DONALD TRUMP AND THE TOLL OF VITRIOL
The HighWire | July 18, 2024
Nearly a decade of increasingly dangerous rhetoric and bias from corporate ‘journalists’ and those in power have prepared the grounds for violence. Who is to blame??
Secret Service under suspicion amid contradictions in Trump’s attempted assassination
By Uriel Araujo | July 19, 2024
Contradictions on Trump’s attempted assassination pile up, with serious security breaches and officials claiming an investigation is needed to determine whether it was a matter of incompetence or malice.
To begin with, according to the ABC News, “law enforcement officials investigating the assassination attempt on Donald Trump told lawmakers Wednesday that 20 minutes passed between the time U.S. Secret Service snipers first spotted the gunman on a rooftop and the time shots were fired at the former president.” How can one explain that?
Moreover, it is a well-established fact now that onlookers alerted the authorities about the presence of an armed man on a nearby roof. One witness reported that to the BBC shortly after the incident.
In addition, local officials in Pennsylvania are complaining that the Secret Service, in an attempt to deflect blame, is throwing them “under the bus”. According to one local police officer: “The Secret Service came out here more than a month ahead of time and met with all the local agencies. They tell us exactly what to do, exactly what they want and exactly how they want it. It’s all on them.”
More intriguingly, several witnesses describe a second shooter, and there seems to be plenty of cell phone footage indicating that – while the Secret Service insist there was only one. According to a Times of India story, “an audio forensic analysis conducted by experts from the National Center for Media Forensics at the University of Colorado in Denver suggests the possibility of a second shooter in the incident”. A CNN story in turn reports that “forensic analysis suggests that as many as three weapons were fired at the Trump rally.”
Stephen Bryen, security expert, takes the second shooter allegation seriously, and, in his Substack newsletter, he is calling for a “solid FBI investigation with Congressional oversight” on the matter. He adds that “there is a general consensus that security at the Trump Rally was poor”, and adds: “if the Secret Service actually approved all the security measures … we wonder, like millions of others no doubt, how could they overlook the rooftops.” Bryen is no fringe figure – he is a former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, who writes for Newsweek, the Jewish Policy Center, and others.
Cory Mills, a member of the United States House of Representatives, takes the matter a bit further, saying an investigation on the Secret Service is needed to determine whether this was merely incompetence or rather malice, with an intent to neutralize Trump.
Cory Mills is a former military, and was a member of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) 20 in Iraq. He is also a defense contractor, who has earned a Master of Arts in international relations and conflict resolution from American Military University. Again, this is also no fringe figure, and his allegations raise eyebrows.
Given all the above, it is no wonder suspicions abound – the fact that Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle is very close to the Biden couple certainly doesn’t help. According to the New York Post, she “landed her role thanks largely to a close relationship with first lady Jill Biden.” In any other country, by the way, after such a scandal, the Secret Service director would have been fired already or would have resigned. One thing that hampers further scrutiny, however, is an American cultural trait, namely the distaste for “conspiracy theories” (which is rather ironic in a country where conspiracies abound). Here, some context is needed.
Most scholars concede that sometimes conspiracy theories (CT) are proven to be at least partly correct. A “true” or ideal CT is supposed to always be false – meaning that its narrative does not describe reality. However, what happens when new data changes the “official” story? For instance, nowadays it is known that in 1962 the US Department of Defense proposed a false flag operation (the Operation Northwoods), calling for CIA operatives to actually commit terrorist attacks against American civilians and military targets in American cities (with bombings and hijackings) and then using those to justify a Cuban invasion. Then President John F. Kennedy rejected the plan, but the proposal existed, and no one denies it.
It is thus not clear at all how a “correct” conspiracy theory (one which later happens to be proven true) differs from a false one. Was it a CT when critics argued that the US government had lied about the real motivations which led it to invade Iraq? Other authors define “conspiracy theories” in a more neutral manner as any hypotheses that try to explain an event by invoking a “conspiracy” – namely, a secret plan carried out by a group of people.
One should also be cautious as to avoid equating a mere CT (about anything) and a conspiratorial way of understanding society and history in general. The latter (conspiracism), implicitly holds that nothing ever happens by chance but rather everything (especially tragedies) happens by design. Conspiracies do exist but not everything is a conspiracy. On the other hand, in the face of a major politically charged event, when various contradictions pile up, it would be naïve to readily dismiss everything as a “coincidence” (I would describe it as a “coincidence theory”).
With Biden’s undeniable senility getting worse, it is becoming increasingly clear he is not fit to run for the presidency again – he can barely participate in a debate or give interviews. Given this, the question then, as I wrote, is how can he govern, or rather how come has he been governing thus? In other words, who has been doing all the governing? Some talk about a “ triumvirate”, referring to Biden’s close advisers Bruce Reed, Mike Donilon, and Steve Ricchetti – the matter is far from being clear, though. One can only imagine the amount of palace intrigue going on amid this “emperor clothes” scenario.
With the ongoing political crisis, any investigation on the Secret Service will be either weaponized by Republicans against Democrats or covered up by the latter, amid a major narrative war and claims about “conspiracy theories”. The crisis is thus also an epistemic one, so to speak.
This state of affairs can only further undermine the legitimacy of American institutions, with serious consequences for the country’s stability. With a suspicious murder attempt on a presidential candidate and an embarrassingly senile incumbent president, the rest of the world holds their breath while the politics within the Atlantic superpower has just gone mad.
US Missiles in Germany Again: Why Is Berlin Betraying Its National Interests?
By Dmitry Babich – Sputnik – 19.07.2024
The decision of Washington to start in 2026 the deployment in Germany of US missiles aimed at Russia was not even discussed in Berlin. The public was forced to face a fait accompli. This is a clear degradation of Germany’s standing vis-a-vis the US, compared to the ’80s. Then, a similar deployment was met with protests of West Germany’s citizens.
The governments of both the US and Germany confirmed that in 2026, the American side will begin deploying long-range missiles in Germany. This dangerous move, reminiscent of the worst years of the Cold War, is officially explained by the need to contain “resurgent Russia.”
Gunnar Beck, an expert on European law and former vice president of Identity and Democracy group in the European Parliament, notes that there was no public discussion of this dangerous development in Germany, specifically no discussion in the Bundestag. No details of the deal have been revealed.
“It’s a fait accompli,” Beck told Sputnik. “The German and the US governments have announced they were considering this… But all of the talk of an imminent Russian threat to Europe, in my view, is just a pretext for justifying further military and financial assistance to Ukraine. And, of course, it is a pretext for intimidating the European population and forcing them to accept even larger amounts of military spending.”
Beck notes the few dissenting voices still audible in Germany belong to the parties, which the European Union and especially the European Commission’s chairwoman Ursula von der Leyen try to marginalize:
“There are people on the right and on the far-left which have been criticizing [the deployment]. The German public, by and large, is not war loving. But, of course, there is a lot of propaganda emphasizing that any attack against Ukraine is an attack against Europe as a whole – it is the position of the EU and German government,” Beck told Sputnik.
The situation is reminiscent of the early 1980s, when the US deployed Pershing missiles in West Germany – presumably countering a possible aggression by the Soviet Union. The only difference is that this time Americans promise not to put nuclear warheads on SM-6 missiles, Tomahawks and even some “hypersonic weapons.” These missiles will be carrying conventional warheads that will still make Germany a target for a Russian retaliation starting from 2026.
Beck indicated that American and West German propaganda of that epoch used the same arguments as now. It was said the ability of NATO allies to protect themselves was the best guarantee for peace, etc., but in both cases it was misleading propaganda based on fears and not facts:
“Up to 1987 the propaganda in West Germany evoked the specter of millions of Soviet soldiers stationed in East Germany … that they would all flood into West Germany and occupy the country within three days,” Beck told Sputnik. “The kind of propaganda we are exposed to now is very reminiscent of this. We know today, and we have known for some time already that everything we were told in the 1980s was a great deal of nonsense. There was no evidence whatsoever of a consistently aggressive strategy by the Soviet Union.”
