that therefore its judges had the right to read new things into the Convention instead of agreeing to be bound by it. Such judicial activism is a travesty of the rule of law.
It is a travesty because the areas in which ECHR judges exercise their judicial activism are precisely the most politically sensitive issues, which should properly be decided by politicians in elected parliaments, or by referenda, and not by an elite caste of unaccountable activists. Those areas include freedom of expression, asylum, LGBT rights, conditions of detention, minority rights, and so on. Using their freedom to make up the law, ECHR judges have over decades applied a new vision of man which is the opposite of the original intention of the Convention, which was to protect human beings and their families from abusive state power. Now the ECHR spends most of its time demanding more state power for this or that fashionable (“woke”) cause.
George Soros has long been attacked for the excessive political power his gigantic fortune has bought, especially in post-communist Eastern Europe. This report by the European Center for Law and Justice is, however, one of the first occasions in which the corrupting effect of that power has been scrupulously identified and documented with respect to the supreme body charged with protecting human rights in Europe. To date, the ECHR has not denied any of the facts outlined in the report and, to the extent that these facts cannot be denied because they come from the ECHR itself, its credibility as an independent judicial body now lies in ruins.
John Laughland has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford and has taught at universities in Paris and Rome. He is a historian and specialist in international affairs.
‘Deliberate hoax’: Russian military denies NGO report of airstrikes in Idlib
RT | February 24, 2020
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports of Russian airstrikes on two villages in Idlib province have nothing to do with reality, the Russian military said, adding that none of its planes operated in that area on Monday.
“The information provided by the British NGO is a deliberate hoax,” Rear Admiral Oleg Zhuravlev, head of the Russian Center for the Reconciliation in Syria, said at a briefing.
Earlier in the day, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) claimed that an airstrike by Russian and Syrian forces on the villages of Kansafra and Al-Bara in Idlib led to the “killing and injuring of nearly ten Turkish soldiers.”
Ankara has not reported any casualties among its troops in Syria, however.
The SOHR claim came at a moment when Russia and Turkey stand on the brink of war over Syria. Ankara sent troops to Idlib – the last remaining terrorist stronghold in Syria – two weeks ago, provoking deadly clashes with the advancing Syrian army. Turkey has demanded Russia to pressure its allies in Damascus into ceasing its operations in the area, while Moscow blamed Ankara of not fulfilling its earlier promise to separate the “moderate” rebels from terrorists.
Last Thursday, Russian bombers struck militants who had launched an attack on Syrian positions with the support of Turkish artillery. However, both Russia and Turkey said they weren’t looking for a military conflict. A new round of consultation between the sides is being prepared in order to defuse the situation in Idlib, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced on Monday.
SOHR has been one of the key sources of Western media since the conflict in Syria broke out in 2011. However, a 2015 investigation revealed that the entire organization was run by a single man in Coventry, a former convict who fled Syria for the UK and has not been back since.
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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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