Bats, Gene Editing and Bioweapons: Recent DARPA Experiments Raise Concerns Amid Coronavirus Outbreak
DARPA recently spent millions on research involving bats and coronaviruses, as well as gene editing “bioweapons” prior to the recent coronavirus outbreak. Now, “strategic allies” of the agency have been chosen to develop a genetic material-based vaccine to halt the potential epidemic.
By Whitney Webb | The Last American Vagabond | January 30, 2020
WASHINGTON D.C. – In recent weeks, concern over the emergence of a novel coronavirus in China has grown exponentially as media, experts and government officials around the world have openly worried that this new disease has the potential to develop into a global pandemic.
As concerns about the future of the ongoing outbreak have grown, so too have the number of theories speculating about the outbreak’s origin, many of which blame a variety of state actors and/or controversial billionaires. This has inevitably led to efforts to clamp down on “misinformation” related to the coronavirus outbreak from both mainstream media outlets and major social media platforms.
However, while many of these theories are clearly speculative, there is also verifiable evidence regarding the recent interest of one controversial U.S. government agency in novel coronaviruses, specifically those transmitted from bats to humans. That agency, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), began spending millions on such research in 2018 and some of those Pentagon-funded studies were conducted at known U.S. military bioweapons labs bordering China and resulted in the discovery of dozens of new coronavirus strains as recently as last April. Furthermore, the ties of the Pentagon’s main biodefense lab to a virology institute in Wuhan, China — where the current outbreak is believed to have begun — have been unreported in English language media thus far.
While it remains entirely unknown as to what caused the outbreak, the details of DARPA’s and the Pentagon’s recent experimentation are clearly in the public interest, especially considering that the very companies recently chosen to develop a vaccine to combat the coronavirus outbreak are themselves strategic allies of DARPA. Not only that, but these DARPA-backed companies are developing controversial DNA and mRNA vaccines for this particular coronavirus strain, a category of vaccine that has never previously been approved for human use in the United States.
Yet, as fears of the pandemic potential of coronavirus grow, these vaccines are set to be rushed to market for public use, making it important for the public to be aware of DARPA’s recent experiments on coronaviruses, bats and gene editing technologies and their broader implications.
Examining the recent Wuhan-Bioweapon narrative
As the coronavirus outbreak has come to dominate headlines in recent weeks, several media outlets have promoted claims that the reported epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan, China was also the site of laboratories allegedly linked to a Chinese government biowarfare program.
However, upon further examination of the sourcing for this serious claim, these supposed links between the outbreak and an alleged Chinese bioweapons program have come from two highly dubious sources.
For instance, the first outlet to report on this claim was Radio Free Asia, the U.S.-government funded media outlet targeting Asian audiences that used to be run covertly by the CIA and named by the New York Times as a key part in the agency’s “worldwide propaganda network.” Though it is no longer run directly by the CIA, it is now managed by the government-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which answers directly to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director immediately prior to his current post at the head of the State Department.
In other words, Radio Free Asia and other BBG-managed media outlets are legal outlets for U.S. government propaganda. Notably, the long-standing ban on the domestic use of U.S. government propaganda on U.S. citizens was lifted in 2013, with the official justification of allowing the government to “effectively communicate in a credible way” and to better combat “al-Qaeda’s and other violent extremists’ influence.”
Returning to the subject at hand, Radio Free Asia’s recent report on the alleged origins of the outbreak being linked to a Chinese state-linked virology center cited only Ren Ruihong, the former head of the medical assistance department at the Chinese Red Cross, for that claim. Ruihong has been cited as an expert in several Radio Free Asia reports on disease outbreaks in China, but has not been cited as an expert by any other English-language media outlet.
Ruihong told Radio Free Asia that:
“It’s a new type of mutant coronavirus.They haven’t made public the genetic sequence, because it is highly contagious…Genetic engineering technology has gotten to such a point now, and Wuhan is home to a viral research center that is under the aegis of the China Academy of Sciences, which is the highest level of research facility in China.”
Though Ruihong did not directly say that the Chinese government was making a bioweapon at the Wuhan facility, she did imply that genetic experiments at the facility may have resulted in the creation of this new “mutant coronavirus” at the center of the outbreak.
With Radio Free Asia and its single source having speculated about Chinese government links to the creation of the new coronavirus, the Washington Times soon took it much farther in a report titled “Virus-hit Wuhan has two laboratories linked to Chinese bio-warfare program.” That article, much like Radio Free Asia’s earlier report, cites a single source for that claim, former Israeli military intelligence biowarfare specialist Dany Shoham.
Yet, upon reading the article, Shoham does not even directly make the claim cited in the article’s headline, as he only told the Washington Times that: “Certain laboratories in the [Wuhan] institute have probably been engaged, in terms of research and development, in Chinese [biological weapons], at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW alignment (emphasis added).”
While Shoham’s claims are clearly speculative, it is telling that the Washington Times would bother to cite him at all, especially given the key role he played in promoting false claims that the 2001 Anthrax attacks was the work of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Shoham’s assertions about Iraq’s government and weaponized Anthrax, which were used to bolster the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, have since been proven completely false, as Iraq was found to have neither the chemical or biological “weapons of mass destruction” that “experts” like Shoham had claimed.
Beyond Shoham’s own history of making suspect claims, it is also worth noting that Shoham’s previous employer, Israeli military intelligence, has a troubling past with bioweapons. For instance, in the late 1990s, it was reported by several outlets that Israel was in the process of developing a genetic bioweapon that would target Arabs, specifically Iraqis, but leave Israeli Jews unaffected.
Given the dubious past of Shoham and the clearly speculative nature of both his claims and those made in the Radio Free Asia report, one passage in the Washington Times article is particularly telling about why these claims have recently surfaced:
“One ominous sign, said a U.S. official, is that the false rumors since the outbreak began several weeks ago have begun circulating on the Chinese Internet claiming the virus is part of a U.S. conspiracy to spread germ weapons. That could indicate China is preparing propaganda outlets to counter future charges the new virus escaped from one of Wuhan’s civilian or defense research laboratories (emphasis added).”
However, as seen in that very article, accusations that the coronavirus escaped from a Chinese-state-linked laboratory is hardly a future charge as both the Washington Times and Radio Free Asia have already been making that claim. Instead, what this passage suggests is that the reports in both Radio Free Asia and the Washington Times were responses to the claims circulating within China that the outbreak is linked to a “U.S. conspiracy to spread germ weapons.”
Though most English-language media outlets to date have not examined such a possibility, there is considerable supporting evidence that deserves to be examined. For instance, not only was the U.S. military, including its controversial research arm — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), recently funding studies in and near China that discovered new, mutant coronaviruses originating from bats, but the Pentagon also became recently concerned about the potential use of bats as bioweapons.
Bats as bioweapons
As the ongoing coronavirus outbreak centered in China has spread to other countries and been blamed for a growing number of deaths, a consensus has emerged that this particular virus, currently classified as a “novel [i.e. new] coronavirus,” is believed to have originated in bats and was transmitted to humans in Wuhan, China via a seafood market that also traded exotic animals. So-called “wet” markets, like the one in Wuhan, were previously blamed for past deadly coronavirus outbreaks in China, such as the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
In addition, one preliminary study on the coronavirus responsible for the current outbreak found that the receptor, Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), is not only the same as that used by the SARS coronavirus, but that East Asians present a much higher ratio of lung cells that express that receptor than the other ethnicities (Caucasian and African-American) included in the study. However, such findings are preliminary and the sample size is too small to draw any definitive conclusions from that preliminary data.
Two years ago, media reports began discussing the Pentagon’s sudden concern that bats could be used as biological weapons, particularly in spreading coronaviruses and other deadly diseases. The Washington Post asserted that the Pentagon’s interest in investigating the potential use of bats to spread weaponized and deadly diseases was because of alleged Russian efforts to do the same. However, those claims regarding this Russian interest in using bats as bioweapons date back to the 1980s when the Soviet Union engaged in covert research involving the Marburg virus, research that did not even involve bats and which ended with the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
Like much of the Pentagon’s controversial research programs, the bats as bioweapons research has been framed as defensive, despite the fact that no imminent threat involving bat-propagated bioweapons has been acknowledged. However, independent scientists have recently accused the Pentagon, particularly its research arm DARPA, of claiming to be engaged in research it says is “defensive” but is actually “offensive.”
The most recent example of this involved DARPA’s “Insect Allies” program, which officially “aims to protect the U.S. agricultural food supply by delivering protective genes to plants via insects, which are responsible for the transmission of most plant viruses” and to ensure “food security in the event of a major threat,” according to both DARPA and media reports.
However, a group of well-respected, independent scientists revealed in a scathing analysis of the program that, far from a “defensive” research project, the Insect Allies program was aimed at creating and delivering a “new class of biological weapon.” The scientists, writing in the journal Science and led by Richard Guy Reeves, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany, warned that DARPA’s program — which uses insects as the vehicle for as horizontal environmental genetic alteration agents (HEGAAS) — revealed “an intention to develop a means of delivery of HEGAAs for offensive purposes (emphasis added).”
Whatever the real motivation behind the Pentagon’s sudden and recent concern about bats being used as a vehicle for bioweapons, the U.S. military has spent millions of dollars over the past several years funding research on bats, the deadly viruses they can harbor — including coronaviruses — and how those viruses are transmitted from bats to humans.
For instance, DARPA spent $10 million on one project in 2018 “to unravel the complex causes of bat-borne viruses that have recently made the jump to humans, causing concern among global health officials.” Another research project backed by both DARPA and NIH saw researchers at Colorado State University examine the coronavirus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in bats and camels “to understand the role of these hosts in transmitting disease to humans.” Other U.S. military-funded studies, discussed in detail later in this report, discovered several new strains of novel coronaviruses carried by bats, both within China and in countries bordering China.
Many of these recent research projects are related to DARPA’s Preventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats, or PREEMPT program, which was officially announced in April 2018. PREEMPT focuses specifically on animal reservoirs of disease, specifically bats, and DARPA even noted in its press release in the program that it “is aware of biosafety and biosecurity sensitivities that could arise” due to the nature of the research.
DARPA’s announcement for PREEMPT came just a few months after the U.S. government decided to controversially end a moratorium on so-called “gain-of-function” studies involving dangerous pathogens. VICE News explained “gain-of-function” studies as follows:
“Known as ‘gain-of-function’ studies, this type of research is ostensibly about trying to stay one step ahead of nature. By making super-viruses that are more pathogenic and easily transmissible, scientists are able to study the way these viruses may evolve and how genetic changes affect the way a virus interacts with its host. Using this information, the scientists can try to pre-empt the natural emergence of these traits by developing antiviral medications that are capable of staving off a pandemic (emphasis added).”
In addition, while both DARPA’s PREEMPT program and the Pentagon’s open interest in bats as bioweapons were announced in 2018, the U.S. military — specifically the Department of Defense’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program — began funding research involving bats and deadly pathogens, including the coronaviruses MERS and SARS, a year prior in 2017. One of those studies focused on “Bat-Borne Zoonotic Disease Emergence in Western Asia” and involved the Lugar Center in Georgia, identified by former Georgian government officials, the Russian government and independent, investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva as a covert U.S. bioweapons lab.
It is also important to point out the fact that the U.S. military’s key laboratories involving the study of deadly pathogens, including coronaviruses, Ebola and others, was suddenly shut down last July after the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified major “biosafety lapses” at the facility.
The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland — the U.S. military’s lead laboratory for “biological defense” research since the late 1960s — was forced to halt all research it was conducting with a series of deadly pathogens after the CDC found that it lacked “sufficient systems in place to decontaminate wastewater” from its highest-security labs and failure of staff to follow safety procedures, among other lapses. The facility contains both level 3 and level 4 biosafety labs. While it is unknown if experiments involving coronaviruses were ongoing at the time, USAMRIID has recently been involved in research borne out of the Pentagon’s recent concern about the use of bats as bioweapons.
The decision to shut down USAMRIID garnered surprisingly little media coverage, as did the CDC’s surprising decision to allow the troubled facility to “partially resume” research late last November even though the facility was and is still not at “full operational capability.” The USAMRIID’s problematic record of safety at such facilities is of particular concern in light of the recent coronavirus outbreak in China. As this report will soon reveal, this is because USAMRIID has a decades-old and close partnership with the University of Wuhan’s Institute of Medical Virology, which is located in the epicenter of the current outbreak.
The Pentagon in Wuhan?
Beyond the U.S. military’s recent expenditures on and interest in the use of bats of bioweapons, it is also worth examining the recent studies the military has funded regarding bats and “novel coronaviruses,” such as that behind the recent outbreak, that have taken place within or in close proximity to China.
For instance, one study conducted in Southern China in 2018 resulted in the discovery of 89 new “novel bat coronavirus” strains that use the same receptor as the coronavirus known as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). That study was jointly funded by the Chinese government’s Ministry of Science and Technology, USAID — an organization long alleged to be a front for U.S. intelligence, and the U.S. National Institute of Health — which has collaborated with both the CIA and the Pentagon on infectious disease and bioweapons research.
The authors of the study also sequenced the complete genomes for two of those strains and also noted that existing MERS vaccines would be ineffective in targeting these viruses, leading them to suggest that one should be developed in advance. This did not occur.
Another U.S. government-funded study that discovered still more new strains of “novel bat coronavirus” was published just last year. Titled “Discovery and Characterization of Novel Bat Coronavirus Lineages from Kazakhstan,” focused on “the bat fauna of central Asia, which link China to eastern Europe” and the novel bat coronavirus lineages discovered during the study were found to be “closely related to bat coronaviruses from China, France, Spain, and South Africa, suggesting that co-circulation of coronaviruses is common in multiple bat species with overlapping geographical distributions.” In other words, the coronaviruses discovered in this study were identified in bat populations that migrate between China and Kazakhstan, among other countries, and is closely related to bat coronaviruses in several countries, including China.
The study was entirely funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, specifically the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) as part of a project investigating coronaviruses similar to MERS, such as the aforementioned 2018 study. Yet, beyond the funding of this 2019 study, the institutions involved in conducting this study are also worth noting given their own close ties to the U.S. military and government.
The study’s authors are affiliated with either the Kazakhstan-based Research Institute for Biological Safety Problems and/or Duke University. The Research Institute for Biological Safety Problems, though officially a part of Kazakhstan’s National Center for Biotechnology, has received millions from the U.S. government, most of it coming from the Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. It is the Kazakhstan government’s official depository of “highly dangerous animal and bird infections, with a collection of 278 pathogenic strains of 46 infectious diseases.” It is part of a network of Pentagon-funded “bioweapons labs” throughout the Central Asian country, which borders both of the U.S.’ top rival states — China and Russia.
Duke University’s involvement with this study is also interesting given that Duke is a key partner of DARPA’s Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program, which officially aims “to dramatically accelerate discovery, integration, pre-clinical testing, and manufacturing of medical countermeasures against infectious diseases.” The first step of the Duke/DARPA program involves the discovery of potentially threatening viruses and “develop[ing] methods to support viral propagation, so that virus can be used for downstream studies.”
Duke University is also jointly partnered with China’s Wuhan University, which is based in the city where the current coronavirus outbreak began, which resulted in the opening of the China-based Duke Kunshan University (DKU) in 2018. Notably, China’s Wuhan University — in addition to its partnership with Duke — also includes a multi-lab Institute of Medical Virology that has worked closely with the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases since the 1980s, according to its website. As previously noted, the USAMRIID facility in the U.S. was shut down last July for failures to abide by biosafety and proper waste disposal procedures, but was allowed to partially resume some experiments late last November.
The Pentagon’s Dark History of Germ Warfare
The U.S. military has a troubling past of having used disease as a weapon during times of war. One example involved the U.S.’ use of germ warfare during the Korean War, when it targeted both North Korea and China by dropping diseased insects and voles carrying a variety of pathogens — including bubonic plague and hemorrhagic fever — from planes in the middle of the night. Despite the mountain of evidence and the testimony of U.S. soldiers involved in that program, the U.S. government and military denied the claims and ordered the destruction of relevant documentation.
In the post World War II era, other examples of U.S. research aimed at developing biological weapons have emerged, some of which have recently received media attention. One such example occurred this past July, when the U.S. House of Representatives demanded information from the U.S. military on its past efforts to weaponize insects and Lyme disease between 1950 and 1975.