Indeed, Moscow acquiesced to the reunification of Germany in 1990 and withdrew its troops from East Germany in 1994 without a single shot fired. Unfortunately, it is often forgotten now that these concessions were part of the “Two plus four” agreement, whose terms Germany and three other signatories are breaching now.
It was signed on September 12, 1990, by the two (East Germany and West Germany) plus four (the Soviet Union, USA, the UK and France, former members of the anti-Hitler coalition).
Moscow then obliged itself not to prevent the reunification of Germany and to withdraw its troops by 1994 from the territory of the late German Democratic Republic. Both obligations were fulfilled. Now, here is how the obligations of Western powers were breached, in the words of Beck:
“No foreign weapons could be deployed in East Germany… And both German states then agreed that the united Germany would only deploy weapons on its territory if it is done in accordance with Germany’s constitution and the Charter of the United Nations. So, unless there is a UN Security Council resolution, it is a very debatable issue whether Germany can allow the deployment of new weapons that increase the risk of war.”
It should be noted that the German constitution prohibits the supplies of German weapons to the zones of armed conflict. However, Berlin is officially “pumping up” Volodymyr Zelensky’s regime with weapons worth tens of billions of euros.
Beck states the subsequent events showed the deceitful nature of the Western propaganda of the 1980s: Moscow indeed had no intention of invading Europe and withdrew from Germany at the first opportunity. Unfortunately, its goodwill was abused by Western allies.
Now, many Germans suspect a “remake” of the that deceitful intimidation: a poll conducted by Forsa Institute revealed 47% of Germans think the planned deployment of US weapons will only increase the possibility of a Russia-NATO conflict.
However, Beck notes this substantial part of German public opinion is not organized and its will has no chance of influencing the European Commission – or even the government of Germany.
Should RFK, Jr., Have Accepted Secret Service Protection?
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | July 19, 2024
In the aftermath of the near-assassination of President Trump, President Biden finally granted independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s longtime request to be granted Secret Service protection. However, I can’t help but wonder whether Kennedy is now having second thoughts, not only given the Secret Service’s massive incompetence, at best, that led to the Trump shooting but also given the possibility, at worst, that there was criminal culpability on the part of the Secret Service, including by simply knowingly letting the shooting happen.
While the event will inevitably be blamed on incompetence by U.S. officials and the mainstream press, one thing is certain: While there is now no doubt that the John F. Kennedy assassination was orchestrated and covered up by the military and the CIA, given the military’s fraudulent autopsy on JFK’s body and the CIA’s production of a fraudulent copy of the Zapruder film on the weekend of the assassination, there is also no doubt that there were elements of the Secret Service involved in the assassination and cover-up. (For a detailed account of the autopsy fraud and the film fraud, see my books The Kennedy Autopsy and An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.)
Consider Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman. He was riding in the passenger seat of the presidential limousine when the first shot was fired at Kennedy. Kellerman’s duty as a Secret Service agent was to jump over the seat and cover Kennedy with his body. Instead, he sat there like a bump on a log, waiting for the fatal shot that hit Kennedy in the head.
Fifty-nine witnesses stated that the driver of the limousine, William Greer, made a complete stop or a near-stop after the first shot rang out, which obviously made it easier for the shooter to hit Kennedy in the head with the fatal shot. Yet, that stop or near-stop is not seen in the extant Zapruder film of the assassination.
As I detail in An Encounter with Evil, the official story has always been that the Zapruder film was shipped to Chicago on the Saturday after the Friday assassination, where LIFE magazine’s printing plant was located. This was after Dallas businessman Abraham Zapruder had sold the print rights to his film of the assassination to LIFE magazine.
In the late 2000s, that official narrative was burst asunder when one of the CIA’s most renowned photo intelligence analysts, Dino Brugioni, disclosed that two men who identified themselves as Secret Service agents secretly delivered the Zapruder film to him and his team at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington, D.C., on the Saturday night after the assassination on Friday. That meant that the film had secretly been diverted from Chicago to Washington. That would not have been difficult to do given that LIFE’s publisher, C.D. Jackson, was a CIA asset under the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird program.
Brugioni’s job was to make blow-ups of frames from the film that the two Secret Service agents selected and post them on “briefing boards.” As I detail in my book, when Brugioni was shown the extant Zapruder film in the late 2000s, he stated unequivocally that it was not the same film he had seen on that Saturday night.
On the following evening, a man who identified himself as a Secret Service agent delivered a 16mm copy of the Zapruder film to another NPIC team, stating that this copy was actually the original film that he had just brought from Hawkeyeworks, a top-secret CIA film facility located in the middle of Kodak’s research and development facility at its national headquarters in Rochester, New York.
How do we know that that that 16mm film was a copy and not the original? Because Zapruder’s film was an 8mm-wide film. There is no way to convert an 8mm film into a 16mm film except by making a copy of it.
Could they have produced a 16mm top-quality copy of an 8mm film at Hawkeyeworks? Brugiioni had visited Hawkeyeworks and had been told that they were capable of “doing anything” at that facility.
How would they have done that? As I detail in An Encounter with Evil, they would have done it with what was called an “aerial optical printer,” which could produce an altered copy that would come out looking like an original. Using that piece of equipment, they could produce an altered copy of the film that deleted all the frames that showed Secret Service agent Greer’s stop or near-stop of the limousine, which, again, had been seen by 59 eyewitnesses.
Since the CIA could view Zapruder’s 8mm film at NPIC, there was no reason whatsoever to secretly take the film to Hawkeyeworks except to produce an altered, fraudulent copy of the film. (While the CIA worked closely with Kodak film experts at Hawkeyeworks, no evidence has ever surfaced that Kodak had any role in helping to produce the altered copy of the Zapruder film.)
Returning to Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman, it’s worth mentioning that he was the agent in charge of the Secret Service team at Parkland Hospital that forcibly prevented the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, from conducting an autopsy on Kennedy’s body, as Texas law required. Brandishing guns and screaming, yelling, and issuing a stream of profanities, Kellerman and his team forced their way out of Parkland with JFK’s body and delivered it to new President Lyndon Johnson, who was patiently waiting for it in Air Force One at Dallas’s Love Field and who would later deliver JFK’s body into the hands of the military.
As I detail in The Kennedy Autopsy, the president’s body was secretly delivered to the Bethesda National Medical Center morgue at 6:35 p.m. in a cheap shipping casket, which was almost 1 and 1/2 hours before the official entry time of the body into the morgue in the heavy, ornate casket into which it had been placed in Dallas.
You’ll never guess who was in charge of the secret operation to get JFK’s body back into the Dallas casket after it had been secretly delivered to the Bethesda morgue at 6:35 pm in the cheap shipping casket. Yes, Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman, who obviously was a very busy man on November 22, 1963.
After the Assassination Records Review Board was brought into existence in 1992, the ARRB sent a notice to all federal agencies, including the Secret Service, specifically advising them that they were not to destroy any assassination-related records. With full knowledge of that directive, the Secret Service knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately destroyed its records of Kennedy’s trips in the month preceding the assassination. Those records were important in part because of an assassination plot in Chicago that was foiled, one that involved a “patsy” who was similar to Lee Harvey Oswald, a man named Thomas Vallee.
Given the manifest incompetence of the Secret Service with respect to the Trump shooting, at best, and given that elements of the Secret Service were criminally culpable in the Kennedy assassination, and given the Secret Service’s contemptible conduct with the ARRB, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., might today be wishing he had stuck with a private-sector security firm.
EU Commission Hid Vaccine Contract Details From Public, Court Rules
By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | July 17, 2024
The European Union‘s (EU) top court today ruled that the European Commission’s decision to heavily redact key portions of COVID-19 vaccine contracts with pharmaceutical companies during the pandemic violated the commission’s transparency obligations.
