Global Engagement Center officially shuts down, but censorship efforts likely to persist through State Department offices
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 27, 2024
“The GEC is dead – long live the GEC!” That would be one way to summarize the situation around the US State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) that has formally shut down.
But judging by previous announcements, the move could prove to be by and large symbolic, as there are plans to continue the work by funding it, and assigning the 120 GEC staff to other offices and bureaus.
And the work has included surveilling Americans and flagging their social media posts for censorship in the US, critics have said.
Many Republican lawmakers have been among those critics over the previous years, and so has Elon Musk, who in 2023 did not shy away from branding GEC as “a threat to our democracy” – as the worst among the government entities that engaged in censorship and media manipulation.
Musk, who is now set to become a member of President Trump’s administration, and others raised the alarm when it came to light that the recent spending bill proposal included continued bankrolling of the GEC.
The GEC launched in 2016 and has been repeatedly accused and investigated as essentially an example of a “policy gun” supposedly designed to tackle foreign disinformation challenges, that the outgoing administration turned on its own citizens, threatening their right to free speech online.
The end of GEC as such came with the spending bill passed last week in Congress removing the approximately $61 million in funding that the agency received every year.
When it comes to “the next steps” regarding staff and unfinished GEC projects, the State Department said it was “consulting” with Congress on these issues.
The State Department now on its way out has insisted that the GEC worked to counter Russian, Chinese, etc., disinformation.
But one of the House investigations that looked into the activities of the agency, conducted by the Committee on Small Business, looked into the ways the government funded companies who then damaged competitiveness of small businesses online because of their lawful speech.
The GEC also shows up in an interim report by the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government as coordinating with third parties to censor Americans ahead of the 2020 election.
Ex-NATO boss made head of Bilderberg Group
Former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg © Getty Images / Omar Havana
RT | December 27, 2024
Former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who was at the helm the bloc for the past decade, has officially joined the secretive Bilderberg Group as co-chairman of the annual closed-door meetings involving the world’s most powerful and wealthy individuals.
The elite club was founded in 1954, officially to improve dialogue between Europe and the US. Every year, some 130 political leaders and experts from industry, finance, intelligence, labor, academia and the media are invited to the gathering.
The forums are generally not announced in advance and are held beneath a veil of secrecy, with attendees forbidden from disclosing any information derived from discussions. This has sparked a number of conspiracy theories as to the nature of the group’s activities and its influence on global events.
According to an update on the group’s website, Stoltenberg, who attended his first Bilderberg summit in 2002, has now been made the head of the group’s “steering committee,” which decides the agenda and who gets to participate.
Media outlets, including the Daily Mail, have speculated that the move could be a sign the group is undergoing a leadership transformation ahead of the presidency of Donald Trump, who has frequently criticized NATO and has hinted at cutting US funding of foreign conflicts after he enters office next month.
As head of NATO, Stoltenberg played a key role in the bloc’s involvement in the Ukraine conflict, which first started not long after he took office in 2014. He has proudly noted that during his tenure he oversaw “the largest reinforcement of our collective defence in a generation,” and that “defence spending is on an upward trajectory across the alliance.”
The Daily Mail reported that many of Stoltenberg’s friends at Bilderberg have directly benefited from this uptick.
The Guardian has hailed Stoltenberg’s appointment, saying it “cements the group’s role at the heart of transatlantic strategy,” particularly as the former NATO chief is also set to take over as chairman of the Munich Security Conference, which has also played a key role in shaping Western defense policy and diplomacy.
“Combined with the Munich Security Conference, this is a good platform for collaborating with leaders from politics, business, and academia. It is also an important meeting place for strengthening ties between Europe and the US. I look forward to contributing to Bilderberg’s work,” Stoltenberg told the DN.no news outlet.
South Korea votes to impeach acting president
RT | December 27, 2024
South Korea’s Parliament has voted to impeach acting head of state Han Duck-soo over his refusal to appoint justices to the Constitutional Court, local media reported on Friday. The appointments are necessary to finalize the impeachment of Han’s predecessor, President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was stripped of his powers earlier this month.
The motion to impeach Han, filed by the opposition Democratic Party, was passed with 192 votes in favor in the 300-member parliament, called the National Assembly, speaker Woo Won-shik announced in a televised statement.
The National Assembly initially voted to impeach Yoon on December 14 over his brief imposition of martial law in the country. On December 3, he had declared emergency martial law on the grounds that the opposition – which he accused of being sympathetic towards North Korea – had allegedly been preparing a “rebellion.”
The impeachment decision by the National Assembly meant that Yoon was automatically suspended from office. However, in order to complete the procedure, it must be upheld by the Constitutional Court. The nine-member bench is currently short of three judges, and, while it can technically vote with only six members, a single dissenting vote would reinstate Yoon to office under South Korean law.
As interim head of state, Han was expected to appoint the justices to fill the vacancies following requests from the opposition party, which is against Yoon’s reinstatement. On Thursday, the National Assembly passed the appointment consent bill for three candidates, two of which were nominated by the opposition and one by the ruling conservative People Power Party. However, at an emergency press-conference immediately after, Han said he could not appoint the justices right away as the PPP did not support the nominees, and the appointment could harm the constitutional order.
“The consistent principle embedded in our Constitution and laws is to refrain from exercising significant exclusive presidential powers, including the appointment of constitutional institutions,” he argued in his address, adding that “a consensus between the ruling and opposition parties in the National Assembly, representing the people, must first be reached.” In response to this, the opposition proposed impeaching Han as well.
“It has become clear that Prime Minister and acting President Han Duck-soo has neither the qualifications nor the will to protect the Constitution,” Park Chan-dae, the Democratic Party’s floor leader, said in a statement announcing the motion.
Friday’s vote marked the first time in South Korea’s modern history that an impeachment motion has been filed against an acting president. The country’s finance minister, Choi Sang-mok, is now expected to take over as acting president.
Manufacturing rebels: How the UK and US empowered HTS
By Kit Klarenberg | The Cradle | December 26, 2024
On 18 December, The Telegraph published an extraordinary investigation into how the UK and US trained and “prepared” fighters in the Revolutionary Commando Army (RCA), a “rebel” force that collaborated with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in the mass offensive toppling of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad weeks earlier.
In an unprecedented disclosure, the outlet revealed that Washington not only “knew about the offensive” well in advance, but also had “precise intelligence about its scale.” Washington’s now-confirmed “effective alliance” with HTS was described as “one of many ironies” emerging from the decade-and-a-half-long proxy war.
The Telegraph suggested this collaboration was inadvertent – simply a symptom of how Syria’s grinding, protracted civil war gave birth to “a bewildering array of militias and alliances, most of them backed by foreign powers.”
US support of HTS: A ‘necessary’ alliance
Alliances were fluid, with groups often splintering, merging, and shifting allegiances. Fighters frequently found themselves switching sides, blurring lines between factions. Yet, ample evidence indicates the UK and the US maintained deliberate, long-standing ties with the dominant rebels of HTS.
For instance, in March 2021, President-elect Donald Trump’s former lead Syria envoy, James Jeffrey, gave a revealing interview to PBS, during which he disclosed that Washington secured a specific “waiver” from then-secretary of state Mike Pompeo to assist HTS.
While this did not permit direct funding or arming of the UN/US-designated terrorist organization, the waiver ensured that if US-supplied resources “somehow” ended up with HTS, western actors “[could not] be blamed.”
The fungibility of weapons on the Syrian battlefield was something Washington counted on heavily. In a 2015 interview, CENTCOM spokesman Lieutenant Commander Kyle Raines was quizzed about why Pentagon-vetted fighters’ weapons were showing up in the hands of the Nusra Front (precursor to HTS). Raines responded: “We don’t ‘command and control’ these forces – we only ‘train and enable’ them. Who they say they’re allying with, that’s their business.”
This legal loophole enabled Washington to “indirectly” support HTS, ensuring the group did not collapse while maintaining its designation as a terrorist organization – a status complete with a now-rescinded $10 million bounty on leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who now goes by his real name Ahmad al-Sharaa.
Jeffrey rationalized this strategy, calling HTS “the least bad option” for preserving “a US-managed security system in the region,” and thus worth “[leaving] alone.” HTS’s dominance, in turn, gave Turkiye a platform to operate in Idlib. Meanwhile, HTS sent unmistakable messages to their US patrons, pleading:
“We want to be your friend. We’re not terrorists. We’re just fighting Assad.”
‘Safe haven’
Since Assad’s fall, officials in London have markedly taken the lead in legitimizing the HTS-led interim administration as Syria’s new government. The group was added to the UK’s list of proscribed terrorist organizations in 2017, its entry stating HTS should be considered among “alternative names” for the long-banned Al-Qaeda.
While UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared it “too early” to rescind the group’s designation, British officials met HTS representatives on 16 December – despite the illegality of such meetings.
This likely signals an impending, highly politicized western rehabilitation of HTS. Throughout Syria’s dirty war, UK intelligence waged extensive psychological operations to promote “moderate rebels,” crafting atrocity propaganda and human-interest stories.
These efforts were ostensibly aimed at undermining groups like HTS, ISIS, and Al-Qaeda. Yet leaked documents from UK intelligence reveal how HTS remained intertwined with Al-Qaeda post-2016, directly contradicting media narratives.
In other words, throughout the decade-and-a-half-long crisis, HTS was officially considered on par with the most fundamentalist, genocidal elements in the country.
British documents also make a total mockery of the common refrain that HTS severed all ties with Al-Qaeda in 2016. A 2020 file described how Al-Qaeda “co-exists” with HTS in occupied Syrian territory, using it as a launchpad for transnational attacks.
The document warned that HTS’s domination created a “safe haven” for Al-Qaeda to train and expand, fueled by instability. British psyops against HTS spanned years but ultimately failed. Instead, leaked files lament HTS’s growing influence, territorial gains, and rebranding as an alternative government.
“[Al-Qaeda] remains an explicitly Salafi-Jihadist transnational group with objectives and targets which extend outside Syria’s borders. [Al-Qaeda’s] priority is to maintain an instability fuelled safe haven in Syria, from which they are able to train and prepare for future expansion. HTS domination of north west Syria provides space for [Al-Qaeda] aligned groups and individuals to exist.”
British-backed propaganda benefiting HTS
British intelligence psyops attempting to hinder HTS were in operation from the group’s founding until recently. Yet, they appear to have achieved nothing. Numerous leaked files reviewed by The Cradle bemoan how HTS’s “influence and territorial control” had “dramatically grown” over the years.
Its successes allowed the extremist group “to consolidate its position, neutralize opponents, and position itself as a key actor in northern Syria.” But HTS’s “domination” was secured in part by the group rebranding itself as an alternative government.
HTS-occupied territory was home to a variety of parallel service providers and institutions, including hospitals, law enforcement, schools, and courts. The group’s domestic and international propaganda specifically promoted these resources as a demonstration of an “alternative” Syria awaiting rollout across the entire country.
Ironically, many of these structures and organizations – such as the infamous White Helmets, who also operated in ISIS-run territories – were direct products of British intelligence, created for regime change propaganda purposes. Moreover, they were aggressively promoted by London at enormous expense.
