The Biden Administration’s Ukraine strategy is increasingly disconnected from political and military realities on the ground, Judge Andrew Napolitano told Sputnik’s New Rules podcast.
“Joe Biden cannot articulate what the goal of the American military involvement [in Ukraine] is,” Judge Andrew Napolitano, former New Jersey superior court judge and host of the Judging Freedom podcast, told Sputnik. “The neocons around him just love the concept of war, particularly war against Russia, particularly against Russia while Vladimir Putin is in office.”
Delusional Neocons Set Biden’s Ukraine Agenda
The US has been involved in the Ukraine conflict for 17 months and has already transferred over $68 billion. Nevertheless, Kiev cannot boast any considerable progress on the ground with their much-discussed counteroffensive having eventually stalled. As the conflict is continuing to drag on, Biden administration officials and the US president are still asserting to Kiev that Washington will support it “as long as it takes.”
“If you ask him, as long as it takes to do what he can’t answer the ‘To do what?’ As long as it takes to produce a stalemate? As long as it takes to produce a cease fire? As long as it takes, if you ask Victoria Nuland, to drive President Putin from office? I mean, they can’t answer that question,” Napolitano noted.
Can Trump Strike Ukraine Peace Deal?
The Ukraine conflict has been presented in the Western mainstream press as a way to bleed Russia dry and drain President Vladimir Putin’s “political standing with the Russian people,” the judge opined.
In February 2023, President Biden made a claim in front of a Polish crowd that suggested he wanted to see the Russian president deposed: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden stated. The White House later downplayed this rally cry as a gaffe.
Still, what Team Biden and their neocon allies “don’t understand is that President Putin is enormously popular, that he’s fighting a patriotic war for a return of land, for which there is a valid legal argument, it has always been a part of Russia, culturally a part of Russia, linguistically a part of Russia,” according to Napolitano.
“They think they can use Ukraine as a battering ram to drive President Putin from office. They’re crazy. It’s not going to work. Joe Biden does not have an off ramp. He doesn’t have the ability to say, okay, we’ve we’ve succeeded. It’s time for us to stop. There’s no goal and there’s no off ramp. His internal goal is to run for reelection as a wartime president like his hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in 1940. But this is not a war like World War Two. This is not a war that the American public perceives as a threat to American national security. All the politicians will argue that. But they’re so tied up with the military industrial complex that, you know, you have a majority in the Congress, Republicans and Democrats, that like all wars because it enriches the military industrial complex and keeps people working in the factories.”
What’s more, there is no American national security interest at stake in Ukraine, despite US neocons arguing to the contrary, according to the judge.
US war hawks are continuing to claim that Washington’s military aid to Kiev is a great investment since Russia is being bashed without American lives being lost. “The Russians are dying. The best money we’ve ever spent,” as US Senator Lindsey Graham said back in May. As long as no American body bags are coming home, the public is buying into this argument.
Still, it’s no longer a secret that a limited contingent of US servicemen has been operating on the ground in Ukraine. “We know the US military is there in Ukraine out of uniform. We know it is there in Poland, operating equipment that is shooting projectiles at Russian boys,” noted the judge. US mercenaries have also joined Ukrainian battalions on the battlefield.
And these Americans are dying in Ukraine: a sad statistic has already found its way out, indicating that dozens if not hundreds of US citizens have been killed in the conflict zone since February 2022.
Dissent is Brewing Within the US Military and Intel Community
Meanwhile, the US president and his administration are continuing to assert to the American public that Russia is losing and that Ukraine is going to prevail.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently insisted that Russia had “already lost” while speaking to an American broadcaster. However, this triumphalist stance is not unanimously shared by US Department of Defense officials and the US intelligence community. The so-called Pentagon leak – that caught the headlines in April – shed some light on what the US military and spies really think about the situation on the ground in Ukraine.
“There is a 21 year old young Massachusetts National Guardsman sitting in a federal jail cell as we speak, named Jack Teixeira, who is accused of leaking secret documents – to which he had access by virtue of his work in the National Guard – to a chat room,” said Napolitano.