The European Court of Justice found that the commission failed to provide sufficient public access to COVID-19 vaccine purchase agreements, in a ruling that could deal a blow to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the eve of her re-election bid, according to The Associated Press (AP).
The ruling came in response to legal challenges brought by EU lawmakers and private citizens seeking fuller disclosure of the multibillion-euro vaccine deals.
It highlights ongoing concerns about the secrecy surrounding the EU’s vaccine procurement process, a contentious issue since the early days of the pandemic.
“The Commission did not give the public wide enough access to the contracts for the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines,” the court said in its judgment, pointing to several areas where the executive body fell short in being sufficiently transparent.
In response to the ruling, the commission wrote, “The Commission needed to strike a difficult balance between the right of the public, including MEPs [Members of the European Parliament], to information, and the legal requirements emanating from the COVID-19 contracts themselves, which could result in claims for damages at the cost of taxpayers’ money.”
Green MEP Tilly Metz, one of the deputies who submitted the original request, said, “This ruling is significant for the future, as the EU Commission is expected to undertake more joint procurements in areas like health and potentially defence,” Euractiv reported.
“The new European Commission will have to adapt their handling of access to documents requests to be in line with today’s ruling,” Metz said.
However, Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst told The Defender that the court ruling is not the victory it seems. She argued that the EU court has given the commission a “giant loophole” to keep parts of the contracts secret “to protect ‘business interests.’”
“It is not possible to both protect public health and full transparency and at the same time protect the business interests of the supplier,” Terhorst said. “We, the public, will not get the access to the information we need. The cat and mouse play continues.”
The commission, which has two months to appeal the decision, said it would “carefully study the Court’s judgments and their implications” and that it “reserves its legal options.”
Scale and speed of purchases unprecedented
In 2020 and 2021, von der Leyen negotiated purchase agreements for COVID-19 vaccines with several pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, according to the AP.
EU member states mandated the European Commission organize the joint procurement of vaccines and lead negotiations with manufacturers.
The scale and speed of these purchases were unprecedented. According to the court, approximately 2.7 billion euros ($2.95 billion) was quickly mobilized to place firm orders for more than 1 billion doses of vaccines. This joint procurement approach allowed for the rapid acquisition of vaccines for all 27 EU member states.
Initially, von der Leyen received praise for her leadership during the COVID-19 crisis, particularly for her role in securing collective vaccine access for EU citizens. However, the spotlight quickly shifted to concerns about the negotiations’ lack of transparency.
In 2021, several members of the European Parliament requested full details of the agreements. The commission, citing confidentiality reasons, agreed to provide only partial access to certain contracts and documents, which were placed online in redacted versions.
The commission also refused to disclose how much it paid for the billions of doses it secured.
Concerns over secret deals with Pfizer
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla twice in 2022 refused to testify before the European Parliament’s special committee on COVID-19. Bourla was expected to face tough questions about secretive vaccine deals and negotiations between Pfizer and the European Commission.
Of particular interest were text messages between Bourla and von der Leyen that preceded a multibillion-euro vaccine contract. In January 2023, The New York Times sued the European Commission over its failure to release the messages.
That suit followed a January 2022 inquiry by the EU ombudsman charging the commission with maladministration over its handling of a previous request for the messages.
In June, a Belgian court took up the issue of the secret negotiations between Bourla and von der Leyen, with a former lobbyist for the EU Parliament claiming “destruction of public documents” and alleging von der Leyen violated the commission’s code of conduct.
Commission officials argued the messages didn’t contain any important information and have thus far refused to provide them, according to the AP.
European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) in 2022 opened an investigation into the acquisition of COVID-19 vaccines in the EU during the pandemic. This investigation stems from a criminal complaint filed by an individual, with the governments of Hungary and Poland later joining the lawsuit, euronews reported. EPPO adjourned the case until December.
Implications for the European Commission and von der Leyen
The court’s ruling comes at a critical time for von der Leyen, just one day before the European Parliament is set to vote on her reappointment as commission president.
Von der Leyen had previously won backing from a majority of EU leaders in June. To secure her position, she now needs to garner support from at least 361 MEPs in the 720-seat European Parliament, WIONews reported.
This ruling presents a dilemma for the Greens, who initiated the legal challenge against the commission’s redactions. In recent days, von der Leyen has been courting the Greens to shore up support for her nomination ahead of the vote.
During a press conference in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Manon Aubry, a French MEP from the Left group, expressed strong concerns about the European Commission’s “lack of transparency.”
On the heels of the EU court ruling, German MEP Christine Anderson today said she would call for the removal of von der Leyen and the continuation of the criminal investigation of her actions.
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.
US claims Russia threatened by ‘democracy’
RT | July 16, 2024
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller has rejected Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s call for resolving the “root causes” of the Ukraine conflict, arguing that Moscow illegitimately fears a “functioning democracy” in Kiev.
Lavrov spoke at the UN Security Council in New York on Tuesday, describing Russia’s military action in Ukraine as the consequence of a security threat by the US and its allies.
“The problem with the formulation from the foreign minister is that there’s no one in Europe that is threatening Russia,” Miller said at a State Department press briefing. He insisted that there is no military threat to Russia by NATO and that no one has threatened to take Russian territory.
“What Russia seems to see as a threat is a democracy functioning on its borders. And that’s just not a legitimate view,” Miller added. “We reject that view.”
Miller did not specify which country he considered a functioning democracy. Multiple US officials and foreign policy pundits have described Ukraine that way in the past, especially following the 2014 US-backed coup in Kiev.
The new Ukrainian authorities, “midwifed” into place by US envoy Victoria Nuland, sicced nationalist militias to kill and intimidate dissidents in Odessa and Kharkov, while triggering a civil war by sending tanks to pacify Donetsk and Lugansk.
Since Russia intervened in February 2022, Vladimir Zelensky’s government has suspended all elections and banned most opposition parties, while taking control of all TV stations. Zelensky’s own term expired in May.
Last month, at the so-called “Peace for Ukraine” conference in Switzerland convened by Zelensky, Polish President Andrzej Duda called for dismembering Russia, describing the federation as a “prison of nations.”
“Russia remains the largest colonial empire in the world,” Duda argued, advocating for his neighbor to be “decolonized” among some 200 ethnic groups living there.
In late 2021, Moscow sent the US and NATO a comprehensive security proposal in line with existing international treaties. In February 2022, Washington and Brussels rejected it, ignoring what Russia described as its “red lines,” at which point Moscow said it would have no choice but to resort to “military and technical measures.”
Russia also considers Ukraine to be unlawfully occupying parts of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, all of which voted last September to join Russia. President Vladimir Putin has conditioned any ceasefire talks on Kiev’s withdrawal from the administrative borders of these regions and a legal commitment to never join NATO.
What? 3 police snipers were staged inside the building from which Crook took his shots.
By Meryl Nass | July 16, 2024
Consider JFK, RFK assassinations: there was a patsy and there were the real shooters. The Deep State does not rely on its patsy to do the job. It relies on at least 2 distance shooters or a point blank hit. Because it cannot afford to fail.
And yet it just did. Thanks to Providence. Look at the freefall the Democrats are now experiencing. Because the whole world knows who did this. After all the attacks during Trump’s earlier Presidency, the extraordinary lawfare attacks during his campaign, and now this attempted assassination, it does not take a rocket scientist to say Qui Bono (who benefits?).
And Biden, cool as another cuke, gives himself a pass over his inflammatory language 5 days before the hit: “I didn’t say crosshairs, I said bullseye!” in interview with Lester Holt.
I dredged up this interesting quote from February 2020:
Now for the claims about another shooter, etc.