Repeated references are made in leaked UK intelligence documents to the importance of “[raising] awareness of moderate opposition service provision,” and providing domestic and international audiences with “compelling narratives and demonstrations of a credible alternative to the [Assad] regime.” There is no consideration evident in the files that these efforts might be assisting HTS greatly in its own efforts to present itself as a “credible alternative” to Assad.
Nonetheless, it is acknowledged that Syrians in occupied territory would accommodate HTS “particularly if [they are] receiving services from it.” Even more eerily, the documents note, “HTS and other extremist armed groups are significantly less likely to attack opposition entities that are receiving support” from the UK government’s Conflict, Stability, and Security Fund (CSSF).
This was the mechanism through which Britain’s Syrian propaganda war and organizations like the White Helmets and extremist-linked Free Syrian Police were financed.
These UK-run governance structures and opposition elements, which were allegedly intended to “undermine” HTS, operated in areas controlled by the group safe from violent reprisals for their foreign-funded work, as they “demonstrably provide key services” to residents of occupied territory.
There is also the darker prospect that HTS was well aware these “opposition entities” were bankrolled by British intelligence, and they were unmolested on that very basis.
Coordinated offensive
As The Telegraph‘s report explains, “the first indication that Washington had prior knowledge” of HTS’s offensive was when its RCA proxies were given a rousing pep talk by their US handlers three weeks prior.
At a secret meeting at the US-controlled Al-Tanf air base close to the borders of Jordan and Iraq, the militants were told to scale up their forces and “be ready” for an attack that “could lead to the end” of Assad. A quoted RCA captain told the outlet:
“They did not tell us how it would happen. We were just told: ‘Everything is about to change. This is your moment. Either Assad will fall, or you will fall.’ But they did not say when or where, they just told us to be ready.”
This followed US officers at the base, swelling the RCA’s ranks by unifying the group with other UK/US-trained, funded, and directed Sunni desert units and rebel units operating out of Al-Tanf under joint command.
According to The Telegraph, “RCA and the fighters of HTS … were cooperating, and communication between the two forces was being coordinated by the Americans.” This collaboration proved to be of devastating effect in the “lightning offensive,” with RCA rapidly seizing key territory across the country upon explicit US orders.
RCA even joined forces with another rebel faction in the southern city of Deraa, which reached Damascus before HTS. RCA now occupies roughly one-fifth of the country, pockets of territory in Damascus, and the ancient city of Palmyra.
Hitherto “heavily defended” by Russia and Hezbollah, Moscow’s local base has now been taken over by RCA. “All members of the force continued to be armed by the US,” receiving salaries of $400 monthly, nearly 12 times what Syrian Arab Army (SAA) soldiers were paid.
It is uncertain whether this direct financing of the RCA and other extremist militias that toppled the Assad government continues today. What is clear, though, is that the UK and US supported HTS from the group’s inception, even if “indirectly.” In turn, this covert backing played a pivotal role in positioning HTS financially, geopolitically, materially, and militarily for its “lightning” swoop on Damascus and assumption of government today.
Reinforcing the interpretation that this was the objective of London and Washington all along, following Assad’s ouster, Starmer promptly declared that the UK would “play a more present and consistent role” in West Asia as a result.
While western and certain regional capitals may celebrate the apparent success of their lavishly funded, blood-soaked campaign to dismantle decades of Baathism, British intelligence had long cautioned that the outcome would grant Al-Qaeda an even larger “instability-fueled safe haven” for “future expansion.”
They must have their Srebrenica in Syria…
By Stephen Karganovic | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 25, 2024
Following the abrupt and mysterious change of circumstances in Syria, the collective West propaganda machinery went into overdrive to pillory the previous government for a variety of heinous offences, real and imagined. The largely invented horror stories publicised after 8 December are shaped by an unmistakably political agenda. They serve as a cynical alibi for the utter devastation wrought upon Syria by terrorist, head-chopping gangs trained, financed, and unleashed by the very regional and ultramarine powers which are engaged in the spreading of those falsehoods.
Attentive readers will recall numerous false flags and horror porn mantras about “Assad killing his own people” that resonated throughout the decade and a half long assault on Syria. Most were quickly discredited as nasty fabrications. But, of course, the purpose of propaganda is not to demonstrate facts but to influence perceptions and create indelible subliminal impressions. In this infamous category, the alleged Ghouta chemical weapon attack on Syrian civilians, falsely attributed to the Assad government and subsequently debunked, is a salient example. The fabricated incident was thoroughly investigated and ultimately found to be devoid of substance, but attesting to the power of professionally conducted disinformation even many years after discreditation Ghouta remains a vibrant propaganda meme firmly embedded in the public mind as an atrocity typifying the malevolence of the “Assad regime.”
No sooner did the rebranded Al Qaeda terrorists march into Damascus than, as if on cue, on 9 December the collective West media initiated an aggressive attempt to shift public attention away from the victorious radical thugs and their sordid past. Saydnaya Prison, previously (if we disregard a 2017 Amnesty International mention) a virtually unknown venue now unveiled as the “Assad regime slaughterhouse,” suddenly was thrust into the limelight in a sensationalistic narrative that was absurd on its face. It was alleged by the BBC, a known source of trustworthy information, that Saydnaya was a horrific dungeon consisting of multiple underground levels, each independently secured by electronic doors. Within this prison complex, it was further alleged, “more than 100,000 detainees who can be seen on CCTV monitors” were trapped and dying without food or water and choking from lack of ventilation, abandoned by sadistic Assad guards who, when fleeing the premises, malevolently absconded with the codes required to open the electronic door systems.
Left unexplained is how over the years the logistical operation necessary to sustain a prison facility the size of a moderate sized town escaped the notice of aerial surveillance platforms that were observing every inch of Syrian territory for the duration of the conflict. How was it possible after regime change to analyse CCTV monitor data in just a single day in order to reach the conclusion that “over 100,000 prisoners” were trapped inside? And if those CCTV data had indeed been sifted through why have they not been shown to the international public to corroborate beyond doubt the emerging human tragedy of such mind-boggling proportions? Are the electronic portals to the underground cell complexes so impregnable that they may be opened only by the use of the unavailable codes in the guards’ possession, or might there be other means of forcing them and liberating the endangered prisoners?
The latest news on this topic is that “Syria rebels [are] unable to open Assad’s Sednaya ‘Red Cells’ where prisoners are ‘choking to death’.” The problem is that this news item is dated 9 December, but now it is over two weeks later. Since 9 December there has been no follow-up, no updates on how successful the rescuers may have been in opening the electronic doors and gaining access to those trapped inside. In fact, the distressing Saydnaya story has since been obliterated completely from the Western media news radar screen, as abruptly as it appeared. Now that the shocking and unsubstantiated allegations have had their psychological effect on the public mind a complete blackout prevails.
But what has propaganda got to do with logic and coherence?
However after the sensational allegations that have been made, what actually did or did not happen in Saydnaya is important and must be ascertained lest the international public be played for fools. It may reasonably be assumed that after more than two weeks without food, water, or ventilation, by now the vast majority of the wretched prisoners, extravagantly claimed to number over 100,000, should be dead. The stench of their decomposing bodies should be unbearable in a wide radius around the prison complex, perhaps reaching even as far as liberated Damascus, which is 30 kilometres away. It makes no sense to suddenly impose silence over a potential atrocity of such an appalling nature and magnitude which in the eyes of the entire world would irrefutably convict the “Assad regime,” whilst exonerating the collective West from complicity in the crimes of its proxies and in Syria’s callous destruction.
It is now becoming increasingly clear that the Saydnaya affair was conceived as but an overture for a larger propaganda operation that is to follow, to fabricate a Syrian Srebrenica. Besides lending credence to the long list of false flag allegations and outright lies upon which the collective West’s intervention in Syria was based, now crowned with the apparent victory of the terrorists they sponsored, the impending Syrian Srebrenica operation is designed also to diminish Russia’s stature for supposedly sheltering a “perpetrator of genocide.”
As has been reported, the propaganda props, one by one, are meticulously being put in place. Photographs of vast empty spaces are being represented as “killing fields” where allegedly hundreds of thousands of Assad’s victims lie buried. Individuals claiming to have taken part in the mass burials are brought forth to embellish the photographic images with well-rehearsed spin.
We have yet to see however a single disinterred body, not to speak of being shown reliable evidence regarding the time, cause, and manner of death. And even the scant information that is provided is conditioned by weasel words that hundreds of thousands of bodies of Assad regime victims “could be buried in a mass grave east of Damascus.” They could be, but then also perhaps not. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, of which at present there is none. Bare assertions are insufficient.
A dependable indication of how the problem of missing bodies will be solved, and that the fix is already in, is the casual announcement that the task of investigating Syria’s “killing fields” will be entrusted to the notorious White Helmets. They are a fake civil defence outfit set up by British intelligence early in the conflict to pose as a humanitarian organisation. There is an exact parallel between the announced plan and the way that, in the 1990s and early 2000s, Srebrenica forensic issues were handled in order to provide the Hague Tribunal with fake evidence of “genocide.” The International Commission on Missing Persons [ICMP] which did the job then was founded specifically for that purpose in 1996 under the tight control of leading NATO powers, and with the proviso that the chairman of ICMP must always be a U.S. citizen nominated by the State Department. ICMP performed the tasks assigned to it with flying colours, having fabricated in its laboratories much of the Srebrenica “genocide” evidence for the use of the Hague Tribunal.
The White Helmets, founded by MI6 operative James Le Mesurier, will undoubtedly acquit themselves equally well in performing a similarly dishonourable task.
How To Fake An Alien Invasion (2015)
Corbett | December 23, 2024
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FROM 2015: We all know about the crude pie-plate-on-string UFO hoaxes that have been perpetrated in the past. But what if I were to tell you the greatest UFO hoax of all time is being prepared right now, and it has Rockefeller backing and UN/Vatican/presidential support? Join us this week as we peek under the bluebeam curtain at the great alien invasion false flag.
Original Post: Episode 301 – How to Fake an Alien Invasion
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
JAMES CORBETT: Welcome back to The Corbett Report, ladies and gentlemen. I’m your host, James Corbett of corbettreport.com, podcasting to you as always from the sunny climes of western Japan, here on this 5th day of February 2015.
Welcome to Episode 301 of The Corbett Report: How to Fake an Alien Invasion.
Now, you’d better be careful who’s watching over your shoulder today, because we are about to broach one of the most top-secret, ultra-classified pieces of information in the entire conspiracy pantheon. A subject so sensitive that its mere exposure threatens to topple the power pyramid itself and, as a result, is never talked about in the establishment mouthpiece media. I’m referring of course to the topic of . . . [whisper] aliens.
Just what was in the skies over Jerusalem, and why did it stop over one of the most treasured sites in Christianity?
SOURCE: Female Anchor Scared Of UFO Sighting Over Jerusalem’s Dome Of The Rock
We bring you this special radio television broadcast in order to give you the very latest information on an amazing phenomenon: the arrival of a spaceship in Washington. The army has taken every precaution to meet any emergency which may develop. Just a minute, ladies and gentlemen, I think something is happening . . .