“The documents, the authenticity and accuracy of which have never been challenged by the government, reveal the government’s own internal deliberations as showing it expects Ukraine to lose. To lose. So if the Department of Defense expects Ukraine to lose and the Secretary of Defense goes before a Senate committee and says under oath ‘Ukraine is going to win’, who are you going to believe? You’re going to believe their candid, unvarnished statements recorded in documents that they believed would forever remain secret.”
Prior to the scandalous leak, American army and intelligence veterans voiced their skepticism with regard to Biden’s Ukraine strategy in their podcasts or interviews with alternative media.
“On my podcast, Judging Freedom, where we have a number of ex-CIA and ex-military harshly critical of the current CIA and the current US government, who are, I believe, giving a far more accurate version of what’s happening there,” Napolitano pointed out, referring to former US Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter, retired US Army colonel and government official Douglas Macgregor, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson and ex-CIA officer Ray McGovern. All of them have stated loud and clear that “it is inconceivable that the Ukraine military can prevail,” the judge underscored.
On top of that, it has been almost impossible for the US and NATO military officials to ignore massive casualties sustained by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in terms of military equipment and manpower since the beginning of their counteroffensive.
As of mid-July, Ukraine had lost 26,000 servicemen, 21 aircraft, five helicopters, some 1,244 tanks and armored vehicles, including 17 Leopard tanks, five French AMX wheeled tanks, 914 units of special vehicles, two air defense systems, and 25 MLRS vehicles, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Thus, unsurprisingly, Western leaders in private conversations cast doubt on Kiev’s odds of winning at the recent Aspen Security Forum despite publicly trying to put a positive spin on Ukraine’s military efforts.
Why is the US Public Buying Into Biden’s Ukraine Narrative?
Meanwhile, the Western mainstream press has been busy spreading the one-sided Biden administration’s Ukraine narrative since the outset of the conflict. Judging from polls, most of the public in the West appear to have swallowed the bait.
“The American public still seems to be in favor of the war. Again, they only hear one side,” highlighted the judge.
“While the Biden administration, through the American Central Intelligence Agency and British MI6, has succeeded in taming the press,” continued Napolitano. “So the press and the American media, even my friends and former colleagues at Fox, are giving a version of these events which is not based in reality on the ground. The version of events that Americans are getting is that the so-called spring offensive, even though we’re now in the middle of the summer, is slow, methodical, but but a steady movement eastward by the Ukrainian forces, Whereas in reality, as you just pointed out, the Russian military has established three runs of defenses and the Ukrainians haven’t even approached, much less breached the first of those three rings. So the American public is not getting a true and accurate view of the so-called spring effect offensive from mainstream media.”
What’s making the West’s Ukraine narrative even less credible is that there are very few American journalists on the ground, according to the judge.
“The military won’t allow them there, Napolitano said. “The Ukrainians won’t allow them there. They don’t want the true story to be told. So the American public hears that same drumbeat over and over and over again, which you so nicely articulated. But in reality, it is not our war, it is not our fight. We shouldn’t be losing any blood and we shouldn’t be losing any money over it. And we are losing.”
In addition, most US presidential candidates from both sides of America’s political aisle are also promoting the US proxy war in Ukraine. Just two major candidates – Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – are against the conflict. “Everybody else is lockstep in favor of it for a variety of what I think are nonsensical reasons,” Sputnik’s interlocutor added.
However, over the past two weeks or so, a growing number of mainstream media outlets have started to release unflattering reports about the Ukraine situation on the front lines. They are even publishing interviews with Ukrainian soldiers where they talk about how this counteroffensive is not exactly going to plan. This could be a harbinger of some potential change, according to the judge, even though Team Biden is still wearing a brave face.