The FBI may say the investigation is over and Matthew Crooks acted utterly alone, just another lone gunman, but everybody else seems to be ignoring the ailing law enforcement agency. CBS ran a live update yesterday headlined, “Three snipers were stationed inside building used in Trump assassination attempt.” In a story broken by the local Beaver County paper, we learned yesterday that three local Beaver County sharpshooters who should have been stationed on the building, were instead inside the building, and it gets worse.
Snipering usually works much better from an elevated position, and isn’t super effective from the ground. I’m not an expert, but it seems obvious.
Anyway, the cops spotted assassin Crooks, several times. Each time Crooks was acting incredibly sketchy and even once used a rangefinder. The Beaver County police stayed put, but called it in to the command post — all while Crooks continued prowling around on the ground. They knew exactly where he was —well before he took the shot— called it in more than once, and even took pictures of him, but still didn’t stop the shooting. CBS:
Whatever reason. Another unconfirmed wrinkle developed yesterday on social media, with no mention in any of the confirmed reporting. They could just be confused by the fog of war, but at least two witnesses interviewed by local reporters claimed there was a second shooter on the water tower.
Here is witness clip one. And here is witness clip two.
Here is a top-down map showing the potential shooting angles.
Who knows? It’s much too early to rule anything in or out. But even though the FBI is wrapping up its “thorough” research, multiple other investigations are already underway. You can expect this thing will get a lot of attention. For instance, in its article, the BBC reported that the House Oversight Committee has already confirmed Secret Service Directory Kimberly Cheatle to testify and requested all the rally records:
Finally, the New York Post interviewed a trained Canadian sniper who holds the current record for the longest kill. I was especially gratified that a professional, military-trained sniper agreed with C&C’s assessment: it seems unlikely unemployed drifter Crooks could possibly have planned and executed the sophisticated operation without some help, regardless of what the FBI says:
Cyberattacks: A New False Flag Frontier
BY KIT KLARENBERG | JULY 15, 2024
At the start of June, Admiral Robert Bauer, head of NATO’s military committee, announced that the military alliance had finalised plans to recognise state-backed cyberattacks on its members as a dedicated pretext for activating Article 5. Reportedly “a joint decision of all allies,” from now on, foreign hacking blitzes can be countered with a collective NATO response, up to and including military measures. Bauer’s disclosure passed the media by entirely – but this is a seismic development, heralding a modern, digital form of ‘false flag’.
Article 5, which provides for collective defence in the event a NATO member is attacked, was a core component of the military alliance’s founding treaty. While it has been invoked just once – by the US, in the wake of 9/11, to invade Afghanistan – there have been efforts to spark it before and since. Most recently, in November 2022, the government of Ukraine falsely declared a missile fired by Kiev that struck Poland, killing two people, was Russian in origin.
The purpose of this deceit was undoubtedly to embroil NATO formally and directly in the proxy war. Wise to the ruse, US officials harshly rebuked President Volodmoyr Zelensky publicly for the World War-threatening fraud. Such incidents amply underline Article 5’s susceptibility to abuse. Yet apparently, military alliance chiefs – and the bloc’s members – are keen to ever-expand its terms, well-beyond its initial remit. Adding cyberattacks to the roster of grounds for collective response is a long-standing objective.
In August 2019, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg authored a bombastic op-ed declaring the military alliance would “guard its cyber domain and invoke collective defence if required.” A “serious cyberattack” on one member state could be “treated as an attack against us all,” he wrote, triggering Article 5 in the process. Fast forward two years, and Keith Alexander, US National Security Agency director 2005 – 2014, called on the ‘Five Eyes’ global spying network to construct a global unified cyberattack “radar”:
“Imagine if we built a radar picture for cyber that covered not only what impacts Australia, but what impacts other countries, and we could share, in real time, threats that are hitting our countries… What we can do is share information and work together… Cyber is going to be hugely important for our future. It’s the one area where adversaries can attack Australia and the US without trying to cross the oceans… We have this anomaly: how are you gonna defend that which you can’t see?”
Alexander, who lied brazenly to the public about his agency’s spying capabilities – including while while testifying under oath to Congress – during his time as NSA chief, suggested this worldwide dragnet would contribute significantly to collective defence, in the obvious spirit of NATO’s Article 5. Given “proposals” for Orwellian, futuristic resources from Western politicians and military and intelligence officials almost invariably presage their real-world rollout, we can only assume in light of Bauer’s announcement such a “radar” is incoming.
‘Security Failures’
This interpretation is reinforced by Bauer observing how invoking Article 5 could only happen once it was confirmed a cyberattack was carried out by a state actor, not a private person or structure. “In that case, it would not be clear who to go to war with,” he added. It’s certainly a source of some relief that NATO is committed to securing clarity on “who to go to war with”, before launching a military “response” to a cyberattack.
However, these comments illuminate a very obvious, grave problem with adding cyberattacks to Article 5’s ambit. Identifying who or what is responsible for them to an absolute certainty is extremely difficult. This task is further complicated by a frequent lack of certainty over whether hackers operating from a particular state are doing so at the behest of authorities. For example, much has been made in Britain recently of Russian hacking group Qilin, which supposedly infiltrated NHS servers.
Mainstream media reports have universally framed Qilin as a malign instrument of the Kremlin, although whether Russian officials command the group, let alone even know of its existence, is far from clear. A representative iNews article refers to Qilin as “a syndicate made up of more than 100 groups…not believed to be under the direct control [emphasis added] of the Russian government.” Instead, Qilin is claimed to be “a useful tool of global disruption the Kremlin is happy to turn a blind eye to.”
Further muddying the picture, it has been confirmed that Western intelligence services can falsely attribute cyberattacks, with devastating effect. In 2017, CIA files published by WikiLeaks revealed how the Agency masks its hacking exploits, to make it appear another state actor was responsible. Dubbed ‘Marble Framework’, among other things the resource inserts foreign-language text into malware source codes to misdirect security analysts. The Framework can obfuscate in this manner via Arabic, Chinese, English, Farsi, Korean, and Russian.
Excerpt from leaked Marble Framework files
Moreover, CIA hackers employ crafty tricks and double bluffs to reinforce these bogus attributions, such as creating the appearance of attempts to conceal foreign-language text. Thus, forensic investigators are successfully conned into concluding even more strongly that the country framed by Langley is responsible. Unbelievably, this seismic disclosure prompted no Western journalist to reappraise the widely received narrative that Moscow’s GRU was responsible for the hack and leak of damaging Democratic National Committee emails in 2016.
That conclusion, universally reinforced by the Western media, was initially peddled by Matt Tait, a former GCHQ spy. He didn’t base his conclusions on anything technical, but “basic operational security failures” he detected on the part of the individual(s) who released the communications, including their computer username referencing the founder of the Soviet Union’s secret police, and “ham-fisted” attempts to pose as Romanian. Which is, of course, precisely how the CIA would cover its own tracks via Marble Framework.
‘Irrevocable Proof’
There has similarly been no mainstream discussion of why the Agency would seek to acquire and maintain this capability in the first place. Now that NATO considers cyberattacks an Article 5 matter, this question has never been a more urgent question, given the CIA’s extensive and deplorable history of false-flag operations to overthrow governments, and kickstart conflicts.
For example, in April 1953, the CIA and MI6 launched a welter of covert actions to undermine Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, in order to lay the foundations of his ouster. One key tactic in which the pair engaged was bombing mosques, and homes of prominent Muslim figures by operatives posing as members of Tehran’s Communist Party. A subsequent internal review of the coup noted that this incendiary activity mobilised Mullahs to take action against Mosaddegh.
These efforts were judged to have contributed to the “positive outcome” of the wider coup effort. Such a glowing appraisal of these false flag manoeuvres may have informed the dimensions of Operation Northwoods, a daring set of proposals under which the CIA would stage and commit acts of terrorism against US military and civilian targets. These could then be blamed on the government of Fidel Castro, precipitating all-out war with Cuba.