What’s hovering over Salt Lake City? Is it a rocket? A blimp? A UFO?
SOURCE: A Giant UFO Over Salt Lake City
PRESENTER: Former government UFO expert is warning that Britain is wide open to alien visitors and that the consequences of not monitoring extraterrestrials could be huge. Nick Pope, who resigned from the Ministry of Defense UFO Project, says the department looking into UFOs has all but closed down and despite a higher number of credible sightings. Let’s speak to Nick Pope. He joins us in the studio. . . .
SOURCE: BBC Warns of Alien Invasion
PRESENTER: . . . you want to meet this guy. Joining us now are team leader James Fox, one of the nation’s top UFO experts, and Erin Ryder, who is in charge of tech and recon for this series. Good morning to both of you.
JAMES FOX/ERIN RYDER: Good morning.
FEMALE REPORTER: This is a ufologist? Is that what the actual . . .?
JAMES FOX: So they say.
SOURCE: CBS: UFOs Mounting Preponderance of Evidence & Government Cover Up!
“AWA 517, do you want to report a UFO? Over.”
“Negative. We don’t want a report.”
“Aries 31, do you wish to report a UFO? Over.”
“Negative. We don’t want to report one of those, either.”
“Aries 31, do you wish to file a report of any kind? Over.”
“I wouldn’t know what kind of report to file.”
“Aries 31, me neither. I’ll try to track traffic at destination. Over.”
SOURCE: (Close Encounters) Indianapolis Air Traffic Control detects the UFOs
ADRIENNE MOORE: While the family knows their story sounds out of this world, they are convinced they witnessed a close encounter and will be keeping a watchful eye on the sky.
STACEY GIBSON: I think we’re definitely believers now.
SOURCE: UFO near San Diego — El Cajon, California — CBS News
Sorry, my mistake, my mistake. No, this is clearly a subject that is propounded time and again ad nauseam in the establishment mouthpiece media—that same media that we know is lying to us about most major world events, either through direct lying or lying by omission.
So, why are they not omitting this little idea from the cultural context? Why are they constantly returning to the idea of “alien presence,” “alien cover-up,” “alien invasion,” “alien threat”?
Why is this propounded so often, not just in the news media but also in those cultural entertainment productions that I hope we understand are, in the end, a product of the culture-creation industry that has been predictably programming us for decades—generations, perhaps—to accept various memes and ideas, including this idea of “alien invasion,” “alien threat” and the fallout and consequences thereof?
It is a theme that has been returned to time and time and time and time and time again for the better part of the century by this point. It’s almost as if the billionaire power players at the top of this pyramid are actually connected to an idea to implant this idea of alien invasion in the public consciousness for the purpose of manipulating public opinion. And that’s because . . . they are connected to such an agenda, demonstrably so.
RADIO NEWSCASTER (archival): Ladies and gentlemen, here is the latest bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News, Toronto, Canada: Professor Morris of Macmillan University reports observing a total of three explosions on the planet Mars between the hours of 7:45 PM and 9:20 PM Eastern Standard Time. This confirms earlier reports received from American observatories. Now, nearer home, comes a special bulletin from Trenton, New Jersey. It is reported that at 8:50 PM a huge flaming object, believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in the neighborhood of Grovers Mill, New Jersey, twenty-two miles from Trenton. The flash in the sky was visible within a radius of several hundred miles, and the noise of the impact was heard as far north as Elizabeth.
NARRATOR: Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. Never before had a radio broadcast provoked such outrage—or such chaos. Upwards of a million people convinced, if only briefly, that the United States was being laid waste by alien invaders, and a nation left to wonder how they possibly could’ve been so gullible.
By a quarter past eight Eastern time, telephones were ringing madly all across the country, as concerned Americans tried to determine the whereabouts of relatives, warn friends and acquaintances, and most of all, corroborate what they were hearing.
MAN ON THE PHONE (archival): City Desk. A what?? Wait a minute.
NARRATOR: For the next several hours, newspapers, radio stations and police precincts from coast to coast would be swamped with calls.
MAN ON THE PHONE (archival): Well, I can’t help that, ma’am, we just don’t know anything about it. Did I say something about a quiet Sunday evening?
SECOND MAN (archival): What’s going on, anyway?
NARRATOR: Soon, strange bulletins began coming in over the press service wires. In Bergenfield, New Jersey, just north of Grovers Mill, some twenty families turned up at a police station, with all of their household possessions piled into their cars. In Indianapolis, a woman rushed to the pulpit in a Methodist church, shouting that the end of the world had come. And in Washington state, a spectacularly ill-timed power failure plunged the small town of Concrete into darkness and sent terrified residents fleeing into the mountains.
RADIO NEWSCASTER (archival): The battle which took place tonight at Grover Mills has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by an army in modern times: 7,000 men armed with rifles and machine guns pitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders from Mars. One hundred and twenty known survivors . . .
SEYMOUR CHARLES HAYDEN (archival): Well, my wife, she came in, my wife did, just wringing her hands and wailing away, her eyeballs about to pop out onto her lap, going, “What is it? What is it? What could it be? Is it the Germans?” Well, she hadn’t heard the word “Martians,” but I had.
RADIO NEWSCASTER (archival): . . . There’s a brief statement informing us that the charred body of Carl Phillips has been identified in a Trenton hospital.
DAVID ROEPIK (archival): We think that we’re really smart, but if there’s a cue out there that could possibly be dangerous, we’re going to react to it protectively, autonomically, instinctively—fear first, and reason and fact second.
SOURCE: War of the Worlds: The Panic Broadcast | PBS America
Now, I’m sure that the majority of the listening and viewing audience will be familiar with the story of Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 radio dramatization of the famous H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds and the resulting hysteria and panic that ensued, driving people insane, believing there to be a real alien invasion taking place, and farmers running out into the fields shooting at grain silos and the like. That story is a fascinating one for a number of reasons—namely, because it is a confluence of different events in world history at that time that had a very interesting and profound effect on shaping an entire field of study.
This relates to the advent of mass communication technologies like the radio, which was still, to some extent, in its infancy as a broadcast medium at that time, capable of reaching across a nation as wide and diverse as America and reaching many millions of people at the same time and inducing this kind of mass panic and psychosis.
It is interesting to study in that regard. So, it is not surprising that it was immediately made the subject of such a study, funded by—who else? The Rockefellers. We can take more on this from a very, very important article that was published on GlobalResearch.ca back in 2012: Early ‘Psychological Warfare’ Research and the Rockefeller Foundation by Prof. James Tracy.
Reading from that article:
The “founding fathers” of mass communication research could not have established their field without Rockefeller largesse. Alongside World War One propagandist and University of Chicago political scientist Harold Lasswell, psychologist Hadley Cantril was a principal contributor to the knowledge and information that helped propel Rockefeller-controlled enterprises and American empire in the postwar era. Throughout this period Cantril provided the Rockefeller combine with important information and new techniques in public opinion measurement and management in Europe, Latin American, and the United States.
A roommate of Nelson Rockefeller’s at Dartmouth College in the late 1920s, Cantril took a doctorate in psychology at Harvard, coauthoring The Psychology of Radio with his doctoral mentor Gordon Allport in 1935. “Radio is an altogether novel medium of communication,” Cantril and Allport observed, “preeminent as a means of social control and epochal in its influence upon the mental horizons of men.”
The work garnered the attention of Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Division officer John Marshall, commissioned by the Foundation with convincing commercial broadcasters to include more educational programming into their advertiser-driven schedules. To this end Rockefeller was funding fellowships at the CBS and NBC broadcasting networks.
Aware of the Dartmouth connection, Marshall encouraged the enterprising Cantril to apply to the Foundation for support. Cantril’s request resulted in a $67,000 grant for a two-year charter of the “Princeton Radio Project” (PRP) at Princeton University. There Cantril proceeded to develop studies assessing radio’s effects on audiences. In 1938 Cantril also became a founding editor of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Public Opinion Quarterly, an organ closely associated with US government’s psychological warfare endeavors following World War Two.
When the Princeton venture commenced, another trained psychologist close to Rockefeller, CBS Director of Research Frank Stanton, was named PRP lead researcher but took a secondary role of Associate Director due to his position at his broadcast network. At this time Austrian émigré social scientist Paul Lazarsfeld was recruited to join Cantril. Thus Cantril, Stanton, and Lazarsfeld were closely affiliated and ideally positioned to embark on a major study involving public opinion and persuasion.
The opportunity for such an analysis presented itself when CBS broadcast Orson Welles’ rendering of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938. Lazarsfeld saw the event as especially noteworthy and immediately asked Stanton for CBS funds to investigate reaction to what at the time was the largest immediate act of mass persuasion in human history. Over the next several months interviews with War of the Worlds listeners were collected, provided to Stanton at CBS, and subsequently analyzed in Cantril’s 1940 study, The Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic.
SOURCE: Early ‘Psychological Warfare’ Research and the Rockefeller Foundation
A fascinating little tidbit from history, I trust that you’ll agree. And if you do, I hope you’ll go and follow the link in the show notes to that original article so you can continue reading about Hadley Cantril’s adventures providing studies and information about psychological persuasion to the Rockefeller Foundation and how that developed and contributed to world psychological warfare techniques for the US Army and things of that nature.
I think it is interesting to see this confluence of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds becoming a radio dramatization, which incites this mass panic, the largest immediate act of mass persuasion in human history, which is then studied by the Princeton Radio Project backed up by the Rockefeller Foundation.
But you could argue that that’s a tangential connection or just a coincidental connection—that this doesn’t mean that the Rockefellers are interested in mass persuasion in terms of alien invasion per se, it’s just that that was the immediate proximate cause of this particular study.
So, you might fruitfully ask, “Are there any other connections between the Rockefellers and this idea of faking an alien invasion or an alien presence of some sort?” And the answer is: yes! Yes, there is such evidence . . .
RESEARCHER ANTONIO HUNEEUS: Mr. Rockefeller backed many UFO-related projects in the period between the late ’80s and 2000. But, for the purposes of this hearing, we will concentrate on his political initiatives in these areas.
Laurance Rockefeller’s first forays into ufology started sometime in the late ’80s through Dr. Cecil B. Scott Jones, a parapsychologist and former US Navy Commander who had worked as naval attaché́ in Asia and at the Naval Scientific and Technical Intelligence Center. Between 1985 and 1991, Jones was Special Assistant to Sen. Claiborne Pell (1918–2009), the powerful Rhode Island Democrat Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1987–1994) who was deeply interested in parapsychology and who probably many of you met personally. Sen. Pell was also friends with Laurance Rockefeller, and both served on the board of the Human Potential Foundation, a small think tank launched in 1989 in Vienna, Virginia, by Jones to conduct “research into all conditions of humankind: physiological, psychological and spiritual.”
Many of the papers released by the White House OSTP [Office of Science and Technology Policy] come from Scott Jones, who knew Dr. John Gibbons, a physicist who worked for many years as Director of the Office of Technology Assessment for the US Congress and was appointed in 1993 by the Clinton administration to direct the OSTP.