The U.S. has claimed that it has not pursued offensive biological weapons since 1969 and this has been further supported by the U.S.’ ratification of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which went into effect in 1975. However, there is extensive evidence that the U.S. has continued to covertly research and develop such weapons in the years since, much of it conducted abroad and outsourced to private companies, yet still funded by the U.S. military. Several investigators, including Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, have documented how the U.S. produces deadly viruses, bacteria and other toxins at facilities outside of the U.S. — many of them in Eastern Europe, Africa and South Asia — in clear violation of the BWC.
Aside from the military’s own research, the controversial neoconservative think tank, the now defunct Project for a New American Century (PNAC), openly promoted the use of a race-specific genetically modified bioweapon as a “politically useful tool.” In what is arguably the think tank’s most controversial document, titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” there are a few passages that openly discuss the utility of bioweapons, including the following sentences:
“… combat likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, “cyber-space,” and perhaps the world of microbes… advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”
Though numerous members of PNAC were prominent in the George W. Bush administration, many of its more controversial members have again risen to political prominence in the Trump administration.
Several years after “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” was published, the U.S. Air Force published a document entitled “Biotechnology: Genetically Engineered Pathogens,” which contains the following passage:
“The JASON group, composed of academic scientists, served as technical advisers to the U. S. government. Their study generated six broad classes of genetically engineered pathogens that could pose serious threats to society. These include but are not limited to binary biological weapons, designer genes, gene therapy as a weapon, stealth viruses, host-swapping diseases, and designer diseases (emphasis added).”
Concerns about Pentagon experiments with biological weapons have garnered renewed media attention, particularly after it was revealed in 2017 that DARPA was the top funder of the controversial “gene drive” technology, which has the power to permanently alter the genetics of entire populations while targeting others for extinction. At least two of DARPA’s studies using this controversial technology were classified and “focused on the potential military application of gene drive technology and use of gene drives in agriculture,” according to media reports.
The revelation came after an organization called the ETC Group obtained over 1,000 emails on the military’s interest in the technology as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Co-director of the ETC Group Jim Thomas said that this technology may be used as a biological weapon:
“Gene drives are a powerful and dangerous new technology and potential biological weapons could have disastrous impacts on peace, food security and the environment, especially if misused, The fact that gene drive development is now being primarily funded and structured by the US military raises alarming questions about this entire field.”
Though the exact motivation behind the military’s interest in such technology is unknown, the Pentagon has been open about the fact that it is devoting much of its resources towards the containment of what it considers the two greatest threats to U.S. military hegemony: Russia and China. China has been cited as the greatest threat of the two by several Pentagon officials, including John Rood, the Pentagon’s top adviser for defense policy, who described China as the greatest threat to “our way of life in the United States” at the Aspen Security Forum last July.
Since the Pentagon began “redesigning” its policies and research towards a “long war” with Russia and China, the Russian military has accused the U.S. military of harvesting DNA from Russians as part of a covert bioweapon program, a charge that the Pentagon has adamantly denied. Major General Igor Kirillov, the head of the Russian military’s radiation, chemical and biological protection unit who made these claims, also asserted that the U.S. was developing such weapons in close proximity to Russian and Chinese borders.
China has also accused the U.S. military of harvesting DNA from Chinese citizens with ill intentions, such as when 200,000 Chinese farmers were used in 12 genetic experiments without informed consent. Those experiments had been conducted by Harvard researchers as part of a U.S. government-funded project.
Hand inserts a molecule into DNA concept design.
DARPA and its partners chosen to develop coronavirus vaccine
Last Thursday, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced that it would fund three separate programs in order to promote the development of a vaccine for the new coronavirus responsible for the current outbreak.
CEPI — which describes itself as “a partnership of public, private, philanthropic and civil organizations that will finance and co-ordinate the development of vaccines against high priority public health threats” — was founded in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India along with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its massive funding and close connections to public, private and non-profit organizations have positioned it to be able to finance the rapid creation of vaccines and widely distribute them.
CEPI’s recent announcement revealed that it would fund two pharmaceutical companies — Inovio Pharmaceuticals and Moderna Inc. — as well as Australia’s University of Queensland, which became a partner of CEPI early last year. Notably, the two pharmaceutical companies chosen have close ties to and/or strategic partnerships with DARPA and are developing vaccines that controversially involve genetic material and/or gene editing. The University of Queensland also has ties to DARPA, but those ties are not related to the university’s biotechnology research, but instead engineering and missile development.
For instance, the top funders of Inovio Pharmaceuticals include both DARPA and the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the company has received millions in dollars in grants from DARPA, including a $45 million grant to develop a vaccine for Ebola. Inovio specializes in the creation of DNA immunotherapies and DNA vaccines, which contain genetically engineered DNA that causes the cells of the recipient to produce an antigen and can permanently alter a person’s DNA. Inovio previously developed a DNA vaccine for the Zika virus, but — to date — no DNA vaccine has been approved for use in humans in the United States. Inovio was also recently awarded over $8 million from the U.S. military to develop a small, portable intradermal device for delivering DNA vaccines jointly developed by Inovio and USAMRIID.
However, the CEPI grant to combat coronavirus may change that, as it specifically funds Inovio’s efforts to continue developing its DNA vaccine for the coronavirus that causes MERS. Inovio’s MERS vaccine program began in 2018 in partnership with CEPI in a deal worth $56 million. The vaccine currently under development uses “Inovio’s DNA Medicines platform to deliver optimized synthetic antigenic genes into cells, where they are translated into protein antigens that activate an individual’s immune system” and the program is partnered with U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and the NIH, among others. That program is currently undergoing testing in the Middle East.
Inovio’s collaboration with the U.S. military in regards to DNA vaccines is nothing new, as their past efforts to develop a DNA vaccine for both Ebola and Marburg virus were also part of what Inovio’s CEO Dr. Joseph Kim called its “active biodefense program” that has “garnered multiple grants from the Department of Defense, Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and other government agencies.”
CEPI’s interest in increasing its support to this MERS-specific program seems at odds with its claim that doing so will combat the current coronavirus outbreak, since MERS and the novel coronavirus in question are not analogous and treatments for certain coronaviruses have been shown to be ineffective against other strains.
It is also worth noting that Inovio Pharmaceuticals was the only company selected by CEPI with direct access to the Chinese pharmaceutical market through its partnership with China’s ApolloBio Corp., which currently has an exclusive license to sell Inovio-made DNA immunotherapy products to Chinese customers.
The second pharmaceutical company that was selected by CEPI to develop a vaccine for the new coronavirus is Moderna Inc., which will develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus of concern in collaboration with the U.S. NIH and which will be funded entirely by CEPI. The vaccine in question, as opposed to Inovio’s DNA vaccine, will be a messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine. Though different than a DNA vaccine, mRNA vaccines still use genetic material “to direct the body’s cells to produce intracellular, membrane or secreted proteins.”
Moderna’s mRNA treatments, including its mRNA vaccines, were largely developed using a $25 million grant from DARPA and it often touts is strategic alliance with DARPA in press releases. Moderna’s past and ongoing research efforts have included developing mRNA vaccines tailored to an individual’s unique DNA as well as an unsuccessful effort to create a mRNA vaccine for the Zika Virus, which was funded by the U.S. government.
Both DNA and mRNA vaccines involve the introduction of foreign and engineered genetic material into a person’s cells and past studies have found that such vaccines “possess significant unpredictability and a number of inherent harmful potential hazards” and that “there is inadequate knowledge to define either the probability of unintended events or the consequences of genetic modifications.” Nonetheless, the climate of fear surrounding the coronavirus outbreak could be enough for the public and private sector to develop and distribute such controversial treatments due to fear about the epidemic potential of the current outbreak.
However, the therapies being developed by Inovio, Modern and the University of Queensland are in alignment with DARPA’s objectives regarding gene editing and vaccine technology. For instance, in 2015, DARPA geneticist Col. Daniel Wattendorf described how the agency was investigating a “new method of vaccine production [that] would involve giving the body instructions for making certain antibodies. Because the body would be its own bioreactor, the vaccine could be produced much faster than traditional methods and the result would be a higher level of protection.”
According to media reports on Wattendorf’s statements at the time, the vaccine would be developed as follows:
“Scientists would harvest viral antibodies from someone who has recovered from a disease such as flu or Ebola. After testing the antibodies’ ability to neutralize viruses in a petri dish, they would isolate the most effective one, determine the genes needed to make that antibody, and then encode many copies of those genes into a circular snippet of genetic material — either DNA or RNA, that the person’s body would then use as a cookbook to assemble the antibody.”
Though Wattendorf asserted that the effects of those vaccines wouldn’t be permanent, DARPA has since been promoting permanent gene modifications as a means of protecting U.S. troops from biological weapons and infectious disease. “Why is DARPA doing this? [To] protect a soldier on the battlefield from chemical weapons and biological weapons by controlling their genome — having the genome produce proteins that would automatically protect the soldier from the inside out,” then-DARPA director Steve Walker (now with Lockheed Martin) said this past September of the project, known as “Safe Genes.”
Conclusion
Research conducted by the Pentagon, and DARPA specifically, has continually raised concerns, not just in the field of bioweapons and biotechnology, but also in the fields of nanotechnology, robotics and several others. DARPA, for instance, has been developing a series of unsettling research projects that ranges from microchips that can create and delete memories from the human brain to voting machine software that is rife with problems.
Now, as fear regarding the current coronavirus outbreak begins to peak, companies with direct ties to DARPA have been tasked with developing its vaccine, the long-term human and environmental impacts of which are unknown and will remain unknown by the time the vaccine is expected to go to market in a few weeks time.
Furthermore, DARPA and the Pentagon’s past history with bioweapons and their more recent experiments on genetic alteration and extinction technologies as well as bats and coronaviruses in proximity to China have been largely left out of the narrative, despite the information being publicly available. Also left out of the media narrative have been the direct ties of both the USAMRIID and DARPA-partnered Duke University to the city of Wuhan, including its Institute of Medical Virology.
Though much about the origins of the coronavirus outbreak remains unknown, the U.S. military’s ties to the aforementioned research studies and research institutions are worth detailing as such research — while justified in the name of “national security” — has the frightening potential to result in unintended, yet world-altering consequences. The lack of transparency about this research, such as DARPA’s decision to classify its controversial genetic extinction research and the technology’s use as a weapon of war, compounds these concerns. While it is important to avoid reckless speculation as much as possible, it is the opinion of this author that the information in this report is in the public interest and that readers should use this information to reach their own conclusions about the topics discussed herein.
Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media & The Last American Vagabond. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.
Warren blames global warming for cold-loving influenza
CFACT | January 30, 2020
Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren blames global warming for assisting influenza, and warns on her campaign website that President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord may fuel the next epidemic. This is despite the fact that influenza is greatly assisted by cold temperatures and peer-reviewed studies and objective data show cold temperatures kill far more people than warm or hot temperatures.
Under a tab on her website titled, “Preventing, Containing, and Treating Infectious Disease Outbreaks at Home and Abroad,” Warren states, “Experts believe the world is due for another bout of pandemic influenza. The latest threat comes from coronavirus….” She later adds, “On the global stage, his [President Trump’s] decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement demonstrates reckless denial about the role of climate change in fueling epidemics.”
Yet the National Institutes of Health observes that influenza, “is more infectious in cold winter temperatures than during the warmer months. At winter temperatures, the virus’s outer covering, or envelope, hardens to a rubbery gel that could shield the virus as it passes from person to person, the researchers have found. At warmer temperatures, however, the protective gel melts to a liquid phase. But this liquid phase apparently isn’t tough enough to protect the virus against the elements, and so the virus loses its ability to spread from person to person.”
A Harvard University medical article reports that an average of 200,000 people in the United States get sick with the flu each year and 36,000 people die. Observing that the obvious fact that the flu season occurs during cold winter months, the article notes, “the main reason we have a flu season may simply be that the influenza virus is happier in cold, dry weather and thus better able to invade our bodies.”
Ongoing modest warming has reduced the length of winter and the prevalence of the cold temperatures that assist influenza. It seems rather difficult to blame the next influenza pandemic on global warming, but climate alarmists like Elizabeth Warren sure are trying. Worse, by diverting research, attention and resources away from programs that might actually fight influenza, and instead directing them to climate change programs, Warren’s plan could well cause thousands of additional deaths each year.
Die Linke Lawmaker Reveals How NATO Fooled Gorbachev About Bloc’s Eastward Expansion Plans
Sputnik – January 31, 2020
In the 30 years since US Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” verbal commitment to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990 not to expand NATO beyond German lands, the alliance has swallowed up every member of the former Warsaw Pact, along with half a dozen former Soviet and Yugoslav republics.
NATO broke all of the promises it made to Moscow, encouraged by the ‘blindness’ of Soviet leaders, Die Linke lawmaker and Bundestag Defence Committee member Alexander Neu, has stated.
In an op-ed regarding the upcoming Defender 2020 Europe drills, touted by NATO as the largest US deployment in Europe in 25 years, the opposition lawmaker argued that the alleged ‘Russian threat’ which the drills are meant to deter was imaginary, and that NATO is the side acting like the real aggressor.
Taking a retrospective look into the foreign and security policy developments in Europe over the past three decades which have led to the current impasse, Neu recalled that while Western leaders appeared to show support for General Secretary Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ about a common security policy in the Euro-Atlantic area ‘from Vladivostok to Vancouver’, their support proved superficial.
“With the end of the Cold War, German unification, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West was suddenly seen as the winner of the confrontation. All ideas about a collective understanding and common security were swept aside. The promises made by the United States during negotiations on German unity stipulating that NATO would not expand beyond Germany if the Soviet Union accepted a united Germany turned out to be a lie and a fraud,” the lawmaker argued.
According to Neu, “the Soviet side,” for its part, “proved to be blinded and refrained from asking for a contractual promise – this was an unforgivable mistake made by the then increasingly incapable Soviet leadership under Gorbachev.”
Talks between Mikhail Gorbachev and US Secretary of State James Baker, 1990. © Sputnik / Sergey Guneev
The rest is history, the German opposition lawmaker wrote, with NATO beginning its eastward expansion in 1999, and the process continuing ever since. “Even post-Soviet republics were admitted into the alliance. Protests by the Russian side against these gains in security policy, contrary to the 1990 US commitment, have been and will continue to be coolly brushed aside,” Neu noted.
Ultimately, Neu suggested that amid the ongoing tensions between the West and Russia, whether over Ukraine, Georgia or Syria, instead of trying to take de-escalatory steps, the self-proclaimed winners of the Cold War “continue to claim their right to the geostrategic loot,” with Russia portrayed as an aggressor which has insolently refused to remain subordinate to the ‘New World Order’ proclaimed by George H.W. Bush.
“In short: NATO is moving its military infrastructure further and further toward Russia’s borders, breaking the promise it made in 1990. And Russia’s reactions to these offensive actions by the US-led alliance are called aggression and threats. This is the wrong perception, but unfortunately is also widespread among most media and journalists in the West, who are full of conviction that we are the good guys. And since Russia is no longer willing to stand by and watch the geopolitics and imperialism-driven policies of the US and its vassals, NATO countries are massively increasing military spending (to 2 percent of GDP) and training as close to Russia’s borders as possible to show who is in charge.”
The Defender 2020 Europe drills were another demonstration of this, Neu noted, but promised that he, as a lawmaker, and member of the Bundestag Defence Committee, would “call for resistance” to the drills.
The Defender 2020 drills are expected to kick off in February and will continue until August, and will involve the participation of about 37,000 troops from 18 countries.
The Last Days of the “Holocaust”
By Eric Striker – National Justice – January 29, 2020
Holocaust revisionism is perhaps the most institutionally reviled, criminally punished and socially persecuted field of research in modern Western history.
Yet, on the much publicized 75th anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz, the gatekeepers of the Holocaust continue to give ground, kicking and screaming along the way.
The latest example is a new book by former Museum of Jewish Heritage director David G. Marwell, “Unmasking the ‘Angel of Death’,” which grants many revisionist challenges to the legend of Joseph Mengele.
Marwell’s work is considered the most well-researched mainstream biography of Mengele to date. In it, he cross references witness testimony from “survivors” with hard evidence and primary sources, only to conclude that their “memories” were “unreliable.” In other words, they are lying.
Stitching together humans to create siamese twins, smashing babies against train cars, attempts to transform boys into girls – all of the barbarism etched into the popular mind about a German in a labcoat, Marwell concludes, is nothing but a pack of atrocious hoaxes.
Marwell does stress that Mengele was a true-believing National-socialist, which in his mind is an act of evil in and of itself. According to the book, he also at times overstepped ethical boundaries, for example when studying the effects of food deprivation on the human body, but the so-called “Angel of Death” made up for this by giving subjects superior accommodations and privileged treatment when the experiments were over. The twins and dwarves he studied were treated kindly, even if looking at living people as laboratory specimens in any context is dehumanizing. By and large, the book admits that what is commonly known about Mengele is fiction constructed by rumors, novels and Hollywood which have been held as true thanks to Jewish “eyewitnesses” substantiating the hoaxes post-hoc.