Potential false-flag actions outlined in extraordinary declassified documents include assassinating of Cuban immigrants on US soil, sinking boats ferrying Cuban refugees to Florida, shooting down US civilian airlines, blowing up US ships, and more. One specific element of Operation Northwoods is particularly relevant to consider in light of alleged state cyberattacks becoming Article 5 worthy. If the 1962 Mercury launch – the first US orbital spaceflight – went awry, Castro would be blamed by concocting:
“Irrevocable proof… the fault lies with the Communists… this to be accomplished by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans.”
While Northwoods was ultimately rejected by President John F. Kennedy, the US military and intelligence community continued constructing false-flag blueprints thereafter. In 1963, a Pentagon policy paper advocated making it appear that Cuba had attacked a member of the Organization of American States (OAS), justifying US retaliation:
“A contrived ‘Cuban’ attack on an OAS member could be set up, and the attacked state could be urged to take measures of self-defense and request assistance from the US and OAS.”
Langley’s cyberattack connivances have surely only grown more sophisticated, and more complex to unravel, in the years since Marble Framework was publicly exposed. Pinning blame on a foreign country for a cyberattack it didn’t actually commit is no doubt even easier and more effective today. Resultantly, a false flag tripwire for Beijing, Moscow, or any other Washington-mandated ‘enemy’ state to unwittingly and unwillingly stumble over, triggering the outbreak of global war, has now been forged by NATO.
AND JUST LIKE THAT, THE CLAIM VACCINES ARE THE WORLD’S BEST STUDIED PRODUCT DIES
The world’s leading vaccinologist, Dr. Stanley Plotkin, and company have just capitulated…
Injecting Freedom by Aaron Siri | July 10, 2024
Wow. After decades of Dr. Stanley Plotkin and his vaccinologist disciples insisting vaccines are the most well studied products on the planet, they just penned an article admitting precisely the opposite.
They just admitted vaccines are not properly studied—neither pre-licensure nor post-licensure. They admitted, for example, “prelicensure clinical trials have limited sample sizes [and] follow-up durations” and that “there are not resources earmarked for postauthorization safety studies.”
That is an incredible reversal. But let me provide context so nobody is fooled at what they are clearly up to:
For decades, the medical community insisted vaccines are the most thoroughly studied product ever; for example, Dr. Paul Offit said, “I think we should be proud of vaccines as arguably the safest, best tested things we put in our body.”
For decades, parents of vaccine injured children, vaccine injured adults, and other stakeholders contested these claims only to be shunned and attacked by the medical community and health agencies.
In 2018, I had the unprecedented opportunity to depose the architect of our vaccination program and the Godfather of Vaccinology, Dr. Plotkin, and lay bare the evidence that showed what these authors are now finally admitting about the utter lack of vaccine safety trials and studies. See https://thehighwire.com/ark-videos/the-deposition-of-stanley-plotkin/.
After this deposition is made public, Dr. Plotkin goes on a tirade, making demands that FDA add “missing information on safety and efficacy” in vaccine package inserts and that CDC exclude harms from its Vaccine Information Sheets, “lobbying the Gates Foundation to support pro-vaccine organizations,” working to have WHO list vaccine hesitancy as a global threat, lobbying AAP, IDSA and PIDS to “support training of witnesses” to support vaccine safety, etc. See https://icandecide.org/article/dr-stanley-plotkin-the-godfather-of-vaccines-reaction-to-being-questioned/.
The problem is, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because, at bottom, there are no proper safety studies. So, there is no safety data to add to the FDA package inserts, and hiding harms by removing them from CDC inserts doesn’t make them go away. Parents and other adults don’t simply stop believing what they have seen with their own eyes because CDC, WHO, the Gates Foundations, etc., won’t acknowledge them, or worse, they attack them.
That brings us to the present in which Plotkin and his disciples realize they can’t cast voodoo on the public. They can’t hide the truth. So, their only option is to try and co-opt the truth they have lied about for decades by now admitting that the studies to show vaccines are safe do not exist. But in making that admission, they conveniently fail to admit that for decades they lied, gaslit, defrauded (and I don’t use that word lightly) the public by claiming that vaccines are probably the most thoroughly safety tested products on the planet and that people should rest assured, no stone on vaccine safety was left unturned.
Thus, in their article just published, they pretend they never lied about vaccine safety. They pretend they are now just pointing out vaccine safety has never really been conducted, as if that was not known to them before.
Don’t be fooled. Their real agenda is plain, and it is not to study vaccine safety, but rather to confirm that which they already believe. This is crystal clear from the fact that, while their article admits the studies have not been done, they write in the same breath that serious vaccine harms are “rare.” But if the studies have not been done, how do they know that? The answer is, they don’t, and they don’t care to know the truth. Their goal is to protect the products they have spent their careers defending and worshipping and that have brought them fame and riches.
They also ignore the mountain of studies and data which already exist that clearly show serious vaccine harms. Just take a moment to review the large body of science around one of the adjuvants used in vaccines which multiple studies show can cause serious harm. See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38788092/.
Finally, just look at their proposed solution. After making the a priori conclusion that harms are “rare,” ignoring all the existing studies showing harm, these folk have the audacity to want to raid the federal vaccine injury compensation fund to presumably pay themselves and their compatriots hundreds of millions of dollars to conduct the studies that would, no doubt, seek to confirm their prior conclusion that vaccine harms are “rare,” while ignoring the studies that already show serious harm.
So, with that in mind, and sorry for the long wind-up, here are the things they admit in this article for maybe the very first time:
“[T]he widespread vaccine hesitancy observed during the Covid-19 pandemic suggests that the public is no longer satisfied with the traditional safety goal of simply detecting and quantifying the associated risks after a vaccine has been authorized for use.”
Comment: The parents of vaccine injured children, vaccine injured adults, and others were never “satisfied” with seeking to assess “risks after a vaccine has been authorized.”
“Postauthorization studies are needed to fully characterize the safety profile of a new vaccine, since prelicensure clinical trials have limited sample sizes, follow up durations, and population heterogeneity.”
Comment: Let me translate: the clinical trials relied upon to license childhood vaccines are useless with regard to safety since they virtually never have a placebo control, typically review safety for days or weeks after injection, and often have far too few participants to measure anything of value, just see www.icandecide.org/no-placebo; amazingly, I just had a dispute with a Plotkin disciple not long ago in which they were clearly still not ready to admit the above truth https://x.com/AaronSiriSG/status/1673483027618623489.
“It is critical to examine adverse events following immunization (AEFIs) that have not been detected in clinical trials, to ascertain whether they are causally or coincidentally related to vaccination.”
Comment: No shit and you have been claiming for decades this was being done!
“When they are caused by vaccines (vaccine adverse reactions), the risk attributable to vaccination and the biologic mechanism must be ascertained. That science becomes the basis for developing safer vaccines, if possible, and for determining contraindications to vaccination and the compensation that should be offered for AEFIs.”
Comment: Again, no shit, and you have also been claiming for decades this was being done!
“Currently in the United States, when the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommends a new routine vaccine, the only automatic statutory resource allocations that follow are for vaccine procurement by Vaccines for Children (VFC) and for the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). Although the ACIP acknowledges the need, there are currently no resources earmarked for postauthorization safety studies beyond annual appropriations, which must be approved by Congress each year.”
Comment: Again, no shit! But nice of you to finally admit it after decades of gaslighting.
“Progress in vaccine-safety science has understandably been slow — often depending on epidemiologic evidence that is delayed or is inadequate to support causal conclusions and on an understanding of biologic mechanisms that is incomplete — which has adversely affected vaccine acceptance.”
Comment: More gaslighting because had a proper clinical trial been conducted pre-licensure, we would know the safety before it is unleashed on babies and we wouldn’t need to rely on confounded-biased-conflicted-post-authorization “epidemiological” studies you now want to conduct which you make clear you only suggest because you want to avoid “public concern and consequent decreases in immunization coverage,” not because you actually care about safety.