What was the exact turning point of Laurance Rockefeller’s evolution from a general interest in consciousness studies into the specific area of UFOs and Extraterrestrial Intelligence is still unclear. But the end of the Cold War and the arrival in Washington of a younger generation represented by Bill and Hillary Clinton are key factors. He felt the time was ripe for a new and fresh approach into an area that had been previously dominated by a Cold War mentality.
Rockefeller recruited for these efforts a long-time associate, Henry L. Diamond, an environmental attorney from Washington, D.C., whose links to the family went all the way back to the 1960s, when he worked with Laurance in his conservation activities. Diamond also knew John Gibbons, and so he was the right person to make the first contact with the OSTP chief when he sent a Memorandum on March 29, 1993, requesting a meeting. I’m quoting now the first paragraph:
“Laurance S. Rockefeller, who is a leading US conservationist, businessman, and philanthropist, is anxious to have a brief meeting with Dr. Gibbons to discuss the potential availability of government information about unidentified flying objects and extraterrestrial life. As one who has had a long-time interest in environmental and spiritual issues, Mr. Rockefeller, with other leading citizens, is planning to make an approach to President Clinton on this subject . . . .”
STEPHEN BASSETT: I invite all of the political media, all media in general but certainly the political media, to look at the Rockefeller Initiative. It is one of the stories in American history—it’s one of the great political stories, certainly in this or any other time. It is filled with amazing people who are still around and still very powerful.
At the time that Rockefeller approached, through his attorney, President Clinton, Clinton’s key adviser—or one of his very key advisors—was John Podesta. The Chief of Staff at the time was Leon Panetta. The wife of the President at the time was Hillary Clinton. A good friend of the family at the time, soon to be Clinton’s Secretary of Energy, was Bill Richardson. This Initiative went on for six years. The press completely ignored it, as if “What’s the news there? It’s just a billionaire Rockefeller trying to get the President to release all the files on these phenomena. Possibly put a letter into every newspaper in the country, and release . . . and basically end the Truth Embargo. There’s no news there.”
SOURCE: Citizens Hearing April 29th Steven Bassett Rockefeller Initiative and John Podesta or Annotated Proceedings of the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure [PDF])
Now, for those of you not immersed in the topic of the Disclosure Movement, you may not be familiar with some of these names and faces. But some of the main ones to take note of are Dr. Stephen Bassett, who founded and ran something called the Paradigm Research Group at ParadigmResearchGroup.org. He defines himself as a political activist, lobbyist, commentator, the executive director of Paradigm Research Group and the Extra-Terrestrial Phenomena Politicalist Action Committee, and executive producer of the X Conference: The Citizens Hearing on Disclosure and the Congressional Hearing Initiative, and Dr. Steven Greer, who runs something called the Disclosure Project. He describes himself as “The Father of the Disclosure Movement” and the person who presided over the groundbreaking National Press Club Disclosure Event in May of 2001.
So, these are some of the biggest names if not the biggest names in this Disclosure Movement. And, well, they don’t really make a secret of the fact that the Rockefellers are . . . well, specifically Laurance Rockefeller was a big help in getting this movement launched back in the mid-1990s. We can document this. In order to do so, let’s turn to a very important website, which I will commend to your attention. I hope you guys out there have . . . well, I know some of you have already found it and have emailed me about it.
I have found it myself, and it seems that the author of this website and I are in accord on a number of our political views—especially the overall way in which the BRICS—China and Russia—and other aspects of the New World Order system are being used as the good cop in a good cop/bad cop system.
Also on this subject of the UFO Disclosure Movement, [there is] a very important article called “Why are the Rockefellers and the Jesuits guiding the UFO disclosure movement?” at RedefiningGod.com. I will put the link in the show notes so you can go and follow it.
Reading from that article:
The Rockefeller role in getting the Disclosure ball rolling is something of an open secret among the Disclosure people (the Disclosuristas, as I call them). On Stephen Bassett’s own Research Group website, a specific Rockefeller effort referred to as the “Rockefeller Initiative” is openly touted. The same effort is also touted on Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project website as “Project Starlight” . . . .
“This letter from the Project Starlight Coalition was the result of the historic Asilomar, California, meeting that Dr. Greer organized and Laurance Rockefeller paid for in June 1995, just before Clinton’s meeting with Rockefeller in August 1995.”
[. . .]
Who is Laurance Rockefeller? Well, according to Laurance Rockefeller’s biography:
In 1937 he inherited his grandfather’s seat on the New York Stock Exchange. He served as founding trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund for 42 years, from its inception in 1940 to 1982. During this time, he also served as its president (1958 to 1968) and later its chairman (1968 to 1980) for 22 years, longer than any other leader in the Fund’s history. He was also a founding trustee of the Rockefeller Family Fund from 1967 to 1977.
SOURCE: Why are the Rockefellers and the Jesuits guiding the UFO Disclosure Movement?
So, not only was Laurance deeply involved in the financial industry, but he was also among the founders of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Family Fund. These funds are notorious for advancing globalist aims under the pretense of ‘philanthropy.’ Laurance also served on the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Special Studies Project.” End quote.
Now, I’ll let you continue reading about that Special Studies Project and the interesting fact that even now, four decades after the publication of the final report, The Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports, certain sections of that report are still classified, which is interesting in and of itself. But there are also screenshots of some of the pages of this report shown here in this very important article talking about how they are steering America towards shaping a new world order and things that you would expect to find in a typical Rockefeller study.
I suppose the point here is to emphasize that Laurance Rockefeller is very much in the heart of the Rockefeller matrix, pushing this global government agenda, which David Rockefeller so gleefully admitted to in his memoirs, as I’m sure we all know—or we all should know by now.
And I would again suggest you go to see this original article, if for no other reason than to click on such things as The Rockefeller Initiative or the Disclosure Project’s own Project Starlight’s page, where you can browse through and see all of the main characters who are connected through this Initiative that ran from 1993 to 1996. They include, of course, President Clinton and Laurance Rockefeller, along with Hillary [Clinton] and Dr. John Gibbons and John Podesta and Vice President Al Gore and this cast of Congress critters and [other] very unsavoury characters—including Dr. Steven Greer, the aforementioned “Father of the Disclosure Movement.”
All of these letters are archived here online, so you can read through them all and the various correspondence between some of the players, including between Laurance Rockefeller and John Gibbons and between Laurance Rockefeller and the Clintons.
I mean, this is a pretty interesting and openly admitted non-secret—that the Disclosure Movement was really launched with the aid of Laurance Rockefeller and the Clinton administration. So, I think that should at least get our antennas up toward the possibility that this is going to be used towards the furtherance of some sort of staged or faked alien invasion.
Now, that sounds like an outlandish prospect to those poor souls coming in from mainstream media land who are just landing on this site randomly. I hope you will be able to at least appreciate that there might be a reason why the very rich and powerful and well-connected would be interested in doing something as ridiculous and outlandish— I agree with you there—as staging some sort of alien threat, alien presence—whatever it may be.
But there are reasons why this might be done, and these aren’t reasons we have to speculate on. We can find all of the usual suspects talking about these reasons in all of the usual places, with the big ones—global religion, global finance and global government—uniting the world around this perceived alien threat.
FATHER JOHN MORRIS, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: What is exceptional is that the Vatican was taking very seriously what science might tell us about the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligent life forms. That’s what the conference was about. I can’t tell you that the Vatican found any alien life. I don’t think that’s what they were looking for, but they were taking very seriously the issue.
TRISHA THOMAS, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: We probably won’t be seeing aliens at Mass anytime soon, but the Vatican’s chief astronomer does say that there could exist other forms of life outside Earth, and he says if they do exist they are God’s creatures.
SOURCE: The Vatican’s Take on Aliens?
INTERVIEWER: So, how does this actually work? When Discovery [Channel] decided they were going to do a show on alien invasions, your phone rings because you’re sort of on the speed dial for theoretical physicists who can help them do the war game for how this might play out?
DR. MICHIO KAKU: Well, believe it or not, we physicists have actually studied the question of what happens if we do encounter a hostile advanced civilization in space, and Hollywood gets it all wrong. Hollywood assumes that the aliens are maybe a hundred years more advanced than us and that if only we had a secret weapon, we could defeat the aliens. Wrong. Either the aliens don’t bother with us because we’re simply too primitive or, if they do invade, it’ll be more like Bambi versus Godzilla.”
REPORTER: Now the United Nations is getting ready for contact with aliens from outer space. This is Mazlan Othman. She’s out of Malaysia. She will be planet Earth’s first interstellar diplomat.”
MAZLAN OTHMAN: First, I have to categorically deny that I was appointed or will be appointed the ambassador for aliens, the ambassador for the United Nations for aliens. No, the committee is not discussing this very . . . this subject matter. But yes, I was in the UK to attend a meeting—which I can quote to you—called “Towards a Scientific and Societal Agenda on Extraterrestrial Life,” which is why this whole thing came about, because the British press caught hold of the fact that I was going to be at this meeting, and I was on a panel that was discussing . . . they call it the Great Panel Debate. I like that name. It says: “Extraterrestrial Life and Arising Political Issues for the UN Agenda.”
SOURCE: Dr. Mazlan Othman z ONZ na temat debaty w sprawie UFO (UN ET panel debate at UK) – napisy PL
PAUL KRUGMAN: It’s very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy, but if you had a program of government spending plus an expansionary policy by the Fed, you could get that. So, if you think about using all of these things together, you could accomplish a great deal. If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive build-up to counter this space alien threat, and inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then, if we discovered, “Whoops, we’ve made a mistake. There actually aren’t any space aliens . . .”
PROFESSOR KENNETH ROGOF: We need Orson Welles, is what you’re saying . . .
PAUL KRUGMAN: No, there was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time . . . we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.”
RONALD REAGAN: Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.
SOURCE: Reagan’s ALIEN speech to UN
BILL PULLMAN (AS “PRESIDENT THOMAS J. WHITMORE”): And should we win, the day the 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday but as the day when the world declared in one voice, “We will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight We’re going to live on. We’re going to survive. Today we celebrate our Independence Day.”
SOURCE: Independence Day
JIMMY KIMMEL: If you saw that there were aliens there, would you tell us?
BILL CLINTON: Yeah.
KIMMEL: You would?
CLINTON: I would. I think, look, what do we know? We know now we live in an ever-expanding universe. We know that there are billions of stars and planets literally out there. And the universe is getting bigger. We know from our fancy telescopes that just in the last two years more than twenty planets have been identified outside our solar system that seem to be far enough away from their sun and dense enough that they might be able to support some form of life. So, it makes it increasingly less likely we are alone.
KIMMEL: Oh, you’re trying to give me a hint that there are aliens.
CLINTON: No, I’m trying to tell you I don’t know, but if we were visited someday, I wouldn’t be surprised. I just hope that it’s not like Independence Day. That it, you know—a conflict. Maybe that’s the only way to unite this increasingly divided world of ours. If they’re out there, we’d better think of how all the differences among people on earth would seem small if we felt threatened by a space invader. That’s the whole theory of Independence Day: everybody gets together and makes nice and you know . . .
KIMMEL: You and Bill O’Reilly would be hiding in a bunker together . . .