“It’s very telling that that is beginning to happen. So that would mean the president’s political advisers are taking polls saying the American public’s getting tired of this war. There doesn’t seem to be any progress. We need an off ramp. The off ramp is not going to come all at once. The off ramp is going to come gradually and slowly with the American public acclimated to the coming off ramp. If the Biden administration were to say, that’s it, we’re not involved anymore, well then everybody would say, what about the $68 billion already spent? Are we going to get that back. I mean, was it wasted? What was accomplished by it? So in order to prevent that kind of a blowback, they need this gradual acclimation to the likelihood of Russian success and Ukrainian defeat,” Napolitano concluded.
West African military chiefs met in the Nigerian capital of Abuja on Wednesday to discuss ECOWAS’ potential NATO-backed invasion of Niger, but they stressed that this scenario is supposedly only a “last resort”. Their rhetoric aside, the reality is that “West Africa Is Gearing Up For A Regional War” between NATO-backed ECOWAS and the informally Russian-backed de facto Burkinabe-Malian federation, which recently said that an invasion of Niger would be regarded as an act of war against them both.
None of Nigeria’s objective national interests are served by invading Niger. Rather, only NATO’s subjective interests would be advanced in that scenario, and particularly France’s. This Western European Great Power is struggling to retain its neocolonial influence in the countries that it used to rule. Niger’s patriotic military coup risks leading to France’s expulsion from its last regional bastion after Mali and Burkina Faso kicked its troops out of their countries.
Moreover, France is largely dependent on Nigerien uranium for fueling its nuclear power plants that generate the majority of its electricity. Taken together, this major NATO member has self-interested military, economic, and strategic reasons for tasking Nigeria with leading an ECOWAS invasion of that country aimed at reinstalling its ousted leader on the pretext of defending democracy. In pursuit of that goal, the Mainstream Media (MSM) is spinning the narrative that Nigeria would gain from this as well.
Voice of America, The Economist, and the Associated Press all recently claimed that Niger is now a global epicenter of terrorism, which isn’t true but is intended to mislead the public into thinking that Nigeria’s potentially impending invasion of that country is supposedly in the world’s interests. This information warfare narrative asks those who fall for it to assume that everyone has hitherto ignored this allegedly imminent threat to them all, which isn’t rational to imagine.
Additionally, some of those MSM outlets are also implying that peaceful pro-democracy protesters will suddenly become so radicalized by only a week of military rule that they’ll transform en masse into violent extremists, but this also doesn’t make any sense. Even so, these false claims are being repeated ad nauseum in an attempt to convince average people that there’s some degree of credence to them by dint of so many “experts” and officials warning about these dangers, though it’s all just a psy-op.
The public isn’t being properly informed of the Nigerien junta’s justification for seizing power. They declared that the prior regime was removed due to its failure to improve their country’s economic and security conditions. Additionally, not enough attention is being given to White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre words that “We have not seen indications of Russian or Wagner involvement” nor to National Security Council spokesman John Kirby’s confirmation of her assessment a few days later.
Instead, people are being made to think that some power-hungry military officials overthrew one of the Global South’s democratic icons with Russian support in order to spread terrorism across the world. This artificially manufactured impression misleads folks into thinking that Nigeria’s potentially impending invasion would be a service to the international community, but Al Jazeera and Politico suggested that newly inaugurated President Bola Tinubu has ulterior motives that have nothing to do with terrorism.
Reading between the lines of their skeptical pieces on this subject, it becomes apparent that he might do the West’s geopolitical bidding in his region in a desperate attempt to distract his compatriots from growing economic and political problems at home. As leading American officials have publicly confirmed, there’s no reason to suspect that Russia or Wagner were behind the Nigerien coup, plus its interim military government declared that it wants to ramp up its antiterrorist operations.
Although it’s everyone’s right to think whatever they want about the merits of this latest regime change, there are no plausible grounds for considering it a threat to Nigeria’s objective national interests. To the contrary, the aforesaid would arguably be advanced if the junta succeeds in improving the economic and security situation. That’s regrettably going to be very difficult, however, after Nigeria just cut off electricity to Niger in compliance with ECOWAS’ sanctions against its northern neighbor.