Mengele’s main achievement at the camp, which Marwell credits him for, was containing and preventing a massive outbreak of typhus at Auschwitz in difficult circumstances. This saved thousands of lives, Jewish and Gentile alike. Mengele was not motivated by hate and sadism. His most intimate letters and confessions show only a passion for advancing medical science.
Majdanek: No Longer a Death Camp?
Another relatively recent victory won by revisionists is a quiet adjustment by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to their page on the Nazi “killing centers,” They have been forced to admit that the Majdanek camp in Poland was not used to exterminate Jews.
The USHMM credits “recent research” for retracting what has traditionally been considered the sixth death camp. This is research dissident historians have contributed to while risking their freedoms, employment prospects and lives.
Majdanek was the first camp liberated by the Soviet Union, in 1944. There, they found Zyklon-B canisters, ovens and showers, which Soviet propagandists used to declare that over a million Jews were systematically murdered by gas. The evidence provided by the USSR were German documents that they asserted held coded references to systematic homicide gassings. The pattern is similar to what they later argued with Auschwitz, also liberated by the Soviets. Multiple camp guards and commanders were charged with war crimes and given the death penalty based on fictitious claims related to Majdanek.
This fairy tale was promoted by a variety of Jewish and some non-Jewish scholars. In recent years, the death toll itself has been drastically reduced from 1.3 million victims according to the academic Lucy Dawidowicz, to 78,000 according to the chief historian at the camp’s museum today. Revisionists hold that the numbers of people who died, largely of typhus, dysentary, etc, could be half of even that official figure.
The Immovable Force of Auschwitz
If you’ve noticed that the Holocaust story appears more centered around Auschwitz than usual, it’s because this is the last straw Holocaustians have to grasp on.
An interesting new fad has emerged, particularly with “ex-” revisionists, who admit that all the claims of the Holocaust are lies except the ones made specifically about Auschwitz. Some prominent figures in this sphere today include big names like David Irving and David Cole, two men who simply got tired of being imprisoned and physically beaten for their opinions on history. This is a testament to Auschwitz being the king of all third rails.
But here too, we are beginning to see official omissions of previously claimed homicidal gas chambers, for example at Auschwitz I (Stammlager), the main camp tourists visit. The USHMM now specifically distinguishes only Auschwitz II (Birkenau) as the site of homicide gassings.
Revisionists like Robert Faurisson have always contended that the gas chamber shown to visitors is a fake. Even though the French newspaper L’Express was able to get the Auschwitz Museum to admit that the gas chambers they show to people are phony, official tour guides still present the exhibit as an authentic homicide gas chamber. On the infamous Deborah Lipstadt’s website, it says that the gas chamber isn’t a fake intended to fool visitors, it’s a “recreation” meant to be “symbolic”!
Auschwitz appears to be the fortress those invested in Holocaust mythology are staking their last stand on. It is impossible for them to give any more ground without the whole story collapsing.
But nothing is etched in stone. The aggressive attempt at a Zionist shakedown of Poland, as well as antagonizing its people, could put the myth in danger. The Polish government could shut them up tomorrow by inviting both revisionists and affirmers to do an unrestricted forensic analysis of all the Auschwitz facilities and grounds. I doubt the Israelis will like the results.
The sanctity of the Holocaust narrative becomes even more imperiled thanks to the in-your-face genocidal jingoism of Netanyahu and the unsophisticated political class steering the Israeli ship. International Jewry has spent much of the last 75 years using the Holocaust as the sacred myth guiding the neo-liberal globalist order.
Netanyahu today uses it as a cheap gimmick to push for Israel’s short-term geopolitical goals. The Israelis actively tried to make Vladimir Putin the star of this year’s Holocaust show, even though most Jews see Russia as an affront to the liberal world order. Netanyahu is desperate to do whatever it takes to pull the Russians away from their alliances in Syria and Iran so that the Israeli war machine can continue to advance.
At this point, it’s not a question of historical accuracy but of power. And only power can check power. We are living in the last days of the Holohoax.
Here’s Who Pressured the Medical Journal
Do we want to live in a world in which medical journals are afraid to publish certain conclusions?
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | January 29, 2020
I recently described an organized campaign against a medical journal that published research over the objections of anti-meat activists. After the Annals of Internal Medicine refused to halt publication, the US Federal Trade Commission was urged to intervene. So was the Philadelphia district attorney’s office.
Do we really want to live in a world in which medical journals are afraid to publish certain conclusions because activists will sic the authorities on them? Does it really need to be said that, once government officials and the courts start second-guessing medical journals, free speech and honest scholarship are as good as dead?
So who, precisely, tried to get this research retracted before it saw the light of day? Who arrogantly wanted to extinguish the public’s right to hear that the evidence linking meat consumption and poor health is quite weak?
A lot of people who should know better. People associated with prestigious institutions.
Let’s start with David L. Katz, of Yale University. In a bizarre newspaper column Katz implies the journal is guilty of “information terrorism.” In his universe, this isn’t a matter of different researchers examining the same evidence and coming to different conclusions. It’s a matter of anyone-who-disagrees-with-me-has-nefarious-motives. It’s how-dare-you-challenge-the-prevailing-consensus!
Katz is the founder/director of the True Health Initiative. That organization describes itself as a “voice of reason and consensus.” It claims to be “fighting fake facts” and “combating false doubts” via an “evidence-based” approach. Shutting down competing perspectives is not the voice of reason. It’s the voice of authoritarianism.
Neal Barnard, of George Washington University’s School of Medicine, heads the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. It was his organization that appealed to the Trade Commission and then to the district attorney.
Other signatories to the letter urging the journal to halt publication include Frank Hu, JoAnn E. Manson, Eric Rimm, Meir Stampfer, and Walter Willett. All of these people are associated with Harvard’s School of Public Health. That entity has a party line where meat is concerned. It’s difficult to imagine a researcher with an alternative perspective surviving there long. I wrote about Willett’s vegetarian climate change activism last year.
These are the other individuals who took the highly unusual step of trying to influence the editorial decisions of a respected medical journal:
Dariush Mozaffarian – a Dean at Tufts University
Richard Carmona of the University of Arizona
Christopher Gardner of Stanford University
David J.A. Jenkins and John Sievenpiper of the University of Toronto
Dean Ornish of the University of California
Kim A. Williams of Rush University
NewsGuard Can Save You From Putin!
By Fred Gardner | CounterPunch | January 27, 2020
The New York Times headline was an attention grabber worthy of Sen. Joe McCarthy: “How Amazon, Geico and Walmart Fund Propaganda.” A subhed explained: “Algorithms are sending ads by American brands onto Russian disinformation sites.” The op-ed by L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of the Wall St. Journal, culminated in a sales pitch for his latest venture, NewsGuard. The company’s business plan is to do for internet news sites what Red Channels did for Hollywood movies: maintain a blacklist. Patriotism for personal profit —perfect plan.
Crovitz’s first paragraph invoked Lenin and Putin:
Lenin is sometimes said to have predicted that capitalists would sell Russia the rope with which they would be hanged.* Yet not even Lenin could have imagined Vladimir Putin’s success in getting some of the largest Western companies to subsidize his disinformation efforts by advertising on his government-run “news” websites.
The top programmatic advertiser on Mr. Putin’s Sputnik News site? The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, through ads bought on behalf of Berkshire Hathaway’s Geico insurance. Sputnik News peddles Kremlin propaganda on topics such as Syria and straightfacedly reports Mr. Putin’s denials of interfering in other countries’ elections.
Isn’t a “news site” supposed to report the news straightfacedly? Did Crovitz expect Sputnik to scowlingly report Putin’s denials? Or mockingly? Is that how they would handle the story at the Wall St. Journal? (Of course not. The WSJ would simply ignore Putin’s denials.) As for poor Syria, millions of Americans got a look at Bashar Al-Assad in a 60 Minutes segment that aired in 2015. He’s an ophthalmologist, his wife is a banker, they met in London, they are not religious zealots. The interviewer was hapless Charley Rose, an unlikely Kremlin agent.
Crovitz can only estimate how much US companies spent advertising on Sputnik and RT (Russia Today), but he can name names and try to shame:
Geico is hardly alone in financing propaganda through what’s called “programmatic advertising,” ads that are placed automatically by algorithms, without judgment based on the content or journalistic standards of the websites. Mr. Putin’s leading disinformation arm, RT.com, attracted programmatic advertising from 477 companies and brands over a recent six-month period… Among RT.com’s top 20 programmatic advertisers: Amazon, PayPal, Walmart and Kroger. For Sputnik, its 196 programmatic advertisers in addition to Geico included Best Buy, ETrade and Progressive Insurance.
These all-American brands don’t intend to subsidize the Kremlin. The problem is that with programmatic advertising brands can target the kinds of audiences they want to reach online, rather than specifying, as they once did, on which websites their ads should appear. As a result, these ads inadvertently end up on all kinds of inappropriate sites…
Whatever the amount, companies are supporting websites that are the very definition of corporate social irresponsibility. RT describes its role as encouraging people in other countries to “question more” — that is, promoting divisiveness in the United States and Europe.
To accuse RT of “promoting divisiveness” in the US and Europe is really ludicrous. As if African-Americans would accept the murder of their children by police if it weren’t for outside agitators —the essential White Supremacist line. John Stewart, Amy Goodman, Michael Moore, John Oliver, Samantha Bea and others reported and commented on the same events covered by RT, and their tone was every bit as biting towards racist cops, the ascendant arms industry, greed-driven bankers, mine owners, for-profit healthcare…
“Question more” was the signature sign-off line of Larry King, who conducted interviews on RT that seemed no different than the ones he conducted for 25 years on CNN. Then his show was called “Larry King Live;” on RT it was “Larry King Now.” I forget who King was talking to in the spring of 2016 when he mentioned that Donald Trump had phoned him to discuss the pros and cons of running for President. “Donald Trump is no buffoon,” King cautioned his guest. “It’s a big mistake to write him off as a buffoon.” King has interviewed the Donald more than 100 times over the years. He has been talking to people on-air since the late 1950s. After gaining popularity with radio shows based in Miami and New York, he reached a nationwide audience in 1985 with an all-night show on which a 90-minute interview was followed by call-ins from listeners. Larry King is as American as baseball. (Watching LA Dodger games on TV in recent years, you’d see him sitting behind home plate and seriously observing the field.)
Rosie used to watch RT on the small Panasonic atop the refrigerator. The hour-long news show, produced in New York, was informative. Most of the on-air talent seemed to be American 30-somethings, politically “progressive.” The women were all smart, urbane and way more appealing than the harpies at Fox News. I didn’t think the male comedians were funny, but they thought they were. There was a very clear explainer of financial news named Ed Harrison but RT dropped him before we in the East Bay suddenly stopped getting it about a year ago.
RT.com is but one example, Crovitz writes, cyberspace is full of sites that no reputable company should support with ad buys. He points to three he considers totally loony:
Among the top 20 advertisers on the site Healthy Holistic Living, which has promoted milk thistle as a cancer treatment, are Amazon, Citibank, Hertz and Hilton —as well as the Navy Federal Credit Union. A site called Healthy Food House, which ran an article that said, “Our aim today is to persuade you that there is no such a disease as cancer, as it is only a B-17 deficiency,” carried advertising from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Its top two advertisers were Amazon and Google. A website perhaps appropriately called The Mind Unleashed, which blamed Israel for the Sept. 11 attacks and claimed that certain foods are better than radiation or chemotherapy for cancer treatment, ran advertising from Procter & Gamble, CBS and Best Buy.
To avoid getting sidetracked by milk thistle, let’s stipulate to Crovitz’s basic point: the current programmatic advertising model results in reputable companies buying space on websites their executives and shareholders would disdain for one reason or another. Crovitz has the solution, but before pitching it, he points out the inadequacy of alternative approaches:
Some advertisers have tried to keep their ads off inappropriate sites. Procter & Gamble stopped advertising on YouTube in 2017 for a year because its ads kept appearing alongside videos promoting pedophilia and white supremacy. The broader problem, however, remains.
Some advertisers are trying a cure worse than the disease. Instead of deciding which websites to support with advertising and which to shun, advertisers use a black list* (sic) of words like “Trump,” “taxes” and “antitrust,” keeping their ads off web pages that mention such topics. This amounts to a boycott of serious news.
Other advertisers such as JPMorgan Chase have had their staff try to decide which news sites are safe for their brands. However, the lists they compile can quickly become outdated because there are so many new purveyors of misinformation.
This is Crovitz’s message to prospective clients: Avoiding guilt by association with unsavory websites is too important to leave up to “staff” or algorithms, only dedicated specialists can protect you, hiring experts is a PR imperative! And BTW:
“The company I work for, NewsGuard, provides this service for a fee.”
The Times IDs Crovitz as “co-founder and co-chief executive officer of NewsGuard, which rates news publishers based on their reliability.” Wikipedia tells us that he co-founded a company called Journalism Online that was sold two years later for $45 million. Crovitz has become one of the one percent and deploying his internet acumen against the arch-villain. “If this approach catches on,” he wrote in conclusion to his op-ed, “Mr. Putin will just have to spend more of his government’s own money to promote its disinformation.”
NewsGuard is a good name for a company whose purpose is to guard against the American people receiving certain kinds of news. Whichever company becomes the go-to arbiter of news publishers’ “reliability” will in effect be a very powerful censor.
* The link is to a Wall St. Journal story by Suzanne Vranica that ran August 15, 2019 headlined “Advertisers Blacklist News Stories Online.” At least the WSJ editors know that blacklist is one word, not two, but the usage is jarring. News stories don’t get blacklisted, people do —and not just labor organizers and dissident writers. Vranica and Crovitz point to different words that could trigger a “don’t advertise” warning for clients. She wrote:
“Like many advertisers, Fidelity Investments wants to avoid advertising online near controversial content. The Boston-based financial-services company has a lengthy blacklist of words it considers off-limits. If one of those words is in an article’s headline, Fidelity won’t place an ad there. Its list earlier this year, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, contained more than 400 words, including ‘bomb,’ ‘immigration,’ and ‘racism.’ Also off-limits: ‘Trump.’”
Fred Gardner is the managing editor of O’Shaughnessy’s. He can be reached at fred@plebesite.com
Truth a Major Casualty of Impeachment Hearings
By Jeremy Kuzmarov | CounterPunch | January 28, 2020
As in any political battle, truth has been one of the major casualties of the impeachment proceedings against President Donald J. Trump.
While the Democratic impeachment managers have accused Trump repeatedly of dishonesty – often with good reason – they themselves have twisted the truth to serve their own political agenda.
Impeachment manager Adam Schiff, for example, claimed that “more than 15,000 Ukrainians have died fighting Russian forces and their proxies” and that the military aid [which Trump subverted] was for “such essentials as sniper rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers, radar… and other support for the war effort.”
While the military aid may have assisted the war effort, Schiff’s comments are misleading because the majority of those killed have been Eastern Ukrainians who died at the hands of the Ukrainian military that the U.S. has armed – not the Russians.
The UN Monitoring Mission on Human Rights determined that of the approximately 13,000 people killed between April 2014 and December 2018, 3,300 of the victims were civilians, 4,000 were Ukrainian military and 5,500 “Russian-backed armed militants.”
Thus, according to Schiff, Russia is responsible for killing 5,500 of its own men!
Human Rights Watch found that the Ukrainian military actually caused many of the civilian deaths by “us[ing] explosive weapons with wide-area effect in populated areas, including near school buildings, in violation of international humanitarian law.”
But this doesn’t fit with Schiff’s alarmist views about Russia, which are straight out of the 1950s McCarthy era.
At the hearings, Schiff frequently referenced the danger of “Russian expansion” and its efforts to “remake the map of Europe” and quoted a witness who stated that “the U.S. aids Ukraine and her people so that they can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”
Sounding like Ronald Reagan or any one of the most hawkish of cold warriors, this assessment has no basis in reality.
Among other things, it ignores that Russia under Putin was the first country to offer sympathy to the U.S. following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and has repeatedly pushed for better diplomatic relations.
Schiff’s misinformation extends to his defense of Joe Biden.
In his opening statement, Schiff claimed that Biden never wanted the “corrupt prosecutor removed in order to stop an investigation into Burisma Holdings, on whose board Biden’s son Hunter sat.”