SOURCE: Bill Clinton Talks About The Coming FAKE Alien Invasion — April 1st 2014
What an interesting milieu of characters we have floating around there. We have the Vatican and the UN and Nobel Prize-winning economist/Keynesian wingnut Paul Krugman and multiple presidents of the United States—and all of these people talking about the same thing: “Wouldn’t it be great if we had this idea of an alien threat that would unite us all behind . . . fill in the blank . . . a world government or a world financial system or baptizing the aliens. Wouldn’t that be wonderful!”
And it’s interesting to look at this. I mean, I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday. I understand and can smell the public preparation for some sort of staged event when I see one, and, well, if it looks and smells and quacks like a false flag operation, it probably is one.
Being supported by some of the most prominent and powerful and well-connected political and financial elites, clearly there is something very, very stinky here. In order to really understand this stink . . . again, we know why this would potentially be a valuable thing for these “power elites” to consolidate their power in a world government or what have you.
But the question is: could they do it? If so, how could they do it? These are important questions that we need to address if we want to really approach the subject. And, I guess, if we’re going to address it, we have two different routes we can take. We can go down the unverifiable, unsourceable, unfalsifiable, undocumented route, or we can go down the sourced, verified, falsifiable documented route. Me being me, I’m going to go down the sourced, falsifiable, documented route. But if you want to go down that unsourced, unknowable, unverifiable route, you can go, for example, with something called Project Blue Beam.
Now, Project Blue Beam is something I’m sure most of the listeners out there have heard of at some point—at least in a vague sense—as some sort of plan that was uncovered. There must be documents backing this up—talking about staging an alien invasion with holograms in order to create a world government. Something along those lines.
Well, if you really want to open the Pandora’s Box of Project Blue Beam, it’s much more specific than that and, well, somewhat more outlandish and much less documented than you might expect.
This really all dates back and sources back to one particular French Canadian journalist, Serge Monast, who was talking in the mid-1990s about this Project Blue Beam—this NASA project that he had uncovered and was unveiling to the public. It had a multiple stage process for creating a world religion, world government—world tyranny. This involved the induction of earthquakes in order to expose archaeological finds—manipulated, planted archaeological finds—that would change our view of human history and a staged extraterrestrial invasion and the appearance of a new Messiah to be the head of this world religion and the imposition of UN World Government, etcetera. This is a detailed plan that was talked about, but there is literally no document behind this. There is no NASA secret paper that was ever exposed about this. It really all sources back to this Serge Monast and a couple of interviews that are available online.
There’s a transcript of a speech. There’s a translation of what I guess is some sort of summary of a book he apparently wrote on this subject. He did write a book, apparently in French, on this subject, but it’s never been reprinted, and it’s basically unobtainable. There are a couple of different translations of something that may have sourced from this book, more or less, but that’s basically it. I mean, there are just a few scraps. And from those scraps there’s been a lot of talk, and a lot of people have run with this idea. But I think not a lot of people know where it actually sources from.
I will put some links in the show notes, so you can actually follow them and read about them and come to your own conclusion: “Is this worth following?” and “Why should we believe this particular piece of information?” Call me a doubting Thomas. I’ll believe it when I see something, anything documentable, verifiable in terms of this plan.
If we want to go down the other route and look at actual verifiable, sourced and knowable technologies that we know exist, let alone those technologies that we don’t know exist that are being worked on in the skunkworks of DARPA, down in the bowels of the Pentagon—and for more on DARPA I’ll direct you to a previous Corbett Report radio episode, where we talked about DARPA and its various projects—we can source that in a number of different ways, from a number of different, seemingly disparate threads, but definitely technologies that we now know exist.
One place to start: we can get the clue from the book by previous Corbett Report guest James Perloff, Truth Is A Lonely Warrior, where he talks about an Air Force military publication that was available on the Air Force website. You can still access it on the Wayback Machine. The link will be in the show notes. This is about an airborne holographic projector which, this AF.MIL website notes, is:
” . . . a three-dimensional visual image in the desired location, removed from the display generator. The projector can be used for psychological operations and strategic perception management. It is also useful for optical deception and cloaking, providing a momentary distraction when engaging an unsophisticated adversary.”
SOURCE: Airborne Holographic Projector
You can see the unsophisticated visualization that is accompanying this on the website itself. But, yes, very crudely, it’s a plane projecting an image of another plane elsewhere in the sky. Now that is a very crude implementation of this type of holographic technology that, at the very least, would be required for making the world believe we were under some sort of alien invasion threat or what-have-you, but that is twenty years old now and sources from an Air Force military website.
I’m thinking that the actual technology would be somewhat more advanced. But we don’t have to speculate about that. We can take a look at the very real developments in technology, including such incredible things as beaming sound directly into people’s ears, touchable holograms, and being able to manipulate people’s perceptions and incite fear and panic through brain wave technology.
PRESENTER: “The ultimate weapon in the infowar would be so secret, so invisible, so undetectable, you would never know your mind was under attack. At Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada, a young student is about to undergo one of the strangest experiences of her life. They’re hooking Denise’s brain up to an electroencephalograph, or EEG machine. For thirty to forty minutes, this will monitor her brain waves while these electric coils attached on either side of her head will immerse her brain in an electromagnetic field. Her brain actually completes the circuit between the two coils. The field pulsing through her brain is less powerful than one given off by a digital clock radio. But, acutely controlled and focused on specific parts of the brain, it will open Denise’s mind to outside suggestion by this man. Dr. Michael Persinger is a professor of psychology and neuroscience. He is designing ways to put the power of mind control to good use. Dr. Persinger’s research focuses on brain trauma, and he uses carefully controlled doses of electromagnetic radiation to induce relaxation and alleviate pain.
DR. PERSINGER: So what Sandra did was to initiate an opiate-releasing pattern. That’s a burst-firing field that is stimulated once every four seconds and that produces relaxation and a very pleasant sensation. Similarly, using the appropriate field we can induce fear and apprehension, but clearly that would be unethical in that setting.
PRESENTER: Dr. Persinger’s tests suggest that carefully programmed electromagnetic frequencies can tap into individual brains and influence people’s emotions.
DR. PERSINGER: The cognitive processes of the human brain are really quite simple. And, if you understand how they work, you can make entire populations think and decide in the manner which you wish.
PRESENTER: Many experts are skeptical of such an Orwellian scenario, but Persinger thinks the implications are chillingly real.
DR. PERSINGER: Suppose you generate a field that produces fear—fundamental fear—in large numbers of people, and then over the television or in traditional ways you say, “The reason we’re having this fear is because of this particular group.” Now you start to move the population, believing in a direction that you wish.
PRESENTER: To influence 250 million people, the equivalent of the entire population of the United States, may not be difficult. According to Dr. Persinger, we already have the technology—satellites and television and radio transmitters. Mind control may already be happening. We know the mysterious psyops plane can beam persuasive sounds and pictures into people’s television sets. Will it someday beam disturbing frequencies directly into the mind?”
PRESENTER: First, your voice is transformed into high-frequency ultrasound—a sound so high no one can hear it. Ultrasound is highly directional, so, like a torch, it can be pointed at someone standing a long way away. Although they cannot hear the ultrasound, it causes secondary vibrations in the air around them, and it’s that sound the person hears.
DR. JOSEPH POMPEI: So, if you imagine you’re in a room and I shine a flashlight at you, it’s very bright for you but it’s very dark for everybody else. Much the same way, the audio spotlight creates a very narrow beam of sound that can shine at a listener. They hear it very clearly, and it doesn’t create noise that might bother other people in the same space.
SOURCE: Voice to Skull Time
PRESENTER: Researchers at Tokyo University have come up with the technology that is a first and significant step away from the mouse and keyboard: touchable holograms.
HIROYUKI SHINODA (translated): Up until now, holography has been for the eyes only. If you tried to touch it, your hand would go right through. But now we have the technology that also adds the sensation of touch to holograms.”
Now, look, I’m not necessarily saying that there’s going to be a staged alien invasion tomorrow and that we should all be concentrating on this, nor am I saying that there is no such thing as alien life in the universe. I would be shocked, flabbergasted, if there was not. Whether or not it’s visiting Earth well, what do I know? How do I know? I mean, I haven’t seen it myself, but does that mean it doesn’t exist? Well, of course not.
I’ll let you guys . . . you’re grown-up boys and girls out there. I’m sure you can decide for yourself on things like that. But we should know that there is a coordinated plan, or an agenda in place, to capitalize on such things as fake alien invasions that is being funded and promoted by the financial power elite at the top of the pyramid and is being promoted and pushed out into the cultural sphere by the politicians and economists and the Vatican and the UN, and then, underneath them, the culture-creators in the entertainment industry, to prepare the public for such a possibility. And we should be on guard against such manipulations.
These technologies that are now coming together . . . the ones that we know about, let alone the ones that are secretly in development that we don’t have access to . . . are clearly along the path towards making such an event possible.
You can look at something like the Norway spiral and believe the official response—that this was a Russian ICBM test that went awry. If you believe that, I have a bridge on the moon to sell you.
But all of these are just different pieces of the puzzle. I think they add up to something very interesting and something that is potentially coming sometime in the future.
Even if this particular instantiation—this fake alien invasion or what have you—doesn’t come together, still, the concept of psychological manipulation through manipulated events in manipulated reality is an important one—obviously one that we have to continue to keep in mind. Now that the technology for making these events possible is more and more a documentable reality, I think we should have our mental guards up for such eventualities.
So, that’s, I think, where we’re going to leave things today.
This is an open-source investigation. I invite and encourage and applaud the input of all of you out there. So, if you are a Corbett Report member, please do leave your comments on the website with any relevant links or information. Any comments, questions, complaints, criticisms, concerns or otherwise—all invited at corbettreport.com.
Once again, I’m your host James Corbett of corbettreport.com thanking you for joining me for this edition of The Corbett Report podcast and inviting you to join me again next week.
National Security Archive Publishes Key Records on Infamous MKULTRA Program
Agency Sought Drugs and Behavior Control Techniques to Use in “Special Interrogations” and Offensive Operations
Sidney Gottlieb’s CIA Personnel File, 1983 Deposition Testimony, Among Newly Available Documents
At the urging of Dr. Geschickter, the CIA provided $375,000 toward the construction of a new medical facility at Georgetown University Hospital. In return, Geschickter agreed to let the CIA use one-sixth of the new “Gorman Annex” as its “hospital safehouse” and to provide “human patients and volunteers for experimental use.”
Edited by Michael Evans | National Security Archive | December 23, 2024
Washington, D.C. – Today, the National Security Archive and ProQuest (part of Clarivate) celebrate the publication of a new scholarly document collection many years in the making on the shocking secret history of the CIA’s mind control research programs. The new collection, CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA, brings together more than 1,200 essential records on one of the most infamous and abusive programs in CIA history.
Under code names that included MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, the CIA conducted terrifying experiments using drugs, hypnosis, isolation, sensory deprivation, and other extreme techniques on human subjects, often U.S. citizens, who frequently had no idea what was being done to them or that they were part of a CIA test.
Today’s announcement comes 50 years after a New York Times investigation by Seymour Hersh touched off probes that would bring MKULTRA abuses to light. The new collection also comes 70 years since U.S. pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Company first developed a process to streamline the manufacture of LSD in late 1954, becoming the CIA’s chief supplier of the newly discovered psychoactive chemical central to many of the Agency’s behavior control efforts.