Only one in seven people there had access to this amenity before that happened, but now even fewer will enjoy its benefits since Nigeria used to provide a whopping 70% of Niger’s electricity. Making matters even worse for its people is Benin’s closure of the border. Niger used to depend on imports from the Atlantic port of Cotonou so now it’s basically cut off from most of the world. Reopening its borders with friendly neighbors won’t help much since those trade routes are threatened by terrorists.
Niger is already the world’s third poorest country but its people’s plight is expected to worsen even further due to that bloc’s sanctions, which could soon create a major socio-economic crisis with very serious humanitarian implications for the region. That cynically seems to be the point, however, since Nigeria might exploit large-scale refugee flows as the national security pretext for invading Niger even though ECOWAS’ crippling sanctions that Abuja itself is leading would be entirely responsible for this.
If Nigeria would have given the Nigerien junta a chance to make good on its promise to improve their country’s economic and security conditions, then it wouldn’t have anything to worry about, which reveals that Tinubu’s policies actually threaten his country’s objective national interests. He likely won’t relent on them though since his country’s Western-aligned military-political elite are intoxicated with the praise that the MSM is heaping on their country for doing that bloc’s bidding in Niger and won’t let him.
A self-fulfilling prophecy is therefore in the process of transpiring whereby Niger is indeed becoming a national security threat to Nigeria but solely due to the latter’s Western-dictated policies catalyzing a humanitarian crisis there that threatens to spill over its borders and prompt an invasion on that basis. Other pretexts will include the discredited anti-Russian and terrorist ones alongside the “rules-based order’s” mantra of defending democracy to complement the core humanitarian intervention claim.
The public should thus expect more fearmongering about all of the above ahead of ECOWAS’ ultimatum for installing the ousted Nigerien leader expiring this Sunday. Although the bloc’s military chiefs stressed that armed force will only be a “last resort”, the humanitarian crisis that their group’s policies are creating could soon lead to this being a fait accompli if a lot of people start flooding into Nigeria. The MSM will then likely spin this to claim that they’re “fleeing their Russian-backed and pro-terrorist junta”.
The narrative stage would therefore be set for justifying the NATO-backed Nigerian-led ECOWAS invasion of Niger on multiple pretexts connected with the “rules-based order’s” worldview, thus enabling the aggressors to reverse the roles of victim and villain to misrepresent themselves as “heroes”. This is nothing but a psy-op though since the only threats that could conceivably emanate from Niger are entirely due to foreign meddling in its internal affairs and would disappear if this interference stopped.
Apparently it wasn’t Abert Einstein who said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”. But we like to think it was, so it became a quotation attributed to him. How else to describe the West’s stalwart determination to impale itself further with the agony of the Ukraine war as we are led to believe that NATO and the U.S. are determined now to dig in for a long war. The belief is still upbeat, despite the huge anti-climax of Ukraine’s so-called “offensive” which didn’t even break through the Maginot Line which Russia has built along a 900-km fortified line.
The blinded dogma of NATO members at last month’s Vilnius Summit stems from being drunk on their own fake news which media dutifully pumps out each day from the propaganda factory in Kiev. There’s just so much of it, that it’s hardly surprising that Biden and his European lap dogs overconsume on it without looking at the hard facts. It isn’t simply that Ukraine “has run out of ammo” as Biden put it. It’s more than that. It’s that it has been proven over and over again that they don’t have the will, resources or rank ability to take on the Russian army and that sending more and more military hardware will only delay the inevitable loss. Or at least armistice which is bound to happen on an unofficial level at some point, if an official one can’t be signed.
Zelensky looked worried at the Vilnius conference. And it’s hardly surprising. Even when you look at the pledges made by western countries for military hardware, there’s no question that the speed of these deliveries and the actual quantity has radically dropped. So how can Ukraine or NATO believe that it can win the war, even in years to come? Fighting a war without ammunition is like baking bread without flour, after all.