However, Biden has been filmed in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations bragging about his efforts to blackmail the Ukrainian government by threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan if that prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was not removed.
Shokin had never actually been censured or indicted for corruption, although his successor, Yuriy Lutsenko was.
The latter settled the case with Burisma and its chief executive Mykola Zlochevsky by allowing it to pay a $7 million fine when the company stood accused of evading $40 million in taxes – a clear victory for Burisma.
Lutsenko did not even have a law degree and has been characterized by Ukrainian officials as a crooked political appointee of Ukraine’s former Prime-Minister Petro Poroshenko, whom Biden had cultivated close ties with.
(For more information on this see Olivier Berrayer’s documentary, Ukraine-Gate- Inconvenient Facts.)
Schiff and other Democratic Impeachment Managers such as Sylvia Garcia of Texas claimed that under Shokin the investigation against Burisma had lain “dormant.”
However, Shokin told ABC News in an interview – which was conveniently never aired – that this was not true and that the case was proceeding prior to his removal in February 2016.
The Ukraine-Gate saga has commanded a huge amount of attention and contributed to the rising fame of Schiff who has been praised in some circles for his magnificent performance.
By spreading misleading or outright false information about Russia and Ukraine, and drumming up anti-Russian sentiment, the consequences of the hearings, however, could be even more damaging then the Trump presidency.
Jeremy Kuzmarov is the author of The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (Monthly Review Press, 2018) and Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting for the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019).
How Government and Media Are Prepping America for a Failed 2020 Election
Feature photo | Graphic by Claudio Cabrera for MintPress News
By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | January 28, 2020
As World War II drew to a close in Europe, British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that “neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.”
Though numerous examples in the post-World War II era have proven Russell’s point, perhaps one of the best examples was the U.S. public’s willingness to swallow lie after lie about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq due to the climate of fear that followed the September 11 attacks. Those lies, propagated by dubious intelligence, government officials and a compliant media, resulted in catastrophes – large and small, both abroad and at home.
Today, an analogous narrative is being crafted by many of the same players – both in media and government – yet it has avoided scrutiny, even from independent media.
Over the past several months and with a renewed zeal in just the last few weeks, anonymous intelligence officials, dubious “experts” and establishment media outlets have crafted a narrative about the coming “chaos” of the 2020 election, months before it takes place. Per that narrative, certain state actors will use specific technologies to target the “American mind” in order to undermine the coming presidential election. The narrative holds that those efforts will be so successful that the U.S. will never recover as a democracy.
Though these anonymous government sources and their stenographers have already named the countries who will be responsible and the technologies they will use, they also admit that no evidence yet exists to back up these claims, meaning they are — at best — pure speculation.
Headlines such as “Hackers Are Coming for the 2020 Election — And We’re Not Ready,” “Basically Every US National Security Leader Is Warning About Foreign Interference In The 2020 Election,” and “U.S. intel agencies: Russia and China plotting to interfere in 2020 election” have become increasingly common, despite no available evidence, as have warnings that the American public is defenseless against the old scourge of “fake news” and the new scourge of “deep fakes.” Some media reports have gone so far to say that actual foreign meddling isn’t even necessary as merely the fear of foreign meddling could be enough to upend the American political system beyond repair.
Historically, the goal of such fear-inducing narratives has been the trading of civil liberties for increased security, or rather, the appearance of increased security. Yet, when the need for security is felt due to a fear that is based on government-driven speculation and not on evidence, the goal of that narrative is not about protecting the public from a real, tangible threat but instead about the consolidation of power by the very groups responsible for crafting it — in this case, the intelligence community and other key players in the national security state.
However, what is particularly odd about this narrative surrounding imminent “chaos” and meddling in the upcoming 2020 election is the fact that, not only have the instruments of said meddling been named and described in detail, but their use in the election was recently simulated by a company with deep ties to both U.S. and Israeli intelligence. That simulation, organized and run by the Israeli-American company Cybereason, ended with scores of Americans dead, the cancellation of the 2020 election, the imposition of martial law and a spike in fear among the American populace.
Many of the technologies used to create that chaotic and horrific scenario in the Cybereason simulation are the very same technologies that U.S. federal officials and corporate media outlets have promoted as the core of the very toolkit that they claim will be used to undermine the coming election, such as deep fakes and hacks of critical infrastructure, consumer devices and even vehicles.
While the narrative in place has already laid the blame at the feet of U.S. rival states China, Russia and Iran, these very technologies are instead dominated by companies that are tied to the very same intelligence agencies as Cybereason, specifically Israeli military intelligence.
With intelligence agencies in the U.S. and Israel not only crafting the narrative about 2020 foreign meddling, but also dominating these technologies and simulating their use to upend the coming election, it becomes crucial to consider the motivations behind this narrative and if these intelligence agencies have ulterior motives in promoting and simulating such outcomes that would effectively end American democracy and hand almost total power to the national security state.
Media, intelligence foreshadow tech-powered doom for 2020
Even though the 2020 U.S. election is still months away, a plethora of media reports over the past six months (and even before then) have been raising concern after concern about how the U.S. election is still so vulnerable to foreign meddling that such meddling is essentially an inevitability.
Part of the reason for the recent pick-up in fear mongering appears to have been the release of a joint statement issued by key members of the Trump administration last November. That statement, authored by Attorney General Bill Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan, acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, FBI Director Christopher Wray, NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Christopher Krebs, claimed that foreign interference in 2020 was imminent despite admitting that there is no evidence of interference having taken place:
Our adversaries want to undermine our democratic institutions, influence public sentiment and affect government policies. Russia, China, Iran, and other foreign malicious actors all will seek to interfere in the voting process or influence voter perceptions. Adversaries may try to accomplish their goals through a variety of means, including social media campaigns, directing disinformation operations or conducting disruptive or destructive cyber-attacks on state and local infrastructure.
While at this time we have no evidence of a compromise or disruption to election infrastructure that would enable adversaries to prevent voting, change vote counts or disrupt the ability to tally votes, we continue to vigilantly monitor any threats to U.S. elections (emphasis added).”
Despite the key caveat of there being no evidence at the time the statement was issued, media reports used the statement to claim that foreign interference in 2020 was imminent, such as in these reports from BuzzFeed, ABC News, and Newsweek.
In addition to the reports that have cast the involvement of state actors — namely Russia, Iran and China — as assured despite no evidence, other reports have made the claim that this allegedly imminent interference will inevitably be successful, largely due to claims that the tactics used will rely heavily on technology that the U.S. can’t hope to successfully counter. CSO Online, an online news outlets that provides news, analysis and research on security and risk management, recently warned that “fixing America’s voting and election infrastructure problems is a long-term proposition, one that won’t be fixed in time for the election in November” while the New York Times warned of imminent chaos and that “stealthier” malevolent foreign actors had already created the foundation for “an ugly campaign season marred by hacking and disinformation.” Wired claimed last year that U.S. election security “is still hurting at every level.”
In another example, Rolling Stone published an article earlier this month with the headline “Hackers Are Coming for the 2020 Election — And We’re Not Ready,” which claims that “the reality is that: “We’ve made progress since the last election — but we’re much less secure than we should be.” The article goes on to say that claim that the goal isn’t necessarily to hack voting machines or change results, but “to merely create the impression of an attack as a way to undermine our faith in the electoral process.”
It continues:
The target is the minds of the American people,” says Joshua Geltzer, a former counterterrorism director on the National Security Council. “In some ways, we’re less vulnerable than we were in 2016. In other ways, it’s more.” Nearly every expert agrees on this: The worst-case scenario, the one we need to prepare for, is a situation that causes Americans to question the bedrock of our democracy — free and fair elections.”
Well before this type of rhetoric made its way into the U.S. media, Israeli intelligence-linked tech firm Cybereason claimed, in a release on its website that “messing with a voter’s mind” would have a bigger impact than changing vote totals, even before the 2016 election. That release, published by Cybereason prior to the last presidential election, was authored by the company’s CEO, Lior Div, who used to lead offensive hacking operations against nation-states for Israeli military intelligence.
Notably, of all of these media reports, there is a clear consensus that one of the main tactics that will soon be used to meddle in the coming U.S. election will be the use of so-called “deep fakes.” Deriving its name from a combination of “deep learning” and “fake,” deep fakes involve video and audio that has been manipulated using artificial intelligence (AI) to create media that appears to be authentic, but is not. Concern about its use in the upcoming election has spurred not only a wealth of media reports on the matter but has prompted both the U.S. military and Congress to take action to limit its potential misuse.
One thing that stands out about the media narrative regarding election meddling and deep fakes is that several news organizations have published articles that state that deep fakes will be used to undermine the 2020 election, as opposed to stating that they could be used or that they are a phenomenon worthy of attention (though some reports have taken this more measured approach).
The reason for this level of confidence may owe to statements made by prominent U.S. intelligence officials last year, including those made by Dan Coats, the former Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who claimed in the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment for the U.S. Intelligence Community that deep fakes and other hi-tech forms of fake media would be used to disrupt the 2020 election. Coats specifically stated:
Adversaries and strategic competitors probably will attempt to use deep fakes or similar machine-learning technologies to create convincing—but false—image, audio, and video files to augment influence campaigns directed against the United States and our allies and partners.”
Since Coats made the warning, numerous media reports have promoted the concern with little scrutiny, representing just one of the numerous times in U.S. history where narratives first authored by U.S. intelligence are subsequently promoted heavily by U.S. media, even when the claim made by intelligence officials is speculative, as it is in this case. Indeed, the narratives being promoted with respect to the 2020 election involve many of the same intelligence agencies (American and Israeli) and media outlets who promoted claims that were later proven false about “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion, among other pertinent examples.
Notably, deep fakes figured prominently and was the tool most used by malevolent hackers in Cybereason’s 2020 election simulation, which saw both video and audio-only deep fakes used to spread misinformation on national and local TV channels in order to impersonate police officers and election officials and to create fake bomb threats by posing as the terror group Daesh (ISIS). Cybereason also happens to be a partner of the organization funding the most well-known creator and producer of deep fakes in the world, an organization that — much like Cybereason itself — is openly tied to Israeli intelligence.
Aside from deep fakes, other technologies weaponized in Cybereason’s election simulation have also been the subject of several media reports, such as the hacking of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and appliances and even the hacking of vehicles that have some form of internet connectivity. In the Cybereason simulation, IoT hacks were used to cut power to polling stations and disseminate disinformation while vehicles were hacked to conduct terror attacks against civilians waiting in line to vote, killing several and injuring hundreds.
Most media reports have claimed that these technologies will be part of the coming “explosion” in cyber warfare in 2020 and do not specifically link them to imminent election meddling. Others, however, have made the link to the election explicit.
Naming the culprits in advance
In addition to the apparent consensus on how foreign meddling will occur during the 2020 election, there is also agreement regarding which countries will be responsible. Again, this is largely based on statements made by U.S. national security officials. For instance, the joint statement issued last November by the DOJ, DOD, DHS, DNI, FBI, NSA, and CISA regarding 2020 election security, states that “Russia, China, Iran, and other foreign malicious actors all will seek to interfere in the voting process or influence voter perceptions” before adding “at this time we have no evidence.”
Similarly, the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment for the U.S. Intelligence Community, written by then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, names these same three countries in relation to imminent 2020 election interference and states that their interference in the 2020 election is “almost certain.” The assessment adds the following about each nation:
- Russia: “Russia’s social media efforts will continue to focus on aggravating social and racial tensions, undermining trust in authorities, and criticizing perceived anti-Russia politicians.”
- China: “China will continue to use legal, political, and economic levers—such as the lure of Chinese markets—to shape the information environment. It is also capable of using cyber attacks against systems in the United States to censor or suppress viewpoints it deems politically sensitive.”
- Iran: “Iran, which has used social media campaigns to target audiences in both the United States and allied nations with messages aligned with Iranian interests, will continue to use online influence operations to try to advance its interests.”
Coats’ assessment was enough to spawn numerous stories on the imminent threat that these three nations pose to the 2020 election, with headlines such as “U.S. intel agencies: Russia and China plotting to interfere in 2020 election.”
The vast majority of warnings regarding future election interference have come from U.S. intelligence officials with a dubious record of trustworthiness and a history of using the media to spread propaganda and disinformation, most famously through Operation Mockingbird. Most — if not all — of the recent and numerous articles on imminent interference rely heavily on claims made by the two aforementioned government documents, documents crafted by U.S. intelligence agencies for public consumption, as well as claims made by anonymous U.S. officials.
A screenshot from the 2019 National Threat Assessment lists Russia, China and Iran as primary threats to the United States
A recent New York Times article, for example, titled “Chaos Is the Point’: Russian Hackers and Trolls Grow Stealthier in 2020,” is based almost entirely on “interviews with dozens of officials and experts,” though the only government official named in the article is Shelby Pierson, the intelligence community’s election threats executive. The most quoted experts named in the article are Ben Nimmo, formerly of the hawkish, NATO-funded Atlantic Council and now with Graphika, and Laura Rosenberger, director of the neoconservative-created Alliance for Securing Democracy. The article nonetheless cites “American officials” and “current and former officials” several times to make claims about imminent election interference that paint a bleak picture of the current election season.
A recent article from The Hill relies on the acting head of DHS, Chad Wolf, as its only source, citing Wolf’s claim that “we fully expect Russia to attempt to interfere in the 2020 elections to sow public discord and undermine our democratic institutions” amid other warnings that Wolf gave about Chinese and Iranian cyber threats to U.S. elections. Other articles, including one titled “Russia, China plan to adjust their tactics to hack, influence 2020 elections” cite only Shelby Pierson of the U.S. intelligence community as its source for that headline’s claim. Another titled “Russia isn’t the only threat to 2020 elections, says U.S. intel” cites only anonymous U.S. intelligence officials, as the headline suggests.
Though Russia and China have consistently been named as the most likely election meddlers, reports have also been drumming up the likelihood that Iran will emerge as 2020’s foreign meddler of choice, especially in the months prior to and weeks after the killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani by the Trump administration. A recent “informal poll” conducted by the Washington Post asked hawkish think tank fellows, employees at companies like Raytheon and current and former federal officials if Iran would likely retaliate against the U.S. via cyberattack. The Post ran the results of the poll under the headline “Get ready for serious cyberattacks from Iran, experts say.”
Despite the media’s numerous warnings of imminent and “serious” cyber-retaliation from Iran, the only cyberattack attributed to the country after Soleimani’s death was the vandalism of the Federal Depository Library Program website, a rather benign act that was nevertheless blasted across headlines such as “US government website hacked with pro-Iranian messages, image of bloodied Trump.” The U.S. government is quoted in that article as saying that “At this time, there is no confirmation that this was the action of Iranian state-sponsored actors.”
Also notably absent from media reports is the fact that WikiLeaks revealed in 2017 that the CIA had stockpiled a library of “stolen” cyberattack techniques produced in other nations, including Russia and Iran. Those revelations, part of the Vault 7 release, revealed that the CIA’s UMBRAGE group was capable of “misdirect[ing] attribution [for cyberattacks actually done by the CIA] by leaving behind the ‘fingerprints’ of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.” In other words, the CIA was more than capable of conducting “false flag” cyber attacks and blaming them on foreign actors.
Notably, one of the viruses being blamed on Iran for cyberattacks targeting the U.S. ahead of the 2020 election — called Shamoon — was “stolen” by the CIA’s UMBRAGE and cited in the WikiLeaks release.
Conflict of interest-ridden Microsoft “defends democracy”
Last year saw the tech behemoth Microsoft join the effort to blame foreign state actors, specifically Iran, for cyberattacks against the U.S. This helped to bolster assertions that had largely originated with a handful of U.S. intelligence officials and hawkish, neoconservative-aligned think tanks as media reports on Microsoft’s related claims treated the company as an independent private sector observer.
Yet, as MintPress investigations have revealed, Microsoft has clear conflicts of interest with respect to election interference. Its “Defending Democracy” program has spawned tools like “NewsGuard” and “ElectionGuard” that it claims will help protect U.S. democracy, but — upon closer examination — instead have the opposite effect.
Last January, MintPress exposed NewsGuard’s neoconservative backers and how special interest groups were backing the program in an effort to censor independent journalism under the guise of the fight against “fake news.” Subsequent investigations revealed the risk that Microsoft’s ElectionGuard poses to U.S. voting machines, which it claims to make more secure and how the platform was developed by companies closely tied to the Pentagon’s infamous research branch DARPA and Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200.
ElecionGuard software has since been adopted by numerous voting machine manufacturers and is slated to be used in some Democratic Primary votes. Notably, the push for the adoption of ElectionGuard software has been spearheaded by the recently created Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is the federal agency tasked with overseeing election security and is headed by Christopher Krebs, a former high level Microsoft executive.