Highlights of the new MKULTRA collection include:
- A DCI-approved plan in 1950 for the establishment of “interrogation teams” that would “utilize the polygraph, drugs, and hypnotism to attain the greatest results in interrogation techniques.” (Document 2)
- A 1951 memo that captures a meeting between CIA and foreign intelligence officials about mind control research and their shared interest in the concept of individual mind control. (Document 3)
- A 1952 entry from the daily calendar of George White, a federal narcotics agent who ran a safehouse where the CIA tested drugs like LSD and performed other experiments on unwitting Americans. (Document 5)
- A 1952 report on the “successful” use of ARTICHOKE interrogation methods that combined the use of “narcosis” and “hypnosis” to induce regression and later amnesia on “Russian agents suspected of being doubled.” (Document 6)
- A 1956 memo in which MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb signs off a project that would “evaluate the effects of large doses of LSD-25 in normal human volunteers” on federal prisoners in Atlanta. (Document 13)
- The 1963 report from the CIA’s inspector general, which led CIA leadership to reexamine the use of unwitting Americans in their covert drug testing program. (Document 16)
- The 1983 deposition of MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb in a civil case brought by Velma “Val” Orlikow, a victim of CIA-sponsored projects conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. (Document 20)
The challenges facing this documentation project were considerable, as CIA director Richard Helms and longtime MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb destroyed most of the original project records in 1973. It is a story about secrecy—perhaps the most infamous cover-up in the Agency’s history. It is also a history marked by near-total impunity at the institutional and individual levels for countless abuses committed across decades—not during interrogations of enemy agents or in wartime situations, but during ordinary medical treatments, inside prison hospitals, addiction clinics, and juvenile detention facilities, and in many cases led by top figures in the field of the behavioral sciences. Despite the Agency’s efforts to erase this hidden history, the documents that survived this purge and that have been gathered together here present a compelling and unsettling narrative of the CIA’s decades-long effort to discover and test ways to erase and re-program the human mind.
The bulk of these records were drawn from records compiled by John Marks, the former State Department official who filed the first Freedom of Information Act requests on the subject and whose 1979 book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences (New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1979) remains the single most important source on this episode. Marks later donated his FOIA documents and other research papers to the National Security Archive. Many of the redactions in the documents have been effectively removed with the passage of time, as official investigations, civil depositions, and detailed histories have shed significant light on some of these episodes. In many cases, copies of declassified records donated by Marks to the National Security Archive bear his handwritten annotations.
The legacy of MKULTRA goes far beyond the various “subprojects” described in these documents and that were largely shut down by the mid-1970s. As author Stephen Kinzer points out, the CIA’s behavior control research programs “contributed decisively to the development of techniques that Americans and their allies used at detention centers in Vietnam, Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and secret prisons around the world.” MKULTRA techniques were cited in the CIA’s 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual that was the basis for prisoner interrogations in Vietnam and later in anti-communist dictatorships in Latin America.[1]
While many of the MKULTRA projects were conducted in hospitals, laboratories, or other institutional settings, others were carried out in clandestine CIA safehouses staffed not by doctors or clinicians but by hard-nosed federal narcotics agents like George Hunter White. Under the direction of Gottlieb, White adopted the persona of a bohemian artist named “Morgan Hall” to lure unsuspecting victims to his “pad” where he and his CIA collaborators secretly experimented on them and recorded their behavior. An OSS veteran who had worked on “truth drug” development for the Army in World War II, White surreptitiously dosed many of his victims with LSD, a drug that the CIA had in abundance thanks to Eli Lilly, which had developed the capacity to produce the drug in “tonnage quantities” and had agreed to become the Agency’s supplier. Gottlieb, his deputy Robert Lashbrook, and CIA psychologist John Gittinger are among the CIA officials who frequently visited White’s safehouses.
Of particular interest is the mysterious 1953 death of Frank Olson, an Army chemist and aerosols specialist for the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the Army’s Chemical Corps, the CIA’s military partner in behavior control research. Officially ruled a suicide, Olson’s death from a 10-story fall in New York City came 10 days after Gottlieb and TSS staff spiked his cocktail with LSD during a CIA-SOD work retreat at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland. The drugging was later determined to have contributed to his death, but many, including members of his family, have questioned the conclusion that Olson—who was sharing a room with Lashbrook that night—threw himself out the window of the Statler Hotel.
At the center of it all was Sidney Gottlieb, the head of the Technical Services Staff (TSS) of the CIA’s Chemical Division and later director of the Technical Services Division (TSD). Gottlieb was “the CIA’s chief poison maker,” according to Kinzer, whose book, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (New York: Henry Holt, 2019), is the definitive work on the mercurial chemist. From his position deep inside the CIA’s secret corridors, Gottlieb led the Agency’s decades-long effort to find ways to use drugs, hypnosis, and other extreme methods to control human behavior and, it was hoped, turn them into usable tools for intelligence agencies and policymakers.
Stories about the CIA’s involvement in unsuccessful efforts to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, among others, are among the most legendary, if not the most successful, examples of the Agency’s efforts to operationalize the tricks and tools assembled by Gottlieb’s unit. Less well known is his role in drug experiments and “special interrogation” programs that left hundreds of people psychologically damaged and others “permanently shattered,” according to Kinzer.[2]
Although MKULTRA was approved at the highest levels, it operated with virtually no oversight. As Marks notes, the initial MKULTRA budget authorization “exempted the program from the normal CIA financial controls” and “allowed TSS to start up research projects ‘without the signing of the usual contracts or other written agreements.’”[3] With little accountability, boundless resources, and the backing of CIA covert operations chief Richard Helms, Gottlieb and his staff at TSS developed a series of bizarre experiments that they believed would enhance covert intelligence operations while at the same time improving the Agency’s defenses against the use of similar techniques by enemy forces.
By the time Gottlieb arrived at CIA in 1952, Project BLUEBIRD, which explored “the possibility of control of an individual by application of Special Interrogation techniques,” was already well underway.[4] Led by Office of Security chief Morse Allen, the early BLUEBIRD experiments were performed by teams that included polygraph experts and psychologists and were conducted on detainees and suspected informants at secret U.S. interrogation facilities in Japan and Germany.
The elevation of Allen Dulles to deputy director of central intelligence in 1951 led to an expansion of BLUEBIRD programs under a new name, ARTICHOKE, and under the direction of Gottlieb at TSS. The new program was to include, among other projects, the development of “gas guns” and “poisons,” and experiments to test whether “monotonous sounds,” “concussion,” “electroshock,” and “induced sleep” could be used as a means to gain “hypnotic control of an individual.”[5]
It was under ARTICHOKE that the Agency first began to more systematically recruit the top researchers and court the most prestigious institutions to collaborate in its mind control research. One of the first to participate was the deputy director of Boston Psychopathic Hospital, Dr. Robert Hyde, who in 1949 was the first American to “trip” on LSD after the hospital acquired samples of the drug from Sandoz laboratory in Switzerland. In 1952, the CIA began to fund the hospital’s LSD research, under which Hyde used himself, his colleagues, student volunteers, and hospital patients as his subjects. Hyde would work on four MKULTRA subprojects over the next decade.
Shortly after Dulles became DCI in 1953, he authorized MKULTRA, expanding the Agency’s behavior control research and refocusing it on the development of “a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials” in “present and future clandestine operations.”[6] Many of the 149 MKULTRA subprojects were carried out through well-regarded universities like Cornell, Georgetown, Rutgers, Illinois, and Oklahoma. Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, the chairman of the Department of Pharmacology of Emory University, directed four MKULTRA subprojects, all of which involved the use of drugs, including LSD, to induce psychotic states. The horrifying series of experiments left many of his subjects—including prisoners at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and juveniles housed at a detention facility in Bordentown, New Jersey—scarred for life.
Many other MKULTRA subprojects were established through grants from false foundations funded by the CIA. One of these, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, run by Dr. Charles Geschickter, a professor of pathology at Georgetown University, steered millions of CIA dollars into research programs at Georgetown and other institutions. As part of the agreement, the CIA gained access to a medical safehouse at the newly constructed Gorman Annex of Georgetown University Hospital along with a ready supply of patients and students to use as subjects for MKULTRA experiments.
Another prominent MKULTRA “cutout” foundation, the Human Ecology Society, was run by Cornell Medical Center neurologist Dr. Harold Wolff, who wrote an early study of communist brainwashing techniques for Allen Dulles and later partnered with the CIA to develop a combination of drugs and sensory deprivation that could be used to erase the human mind. Among the most extreme MKULTRA projects funded through Wolff’s group were the infamous “depatterning” experiments conducted by Dr. D. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Cameron’s methods combined induced sleep, electroshocks, and “psychic driving,” under which drugged subjects were psychologically tortured for weeks or months in an effort to reprogram their minds.
These records also shed light on an especially dark period in the history of the behavioral sciences in which some of the top physicians in the field conducted research and experiments usually associated with the Nazi doctors who were tried at Nuremberg. While some medical professionals engaged by the CIA apparently struggled with the ethical issues raised by conducting harmful tests on unwitting human subjects, others were eager to participate in a program in which, according to one 1953 memo, “no area of the human mind is to be left unexplored.”[7] Just as CIA psychologists later oversaw the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and at CIA “black sites,” during the first decades of the 21st century, many of the doctors and clinicians recruited for MKULTRA work were leaders in the field, whose participation boosted the prestige of the program and drew others into it. Scholars and researchers looking at the involvement of psychologists and other medical professionals in the horrific U.S. detention and interrogation programs that have been exposed in recent years will find parallels and historical antecedents throughout this collection.
The collection is also of great value to those interested in learning more about the early years of the CIA and some of its major personalities, such as Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Richard Bissell, Franks Wisner, and others, who envisioned and created an intelligence agency that favored bold, often covert, action and where controversial projects like MKULTRA could secretly take root and flourish.
Pentagon’s African Biolabs: Russia Warns of Global Pathogen Threat
Sputnik – 24.12.2024
The US military-biological presence on the African continent is growing at a rapid pace, Deputy Chief of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Forces of the Russian armed forces Major General Aleksey Rtishev said on Tuesday.
“The documents at our disposal confirm that the US military-biological presence on the African continent is increasing rapidly,” Rtishev told a briefing.
The United States deployed branches of naval military medical center in Ghana and Djibouti, Rtishev added.
“Active work in the region is being carried out by research organizations of the US Department of Defense. For example, branches of the military medical center of the naval forces are located in Ghana and Djibouti, where active work is being carried out in natural foci of diseases, isolation and sequencing of pathogens,” Rtishev said.
American specialists capable of enhancing the pathogenic functions of microorganisms are actively working in Africa, Rtishev said. He added that the US government views the region as a rich reservoir of dangerous infectious agents and a testing ground for experimental drugs, and Washington is using a biological risk management system in Africa that has already been tested in Georgia and Ukraine.
The US is actively engaged in:
- Nigeria: A joint medical research center and a military medical laboratory for the armed forces were established in 2024.