The truth is that most western leaders already know that the time is up. They know that three key elections are going to play a huge role in putting the brakes on the campaign to continuously supply the Kiev cabal, who by some accounts, are buying 7 million euro villas in Cannes with the money which is being syphoned off. War is a racket after all and Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Should we be surprised that a government minister there has this kind of cash to blow on a wedding present for his offspring?
The three elections are of course the UK general election, The U.S. presidential elections and the European parliamentary elections. All three will take place at the end of 2024 and it will be the first time people will have a real opportunity to make a statement about the war and the abysmal hardship it is imposing on people in western countries. It’s as though Joe Biden knows also that it will be very hard for him to stand again as president when he has to explain why he has sent over 130 billion dollars of taxpayers’ money to a country that few Americans can even find on a map of the world.
Money matters. Finally, it matters. The argument on the American side that it doesn’t matter as it is being printed and given over to the industrial military complex has some validity, as this secures jobs and keeps these companies buoyant. But it’s public money. And so, rightfully, people will want to know why couldn’t the same money be spent on the very poor.
For the Europeans it’s very different. They pay a very high price for the Ukraine war and the folly of their governments who indulge themselves with the military aid like children gouging themselves on chocolate cake while the parents are away. Germany’s economy is flat broke. For the UK, homeowners are facing losing their house due to colossal mortgage rate hikes with an entire generation now unable to get on the housing ladder. How will these politicians explain this at the polls?
It really is about the money. NATO knows that it needs much more than just the miniscule offering of 2 % of GDP, which in reality only 11 NATO members adhere to. All western countries’ military stockpiles are depleted and so, not only do NATO and its members need to find trillions of dollars of new cash just to bring their stocks back up to what they were, but also trillions more for Ukraine. The numbers just don’t add up. Even on an EU level, Ursula von der Leyen, who is almost certainly going to be NATO secretary general, when her term as EU Commission president runs out in about a year, has her begging bowl out. She is hoping to raise 20 billion euros to be given to Ukraine over 4 years as military aid. For the Ukraine war, it is pretty meagre.
For the EU itself, there is no clear sign how she will get it when she is already asking member states to contribute 30 billion euros more to the budget to pay for another egregious scam of COVID vaccinations, which at one point she was being accused of having corrupt connections to, until colleagues managed to cover the scandal up. Europe not only has no cash or military kit left to offer Ukraine, it has serious financial problems to tackle of its own for its own elites to retain the power they wield. The only respite would have to be much more cash from the U.S. only which is probably not what Biden is planning on. The Europeans have paid too much. We are an empty Amazon warehouse with all the workers at the foodbank.
Biden: “Putin has already lost the war … Putin has a real problem: How does he move from here? What does he do?” Secretary Blinken repeats ad infinitum the same mantra: ‘Russia has lost’. So does the head of MI6, and Bill Burns, the head of CIA, opines, (replete with snide asides) at the Aspen Security Conference, that not only has Putin ‘lost’, but further, that Putin is failing to keep a hold on a fragmenting Russian state, entering upon a likely death-spiral disintegration.
What is going on? Some suggest a psychic disorder or groupthink has seized the White House Team, resulting in the formation of a pseudo-reality, severed from the world, but unobtrusively shaped around wider ideological ends.
The parroting of dubious narrative however, morphs for the informed world into seeming western delusion – the world as the ‘Team’ imagines it to be, or more to the point, would like it to be.
This tight parroting though is clearly no ‘coincidence’. A clutch of high officials speaking to script and in concert are not deluded. They are mounting a new narrative. The ‘Russia has lost’ mantra defines the mega-narrative that has been decided. It is the prelude to an intense ‘blame game’: Project Ukraine ‘is failing because the Ukrainians are not implementing the doctrines received from NATO trainers – yet despite this, the war has shown that Putin has ‘lost’ too: Russia too, is weakened’.
This is another exemplar of the current western fixation on the idea that ‘narratives win wars’, and that set-backs in the battle space are incidentals. What matters is to have a thread of unitary narrative articulated across the spectrum, asserting firmly that the Ukraine ‘episode’ now is closed and should be ‘book-ended’ by the demand that we all ‘move on’.