In recent months, Microsoft has also been at the center of claims that Iran attempted to hack U.S. presidential campaigns ahead of 2020 as well as claims that Iran plans to target the U.S. power grid and other critical infrastructure with cyberattacks.
Last October, Microsoft penned a blog post discussing a “threat group” it named Phosphorus that they “believe originates from Iran and is linked to the Iranian government.” The post went on to claim that Phosphorus attempted to target a U.S. presidential campaign, which later media reports claimed was President Trump’s re-election campaign. Microsoft concluded that the attempt was “not technically sophisticated” and ultimately unsuccessful, but felt compelled to disclose it and link it to Iran’s government.
Though it provided no evidence for the hack or its reasons for “believing” that the attack originated from Iran, media reports treated Microsoft’s declaration as proof that Iran had begun actively meddling in the 2020 election. Headlines such as “Iranian Hackers Target Trump Campaign as 2020 Threats Mount,” “Iran-linked Hackers Target Trump 2020 Campaign, Microsoft says”, “Microsoft: Iran government-linked hacker targeted 2020 presidential campaign” and “Microsoft Says Iranians Tried To Hack U.S. Presidential Campaign,” were blasted across the front pages of American media. None of the reports scrutinized Microsoft’s claims or noted the clear conflict of interest Microsoft had in making such claims due to its efforts to see its own ElectionGuard Software adopted nationwide.
Media reports also left out the fact that Microsoft is a major government contractor for the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon. Notably, the Trump campaign, which Microsoft said was the target of this attack, was later identified as the only major presidential campaign using Microsoft’s “AccountGuard” software, part of its dubious “Defending Democracy” program that also spawned NewsGuard and ElectionGuard. AccountGuard claims to protect campaign-linked emails and data from hackers.
Microsoft surfaced not long after, again claiming that Iran was maliciously targeting the United States’ civilian infrastructure. This subsequent claim was first published by Wired and later covered by other outlets. Those reports cite a single person, Microsoft security researcher Ned Moran, who claimed that an Iran-backed hacking group called APT33 was targeting the U.S. “physical control systems used in electric utilities, manufacturing, and oil refineries.”
“They’re trying to deliver messages to their adversaries and trying to compel and change their adversaries’ behavior,” Moran told Wired. Moran also stated that “Microsoft hasn’t seen direct evidence of APT33 carrying out a disruptive cyberattack rather than mere espionage or reconnaissance, it’s seen incidents where the group has at least laid the groundwork for those attacks (emphasis added).”
Cybereason helps craft the narrative
While U.S. intelligence officials and media outlets alike have been largely responsible for setting the narrative that imminent meddling will be conducted by Russia, China and Iran, key components of that narrative, particularly with respect to China and Iran, have been laid by Cybereason, a company that recently ran 2020 doomsday election simulations and that has close ties to the intelligence communities of both the U.S. and Israel.
Shortly after the killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani earlier this month, an operation conducted in concert with Israeli intelligence, Cybereason warned that Iran could imminently retaliate with a cyber threat and quoted its own employees who explained what and how Iran would likely target in retaliation. Cybereason’s CSO Sam Curry, who actively participated in the firm’s 2020 doomsday election simulations, stated:
This means that Iran’s “forceful revenge” response is likely to be less about the flash and all about the bang. If you have connected systems that are responsible for kinetic world effects, like ICS systems and critical infrastructure around water, energy or vital services, it’s time to pay attention. Iran and the US are engaged in Cyber brinksmanship, which means that the gloves are off as Iran picks it’s targets (emphasis added).”
Cybereason also quoted visiting fellow for the National Security Institute and former advisor to the U.S. Secret Service (which participated in Cyberaeson’s election simulations), Anne Marie Zettlemoyer, who claimed that Iran could soon target Wall Street and critical U.S. infrastructure like the power grid:
An attack against the financial systems can be devastating economically and weaken the confidence and viability of markets. However, we cannot ignore the physical consequences and manifestations that can come from a cyberattack, particularly against critical infrastructure like energy and industry control systems.”
Cybereason’s claims regarding Iran’s interest in “critical infrastructure” systems likely originated with Microsoft, the claims were then parroted by the media in several reports, many of which quoted Cybereason’s Sam Curry. Curry is also a contributor to major news outlets like Forbes where he writes about Iran’s cyber warfare capabilities.
Notably, in Cybereason’s recent allegations against Iran, it states that “it’s clear that Iran has been preparing for future geopolitical conflict by gaining access to critical infrastructure and other important operations in the United States.” It backs these claims by citing an article authored by Curry for Forbes. Following Soleimani’s death, numerous media reports, including in the UK’s The Independent and ABC News, have cited Curry as an “expert” source in claiming that Iran would retaliate with cyberattacks.
Microsoft’s claims about foreign hackers and meddling — the evidence for which have never been made public but has been parroted as fact nonetheless — are frequently supported by Cybereason.
Last August, Microsoft claimed to have foiled Russian attempts at hacking two Republican-affiliated think tanks and, despite providing no evidence, Cybereason’s then-senior director of intelligence services Ross Rustici was quoted as an expert in several media reports as saying that such behavior was to be expected from Russia. In one such report, Rustici stated:
We’re very good at fighting the last war, but the Russians are very good at evolving their game. I suspect if they’re going to do a psychological operation around the elections, the way they do it will be different than what they did in 2016. How effective the defenses we’ve built for what they did in 2016 will be for those attacks is yet to be seen.”
None of the media reports quoting Rustici mentioned Cybereason’s ties to Israeli intelligence, referring to tech firms only a “Boston-based cybersecurity company” and similar variants. Cybereason’s Intelligence Group is stuffed with former and active members of U.S. and Israeli intelligence services and has released several reports about nation-state hacking with a focus on Russia and China.
Cybereason has also been at the forefront of claims that China has been engaged in aggressive cyberattacks against multinational companies that have also seen widespread coverage in U.S. media, despite the untransparent nature of the evidence for Cybereason’s claims.
In a story that received major coverage from outlets such as Fox News, Reuters, CNBC and others, Cybereason unveiled what it called “Operation Soft Cell,” an operation that stole mass troves of data from several global telecommunications companies. In each story, Cybereason is the sole source of the claim and declined to provide the name or location of any of the affected companies. The firm also claimed to have determined that the attack was likely perpetrated by someone “backed by a nation state, and is affiliated with China.” It further claimed to have debriefed and coordinated responses with U.S. intelligence.
In an article for Reuters, Cybereason stated that “this time as opposed to in the past we are sure enough to say that the attack originated in China” while Cybereason separately told CyberScoop that it had “found hacking tools such as a modified web shell and a remote access trojan that are commonly associated with, but not unique to, Chinese hackers.” Despite the incongruity, media reports laid the blame squarely on China, as seen in headlines such as “Chinese spies have been sucking up call records at multinational telecoms, researchers say.”
Prior to uncovering Operation Soft Cell, Cybereason had warned on its blogs in the months and years prior that China would imminently target U.S. companies. The revelation of Operation Soft Cell — which originated exclusively with Cybereason — has been used to build the case that China is openly engaged in cyberwarfare against its rival states, like the United States, and targeting “democracy itself.”
Best Known Deep Fake Creator is Funded by Israeli Intelligence
While the media, and even Cybereason itself, have helped lay the foundation to blame specific state actors for 2020 election meddling well ahead of the fact, it is worth revisiting Cybereason’s “Operation Blackout” election simulation and the tactics used by the “bad actors” in that scenario.
That simulation, discussed in detail in the first installment of this series, saw the weaponization of specific technologies, namely deep fakes, hacks of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and hacks of vehicles, in order to target the 2020 U.S. election, resulting in the cancellation of the election and the imposition of martial law.
Given the current narrative regarding what state actors are likely to meddle in the 2020 election — namely Russia, China and Iran — and the tactics they will allegedly use, it is important to explore the sources of the technologies weaponized per that narrative as well as in “Operation Blackout.”
Indeed, if there is any clear overlap between the creators of those technologies and the state actors being blamed in advance for their imminent use, it would certainly lend credibility to the claims promoted by U.S. intelligence, the media and companies like Microsoft and Cybereason.
Yet, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that the companies and state actors most involved in developing these technologies are the very ones claiming that Russia, China and Iran will use them to undermine the 2020 election.
Take for instance the use of deep fakes. Not only have numerous media reports focused on how deep fakes will be used to meddle in the 2020 elections, but Cybereason’s doomsday election simulation saw “bad actors” rely heavily on their use to spread disinformation and even make fake bomb threats. While much has been said of the coming election and deep fakes, remarkably few reports have bothered to look at the company best known for creating viral deep fakes.
Canny AI has garnered considerable media attention over the past few years for its persuasive deep fake videos that have frequently gone viral. In the last year alone, the tech firm’s viral deep fakes have included a controversial video of Mark Zuckerberg where the Facebook co-founder appears to be saying “Imagine this for a second: One man, with total control of billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures,” as well as a video showing Richard Nixon giving a speech he never actually gave. More recently, Canny AI was behind the viral videos immediately prior to the 2019 U.K. general election that appeared to show Jeremy Corbyn and his rival Boris Johnson endorsing each other and another video that showed world leaders singing John Lennon’s “Imagine”:
Oddly, many of the media reports that discuss these viral videos fail to mention the role of Canny AI in creating these viral deep fakes and instead only mention the organization or artists with whom Canny AI partnered to create them. For instance, the Corbyn-Johnson videos were reported to have been produced by the group Future Advocacy and artist Bill Posters, but it was actually Canny AI that created those videos for that group. Similarly, the Nixon Speech deep fake was reported by several outlets as having been solely created by MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality. However, the Boston Globe noted that “the [MIT] team worked with Canny AI, an Israeli company that does Video Dialogue Replacement, and Respeecher, a Ukrainian startup specializing in speech-to-speech synthetic voice production” to create the video.
The Zuckerberg deep fake that Canny AI created led to lots of positive press for the company, with several media reports dubbing them as the company using “deep fakes for good” and that uses the controversial technology “responsibly.” The Zuckerberg deep fake has been cited as one of the main drivers behind Facebook’s new “deep fake” policy, which only bans some deep fake videos and has been criticized by U.S. lawmakers as insufficient. Notably, neither Facebook nor Facebook-owned Instagram ever took down Canny AI’s deep fake of Zuckerburg.
Given the concern over deep fakes in relation to the coming election and Canny AI standing out as the main producer of deep fakes that have gone viral over the past year, it is important to point out that Canny AI has ties to a state actor with a history of election meddling: the state of Israel.
Indeed, Canny AI is 100 percent funded by an Israeli start-up accelerator called Xcelerator, a joint venture between Tel Aviv University and Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet (sometimes called Shabak). According to Start Up Nation Central, the Paul Singer-created organization that promotes Israeli technology start ups, Xcelerator-funded “start-ups participating in the program benefit from close mentoring from content and technology experts from the Shabak, experts from Tel Aviv University, and industry leaders. The connection to the Shabak also provides the entrepreneurs with ways to test the capabilities of their technologies and cooperation opportunities (emphasis added).”
In addition, Xcelerator is partnered not only with Israeli intelligence directly, but also with Cybereason, the very company that explored the use of deep fakes in the 2020 U.S. presidential election that saw the election cancelled and martial law declared as well as a company that itself has deep ties to Israeli intelligence. Other notable partners of Xcelerator include NEC Corp, which has intimate ties to top Cybereason investor Softbank; Check Point Technologies, which has ties to Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200; and the Israeli start-up accelerator Team8. In previous reports published by MintPress, Team8 was discussed in detail, particularly their recent hire of former director of the NSA and former head of U.S. Cyber Command Mike Rogers, and their close ties to Paul Singer’s Start Up Nation Central, which itself has deep ties to U.S. neoconservatives.
It is also worth noting that Xcelerator also backs an “anti-fake news” start-up called Cyabra, which has direct ties to Israel’s Mossad and offers its AI-driven “disinformation protection” to government agencies as well as politicians, particularly during election seasons. Two of Cyabra’s co-founders previously co-founded Psy-Group, which attempted to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election by weaponizing “fake news” and social media and later closed down its operations after U.S. government scrutiny into its activities began as part of the Mueller investigation.
Psy-Group also engaged in doxxing campaigns targeting Palesintian rights activists in the U.S. which were planned in conjunction with Ram Ben-Barak, the former deputy director of the Mossad who now advises Cyabra. Given that much of the concern ahead of the next election is related not only to deep fakes but also “fake news,” Cyabra’s rise and its clear ties to Mossad and the now defunct Psy-Group are important to note.
Furthermore, in examining the other technologies weaponized during Cybereason’s 2020 election simulation and cited in the aforementioned media narrative regarding 2020 meddling, a pattern similar to that of Canny AI emerges.
Indeed, the other technologies linked to these “bad actors” and foreign meddlers — namely hacking IoT devices and hacking vehicles — are also pioneered by companies with deep ties to Israeli military intelligence, specifically Unit 8200, and Israeli tech companies that have aggressively spied on U.S. government institutions in collusion with Israeli intelligence in the past, namely Comverse (now Verint) and Amdocs.
Hacking the Internet of Things
In Cybereason’s doomsday election simulation, another of the tactics used was the hacking of devices and appliances connected to the internet, often referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT) and which includes everything from smartphones to power grid infrastructure to city traffic lights.
While most reports on IoT hacks to date have focused on “lone wolf” or non-state-aligned actors, one company has stood out for its efforts to create a tool that would allow governments and intelligence agencies to hack these devices with ease. That company, called Toka, announced in 2018 that it planned to offer “a one-stop hacking shop for governments that require extra capability to fight terrorists and other threats to national security in the digital domain,” with “a special focus on [hacking] the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), covering tech like Amazon Echo, Nest connected home products, as well as connected fridges, thermostats and alarms.”
The Israel-based company, which raised $12.5 million within months of launching, has since been busy marketing its services to governments around the world, most recently France where it described its product portfolio as “empower[ing] governments, Intelligence, and law enforcement agencies to enhance Homeland Security with groundbreaking cyber-intelligence and operational capabilities” during an exposition in Paris last November.
Even though Toka openly markets the ability to hack private consumer devices to governments and law enforcement agencies around the world, the clear threat to privacy has gone ignored by media outlets as the company has garnered nearly no media attention since it launched nearly two years ago.
Yet, Toka is not only notable for what it offers but also for its founders and investors. Indeed, the co-founders of Toka have been described as an “all-star” team, largely because of the role of former Israeli Prime Minister and former head of Israeli military intelligence, Ehud Barak. Barak, in addition to co-founding the company, serves as its director and is also the chairman of the board of the controversial Israeli company Carbyne911, which markets software to emergency call centers in the United States. Interestingly, Cybereason’s 2020 doomsday election simulation also dealt with the hacking and weaponization of 911 call centers. Also of note is the fact that another of Carbyne911’s leadership team, former Unit 8200 commander Pinchas Buchris, is an adviser to Cybereason.
Toka’s top brass is a who’s who of former Israeli military and intelligence officials
In addition to Barak, Toka was co-founded by retired Brigadier General Yaron Rosen, former Chief of the IDF’s cyber staff, where he was “the lead architect of all [IDF] cyber activities” including those executed by Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200. Rosen, who now serves as Toka’s CEO, has stated that Toka’s technology will only be sold to countries allied with the U.S. and Israel, telling Forbes that “Russia, China and ‘other enemy countries’ would never be customers.”
Toka’s leadership and software architects are similarly tied into Israel’s national security state. Several — including the “architect” of its hacking software — previously worked for Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office and developed “offensive technologies” for Israel’s head of state and other top Toka employees and executives share numerous connections to Unit 8200, other divisions of Israeli military intelligence and Unit 8200-connected tech companies like Check Point Technologies.
Though Toka’s leadership team makes its ties to Israeli military intelligence abundantly clear, important connections also appear in examining Toka’s investors. One of the major investors in Toka is Dell technologies, one of the world’s largest technology companies that was founded by Michael Dell, a well-known pro-Israel partisan who has donated millions of dollars to the Friends of the IDF and one of the top supporters of the so-called “anti-BDS” bills that prevent publicly employed individuals or public institutions from supporting non-violent boycotts of Israel, even on humanitarian grounds. It goes without saying that a major technology company investing in a company that markets the hacking of that very technology (computers, IoT, smartphones, etc.) should be a red flag.