“In 234 reviews of various vaccines and health outcomes conducted from 1991 to 2012, the IOM found inadequate evidence to prove or disprove causation in 179 (76%) of the relationships it explored, illustrating the need for more rigorous science.”
Comment: Again, no shit, and I would appreciate if you would please properly cite to the ICAN white paper from 2017 from which you have plainly lifted this point https://icandecide.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/VaccineSafety-Version-1.0-October-2-2017-1.pdf.
“Identifying the biologic mechanisms of adverse reactions — how and in whom they occur — is critical for developing safer vaccines, preventing adverse reactions by expanding contraindications, and equitably compensating vaccinees for true adverse reactions.”
Comment: Shameless to pretend you have not for decades ignored or attacked those calling for these studies while pretending a mountain of such studies showing the foregoing don’t already exist.
“[T]he budget for vaccine-safety monitoring at the CDC (which is responsible for the majority of U.S. federal efforts) has remained stagnant … at about $20 million per year” which they write is an “inadequate level of funding.”
Comment: Again, shameless to pretend parent groups have not been yelling about this issue for decades only to be ignored and attacked.
“The public [now] also wants public health authorities to mitigate and prevent rare but serious adverse events – which no longer seem rare when vaccines are given to millions or billions of people.”
Comment: They have always been given to millions or billions of people, and the studies showing the harms they cause are not rare and they already exist, but you don’t really care about that reality as vaccine safety is not really the goal.
If they are really interested in the truth about what injuries vaccines cause and the rate at which these injuries occur, then they should welcome convening a bipartisan panel which could first review all the very concerning studies and hard data that already exists on this topic (often by scientists not on pharma’s dole) and we could design additional studies together and have them run in the open so everybody has to live with the result.
(Among other reasons to demand the study be conducted in the open is that I have witnessed firsthand what happens when a study comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated children in large multi-million person datasets, using historical insurance data, showed vaccinated children had multiple times the rate of numerous chronic diseases – the study gets buried hence the need to do it in the open.)
Plotkin and company should welcome studies which can show vaccines have not contributed to the rise in chronic childhood disease (many of which are immune mediated diseases) from 12% of children in the early 1980s (when CDC recommended 7 routine childhood injections) to over 50% of children now (when CDC recommends over 90 routine childhood injections).
And I think they do welcome such studies if they can assure that the outcome would show vaccines do not cause these harms. Alas, the reality is that (as they know) studies showing vaccines contribute to this rise already exist. But their goal, in any event, is not to really study safety. Rather it is to prove their prior assumption that vaccines are safe and harms are “rare.” This approach is how they designed VAERS, V-SAFE, VSD, and every other “safety” system.
As is transparent from their article, the only reason they even pretend to care about vaccine safety is that they want to avoid reduction in vaccine uptake – not actually assure safety.
That all said, if they are really well-meaning, I would welcome collaborating. To be fair, I will email all four of them to request a meeting to review existing science and design studies mutually agreed upon. If they are really interested in vaccine safety, they should welcome that (I have no hard feelings despite their attacks on me and I hope they can rise above any hard feelings they have for the sake of protecting children). Most importantly, I’m willing to live with the results of those studies. Are they?
Australians in shock over former President of AMA Prof. Kerryn Phelps’ leaked audio on vaccine injuries
PharmaFiles by Aussie17 | July 9, 2024
Australians have been left in a state of shock after more leaked audio emerged from the censored 7News segment “After COVID,” which I wrote about here and here. This time, we have the full, alarming statements by former President of the Australian Medical Association, the largest professional body for doctors in Australia, Professor Kerryn Phelps, in response to host Michael Usher when he asked, “Is there anything to learn from people who’ve had side effects that both of you are describing in detail?”
In the recording, Phelps exposes the disturbing rise in mRNA vaccine side effects and the gross negligence by both the government and pharmaceutical companies in addressing these issues.
“I mean I’ve never seen so many young people having cardiac MRIs in my entire career. There are people who’ve had heart damage, myocarditis, they’ve had heart problems, gastrointestinal problems, dysautonomia.” – Professor Kerryn Phelps
The conversation, hosted by Michael Usher on “Spotlight,” is now available on YouTube. The official version, unfortunately, removed many “controversial” remarks that 7News doesn’t want the public to hear, exposing the shocking incompetence and indifference displayed by the authorities. This blatant censorship is nothing short of an insult to the public’s right to know the truth.
According to Phelps, this dismissive attitude points to an acute lack of medical curiosity and engagement when investigating adverse reactions. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) takes in reports—estimated at 144,000 adverse reactions and 22,000 serious adverse reactions(deaths, permanent disabilities, hospitalizations, miscarriages, and other life-threatening conditions.) — but this figure significantly underrepresents the actual problem, as Phelps said it is only “a drop in the ocean”.
Just to emphasize again, based on the population of Australia, which is approximately 25.7 million, the 144,000 adverse reaction reports represent approximately 0.56% of the population, equating to about 1 in every 179 people. When considering the 22,000 serious adverse reactions, this represents approximately 0.086% of the population, or about 1 in every 1,168 people. This is also roughly in line with Fraiman et al., who found at least 1 in 800 serious adverse reactions.
This is extremely high. For context, the 1976 swine flu vaccine recall in the United States was initiated after it was linked to Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological disorder. The vaccine was associated with approximately 1 case of Guillain-Barré syndrome per 100,000 vaccinations. This event led to the suspension of the vaccine program. The current figures for adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines far exceed the threshold that prompted the swine flu vaccine recall.
Furthermore, Phelps critiques the TGA’s management of adverse reactions. “The TGA never gets back to anybody. They compile this data but they don’t actually follow up. They don’t know how long these vaccine injuries have gone on for. They don’t go back to people and say, you know, ‘Are you still suffering? What’s happening with you now?'” she reveals.
For many Australians, this isn’t just a “conspiracy theory” anymore. Hearing these concerns from the former Australian Medical Association President, Professor Kerryn Phelps, makes it clear that this issue is real. It’s time for real action and support for those affected.
Pro-Israel Group Censoring Social Media Led by Former Israeli Intelligence Officers
By Lee Fang and Jack Poulson | July 11, 2024
CyberWell, an Israeli nonprofit with deep ties to the intelligence arm of an Israeli government propaganda effort, has been influential in shaping social media content since October 7. The group, which purports to be independent, has lobbied Meta, X, and TikTok to remove social media posts under the banner of fighting hate and antisemitism.
The group claimed a major victory regarding Meta’s decision on Tuesday to expand its definition of antisemitic hate speech to include many criticisms of “Zionists” – those who call for an independent state in the Middle East that privileges Jews over other ethnic groups. “CyberWell intends to leverage its technological tools and analysis efforts to ensure this policy is implemented efficiently and fully, and that Meta’s moderation tools are trained to effectively bar this content,” the organization claimed in a press release.
The success is the latest string of victories to shape permissible speech when it comes to Israel and its actions.
In January, CyberWell reported that it had pushed to censor accounts that disputed the false allegation that Hamas had slaughtered dozens of babies during the October 7th attack. Any accounts disputing claims around babies killed during the attack, CyberWell argued, are akin to “content denying or distorting the Holocaust.” President Joe Biden and leading Israeli figures have falsely claimed that Hamas beheaded or burned forty babies during the assault into Israel.
That claim has been widely debunked. Despite repeated false assertions to the contrary, only one baby was killed during the Hamas assault: a 10-month-old infant named Mila Cohen, who was killed at Kibbutz Be’eri. In more recent months, CyberWell has lobbied TikTok and Meta to censor social media posts with the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” claiming that the slogan constitutes hate speech.