The gist of it is that ‘We’ control the narrative; us ‘winning’ and Russia losing, therefore, becomes inevitable. The flaw to this hubris is firstly that it puts the Administration ‘high priests’ at war with reality, and secondly, that the public long ago lost trust in mainstream media.
Jonathan Turley, a recognized legal scholar and Professor at Georgetown, who has written extensively in areas ranging from constitutional law to legal theory, draws attention to: “the last ditch effort of the members of Congress and the media to get the public to just ‘move on’ from the Biden corruption scandal”. The message, he writes, “is clear … Everybody needs to back off! … [However] as evidence and public interest increase, it is a bit late for spin or shiny objects”.
“This week, the scandal is likely to be even more serious for the Bidens and the country. The media is increasingly taking on the appearance of Leslie Nielsen in Naked Gun yelling that there is “nothing to see here” in front of a virtual apocalyptic scene of fire and destruction.”
What is the link to Ukraine? Well, a year ago, Professor Turley wrote that the political and media establishment would likely use a ‘scandal implosion’ approach to the corruption allegations as the evidence mounted. There would be an attempt to ‘cap off’ the scandal with Turley suggesting that the Justice Department would secure a ‘light plea’ by Hunter Biden on a couple of tax counts, with little or no jail time.
Well, that’s exactly what has occurred one year later. Then came the predicted ‘scandal implosion’: Hunter pleaded guilty to having delayed due tax payments – to a chorus of House members and the media shrugging off all other corruption allegations, and firmly declaring the scandal ‘closed’, together with the demand to “move on”. Turley notes however, “the media’s desire to “move on” from the scandal is reaching an almost frantic level, as millions in foreign payments and dozens of corporate shell companies are revealed – and incriminating emails are released”.
It is not clear that the stratagem will work. It is already in trouble.
The key elements to the ‘implosion stratagem’ are revealed as outright, unflinching denial that there is any ‘problem’ at all, and an obstinate refusal to concede even a scintilla to the notion of there being any type of failure. No need to look in the mirror.
This too was the modus operandi in respect to the Nordstream débacle (the destruction of the gas pipeline to Germany): Admit to nothing, and get the CIA to rustle up a ‘scandal implosion’ scenario. In this case, a nonsense diversionary story of a yacht with a few nefarious sub-aqua divers descending to 80-90 metres, without special equipment or using specialised gases, to lay and detonate explosive devices. No real investigation; ‘Nothing to see here’.
But as events in Germany indicate, the story is not believed; the coalition in Berlin is in deep trouble.
And now, the stratagem is being applied to Ukraine: The ‘Chorus’ cries out, ‘Putin has lost’, in spite of Ukraine messing up its chance to weaken Russia decisively. The hope is plain – that ‘Team Biden’ can steal away, undamaged, from devastating defeat, with ‘a scandal implosion’ mechanism already being primed (for after NATO’s summer ‘deadline’ to achieve a ‘win’):
‘We gave them everything – yet, the Ukrainians turned ‘their back’ on our expert advice for how to ‘win’ – and consequently have achieved nothing.
“Ukraine’s counter-offensive is failing to make progress because its army is not fully implementing training it has received from NATO, according to a leaked German intelligence assessment … Ukrainian soldiers trained by the West are showing “great learning success”; but they are let down by commanders who have not been through the [NATO] boot camps, it adds … the Ukrainian military favours promoting soldiers with combat experience, over those who have received NATO-standard instruction”.
Well, well? Like Afghanistan?
The war in Afghanistan was a sort of crucible, too. In very real terms, Afghanistan was turned into a testbed for every single innovation in NATO technocratic project management – with each innovation heralded as precursor to a game-changing future. Funds poured in; buildings were thrown up; and an army of globalised technocrats arrived to oversee the process. Big data, AI and the real-time utilization of ever expanding sets of technical surveillance and reconnaissance were to topple old ‘stodgy’ military doctrines. It was to be a showcase for technical managerialism. It presumed that a properly technical and scientific way of war clearly would prevail.