With a major foot in the door through its connections to Dell, whose products are used by the private and public sectors around the world, other investors in Toka again reveal its ties to Israel’s military intelligence and the same controversial Israeli tech companies that have aggressively spied on the U.S. government in the past — Amdocs and Comverse. For instance, Entrèe Capital, a venture capital fund that is one of Toka’s main investors, is managed by Aviad Eyal and Ran Achituv. The latter, who manages Entrée’s investment in Toka and sits on Toka’s board of directors, is the founder of the IDF’s satellite-based signals intelligence unit and also a former senior Vice President at both Amdocs and Comverse Infosys (Verint).
Another notable investor in Toka is the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, which is advised by former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, a close friend of the infamous pedophile Jeffery Epstein, whose own ties to Israeli military intelligence have been discussed in several MintPress reports. Epstein was also a close friend of Ehud Barak, co-founder and director of Toka, and invested at least $1 million in another company with close ties to Barak, Carbyne911. The remaining investors in Toka are Launch Capital, which is deeply tied to the Pritzker family — one of the wealthiest families in the U.S. with close ties to the Clintons and Obamas as well as the U.S.’ pro-Israel lobby, and Ray Rothrock, a venture capitalist who spent nearly three decades at VenRock, the Rockefeller family venture capital fund.
Unit 8200 – From Hacking Cars to Protecting Them?
Arguably the most disturbing aspect of Cybereason’s “Operation Blackout” election simulation was the hacking of vehicles that were then rammed into civilians waiting in line to vote at polling stations. In the simulation, this led to scores of dead Americans and hundreds of injuries.
As was the case with other technologies used to undermine the 2020 election in the simulation, this technology — the hacking of vehicles — is the bread and butter of an Israeli cybersecurity firm called Upstream Security that specializes in automobiles and boasts deep ties to the country’s military intelligence service.
Though vehicle hacking seemed out of left field when the 2020 election simulation took place last November, media reports about the imminent dangers of “car hacking” began to emerge just a month after the exercise took place, most of which cited a December 2019 report created by Upstream. Some of those reports have warned that car hacking could be used to undermine the coming U.S. election.
One report titled “Car Hacking Hits the Streets,” cites only Upstream’s report to claim that “In 2020, the connected-car market will reach a tipping point, with the majority of vehicles already connected to the Internet when sold in the United States, representing a large base of potential targets for attacks.” Another report, titled “New study shows just how bad vehicle hacking has gotten,” uses Upstream’s report (i.e. study) to claim that hacks of regular vehicles have exploded since 2016 and that most of the cars on U.S. roads today are vulnerable to hackers and that over 80 percent of those hacks occur remotely.
Neither report noted Upstream’s ties to Israeli military intelligence. Equally notable is the fact that both reports that covered the Upstream-written study say that only manufacturers can address the problem by partnering with a company like Upstream.
A screenshot from an Upstream promotional video
Lucky for Upstream, they have already partnered with a slew of auto manufacturers, including Hyundai, Volvo, Renault and even U.S. auto insurance giants like Nationwide, who now number among Upstream’s most important investors. The company’s original investors are Charles River Ventures, one of Cybereason’s first investors, and Israeli venture capital firm Glilot Capital.
Glilot Capital’s interest in Upstream is telling given the firm’s deep ties to Israel’s Unit 8200. Glilot was founded by two former Israeli military intelligence officers and has “a heavy focus on the cyber sector and the entrepreneurs who emerge from the elite Unit 8200,” according to the Jerusalem Post. Even the name of the firm is an homage to Unit 8200, as the unit’s main base is located in Glilot, near Herzliya.
“It’s as if Americans called a VC Fort Meade Capital [the US Army base in Maryland where the National Security Agency and the United States Cyber Command are headquartered], some VC names are meant to be symbolic, as in our case. Glilot is the home of several of the best intelligence and technology units in the IDF, it’s where we came from and it is where we find our best entrepreneurs,” Glilot Capital co-founder Arik Kleinstein told the Jerusalem Post in 2016.
Upstream is certainly the type of company that Glilot Capital is used to investing in. It was founded by two Israelis who both served in the IDF, with one of them serving in an elite intelligence unit. Upstream’s co-founders, Yoav Levy and Yonathan Appel, met while working at Check Point Technologies, the Unit 8200 alumni-founded company with deep ties to Israel’s military intelligence and military-industrial complex as well as the IoT hacking company Toka. Notably, Upstream recently partnered with the Japanese company Fujitsu, a longtime partner with Softbank — Cybereason’s main investor.
Softbank has also invested heavily in another Unit 8200-founded vehicle security start-up called Argus Cyber Security, a firm known for its numerous demonstrations showing how easy it is to hack vehicles. Argus is also backed by Nadav Zafrir, the former Unit 8200 commander who now runs Team8. Argus’ CEO Ofer Ben-Noon, a former captain in Unit 8200, told Forbes in 2014 that “Everything will be hacked in every single [car] brand. It will take time, it might be weeks, months, or a couple of years, but eventually it will happen.”
Since then, Unit 8200 alumni from Argus, Upstream and other Israeli automobile cybersecurity firms have shown media outlets around the world how much easier hacking vehicles has become in the years since Ben-Noon first made the claim. One such report from VICE includes a vehicle hacking demonstration, courtesy of a Unit 8200 alumni, and notes that “most cars today are susceptible to hacker attacks.”
Of course, Unit 8200 isn’t the only intelligence agency known to be experts at hacking vehicles. Indeed, in 2017, WikiLeaks revealed that the CIA was capable of hacking vehicles and exploring their use in committing “undetectable assassinations.”
“Bring down nations to their knees”
At the Tel Aviv Cybertech Conference in 2017, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated the following:
Today warfare has changed dramatically…With a click of a button, you can bring down nations to their knees very rapidly if you so desire and if you’re willing to take the risks, because every system can be hacked. Our hospitals, our airplanes, our cars, our banks. The most important word here is our data banks, they can be hacked.”
Media reports and even members of the Israeli public and private sector have openly acknowledged that Israel’s intelligence apparatus — from Unit 8200 to the Mossad — remains directly linked to many of the private technology companies founded by its former members, especially in the field of cybersecurity. Though reports on the matter often praise this merging of Israel’s public and private spheres, they rarely acknowledge the documented corruption within Unit 8200, the unit’s dark past in recruiting felons and even pedophiles to join its ranks, or the danger posed by having companies directly linked to foreign intelligence being given access to the U.S. government’s most classified and sensitive systems and data.
The last omission is particularly troubling given that Israeli intelligence has not only been caught aggressively using private tech companies to spy on U.S. federal agencies and networks, but also intercepting the private communications of at least two U.S. presidents and using a notorious pedophile to sexually blackmail American politicians.
As was mentioned in the first installment of this series, Cybereason’s CEO Lior Div offers a clear example of this worrisome bridge between Israel’s public and private sector, as Div has openly stated that he views his work at Cybereason as a “continuation” of his service to Israeli military intelligence, where he led offensive cyberattacks against other nations.
Given Div’s past statements and his company’s clear ties to both Israeli and U.S. intelligence, Cybereason’s simulation of the 2020 U.S. election — which involved terrorist attacks and led to the election’s cancellation and the imposition of martial law — is highly concerning. This is particularly so considering that Cybereason’s investors have direct ties to individuals who would benefit from the election’s cancellation and also considering the clear narrative that has emerged in recent months regarding how the coming election will inevitably fall victim to tech-driven “chaos” in coming months.
The clear overlap between Cybereason’s simulation and the intelligence-driven media narrative is clear cause for concern, especially considering that the technologies that they highlight as ultimately upending the election are dominated by the very same intelligence agencies simulating and crafting that narrative.
The keyword that has been used to describe the end result of both Cybereason’s simulation and the prevailing media narrative regarding the 2020 election is “chaos,” chaos so imminent, widespread and unruly that it will shake American democracy to its core.
What has been left unsaid, however, is that a government’s solution to “chaos” is always the imposition of “order.” This means that — whatever “chaos” ultimately ensues prior to or on election day — will result in a government response that will do much more to crush freedom and undermine democracy than any act of foreign meddling has, be it real or imagined.
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.
Fifteen Years Before Kennedy, Zionists Murdered Forrestal
By Laurent Guyénot • Unz Review • January 27, 2020
Israel as serial murderer
In the 1990s, a couple of bestsellers brought to the knowledge of a large public the fact that JFK’s assassination in 1963 solved an intense crisis over Israel’s secret nuclear program. In one of his last letters to Kennedy, quoted by Seymour Hersh in The Samson Option (1991), Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion complained: “Mr. President, my people have the right to exist […] and this existence is in danger.”[1] The nuclear option was judged vital for Israel, and JFK opposed it. A Haaretz review of Avner Cohen’s book Israel and the Bomb (1998) puts it this way:
“The murder of American President John F. Kennedy brought to an abrupt end the massive pressure being applied by the US administration on the government of Israel to discontinue the nuclear program. Cohen demonstrates at length the pressures applied by Kennedy on Ben-Gurion. […] The book implied that, had Kennedy remained alive, it is doubtful whether Israel would today have a nuclear option.”[2]
Also openly discussed by Israeli historians today are the close connections between Ben-Gurion’s network in the U.S. and what Tel-Aviv professor Robert Rockaway calls “Gangsters for Zion”, including the infamous “Murder, Incorporated”, run by Bugsy Siegel and then by Mickey Cohen, Jack Ruby’s mentor.
That Israel had the motive and the means of killing JFK does not prove that Israel did it. But I am quite certain that today, most smart Israelis assume and half-approve that Ben-Gurion ordered the elimination of JFK in order to replace him by Lyndon Johnson, whose love for Israel is also now widely celebrated, to the point that some speculate he might have been a secret Jew.
In Ben-Gurion’s mind, making Israel a nuclear state was a matter of life and death, and obliterating any obstacle was an absolute necessity. In Netanyahu’s mind today, preventing Iran—or any other enemy of Israel—from becoming a nuclear state is of the same order of necessity, and would surely justify eliminating another U.S. president in order to replace him by a more supportive Vice President. Most dedicated Zionists understand that. Andrew Adler, owner and editor in chief of The Atlanta Jewish Times, assumes that the idea “has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circle,” and, in his column of January 13, 2012, called on the Israeli Prime Minister to,
“give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current Vice-President to take his place and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish State obliterate its enemies. […] Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence.”[3]
Eliminating unsubmissive foreign leaders is part of Israel’s struggle for existence. Besides, it is entirely biblical: foreign kings are supposed to “lick the dust at [Israelis’] feet” (Isaiah 49:23), or perish, with their names “blotted out under heaven” (Deuteronomy 7:24).
On November 6, 1944, members of the Stern Gang, led by future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, assassinated Lord Moyne, the British resident minister in the Middle East, for his anti-Zionist positions. The bodies of his murderers, executed in Egypt, were later exchanged for twenty Arab prisoners and buried at the “Monument of Heroes” in Jerusalem. On September 17, 1948, the same terrorist group murdered in Jerusalem Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat appointed as United Nations mediator in Palestine. He had just submitted his report A/648, which described “large-scale Zionist plundering and destruction of villages,” and called for the “return of the Arab refugees rooted in this land for centuries.” His assassin, Nathan Friedman-Yellin, was arrested, convicted, and then amnestied; in 1960 he was elected to the Knesset.[4]
In 1946, three months after members of the Irgun, led by future Prime Minister Menachem Begin, killed ninety-one people in the headquarter of the British Mandate’s administration (King David Hotel), the same terrorist group attempted to murder British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, according to British Intelligence documents declassified in 2006.
These killings and more are documented by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman in Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations (Random House, 2018). Bergman writes:
“At the end of 1947, a report to the British high commissioner tallied the casualties of the previous two years: 176 British Mandate personnel and civilians killed. / ‘Only these actions, these executions, caused the British to leave,’ David Shomron said, decades after he shot Tom Wilkin dead on a Jerusalem street. ‘If [Avraham] Stern had not begun the war, the State of Israel would not have come into being.’”[5]
James Forrestal’s strange death
Absent from Israel’s body count in Bergman’s book is former U.S. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, assassinated eight months after Count Bernadotte. Forrestal had been Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Navy from April 1944. With consolidation of the armed services under Truman in 1947, he became the first Secretary of Defense. He opposed the United Nations’ vote to partition Palestine, and protested vigorously against U.S. recognition of Israel on May 15, 1948, on the ground that U.S. interests in the Middle East would be seriously jeopardized by American sponsorship of a Jewish state. For this, Forrestal received “an outpouring of slander and calumny that must surely be judged one of the most shameful intervals in American journalism,” in the words of Robert Lovett, then Under Secretary of State. Truman replaced Forrestal on March 28, 1949—shortly after his reelection—by the man who had been his main fundraiser, Louis Johnson. According to the received story, Forrestal, who was psychologically exhausted, fell into depression immediately. On April 2, 1949, he was interned against his will in the military hospital of the Navy in Bethesda, Maryland, a Washington, DC, suburb, where he was forcibly confined for seven weeks. He fell to his death from the 16th floor at 1:50 in the morning of May 22, 1949, landing on the roof of the third floor. He had a dressing-gown sash tied around his neck.
Bethesda Navy Hospital, where Forrestal met his death
National authorities and mainstream media immediately labeled his death a suicide, without any known criminal investigation. A review board was appointed on May 23, headed by Admiral Morton Willcutts, to conduct hearings of members of the hospital staff with the sole purpose of exonerating everyone of responsibility in Forrestal’s assumed suicide. The board completed its work in one week, and published a short press release four months later. But the full report, containing the transcripts of all hearings and crucial exhibits, were kept secret for 55 years, until David Martin obtained it through a Freedom of Information Act request in April 2004 (it is now available on the Princeton University Library website in pdf form, or here in HTML rendition by the anonymous Mark Hunter, who makes useful comments).
In his book and in his web articles complementing it, David Martin makes a compelling case that Forrestal was murdered, and that his murder was ordered by the Zionists, most probably with the knowledge and approval of Truman, who was then completely hostage to the Zionists. The motive? Forrestal was planning to write a book and to launch a national magazine: he had the money and the connections for it, and he had three thousand pages of personal diary to back his revelations on the corruption of American leadership and the sell-out of American foreign policy to communism under Roosevelt, and to Zionism under Truman.
I will here summarize the evidence accumulated by David Martin, and highlight the significance of this case for our understanding of Israel’s takeover of the heart, soul, and body of the United States. Unless specified otherwise, all information is from Martin’s book or articles.
From James Forrestal to John Kennedy
My own interest for this heartbreaking story stems from my interest for the Kennedy assassinations. (read my article Did Israel Kill the Kennedys?). I found the connection and similarities between the two stories highly illuminating. Everyone knows that Kennedy was assassinated, yet most Americans are still unaware of the evidence incriminating Israel. In the case of Forrestal, it is the opposite: few people suspect a murder, but once the evidence for murder has been presented, it points directly to Israel as the culprit. For this reason, Forrestal’s assassination by the Zionists becomes a precedent that makes JFK’s assassination by the same collective entity more plausible. If Israel can kill a former U.S. Defense Secretary on American soil in 1949 and get away with it with government and media complicity, then why not a sitting President fifteen years later? If the truth on Forrestal had been known by 1963, it is unlikely that Israel could have killed two Kennedys with impunity.
Forrestal was of Irish Catholic origin like the Kennedys, and was close to JFK’s father. Both James Forrestal and Joseph Kennedy are examples of American patriots of Irish stock who were alarmed by Jewish influence over American foreign policy. The entry for 27 December 1945 in Forrestal’s edited diary, says:
“Played golf with Joe Kennedy. I asked him about his conversations with Roosevelt and Neville Chamberlain from 1938 on. […] Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war.”
One major difference between the two men is that Joe Kennedy had resigned from government after Roosevelt’s entry into the war, and had kept a low profile on Israel. Moreover, unlike Forrestal, he was the head of a wealthy clan and had his own men in the press. He was a politician, whereas Forrestal was an uncompromising man. These differences explain why Forrestal was assassinated, whereas Joe had his son elected president. Yet in the end, the Kennedys suffered the Talmudic curse over three generations.
When James Forrestal, hostile to Stalin’s ambitions on Eastern Europe and to Truman’s decision to nuke Japan, was kept away from the official delegation to the Potsdam Conference in the summer 1945, he flew there privately and took with him the then 28-year-old John Kennedy, for a tour of post-war Germany. Later on, John integrated James Forrestal’s son Michael Forrestal as a member of his National Security Council. In May 1963 he made a symbolic public gesture by visiting the grave of James Forrestal on Memorial Day.