- Kenya: The US Army Military Medical Center has deployed a network of field stations to monitor the spread of infectious diseases throughout Equatorial Africa.
- Senegal: A new $35 million laboratory facility is nearing completion. This project involves the same Pentagon contractors that have worked in the former Soviet Union, including Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine.
- Ghana and Djibouti: The US. has established branches of the National Naval Medical Center and is actively addressing natural disease outbreaks and isolating pathogens.
- The United States is conducting a project in 18 African countries to study the characteristics of infection occurrence and the resistance of pathogens to medical treatments.
According to Aleksey Rtishev, Washington is deliberately exploiting the economic challenges African nations face in the health sector to organize research initiatives, the general warns. Rtishev noted that the US fears that Russia and China could expose American military and biological programs.
The United States often does not disclose the ultimate goals of its experiments to partners, who are often unaware of the risks involved, he said.
Israel seeks to occupy south Lebanon past 60-day truce period
The Cradle | December 24, 2024
Israeli forces are unhappy with the Lebanese army’s efforts to implement the ceasefire agreement announced on 27 November and are planning to maintain a presence in south Lebanon, according to exclusive information.
“The French conveyed to the Lebanese army that the Israeli military is not satisfied with what is happening [in south Lebanon] and that it will not leave before destroying all of Hezbollah’s infrastructure [south of Litani River, even after the 60-day implementation period ends],” Lebanese security sources told The Cradle on 23 December.
The information came as an Israeli attack killed two people in the town of Taybeh in southern Lebanon’s Marjayoun District.
The Lebanese National News Agency’s (NNA) correspondent in Marjayoun reported on Monday afternoon that “two people were killed and another was injured in an enemy raid that targeted a group of people near the official school in Taybeh.”
Israeli ground troops continued their campaign of mass detonations and destruction of homes and buildings across southern Lebanon, blowing up houses in Al-Bustan and Al-Zaloutieh in the Tyre District.
They also put up an Israeli flag on a hill in the Naqoura area overlooking the main entrance to the town, in violation of the ceasefire announced last month.
Israeli troops are required to withdraw from Lebanon within 60 days of the ceasefire’s announcement. So far, it has been four weeks, leaving only a month before the Israeli army must withdraw, according to the agreement that is based on UN Resolution 1701.
The Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) has deployed across south Lebanon with the aim of dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure south of the Litani River – which is required to take place within the 60-day period.
Tel Aviv has violated the ceasefire over 100 times since it took effect with deadly airstrikes, arrests of Lebanese citizens, troop advancements, and mass detonation campaigns in southern villages.
Israeli forces have exploited the ceasefire to advance into areas they were unable to during recent ground battles with Hezbollah.
Hezbollah responded once to dozens of violations in early December with a limited rocket attack on an Israeli site in occupied Lebanese territory, prompting a massive and deadly Israeli response in south Lebanon.
Israel claims it is acting in line with the ceasefire agreement by targeting what it says is Hezbollah infrastructure. However, according to the agreement, dismantling the resistance’s presence in southern Lebanon is the responsibility of the Lebanese state and army. Earlier this month, the Israeli army bombed Khiam after the LAF entered the city to clear rubble and prepare for civilian entry.
A secret side letter between Washington and Tel Aviv reportedly guarantees that Israel can act with force against “threats.”
Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz vowed on 22 December that Tel Aviv would “crush” Hezbollah’s “head” if the Lebanese resistance group violates the ceasefire, coming during a visit to an Israeli army position in southern Lebanon.
Two days earlier, Hezbollah MP Ali Fayyad said that “the resistance will not be dragged into confronting Israeli violations and aggressions militarily, because its priority is the Israeli withdrawal from our land without giving it any pretext to exceed the 60-day deadline, and because we take into consideration the situation of our people who need shelter, reconstruction, and to clean up the effects of the war.”
“We want the Lebanese government and army to play their role in protecting the land and preserving sovereignty, based on the [agreement] based on Resolution 1701,” Fayyad added.
Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati and UNIFIL called on Israel on Monday to hasten its withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Mikati called for the US and France to pressure Israel on the matter.
Sednaya: Investigating Syria’s most notorious prison
The Cradle | December 24, 2024
When militants from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by former Al-Qaeda leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani – who now goes by his real name Ahmad al-Sharaa – finally toppled Bashar al-Assad’s government on 8 December 2024, they quickly released the prisoners in Sednaya.
A flood of new media reports about the horrors of the prison quickly emerged.
But which reports about the crimes of Assad’s government are true, and which are fabricated as part of a new propaganda campaign to legitimize Julani’s rule and whitewash the opposition’s similar past atrocities?
Vast underground prison complex?
On 9 December, one day after Assad’s fall, The Guardian journalist William Christou was among the first journalists to reach Sednaya.
Christou claimed that a day after Julani’s forces had taken control of the prison, a door had been found leading to a “vast underground complex, five stories deep, containing the last prisoners of the Assad regime, who were gasping for air.”
He reported rumors that there “were 1,500 prisoners trapped underground that needed rescuing; perhaps your loved ones are among them.”
As a result, hundreds of panicked Syrians rushed to the prison, located 30 kilometers outside Damascus, to search for loved ones missing from the war. Due to the crowds, “Cars were ditched by the roadside and people began to walk,” Christou wrote.
In subsequent days, numerous fake videos professing to show prisoners in the underground complex went viral, while CNN journalist Clarissa Ward faked the discovery of a prisoner in a detention facility in Damascus.
“We came to see the prisons under the ground,” one woman wandering the halls of Sednaya told The Cradle during its visit to the prison.
She said her brother had been missing since 2018. She first went to the Mezzeh military prison in Damascus, and now she was looking for any sign of him at Sednaya.
However, despite efforts by the White Helmets and Turkish rescue organizations, no secret underground complex holding thousands of prisoners has been found.
During its visit to Sednaya, The Cradle was able to walk freely through the facility and verified that there is just one underground basement level containing small individual isolation cells and an adjoining toilet.
Human slaughterhouse?
In the days after Assad’s fall, more and more western journalists visited Sednaya and filed reports. Virtually all begin by citing a 2017 investigation by Amnesty International, which called the prison a “human slaughterhouse.” The investigation claimed up to 13,000 civilians were executed in mass hangings over a four-year period.
The US State Department tried to reinforce the findings of the Amnesty report by claiming the bodies of the executed were burned in a “crematorium” located in a building adjacent to the main prison.
However, the State Department gave zero proof of the crematorium, and no one has claimed to find it since the prison was opened.
Further, Amnesty’s report acknowledges the number killed was just an “estimate” (between 5,000 and 13,000) based on testimony from alleged former guards and prisoners taken by the rights group in Turkiye. The report said the mass execution process was “secret” but then somehow claimed to reveal its intimate details.
The report also ignores that the Syrian government was detaining people during this period in the context of facing an Al-Qaeda-led insurgency, including from the Nusra Front and ISIS.
When The Cradle asked a Syrian who is supportive of the opposition about his view of the Sednaya issue, he noted that the prison is Syria’s “Guantanamo.” In other words, the prison is reserved for high-security prisoners from Islamist armed groups detained on terrorism charges.
This is evident by the famous Sednaya prison uprising in 2008, in which primarily Islamist prisoners revolted against their guards.
But Amnesty claims that the prisoners were held in Sednaya and mass executed “as part of an attack against the civilian population.”
Iraqi and US forces have also long held large numbers of Al-Qaeda militants in prisons in Iraq, such as at Abu Ghraib. However, the fact that the Syrian government was holding Al-Qaeda militants in its prisons is somehow ignored by Amnesty and others.
Psychological operations
Another question is whether the testimony of the former alleged prisoners and guards given to Amnesty in 2017 and to western media outlets after the prison was opened in 2024 is reliable.
A Spanish journalist who visited Sednaya in the days after Assad’s fall told The Cradle that he was suspicious of the testimony given to him by alleged former prisoners. Fixers associated with Julani’s new government had arranged the interviews, he said, and some of the details of their testimony seemed too fantastic to be true. “But there was no way to verify if they were true or not,” the journalist said.
As a case in point, recent western media reports almost all include interviews with Omar al-Shogre, an alleged former Sednaya prisoner who was the star witness of the 2017 Amnesty report.
However, a close review of Shogre’s testimony shows it was clearly fabricated.
For example, he told Amnesty the guards would regularly force the prisoners to rape each other while being escorted from their cells to the bathroom.
“As we walked to the bathroom, [the guards] would select one of the boys, someone petite or young or fair. … They would then ask a bigger prisoner to rape him … No one will admit this happened to them, but it happened so often,” Shogre claimed.
However, during its visit to Sednaya, The Cradle observed that each cell has its own toilet and sink. In one cell, The Cradle observed items of clothing hanging on lines above the sink to dry after washing. There was no possibility that the guards were escorting prisoners out of their cells to go to the bathroom, as Shogre’s scenario claims.
Over the years, Shogre has made many wild and completely implausible claims, which further undermine his credibility.
The Nation wrote that according to Shogre, “Guards would deliberately execute a prisoner right before serving inmates their only meal of the day, often placing the corpse’s head over the platter of food, so that it would bleed into the daily mound of bread and potatoes.”
The former prisoner’s fabrications have long been part of a broader propaganda campaign to impose crushing sanctions on Syria.
Shogre works for the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a group established and funded by the US government to facilitate the overthrow of the Syrian government. SETF provided alleged non-lethal aid to US-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups that fought the Syrian army starting in 2011.
While working for the SETF, Shogre advocated for the US Congress to impose the Caesar sanctions on Syria, which helped strangle his home nation’s economy and resembled the US sanctions on Iraq, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in the 1990s.
The Caesar sanctions were themselves named after a psychological operation claiming that a Syrian military photographer had smuggled 55,000 photographs out of the country, documenting the torture and killing of some 11,000 detainees by the Syrian government.
But as journalist Rick Sterling observed, Human Rights Watch (HRW) acknowledged that almost half of the photos do not show people tortured to death by the Syrian government. Instead, they show dead Syrian soldiers and victims of car bombs and other violence from the opposition groups. Such deaths are normal for any government to document in a time of war.
Syria’s missing
Despite the propaganda surrounding Sednaya, there are many indications that the Syrian government detained large numbers of Syrians during the war who were either tortured to death or shot and killed.
While in a restaurant in Damascus shortly after Assad’s fall, The Cradle witnessed two employees, a father and his son, emerge from the back room in tears. They told the owner and fellow staff that they had just received word that the names of their three uncles, taken by the government and missing since 2014, had been found in the records at Tishreen military hospital, confirming their deaths.
One reason that many Syrians may have been detained and disappeared is because Syrian intelligence operated in many ways like a mafia. The feared ‘mukhabarat’ often abused their power to extract bribes from Syrians in many aspects of everyday life.
One Syrian from Damascus told The Cradle that there was little rule of law in Syria. Instead, Syrians lived by the “rule of the phone numbers.” Your privileges and ability to protect yourself depended on whether you had the phone number of someone powerful to call if the local security agents tried to extort you, or worse.
Those with money or political connections were often released, including those detained on terrorism charges, while others continued to rot in prison. As a result, many were tortured and killed.