CyberWell is one of many agenda-driven nonprofits now censoring social media discourse, including benign or true information, under the cover of fighting hate and misinformation. The pharmaceutical industry, for instance, funded a nonprofit that worked to censor tweets critical of pandemic-related policies. The U.S. government funds several think tanks that work to moderate social media content critical of NATO’s policies impacting Ukraine.
We briefly mentioned the organization in our recent exclusive on the rebirth of an Israeli government influence effort to counter critics in the United States. After ignoring our detailed request for comment by email, CyberWell recently contacted The Guardian, our publishing partner, and falsely claimed that we never contacted the group for comment.
CyberWell has not received “government funding whatsoever from any country,” wrote Stan Steinreich of Steinreich Communications in a statement to The Guardian, which included a request for a correction. “CyberWell’s leadership is neither affiliated with nor compensated by Voices for Israel,” he continued, in reference to the joint venture created by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs roughly eight years ago under the name Kela Shlomo before renaming to Concert in 2018 and adopting its current name in 2022. In response to Hamas’s October 7 attack, the organization formally rebooted to focus on winning the online war of narratives surrounding Israel’s ongoing invasion of Gaza, which has so far killed roughly 13,000 women and children.
But CyberWell’s attempts to portray itself as independent obscures its deep ties to Israeli intelligence officials and the government-backed influence operation we wrote about.
CyberWell, as we originally reported, maintains close ties to the Israeli government ministries involved in covert advocacy in the U.S. and to the Voices for Israel group now at the center of a sprawling influence campaign. Since reaching out for comment for our investigation, CyberWell has scrubbed the biographies of its executives and advisors, such as former Israeli military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin and a current spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces.
When CyberWell was reached for comment regarding why the biographies of its staff and advisors were removed, they stated: “Highlighting the danger of generating false and misleading information, we were forced to remove the ‘Our Team’ page for safety reasons. Following the publication of your story, our analysts were attacked and identified by name on X. Users shared your article and our employees’ names with a wider network and we became concerned for our staff’s safety.”
Despite CyberWell’s denial of ties to Voices of Israel, the organization’s 2022 annual report listed its Chief Financial Officer as Sagi Balasha, the first CEO of the organization now known as Voices of Israel. The list of CyberWell advisors in the report also included Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, who Israeli corporate records reveal to be a director of the research and intelligence arm of Voices, known as Keshet David, which is Hebrew for “David’s Rainbow.” Keshet David was initially headed by Yossi Kuperwasser, the former head of research in the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate, widely known as Aman, and an ex-director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs. Another advisor to CyberWell, Amos Yadlin, previously led Aman.
“Proud to support @CyberWell_org,” Mr. Lerner posted on X on Wednesday, in response to CyberWell’s celebration of Meta’s new policy on criticisms of Zionism.
Voices of Israel chairman Micah Avni explained the history of Keshet’s aliases in a December 2018 interview, including the previous name of Israel Cyber Shield and the official English name Innovative Collaboration Strategies. “Concert [Voices of Israel] funds Keshet David and we get all the information. That’s one leg of what we’re doing,” said Avni. But, unlike Voices, Keshet David Research and Information Ltd., its legal Israeli entity, maintains no directly attributed public website.
Peter Lerner, an Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson and advisor to CyberWell, as well as former head of international relations at the Israeli labor federation Histadrut, is listed as both a shareholder and director of Keshet David. (As reported by Calcalist, the Histadrut was apparently a customer of the online campaigning firm STOIC, which Haaretz reported to have beat out Voices of Israel for a contract with Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs to covertly influence U.S. lawmakers.)
Formed in 2021 under the name Global Antisemitism Research Center (Global ARC), CyberWell shared a $30,000 donation that year with Keshet David through a foundation run by the wife of CyberWell board member Adam Milstein, who co-founded the influential Israeli-American Council (IAC) in 2007 under the direction of Israel’s then-consul general in Los Angeles, Ehud Danoch, before pleading guilty to two felony counts of tax evasion. Keshet David received an earlier donation through IAC in 2016 under its previous name of Israel Cyber Shield, just as future CyberWell CFO Sagi Balasha transitioned from chief executive of IAC to chief executive of Voices.
The chief executive of Keshet David since 2018, former Israeli police officer Eran Vasker, disclosed on his LinkedIn profile that he has simultaneously led the private intelligence firm Argyle Consulting Group since April 2017. The head of CyberWell, Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, similarly noted in a January podcast interview and on LinkedIn that her immediate previous job was working at Argyle as head of business development circa January to October 2021, the same year as the joint donation to Keshet David and CyberWell. Tal-Or’s manager at the time was Argyle Chief Operating Officer Zohar Gorgel, who became a founding board member of CyberWell. Gorgel co-founded a solar power company in early 2021 with Arik Becker, a member of CyberWell’s audit committee who was, according to Becker’s LinkedIn profile, head of strategic operations at Argyle circa 2018 to 2020.
In other words, the chief executive of CyberWell and two of its board members previously worked at the same private intelligence spin-off from Voices of Israel, a director of the spin-off is an advisor to CyberWell, and the CEO of Voices became the CFO of CyberWell.
Israeli corporate records further show that CyberWell shares the same accountant as Keshet David and Voices of Israel, Yakov Pal (פאל יעקב) of Yakov Pal & Co. Certified Public Accountants. (CyberWell and Voices have also shared the same fiscal sponsor, Central Fund of Israel, which reportedly donated $700,000 to Voices in 2017.)
Letterhead of Yakov Pal CPA from the 2017 financial statements of Voices of Israel, then known as Kela Shlomo, as revealed by the Israeli independent investigative site The Seventh Eye.
A recently-deleted page on CyberWell’s website noted that it was founded as a result of Tal-Or’s time working in private intelligence at an unnamed firm (Argyle), as a result of “her then-manager and IDF intelligence veteran, Zohar Gorgel, [suggesting] that Tal-Or use her open-source expertise and deep understanding of social media” to combat online antisemitism.
Tal-Or’s biography in her podcast interview also noted that she had “provided analysis” to Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, the agency that founded Voices of Israel. CyberWell’s 2022 annual report further disclosed that the nonprofit partnered with Act-IL, a failed online propaganda effort partly run by IAC and closely affiliated with the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, noting that “CyberWell served as the data provider to Act-IL’s community for their end of year call to action on the state of online antisemitism.”
According to 2018 reporting from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Israel Cyber Shield (Keshet David) surveilled the prominent Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour as part of compiling a dossier for Act-IL.
CyberWell CEO Tal-Or Cohen and founding board member Zohar Gorgel did not respond to repeated questions regarding their previous positions at the private intelligence firm Argyle Consulting Group or on Argyle’s relationship to Keshet David. Instead, CyberWell blocked one of our accounts on X.
Argyle and Keshet David CEO Eran Vasker similarly did not respond to a request for comment through Argyle. Neither CyberWell nor Adam Milstein and his wife, Gila, responded to requests for comment on MERONA Leadership Foundation’s receipt of a joint donation for Keshet David and CyberWell.
***
CyberWell’s primary focus has been to pressure social media companies to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) redefinition of antisemitism, which has been described by one of its core contributors as designed to combat growing international human rights criticisms of Israel as an apartheid state, beginning with the United Nations’ 2001 Durban declaration. In reference to the now-defunct advocacy organization known as the Adopt IHRA Coalition, CyberWell’s 2022 annual report noted that “On the heels of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter,” CyberWell “served as the [Adopt IHRA Coalition] data provider, demonstrating our value through collecting, vetting, and leveraging a dataset of over 1,200 recent antisemitic Tweets.”
The IHRA definition has come under fire as an attempt to criminalize and suppress First Amendment-protected speech critical of Israel and its occupation of Palestine. Pro-Israel lobbyists have pushed to encode the IHRA definition into hate crime statutes and official speech codes for hundreds of institutions and have succeeded in advancing legislation on the state and federal level. The IHRA definition of antisemitism includes “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” If enacted, such a definition would mean that an American can call any government, including his own, racist, except for Israel.