But technocracy as the only means of constructing a functional NATO-style military birthed instead, in Afghanistan, something thoroughly rotten – “data-driven defeat”, as one U.S. Afghan veteran described it, that it collapsed in a matter of days. In Ukraine, its forces were caught between Scylla and Charybdis: neither the armoured fist thrust taught by NATO to break the Russian defences, nor the alternative light infantry attacks were successful. Ukraine is suffering rather, a NATO-driven defeat.
Why then, opt to take reality ‘head-on’, with the snide insistence that Putin ‘has lost’? We do not, of course, know ‘the Team’s’ internal rationale. However, to open negotiations with Moscow in the hope of obtaining a ceasefire or a frozen conflict (to bolster the ‘Narrative’) would likely disclose a ‘Moscow’ as insistent only on Kiev’s full capitulation. And that would sit awkwardly with the ‘Putin losing story’.
Perhaps the calculus is to hope that between now and winter, public interest in Ukraine would have been so diverted by other events that the public might have ‘moved on’, and with blame clearly hung around the necks of Ukrainian Commanders showing “considerable deficiencies in leadership” which lead to “wrong and dangerous decisions” – by ignoring NATO-standard instruction.
Professor Turley concludes,
“None of this is going to work, of course. The public has lost trust in the media. Indeed, the “Let’s Go, Brandon” movement is as much a mocking of the media – as [it] is a targeting of Biden”. “Polls show that the public is not “moving on” [from the Hunter allegations] and now view this as a major scandal. A majority believes that Hunter has received special protection in the investigation. While the media can continue to suppress the evidence and allegations within their own echo-chambered platforms – truth like water has a way of finding a way out”.
In effect, ‘events’ are marching forward – with or without the media.
And here is the crux: To the degree that Turley estimates the Biden affair constitutes a putative ‘apocalyptic site of domestic U.S. destruction’, so the West faces a yet more strategic defeat segueing out from its Ukraine project – for that defeat encompasses not just that of the Ukrainian battle-ground – It has destroyed the myth of NATO omnipotence. It has upended the story of ‘magical’ western weaponry. It has burst the image of western competence.
The stakes were never higher. Yet did the ruling-class think this through when they so lightly embarked on this ill-fated Ukraine ‘project’? Did the possibility of ‘failure’ even enter to their consciousness?
On Friday the Mail website reported on the heart attack suffered by US basketball player Bronny James, aged 18, on court. According to two UK doctors cited by the Mail and described as ‘leading experts’, the suggestion that this might be the result of a vaccine injury is a conspiracy theory. The article concedes that deaths from heart disease are at record levels and that Covid vaccines cause heart damage, but stiffly maintains that connecting these two facts is an error. The BBC chimes in with an article claiming ‘there is no evidence to support the implication vaccines might be involved’.
The basis of these claims is the suggestion that vaccine-induced myocarditis is so rare that it could not possibly be causing the huge rate of excess deaths from heart disease which amounts, according to the British Heart Foundation, to a massive 30,000 extra UK deaths per year when compared to pre-pandemic levels.
At the same time as Bronny James was suffering a heart attack and its aftermath, Swiss scientists finalised a scientific paper for publication entitled Sex specific differences in myocardial injury incidence after COVID-19 mRNA-1273 booster vaccination. This is a landmark study because it is a gold standard prospective study with a rigorous schedule of tests rather than an incomplete retrospective assessment of past events.
A total of 777 health care workers with a median age of 37 were tested for myocardial damage three days after Moderna booster vaccination and compared with the same number of controls. Forty (1 in 20) had elevated troponin levels indicative of damage to cardiac cells. These subjects (65 per cent of them women) had follow-up tests and 22 (1 in 35) were judged to have vaccine-induced myocardial injury. This careful study proves that myocardial injury has been massively underreported. The Mail reports that the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) had previously estimated a rate of just one in 666. Wrong by a factor of 20.