JFK visits Forrestal’s grave at Arlington cemetery
James Forrestal’s and John Kennedy’s assassinations bear one sinister thing in common: Bethesda Naval Hospital. As most readers recall, this is where Kennedy’s autopsy was tampered with after his body had been whisked away at gunpoint from Dallas Parkland Hospital, most probably by Secret Service agents on Lyndon Johnson’s order. In 1963, Lyndon Johnson could count on high-level complicity within the Navy.
It happens that Johnson, whom Billy Sole Estes claims ordered nine murders in the course of his political career,[6] makes a special appearance, although brief and poorly documented, in the story of Forrestal’s assassination. LBJ was then a newly elected congressman, on the payroll of Abraham Feinberg, former president of Americans for Haganah Incorporated and financial godfather of Israel’s atomic bomb.[7] According to the testimony of Forrestal’s assistant Marx Leva (more on him later), Johnson paid an unwanted visit to Forrestal at Bethesda Hospital. David Martin asks:
“Could LBJ have been playing something of a foot-soldier role for the orchestrators of Forrestal’s demise? Might he have been there to size up the overall situation, and at the same time contribute to ‘making his bones,’ as it were, by participating in such an important operation?” (Martin p. 20)
The official narrative
It bears repeating that no investigation was conducted into the death of James Forrestal, either by the FBI or the NCIS (Navy Criminal Investigative Service). The very day of his death, the mainstream press announced his suicide as a matter of fact. The New York Times stated in its late May 22 edition that Forrestal “jumped thirteen stories to his death,” and added the next morning:
“There were indications that Mr. Forrestal might also have tried to hang himself. The sash of his dressing-gown was still knotted and wrapped tightly around his neck when he was found, but hospital officials would not speculate as to its possible purpose.”
Later biographers did speculate that he may have tried to hang himself but failed to tie the sash securely to the radiator beneath the window. In The Man Who Kept the Secrets, Pulitzer Price winner Thomas Powers says that Forrestal died trying to hang himself “from his hospital window, but slipped and fell sixteen stories to his death.”
Forrestal left no suicide note, but the New York Times (May 23) informs its readers that:
“A book of poetry beside his bed was opened to a passage from the Greek tragedian, Sophocles, telling of the comfort of death. […] Mr. Forrestal had copied most of the Sophocles poem from the book on hospital memo paper, but he had apparently been interrupted in his efforts. His copying stopped after he had written ‘night’ of the word ‘nightingale’ in the twenty-sixth line of the poem.”
On May 24, the New York Times gave the final word to the psychiatrist in charge, who made suicide sound predictable:
“Captain George M. Raines, the Navy psychiatrist who had been treating Mr. Forrestal, said that the former Secretary ended his life in a sudden fit of despondency. He said this was ‘extremely common’ to the patient’s severe type of mental illness.”
That’s it. Never did the mainstream media hint at the possibility of foul play. The conclusion that Forrestal’s death is an obvious suicide caused by his “mental illness” was taken at face value by the authors of Forrestal’s two main biographies:
- Arnold Rogow, James Forrestal, A Study of Personality, Politics, and Policy (MacMillan Company, 1963);
- Townsend Hoopes and Douglass Brinkley, Driven Patriot, the Life and Times of James Forrestal (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).
Rogow, whose book has been called a “psychological autopsy,” insists on linking Forrestal’s alleged mental illness to his alleged anti-Semitism, with the implication that anti-Semitism is a form of paranoia that may lead to suicide. Rogow is an expert on the subject of anti-Semitism, on which he wrote the article for The International Encyclopedia of Social Science. He is also the author The Jew in a Gentile World: An Anthology of Writings about Jews by Non-Jews.
Hoopes and Brinkley borrow heavily from Rogow, but add valuable information based on their own interviews. They give an interesting interpretation of the morbid poem allegedly copied by Forrestal from Mark Van Dorren’s Anthology of World Poetry, titled “The Chorus from Ajax.” Taking their clue from Zionist apologist John Loftus, author of The Belarus Secret (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), they speculate that, when reaching the word “nightingale” in the poem, Forrestal might have been overwhelmed by a sudden rush of guilt for having authorized a CIA operation with the code name of “Nightingale,” that infiltrated into the Soviet Union Ukrainian spies who had been formerly Nazi collaborators and probably killers of Jews. The word “nightingale,” Hoopes and Brinkley surmise, must have triggered Forrestal’s urge to take the poet’s admonition literally and end his life on the spot.
Was Forrestal mentally ill?
David Martin has uncovered grave inconsistencies and outright lies in the official story. First, it appears that Forrestal’s nervous breakdown has been wildly exaggerated, if not totally invented. As the story goes, Forrestal’s mental health had started deteriorating before Truman replaced him, and collapsed on March 29, just after a brief ceremony in his honor at Capitol Hill. The main source for this story is an Oral history interview of Marx Leva, Forrestal’s special assistant at that time, recorded for the Truman library in 1969. Leva says that, on that day, he found Forrestal in his Pentagon office, “almost in a coma.” He had him driven home and later met him there with Forrestal’s friend Ferdinand Eberstadt, and the two men decided that Forrestal’s state required that he urgently take some vacation. So Leva made immediate arrangement for a Marine plane to fly him to the estate of Robert Lovett in Hobe Sound, Florida that very night. “And on the way out Forrestal said three times, the only thing he said, [Eberstadt] tried to speak to him and he would say, ‘You’re a loyal fellow, Marx.’ ‘You’re a loyal fellow, Marx,’ three times.” Since Leva is Jewish, the implication is that Forrestal was obsessed by the disloyalty he attributed to many Jewish officials. For Leva, “he apparently was beyond being neurotic, I mean it was apparently paranoid”.
David Martin shows in this article (adding a new perspective to his book) that Marx Leva is lying. Forrestal’s vacation had in fact been planned in advance, and his wife was already waiting for him there. This is proven by a Jacksonville Daily Journal article dated March 28 about the ceremony when Truman pinned the Distinguished Service Medal on Forrestal’s chest that very day. The article concludes: “Forrestal is flying tomorrow to Hobe Sound, Fla., for a long rest.” This video clip of Forrestal shows him perfectly healthy and composed on March 28.
News reports and biographies insist that, during his four-day stay at Hobe Sound, Forrestal showed signs of paranoia. One rumor, made up by Daniel Yergin and repeated by Thomas Powers in The Man Who Kept the Secrets, has him running through the streets yelling, “The Russians are coming.” There is no credible source for this claim. Under Secretary of State (and future Defense Secretary) Robert Lovett, who was at Hobe Sound with Forrestal, did say in 1974 that Forrestal appeared to him as “not of sound mind,” because “he was obsessed with the idea that his phone calls were being bugged,” and complained that “they’re really after me.” I find rather strange, though, that Lovett feigns to ignore who Forrestal meant by “they”. There is nothing irrational in Forrestal’s belief that “his telephones were being bugged, [and that] his house was being watched”, as he had earlier complained to Truman’s appointments secretary, Matthew J. Connelly (who said so in a 1968 interview by the Truman Library).
There is also a rumor that Forrestal attempted suicide at Hobe Sound. It is contradicted by the Willcutts report, where Dr. George Raines, the psychiatrist in charge of Forrestal at Bethesda, is recorded stating: “So far as I know he never made a single real attempt at suicide except that one that was successful.” All of Forrestal’s doctors interviewed are unanimous that he had never attempted suicide before his fatal fall.
That is not to say that Forrestal was not psychologically strained in 1949. As Secretary of Defense, he had been subjected not only to slander and calumny by the press, but also to anonymous death threats. Robert Lovett, who shared Forrestal’s views on Israel, testified that he himself received night phone calls with death threats, and that Forrestal was more exposed than him to this kind of treatment. Having lost all protection from the government after March 28, Forrestal had reasons to fear for his life. On May 23, 1949, The Washington Post concluded an article headlined “Delusions of Persecution, Acute Anxiety, Depression Marked Forrestal’s Illness,” with the somewhat paradoxical statement:
“His fear of reprisals from pro-Zionists was said to stem from attacks by some columnists on what they said was his opposition to partition of Palestine under a UN mandate. In his last year as Defense Secretary, he received great numbers of abusive and threatening letters.”
John Loftus and Mark Aarons, the arch-Zionist authors of The Secret War against the Jews, identify Forrestal as “the principal villain, the man who nearly succeeded in preventing Israel’s birth.” They reveal that “The Zionists had tried unsuccessfully to blackmail Forrestal with tape recordings of his own deals with the Nazis” (before the war, Forrestal had been a partner of Clarence Dillon, the Jewish founder of the banking firm Dillon, Read, and Co.), but they believe that Zionist harassment at least succeeded in making him insane: “His paranoia convinced him that his every word was bugged. To his many critics, it seemed that James Forrestal’s anti-Jewish obsession had finally conquered him.”[8]
How convenient to claim that anti-Semitism may lead to suicide. When the Zionist mafia wishes you dead, fearing for your life is not a sign of mental illness, but rather of sound judgment.
We need not doubt Raines’ words to the Willcutts Review Board that, when he first saw Forrestal at Bethesda Hospital, “he was obviously exhausted physically” and showed “high blood pressure.” But here, we also have to take into account that Forrestal had been literally abducted from his vacation center at Hobe Sound. We should not be surprised when Rogow, and Hoopes and Brinkley after him, tell us that, even though he had been sedated, Forrestal “was in a state of extreme agitation during the flight from Florida,” and that:
“Forrestal’s agitation increased during the trip in a private car from the airfield to the hospital. He made several attempts to leave the car while it was in motion, and had to be forcibly restrained. Arriving at Bethesda, he declared that he did not expect to leave the hospital alive.”
As Martin mentions, there is also the very real possibility that Forrestal had been drugged at Hobe Sound, in order to make him appear insane and justify his internment.
Forrestal’s behavior at Bethesda shows nothing abnormal for a man locked up in the psychiatric division of a military hospital, on the 16th floor, for reasons he feared were not strictly medical. It has been reported by medical personnel that Forrestal often seemed restless, walking back and forth in his room late at night. Why wouldn’t he? Forrestal was even denied visits by those dearest to him. His brother Henry had tried several times to visit him, but had been rebuffed by Dr. Raines. The hospital authorities relented only after Henry threatened legal action. Forrestal was also denied the visit of his friend the Catholic priest, Monsignor Maurice Sheehy. Sheehy wrote in The Catholic Digest, January 1951, that, “The day he was admitted to the hospital, Forrestal told Dr. Raines he wish to see me,” but that Dr. Raines told him “that Jim was so confused I should wait some days before seeing him.” Raines turned away Father Sheehy on six occasions.
Despite being kept in virtual imprisonment and under forced medication, Forrestal endured remarkably well. From the hearings conducted by the Willcutts Review Boards, it appears that he was doing fine, in the days preceding his death. Willcutts himself expressed surprise at learning about his death, because he had dinner with him one day earlier (Friday the 20th), and thought he was “getting along splendidly.”
Evidence of cover-up and the fake suicide note
As mentioned earlier, the Willcutts Review Board’s mission was to exonerate every single individual of negligence. Even the brief conclusions released four months after it concluded its hearings, admits so, as reported in the New York Times October 12, 1949:
“Francis P. Matthews, Secretary of the Navy, made public today the report of an investigating board absolving all individuals of blame in the death of James Forrestal last May 22.”
Strangely enough, as Martin discovered, the report states that Forrestal’s fall was the cause of his death, but avoids any statement about the cause of the fall itself.
There is an obvious lack of interest from the Willcutts Board regarding all elements that point to murder rather than to suicide. The nurse who first entered Forrestal’s room after his death testified that there was broken glass on his bed. But the room must have been laundered before the crime scene photographs were taken, because they show the bed with nothing but a bare mattress, while another picture shows broken glass on the carpet at the foot of his bed (photos available on Mark Hunter’s site). The Willcutts Board had no interest in finding the origin of the broken glass, nor the reason it was removed from the bed.
They also failed to ask the personnel or themselves any relevant questions about the gown sash tied around Forrestal’s neck. Hoopes and Brinkley later speculated that Forrestal tied the sash to a radiator beneath the window, but that his knot “gave way.” That is contradicted by hospitalman William Eliades, who found the body of Forrestal with the sash (cord) around his neck, and declared to the Willcutts Review Board: “I looked to see whether he had tried to hang himself and whether a piece of cord had broken off. It was still in one piece except it was tied around his neck.”
But the most compelling proof that Forrestal’s death has been disguised as a suicide is the poem allegedly copied by Forrestal. Among the exhibits obtained by Martin alongside the Willcutts report is a copy of the memo sheet with the transcription of the poem (here). A comparison with any handwritten note by Forrestal makes it plain that it was not copied by Forrestal (both can be found on Mark Hunter’s webpage).
A sample of Forrestal’s handwriting and the note supposedly found in his room
As Martin comments, “One hardly needs an expert to tell him that the person who transcribed the poem is not the same person who wrote the various letters there.” Martin also notes that, from this single page, it is doubtful that the writer, whoever he was, even reached the word “nightingale”, which appears 11 verses below in the poem.
Interestingly, no one is identified in the official report as the discoverer of this handwritten note. It didn’t occur to the members of the Review Board to mention how it came into their possession, and to question about it the person who gave it to them.
In an effort to make the note a convincing proof of suicide, Rogow claims, and Hoopes and Brinkley repeat, that Apprentice Robert Wayne Harrison, Jr., the corpsman on duty to keep watch on Forrestal, checked into his room at 1:45 and saw him copying the poem. But by doing so, they both contradict Harrison’s declaration to the Willcutts Board. He said that, when he checked on him at 1:45, Forrestal was “in his bed, apparently sleeping.” Then he went to fill in the medical chart. Minutes later, a nurse heard the sound of Forrestal’s body striking the third floor roof. Harrison heard nothing but then became aware that Forrestal was missing at 1:50.
Robert Wayne Harrison, Jr. would certainly have been a prime suspect if any criminal investigation had taken place. He was new to the job, and unknown to Forrestal until that fatal night. He had started his guard at midnight, replacing Edward Prise whose shift had started at 4 pm. Prise was well-known and apparently appreciated by Forrestal; he had been assigned to keep watch on Forrestal from the third day of Forrestal’s arrival at Bethesda. Strangely, his name is not mentioned in any contemporary news report, and it is misspelled “Price” in the report and in all biographies, although he clearly signed “Prise” in the medical chart included among the exhibits with the Willcutts report.
David Martin mentions that he received an e-mail from Prise’s daughter saying:
“We grew up hearing whispers between our parents in reference to this matter but were not allowed to ask for detail. Even up until a year prior to my father’s death in 1991 he had called me and was in fear that he was going to be questioned again about the issue.” (Martin p. 9)
We need not insist on the fact that witnesses are easily intimidated in a military environment, as was Bethesda Hospital. The pressure transpires in the transcripts of the Willcutts interviews: every nurse, corpsman or doctor said what they were expected to say, and understood their obligation never to speak otherwise. An interesting insight into this can be gained from David Martin’s interview of John Spalding, James Forrestal’s Navy Driver, then 27 years-old. When informed of the death of Forrestal by his superior, Spalding was handed a sheet of paper to sign, saying “I could never talk about anything that happened between him and me.”
Was it the communists or the Zionists?
Before David Martin, one author, writing under the pen-name Cornell Simpson, had claimed that Forrestal had been murdered. His book, The Death of James Forrestal, was published in 1966, although he claims to have written it in the mid-1950s. Simpson’s book contains much valuable and credible information. He had for example interviewed James Forrestal’s brother Henry, who was positively certain that his brother had been murdered. Henry Forrestal found the timing of the death very suspicious because he was coming to take his brother out of the hospital a few hours later that very same day. According to Simpson, another person who didn’t believe in Forrestal’s suicide was Father Maurice Sheehy. When he hurried to the hospital several hours after Forrestal’s death, he was approached discreetly by an officer who whispered to him, “Father, you know Mr. Forrestal didn’t kill himself, don’t you?”
Simpson blames the communists for Forrestal’s murder. The claim is not preposterous. Forrestal was definitely anti-communist. He had been alarmed by what he saw as communist infiltration in the Roosevelt administration (the Venona decrypts, giving evidence of 329 Soviet agents inside the U.S. government during World War II, would prove him right). After Roosevelt’s death, he was influential in the transformation of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union, from accommodation to “containment.” Senator Joseph McCarthy, another Irish Catholic, testifies in his book The Fight for America that it was Forrestal who directly inspired his exposés of communist influence and subversion in the federal government:
“Before meeting Jim Forrestal I thought we were losing to international Communism because of incompetence and stupidity on the part of our planners. I mentioned that to Forrestal. I shall forever remember his answer. He said, ‘McCarthy, consistency has never been a mark of stupidity. If they were merely stupid they would occasionally make a mistake in our favor.’ This phrase stuck me so forcefully that I have often used it since.”