CyberWell’s high-level influence on social media policy arose during a meeting of the Israeli legislature’s immigration committee on June 21 of last year, which included representatives of Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter.
Matthew Krieger, a representative of Twitter and Elon Musk at the hearing, bluntly refused to answer questions from the committee chairman about a report from the Israeli advocacy organization Fighting Online Antisemitism (FOA), which accused Twitter of only removing 14% of antisemitic content, in contrast to TikTok allegedly removing 100%. Immediately after, Facebook policy manager Yehuda Ben Yaakov noted his relationship with FOA, CyberWell, and Tal Or-Cohen, stating: “The activity of non-profit organizations in this context is important and non-profit organizations like FOA and CyberWell, just last week Tal-Or [Cohen] and I met and had the ability to exchange things.” “Tal-Or told us about a new way of linking the theory of Freemasons and the theory of anti-Semitism,” Ben Yaakov added.
During the same hearing, Ella Saban, an official in Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Absorption, noted that “We work with ADL [Anti-Defamation League], we work with civil society organizations, CyberWell and [FOA] are based here, we also have a good relationship with the social networks in Israel.”
Images from a pair of posts on X on June 17 and on June 25 by CyberWell.
“VICTORY: TikTok is the first social media platform to publicly recognize denial of sexual violence on October 7 as prohibited content,” CyberWell boasted on June 17 through a post on X, which further implied that the decision was a result of CyberWell’s status as a trusted partner of TikTok.
A subsequent post claimed that: “Thanks to CyberWell’s data, TikTok is leading the way in recognizing and actioning this new form of antisemitism, and we urge all other social media platforms to follow suit.”
The image coupled with the post praising TikTok accused X user @HadiNasrallah of “Encouraging Violence” and “Denying that well-documented violent events took place” for claiming that “Hamas did not rape anyone on October 7th and Israel killed their own people with tanks and helicopter shelling.”
The degree to which Hamas committed sexual violence during its attack, and the scale of Israeli usage of the so-called Hannibal Directive preference of killing its own troops and citizens rather than let them be taken hostage, are perhaps the central narrative battles surrounding October 7.
More than 50 tenured journalism professors signed a letter in April asking The New York Times to investigate the reporting process behind its flagship publication on alleged sexual violence on October 7, “Screams Without Words,” and the Associated Press argued the next month that two “debunked” allegations had created a fog over credible evidence presented by organizations such as the United Nations.
Following a late October article from the independent American news site The Grayzone, Times journalist Ronen Bergman reported in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth in January that the country’s military had invoked the Hannibal Directive, indeed firing on any vehicle approaching Gaza, including those that may have carried hostages. Haaretz provided further detail on Sunday, reporting the usage of the Hannibal Directive by the Gaza Division of the Israeli military’s Southern Command in three army facilities. The number of potential casualties remains a matter of ongoing controversy in Israeli papers.
Whether controversial debates relating to the Israeli military should be refereed by a de facto spin-out of a covert Israeli government intelligence effort is perhaps an easier question.
In a series of posts on the social media platform X crediting CyberWell with Meta’s recent decision to classify many criticisms of “Zionists” as hate speech, CyberWell board member Adam Milstein bragged that: “all content targeting Zionists with claims about running the world or controlling the media, plus more, WILL BE REMOVED!” “Will @elonmusk and @X follow suit?” Milstein then asked.
But Meta’s policy update on Tuesday noted that it has not yet decided on how to handle critical speech such as “Zionists are war criminals” and has forwarded the question to its oversight board. Meta argued that “the term ‘Zionists’ can be used to refer to people on the basis of their nationality (i.e., Israeli people), [and] commentary about ‘Zionists’ may also refer to government or military actions.” “We look forward to any guidance the [Oversight] Board may provide,” Meta added. “
Featured Video
Epidemic of fake videos
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Free Book
Vicious
Lies are Unbekoming | January 25, 2026
The waiting room is clean. The receptionist is polite. The forms ask reasonable questions. Nothing in the physical environment suggests danger. The magazines are current. The hand sanitizer dispenser works. Someone has chosen calming colors for the walls.
A pregnant woman sits in a chair designed for her comfort. She has been told to be here. Not ordered—no one orders. Recommended. Strongly recommended. Everyone does this. Her mother did this. Her friends did this. The women in her prenatal group compare notes about their appointments the way they compare notes about nursery furniture. Which provider did you choose? What tests have you had? The questions assume the answers. The answers assume the questions.
She will be offered things today. Offered is the word used. The offers will come with information sheets that list risks and benefits in tabular form. She will sign consent documents. Everything will be voluntary in the legal sense. No one will hold her down. No one will threaten her. She will choose, and her choices will feel like choices, and she will leave feeling she has done the responsible thing.
What she will not feel is the weight of what has been arranged before she arrived. … continue
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
loongtip on Vicious loongtip on EU turns to India for defense… Coronistan on Donald Trump Is No Peace … seversonebcfb985d9 on French court jails pro-Palesti… eddieb on Fourteen Incredible Facts Abou… Bill Francis on European leaders’ shift in the… seversonebcfb985d9 on Villains of Judea: Philip Esfo… loongtip on Report warns that ‘Jewish terr… Craig Nelms on New study shows that toxic gas… loongtip on A Funny Thing Happened on the… loongtip on EU free trade pact on hold as… John Edward Kendrick on Regime Change In Iran Is The F…
Aletho News- The Board For Peace – Whitewashing Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide
- Scientists accuse Cochrane Reviews of using biased studies to claim HPV vaccine prevents cancer
- Spain Opens Probe Into Israeli Tourism Firms
- Epidemic of fake videos
- Craig Murray, Reporting from Venezuela
- Why Israel’s Drive to Destroy Iran is Ultimately about Palestine
- Trump and Iran, War or Negotiations?
- US pressure contributing to Israeli influence in Latin America: Experts
- China Rejects U.S. Claims of Coercion in Central America
- New US defense strategy downgrades Russian ‘threat’
- If Americans Knew
- Greenpeace Demonstrator Exposes Folly of Protest Restrictions
- From CBS to TikTok, Pro-Israel Ellison is now in the driver’s seat
- Israel pays for UK advertisements attacking Doctors Without Borders
- Israel accused of extracting billions from Gazan people to pay for their own genocide
- ‘Deliberate Assassination’: 3 Journalists Among 11 Killed by Israeli Forces in Gaza
- In Gaza, We’re Struggling to Reintroduce Foods to Bodies Adjusted to Starvation
- Will Rafah crossing be opened at last? – Not a ceasefire Day 108
- Israeli drone strike kills two children collecting firewood in Gaza – Not a ceasefire Day 107
- Another Gaza baby freezes to death on Netanyahu’s watch – Not a ceasefire Day 106
- Oppose Israel’s Abuses While You Still Can
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study Affirms Rising CO2’s Greening Impact Across India – A Region With No Net Warming In 75 Years
- Germany’s Natural Gas Crisis Escalates … One Storage Site Near Empty …Government Silent
- Polar Colding…Antarctica Saw Its Coldest October In 44 Years!
- New Study: Sea Levels Rose 20 Times The Modern Rate During The Roman Warm Period
- As German Gas Storage Dips Dangerously Low…Shortage Hardly Avoidable
- New Study: Brazil’s Relative Sea Level Was 2+ Meters Higher And SSTs 3-4°C Warmer 6000 Years Ago
- Philosopher Schopenhauer: Climate Science Certainty Stems From Stupidity, Ignorance
- New Study: Species Extinction Rates Declining Since 1980 – ‘Climate Change Is Not An Important Threat’
- Denmark Places Climate Protection Above Animal Welfare, Poisoning And Culling Cows
- New Study: Greenland Was 3-7°C Warmer And Far Less Glaciated Than Today 6000-8000 Years Ago
Aletho News 