Writing for Al-Akhbar in 2013, journalist Qassem Qassem stated it is an “undeniable fact” that the Palestinian filmmaker from the Yarmouk Palestinian camp in Damascus, Hassan Hassan, was “killed in the regime prisons.” He said that Hassan was not a terrorist or “takfiri,” and “never carried a gun nor blew himself up with an explosive vest,” but was killed anyway.
The “Repentance” prison
But in addition to those who disappeared or were tortured by the government, the armed opposition groups also tortured and disappeared huge numbers of people.
When asked about the issue of those gone missing in Assad’s prison, one Syrian from Aleppo told The Cradle that the militant groups fighting the former president ran mafia-style kidnapping rings of their own.
“The opposition, since the start of the war, has killed tens of thousands of Syrians, and the ones they didn’t bury in mass graves, they sent, in parts, to several families when the ransoms weren’t paid. Try also asking them where the missing are.”
While walking through Sednaya prison, The Cradle spoke with a man who was looking for his missing son – a commander in a militant opposition group called Burkan al-Sham in the eastern Ghouta area of Damascus.
The man said he and his son were accused of being Syrian government agents by another armed opposition group, the Saudi-backed Jaish al-Islam.
Led by Zahran Alloush, the son of a prominent Salafist preacher in Ghouta, the group was described by the UK foreign office as part of the “moderate armed opposition.”
The man told The Cradle that he and his son were both held at Jaish al-Islam’s “Tawba,” or “repentance,” prison in the town of Duma, in the Ghouta region. He said they were tortured in ways “worse than in Sednaya.”
The father said he was later released, but his son remains missing. He later heard rumors his son had ended up in a government prison in Mezzeh. After looking there and finding nothing, he came to Sednaya to search.
Pro-opposition Enab Baladi reported in 2017 that while there is a large network of activists in Duma, there are no accurate statistics on the number of detainees in Tawba.
Abu Khaled, a 31-year-old media activist from Duma, told the outlet he was surprised by the absence of such reports.
“Random arrests take place all around Eastern Ghouta,” he stated. These prisons, especially Tawba, “are as bad as those of the Syrian regime, and, according to former prisoners, many detainees stay in prisons for months without trial.”
“A man’s body was recently returned to his family three days after his arrest,” pro-opposition Syria Direct reported in 2017. “Jaish al-Islam directly threatened them, telling them that if they spoke to the media or published pictures of the body, they would all be killed.”
Julani’s prisons
Abu Mohammad al-Julani’s Nusra Front also imprisoned and tortured many Syrians. We know this from the testimony of Theo Padnos. A freelance journalist from the US, Padnos was kidnapped by the FSA in 2012 and handed over to Nusra. He remained a hostage for two years before Qatar paid a large ransom to release him.
While imprisoned at the Eye Hospital, the Nusra guards beat and shocked the journalist with an electric cattle prod. Other prisoners were hung by their wrists from ceiling pipes. Their feet mimicked the riding of a bicycle in the air.
When Julani’s Nusra conquered Idlib province in 2015 and formed a National Salvation government, the group established new prisons where torture was also common.
An opposition media activist, Jawdat Malas, was imprisoned by the group in a dark and dirty cell, Enab Baladi reported.
For hours every day, he would be tortured until his body was heavily bruised. “I reached a point where I was constipated. My whole body was dark blue,” he said. “Other detainees were taking care of me. I had no idea what I did wrong. I was terrified.”
In April 2020, Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ) issued a report stating that women were detained and killed in Idlib, including for “insulting deity,” “espionage” for the benefit of the Syrian army, and “adultery.”
Conclusion
No one in Syria now knows what the future holds. But what is sure is that Syrians have suffered from more than a decade of horrific war and economic sanctions. Violence has been inflicted on Syrian civilians by the former government under Bashar al-Assad, but also by the foreign-backed extremist groups who functioned as tools of the US and its allies to topple Assad. Most crucial to recall is that the vast majority of this violence occurred after 2011, when the US launched its covert war on Syria on Israel’s behalf.
Fact-checking Fortune: Has Polio Vaccine Saved 20 Million Children From Paralysis?
The Defender | December 23, 2024
A Dec. 13 article in Fortune called the polio vaccine used in the U.S. today “not only safe but also effective.”
The article also claimed that because 3 billion children have been vaccinated against polio since 1988, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, that means “20 million people who would’ve otherwise been paralyzed by polio are walking today.”
How accurate is the 20 million figure?
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) website, in 1988, there were 350,000 reported polio cases worldwide in a global population of 5.1 billion people. If, as the WHO website states, “One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis,” that would amount to 1,750 cases of irreversible paralysis linked to polio in 1988.
Using that figure — 1,750 cases in 1988 — and factoring in 1.2% annual population growth, the estimated number of cases of irreversible paralysis between 1988 and 2024 would total approximately 80,910 — not 20 million, as Fortune reported.
Here are four other facts about polio vaccines the Fortune article doesn’t address.
1. Polio vaccines used in U.S. don’t prevent infection or transmission.
According to Fortune, the polio vaccine is “safe and effective.” Here’s why that statement oversimplifies the issue of polio vaccines and leads to misleading conclusions.
There are two kinds of polio vaccines used in the world today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They are the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) and the oral polio vaccine (OPV).
The OPV is used for mass vaccination campaigns of children outside the U.S., as was recently done in Gaza. However, the U.S. exclusively uses IPV polio vaccines, according to the CDC.
The IPV products, which are injected, contain an inactivated — or dead — poliovirus. According to the CDC, the IPV protects against “severe disease caused by poliovirus” but “does not stop transmission.”
According to the Polio Global Eradication Initiative, the IPV also doesn’t prevent infection.
Two stand-alone IPV products are licensed in the U.S. by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Both are manufactured by Sanofi. The other five are combination vaccines that target polio plus other illnesses, including diptheria, pertussis and tetanus.
One of the two stand-alone IPV products, Poliovax, was discontinued. The FDA page on licensed polio vaccines doesn’t explain why.
That leaves IPOL as the sole stand-alone polio vaccine licensed in the U.S.
2. Global polio vaccine campaigns can lead to ‘vaccine-derived’ polio outbreaks.
As its name suggests, the “oral polio” vaccine, or OPV — used only outside the U.S. — is delivered orally. The OPV contains a weakened vaccine-virus that activates an immune response in the body, according to the WHO.
Unlike the IPV products used in the U.S., the OPV prevents transmission, according to the CDC and the WHO. However, the weakened vaccine-virus used in the OPV can cause polio variant outbreaks.
The CDC states that the U.S. stopped using OPV “to eliminate the risk of polio variants that can occur with OPV.”
According to the WHO, the continued use of the OPV “poses a risk to wiping out the disease” because the weakened vaccine-virus originally contained in the OPV can begin to circulate among people who didn’t get the vaccine.
“When this happens,” the WHO said, “if it is allowed to circulate for sufficiently long enough time, it may genetically revert to a ‘strong’ virus, able to cause paralysis, resulting in what is known as circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses.”
Vaccine-derived polioviruses were responsible for the recently reported cases of polio in Gaza and the 2022 case reported in New York.
In March 2023, seven children were paralyzed by vaccine-derived polio linked to the novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) developed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, according to health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
In other words, the viral infections in these cases resulted from exposure to the vaccine-virus used in the OPV — not from exposure to a naturally occurring, or “wild,” strain of the poliovirus.
The last wild poliovirus case reported in the U.S. was in 1979, according to the CDC.
3. Risk of paralysis from poliovirus infection is roughly 0.001%.
Approximately 90-95% of poliovirus infections are asymptomatic, according to the FDA package insert for IPOL, the only stand-alone IPV product used in the U.S. The package insert also provides general information on polio, including this:
“Nonspecific illness with low-grade fever and sore throat (minor illness) occurs in 4% to 8% of infections. Aseptic meningitis occurs in 1% to 5% of patients a few days after the minor illness has resolved.
“Rapid onset of asymmetric acute flaccid paralysis occurs in 0.1% to 2% of infections, and residual paralytic disease involving motor neurons (paralytic poliomyelitis) occurs in approximately 1 per 1,000 infections.”
In other words, according to the FDA, the risk of becoming paralyzed as a result of a poliovirus infection is roughly 0.001%.
4. All polio vaccines used today are genetically modified.
Unlike the original polio vaccines developed in the early 1950s by Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Albert Sabin, the IPV and OPV being administered today are genetically modified.
In 2020, the WHO authorized a new genetically modified OPV for emergency use in polio outbreaks. According to a 2023 article in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, nOPV2 was developed through a global partnership between public health, governmental, philanthropic and nonprofit organizations, including the Gates Foundation.
IPOL, the only stand-alone polio vaccine used in the U.S., uses technology that involves growing the poliovirus on monkey kidney cells whose chromones were modified to cause them to multiply forever.
In 2022, attorney Aaron Siri, on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, petitioned the FDA to “withdraw or suspend the approval for IPOL for infants, toddlers, and children until a properly controlled and properly powered double-blind trial of sufficient duration is conducted to assess the safety of this product.”
The petition stated that modified monkey kidney cells “are susceptible to infection by dozens of viruses, including HPV, measles, rubella, reovirus, SV40 virus, and SV-5.”
According to the petition, Sanofi’s IPOL vaccine hasn’t been adequately proven safe because the clinical trials relied on for licensing the product did not include a control group and declared the vaccine safe after following the trial participants for up to only three days after injection.
The FDA has not withdrawn or suspended its approval of IPOL as requested by Siri, and the agency continues to rely on the existing clinical trials and the agency’s own safety assessment lasting only up to three days.
The CDC recommends children receive four doses of IPOL, starting at age 2 months. The second dose is given at 4 months. The third is given at 6-18 months, and the fourth is given anytime between 4 and 6 years.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
This article is part of a series of articles by The Defender responding to the latest media coverage of vaccines, triggered by the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Let’s Retire Overused Words. First, ‘Misinformation’
By Dr. Pierre Kory & Mary Beth Pfeiffer | Real Clear Health | December 16, 2024
In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.
We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.
Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”
These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.
Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.
Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?
Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all-but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.
Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The U.S. and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to- consumer” TV ads.
Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.
Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”
Misinformation?
If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.
The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”
Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky U.S.-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”
Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is outright dismissal of a lab leak.
The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.
Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.
Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.
Truth Muzzled?
Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.
The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false story line that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under law only if no alternative was available.
An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.
The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.
The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.
Dr. Pierre Kory, M.D., a pulmonologist and critical care specialist, is president emeritus of the FLCCC Alliance. Mary Beth Pfeiffer is an investigative reporter and author.
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“Democratic Institutions?” – 10 Lessons from history that will destroy your trust in the CIA
By Kit | OffGuardian | July 20, 2018
… At every corner, we are urged to simply believe what we are told. Whether it is about believing Porton Down and MI6 about “novichok”, or believing the White Helmets about Sarin, or believing the FBI about “collusion”, we are presented with no facts, just assertions from authority. Those who question those assertions are deemed “bots” at best or “traitors” at worst.
Well here, fellow traitors, are the Top Ten reasons to question anything and everything the CIA – or any intelligence agency – has ever told you. … Read full article
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