After Forrestal met his violent end, McCarthy moved up to the front line. He himself died on May 2, 1957, at the age of forty-eight, in Bethesda Hospital. Hospital officials listed the cause of death as “acute hepatic failure,” and the death certificate reads “hepatitis, acute, cause unknown.” The doctors declared that the inflammation of the liver was of a “noninfectious type”. Acute hepatitis can be caused either by infection or by poisoning, yet no autopsy was performed. Simpson comments (as quoted at length in Martin’s article James Forrestal and Joe McCarthy):
“Like Jim Forrestal, Joe McCarthy walked into the Bethesda Naval Hospital as its most controversial patient and as the one man in America most hated by the Communists. And, like Forrestal, he left in a hearse, as a man whose valiant fight against Communism was ended forever.”
M. Stanton Evans, who built on his father Medford Evans’ earlier work for his commendable Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (2009), hints at the possibility that McCarthy was murdered, but does not explore the issue.
In 1953, Robert Kennedy worked as an assistant counsel to the Senate committee chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy
The problem with Cornell Simpson’s theory is that Forrestal’s worst enemies were not the communists, but the Zionists. Although Forrestal’s anti-communism later attracted criticism from left-wing historians, it was not, then, a matter of public condemnation. Forrestal’s anti-communism was shared by most of his contemporaries, especially within the military. As long as you did not mention the high percentage of Jews among communists, being anti-communist did not make you the target of the mainstream media. The same, obviously, cannot be said of anti-Zionism. Neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times can be said to have been pro-communist at any time, but both turned strongly pro-Zionist around 1946. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the NY Times’ director of publication since 1938, had actually denounced in 1946 the “coercive methods of the Zionists” influencing his editorial line, but eventually gave in and, since 1948, the NY Times has produced singularly unbalanced coverage of Palestine.[9]
It was his opposition to Zionism, not to communism, that attracted death threats to Forrestal. In his diary entry for February 3, 1948, Forrestal writes that he had lunch with Bernard Baruch and mentioned to him his effort at stopping the process of recognition:
“He took the line of advising me not to be active in this particular matter and that I was already identified, to a degree that was not in my own interests, with opposition to the United Nations policy on Palestine.”
Martin comments (p. 86):
“Baruch clearly did not know his man when he attempted to influence him by appealing to Forrestal’s own self-interest. He might have known more than he was telling, though, when he hinted at the danger that Forrestal faced for the courageous position he had taken.”
Jewish gangsters were traditionally anti-communists, but the Zionists could count on them to give a hand whenever needed. From 1945, Ben-Gurion’s Jewish Agency had close links to the Yiddish mafia, also known as the Mishpucka (Hebrew for “the Family”), who contributed greatly to the clandestine arms-purchasing-and-smuggling network that armed the Haganah. Leonard Slater writes in The Pledge that Teddy Kollek, who later became the longtime mayor of Jerusalem, ran the day-to-day operations and was told explicitly by Jewish gangsters from Brooklyn, “If you want anyone killed, just draw up a list and we’ll take care of it.” Yehuda Arazi, a close aide to Ben-Gurion sent by him to the U.S. to purchase heavy armaments, approached Meyer Lansky and met with members of “Murder, Incorporated.” Another Haganah emissary, Reuvin Dafni, who would become Israeli consul in Los Angeles and New York, met with Benjamin Siegelbaum, known as Bugsy Siegel. Some of those “gangsters for Zion”, writes Robert Rockaway, “did so out of ethnic loyalties,” or “saw themselves as defenders of the Jews, almost biblical-like fighters. It was part of their self-image.” Some also helped “because it was a way […] to gain acceptance in the Jewish community.”[10] Mickey Cohen, the successor of Bugsy Siegel, explains in his memoirs that from 1947, “I got so engrossed with Israel that I actually pushed aside a lot of my activities and done nothing but what was involved with this Irgun war.”[11] He was in close contact with Menachem Begin, and met with him when Begin came touring the U.S. in December 1948, a few months before Forrestal was confined to the Bethesda hospital.[12] Had Begin wanted Forrestal dead, he had only to ask.
I think it is quite self-evident that Forrestal had more to fear from the Zionists than from the communists. And so it is strange that Cornell Simpson totally ignores the Zionists as possible culprits. Neither Israel nor Zionism appears in his index. David Martin, who nevertheless recognizes the merit of Simpson’s investigation, finds the explanation for his blackout on Zionism in the fact that his book was published by Western Islands Publishers, the in-house publishing company of the John Birch Society, a Zionist front.
Three years before the Birch Society published Simpson’s book, Rogow had published the first biography of Forrestal, defending the official line about his death, and linking his supposed mental illness directly to his supposed anti-Semitism. It is very unlikely that Rogow’s book eased the suspicions of the skeptics about Forrestal’s suicide. On the contrary, Rogow’s obvious bias as a writer mainly concerned with anti-Semitism must have led many to consider his book as just another layer in the cover-up. Martin therefore speculates that the writing and publishing of Simpson’s book by the Birch Society was a way to give voice to the skepticism over Forrestal’s death, while directing that skepticism away from the most likely suspects. Blaming the communists was the easiest way to deflect suspicions from the Zionists.
It was all the easier that, from the 1930s up to the time of Forrestal’s death, the communists and the Zionists were the same people in many instances, as David Martin points out. Although communism and Zionism may seem incompatible from an ideological viewpoint, it is a matter of record that some of the Jews who acted as communist agents under Roosevelt, turned ardent Zionists under Truman. A case in point is David Niles (Neyhus), one of the few of FDR’s top advisors kept by Truman: he was identified in the Venona decrypts as a communist agent, but then played a key role as a Zionist gatekeeper under Truman. Edwin Wright, in The Great Zionist Cover-Up, names him as “the protocol officer in the White House, [who] saw to it that the State Department influence was negated while the Zionist view was presented.” David Niles’ brother Elliot, a high official of B’nai B’rith, was a Lieutenant Colonel who passed information to the Haganah while working in the Pentagon.
Did the order come from the White House?
Martin considers David Niles “the most likely coordinator of the Forrestal assassination.” He had the motives and the means. He was actually capable of passing orders on behalf of Truman, as he did when orchestrating the campaign of intimidation and corruption that obtained a two-third majority in favor of the Partition Plan at the U.N. General Assembly.[13]
There are reasons to believe that the order to eliminate Forrestal came directly from the White House. According to Truman’s appointments secretary, Matthew J. Connelly, it was Truman himself who suggested arranging for Forrestal a vacation at Hobe Sound. As for the decision to abduct him from there and intern him in Bethesda, Martin makes the following remark:
“Considering the fact that Forrestal, having been officially replaced as Defense Secretary by Johnson on March 28, was a private citizen at this point, it is certainly reasonable to assume that Forrestal’s extra-legal transportation to Florida on a military airplane and confinement and treatment in the Naval Hospital at Bethesda was not done without approval at the highest level.” (Martin p. 29)
Hoopes and Brinkley state explicitly that the decision to take Forrestal to Bethesda came from Truman, and that Forrestal’s wife was convinced by a telephone conversation with Truman.
The decision to put Forrestal on the 16th floor, which seems hardly appropriate for a patient reputed suicidal, also came from the White House. Hoopes and Brinkley quote Dr. Robert P. Nenno, a young assistant to Dr. Raines from 1952 to 1959, who believed that Raines had received instruction to put Forrestal there, and added, “I have always guessed that the order came from the White House.”
Hoopes and Brinkley justify Dr. Raines’ turning Sheehy away on six occasions by the fear that Forrestal might divulge sensitive information during confession. Such concerns obviously came from higher up. It apparently didn’t come from Navy Secretary John L. Sullivan because, as Hoopes and Brinkley tell us, when Sheehy and Henry Forrestal took their complaint to him on May 18, he expressed surprise and had the decision overruled. According to Simpson: “the priest later commented that he received the distinct impression that Dr. Raines was acting under orders.”
There is, of course, no evidence that throwing Forrestal out of the window was also ordered by the White House, but given Truman’s complete control by the Zionists, and by David Niles in particular, it is not unlikely.
Why kill him after he had been dismissed from power?
But, one may ask, why would Truman or anyone need to kill Forrestal? Once out of the Pentagon, he had no more influence on government policy.
The answer is easy. Far from being suicidal, Forrestal was a man with a plan. According to Hoopes and Brinkley,
“he had told powerful Wall Street friends […] that he was interested in starting a newspaper or a magazine modeled after The Economist of Great Britain, and they had demonstrated a willingness to help him raise the start-up funds.”
He also planned to write a book. With no more ties to the government or to the army, he was free to speak his mind on many issues. As a war hero and a very popular figure, he was sure to have a great impact. And he had plenty of embarrassing things to reveal about what he had seen during his nine years in the government.
Time cover, October 29, 1945
As Navy Secretary, he had been the central person for Pacific operations during World War II. He had inside knowledge of Roosevelt’s scheme to provoke the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor. According to his diary entry for April 18, 1945, he had even told Truman, that,
“I had got Admiral Hewitt back to pursue the investigation into the Pearl Harbor disaster. […] I felt I had an obligation to Congress to continue the investigation because I was not completely satisfied with the report my own Court had made.”
Forrestal was also very bitter about the way the war ended in the Pacific. Knowing the desperate situation of the Japanese, he had worked behind the scene to achieve a negotiated surrender from the Japanese. He was opposed to the demand of “unconditional surrender”, which he knew was unacceptable to the Japanese military leadership. Simpson writes, as quoted by David Martin here:
“As secretary of the navy, Forrestal had originated a plan to end the war with Japan five and a half months before V-J Day finally dawned. He had mapped this plan on the basis of massive intelligence information obtained on and prior to March 1, 1945, to the effect that the Japanese were already desperately anxious to surrender and the fact that the Japanese emperor had even asked the pope to act as peace mediator. If Roosevelt had acted on Forrestal’s plan, the war would have ground to a halt in a few days. A-bombs would never have incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thousands of Americans would not have died in the unnecessary battle of Okinawa and later bloody encounters, and the Russians would not have had a chance to muscle into the Pacific war for the last six of its 1,347 days, thus giving Washington the pretext for handing them the key to the conquest of all Asia.”
Forrestal had also much to say about the way the Zionists obtained the Partition Plan at the General Assembly of the United Nations, or about the way Truman was blackmailed and bought into supporting the recognition of Israel. He had written in his diary, February 3, 1948, about his meeting with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., a strong advocate of the Jewish State:
“I thought the methods that had been used by people outside of the Executive branch of the government to bring coercion and duress on other nations in the General Assembly bordered closely onto scandal.”
Forrestal had a pretty good memory. But, in addition, he had accumulated thousands of pages of diary during his public service. According to Simpson,
“During Forrestal’s brief stay at Hobe Sound, his personal diaries, consisting of fifteen loose-leaf binders totaling three thousand pages, were hastily removed from his former office in the Pentagon and locked up in the White House where they remained for a year. […] all during the seven weeks prior to Forrestal’s death, his diaries were out of his hands and in the White House, where someone could have had ample time to study them.”
The White House later claimed that Forrestal had sent word that he wanted President Truman to take custody of these diaries, but that is very unlikely.
A small part of Forrestal’s diaries was ultimately published in a heavily censored form by Walter Millis, FDR apologist and New York Herald Tribune journalist. Simpson estimates that more than 80 percent was left out. Millis frankly admitted that he had deleted unfavorable “references to persons, by name [and] comment reflecting on the honesty or loyalty of an individual.” Millis also said that he deleted everything on the Pearl Harbor investigations. One can only guess how much censorship Millis exerted on Forrestal’s view about American support for Israel.
David Martin’s conclusion makes perfect sense:
“Forrestal’s writing and publishing plans provide the answer to the question, ‘Why would anyone bother to murder him when he had already been driven from office and disgraced by the taint of mental illness?’”
“The compelling reasons for Forrestal to want to continue living were also compelling reasons for his powerful enemies to see to it that he did not.”
“He comes across, in short, not as a prime candidate for suicide, but for assassination.” (Martin, pp. 52, 53, 87)
A parallel with Lord Northcliffe
In his blurb for Martin’s book, James Fetzer puts it this way:
“Dave Martin has established that James Forrestal was targeted for assassination by Zionist zealots who were convinced that his future influence as an editor and publisher represented an unacceptable risk.”
In this article, Martin expands on this idea by comparing Forrestal to Lord Northcliffe (Alfred Harmsworth), an influential newspaper editor whose tragic story is told by Douglas Reed in The Controversy of Zion (pp. 205-208), based on The Official History of The Times (1952). In the 1920s just like today, factual reporting from the press was the greatest obstacle to the Zionist ambitions. Lord Northcliffe owned journals and periodicals, including the two most widely read daily newspapers, and he was the majority proprietor of the most influential newspaper in the world at that time, The Times of London. He took a definite stand against the Zionist plan, and wrote, after a visit to Palestine in 1922: “In my opinion we, without sufficient thought, guaranteed Palestine as a home for the Jews despite the fact that 700,000 Arab Moslems live there and own it.” Northcliffe commissioned a series of articles attacking Balfour’s attitude towards Zionism. His editor, Wickham Steed, refused, and, when Northcliffe asked him to resign, took a series of actions to have Northcliffe declared mentally ill. Although he appeared perfectly normal to most people he met, on June 18, 1922, Northcliffe was declared unfit for the position of editor of The Times on the authority of an unknown “French nerve specialist,” removed from all control of his newspapers, and put under constraint. On July 24, 1922 the Council of the League of Nations met in London, secure from any possibility of loud public protest by Lord Northcliffe, to bestow on Britain a “mandate” to remain in Palestine and to install the Zionists there. On August 14, 1922, Northcliffe died at the age of fifty-seven, officially of “ulcerative endocarditis.” The public was, of course, kept in total ignorance of the way this highly respected public figure was taken off the scene. Douglas Reed, who was then working as a clerk in the office of The Times, and learned the full story much later, remembers that:
“Lord Northcliffe was convinced that his life was in danger and several times said this; specifically, he said he had been poisoned. If this is in itself madness, then he was mad, but in that case many victims of poisoning have died of madness, not of what was fed to them. If by any chance it was true, he was not mad. […] His belief certainly charged him with suspicion of those around him, but if by chance he had reason for it, then again it was not madness.”
Reed sees Northcliffe’s elimination as a turning point:
“After Lord Northcliffe died the possibility of editorials in The Times ‘attacking Balfour’s attitude towards Zionism’ faded. From that time the submission of the press […] grew ever more apparent and in time reached the condition which prevails today, when faithful reporting and impartial comment on this question has long been in suspense.”
The parallel with Forrestal is indeed striking, as David Martin remarks:
“Forrestal’s first love was journalism. In his youth he had worked as a reporter for three newspapers in his native upstate New York, and he had been the editor of the student newspaper at Princeton. As former president of the investment banking firm of Dillon, Read, & Co. he was a rich, powerful and well-connected man. He had plans to run his own news magazine. In short, he could have become an American Lord Northcliffe with the ability to have a great deal of influence on public opinion in the country.”
Notes
[1] Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991, p. 141.
[2] Haaretz, February 5, 1999, quoted in Michael Collins Piper, False Flags: Template for Terror, American Free Press, 2013, pp. 54–55.
[3] Joe Sterling, “Jewish paper’s column catches Secret Service’s eye,” CNN, January 22, 2012.
[4] Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 2: David Becomes Goliath, Clarity Press, 2013, p. 90.
[5] Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, Random House, 2018, p. 20.
[6] William Reymond and Billie Sol Estes, JFK Le Dernier Témoin, Flammarion, 2003.
[7] Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 2: David Becomes Goliath, Clarity Press, 2013, p. 250.
[8] John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed The Jewish People, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2017 , p. 212-213.
[9] Alfred Lilienthal, What Price Israel? (1953), Infinity Publishing, 2003, pp. 95, 143.
[10] Robert Rockaway, “Gangsters for Zion. Yom Ha’atzmaut: How Jewish mobsters helped Israel gain its independence”, April 19, 2018, on tabletmag.com
[11] Mickey Cohen, In My Own Words, Prentice-Hall, 1975, pp. 91–92.
[12] Gary Wean, There’s a Fish in the Courthouse, Casitas, 1987, quoted by Michael Collins Piper, Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy, American Free Press, 6th ed., 2005, pp. 290–297.
[13] Alfred Lilienthal, What Price Israel? (1953), Infinity Publishing, 2003, p. 50.
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