By no stretch of the imagination can myocardial injury be judged to be ‘extremely rare’ as the Mail suggests. Nor according to this detailed discussion by Dr John Campbell is this level of risk something any of us would consider taking on unless we faced imminent death as an alternative, which we don’t. For another discussion see this informative substack article.
Fortunately the short-term effects among those in the Swiss study did not include severe outcomes, but another prospective study completed in 2022 in Thailand on 314 high school students did find such severe effects. It is well known that myocarditis has both short-term and long-term outcomes. The elevated rate of excess deaths from heart disease in the general population does point to the need to ask questions, and asking does not amount to a conspiracy. The dismissal of these claims suggests there is an attempt to cover up on the part of the same doctors who coerced us to take the jabs and told us they were effective and safe.
Other causal factors for the steep rise in excess deaths from heart disease suggested by the Mail include the rise in typical ambulance response times to cardiac incidents from 30 to 90 minutes. Another suggestion widely touted was a supposed failure to prescribe statins during the pandemic; this disappeared when it was shown that statin prescriptions have not decreased.
If you want to know just how convoluted denial of responsibility can become, read a translation of an article from Sweden where a 30-year-old man died after receiving a booster jab. The government paid his family financial compensation but listed the event as the result of a medicine given in error. A paper analysing post-mortem results following Covid vaccination underlines the intentional obfuscation of this kind of doublespeak.
Behind this posturing and denial of responsibility lies something much darker with more chilling implications for public health. It is not just heart attacks that are up to levels never seen before. Ditto cancers, kidney injury, neurological injury, strokes, miscarriages, menstrual irregularities, stillbirths, cognitive decline and, crucially, unexplained deaths.
These statistics point to the need for probing questions of a different type. Are the vaccines or indeed Covid infection, which the balance of evidence suggests came from a biotech lab, causing generalised immune instability? How long is this going to go on and how bad will it get?
Sometimes you have to face up to extreme challenges in your personal life. Our responses to these crises define who we are and what we can become. This can require admitting to ourselves and others that we got it all wrong. Apology and humility build character and support honesty.
Crises can also engulf the whole of society. The casual dismissal of questions about vaccine safety shows we have arrived at just such a societal crisis: a crisis of health and truth whose dimensions appear to dwarf anything civilisation has had to face in our lifetimes. The beginnings of this crisis are not yet certain, but the turning point came when decision-makers in the pharmaceutical industry at the start of the pandemic decided it would be safe to unleash biotechnology on the general public. We are just at the beginning of this era. The World Health Organization 2030 Agenda predicts that we will all be subject to hundreds of novel vaccines within the decade.
Before the pandemic, biotechnology medicine was well known to be unsafe and inherently mutagenic (having the ability to cause a permanent change in an organism’s genes). Crucially it wasn’t so much what we knew, but what we didn’t know that constituted the colossal error of judgement, hubris, cruelty and greed. A single cell, the origin of life, contains 100trillion atoms organised into 42million protein molecules and 20,000 genes. Scientists have only a vague picture of how cells work. They have no idea how cells produce consciousness or how they join together (37.2trillion of them) to form a single human identity with amazing autonomic functions and immunity. Scientists don’t understand how intra-cellular transport and selection is managed. They have only a hazy comprehension of the role of electric fields, molecular shape, vibrational modes, so-called dark areas of our genome and multi-gene cooperative functions. Their knowledge can be described as a crude notion put together from a few isolated facts derived from a countable number of experiments.
What we do know for certain is the immense precision involved and the vulnerability of cells to minute edits to their structure. Cells work very hard to protect this precision: each one completes over 70,000 self-repairs every day. With this in mind, it is perfectly plain that those working in the field of gene therapy knew from previous failures and disasters just how potentially dangerous Covid vaccines could be. Some did warn their superiors who not only ignored them but set about telling the general public that biotechnology was completely safe and near 100 per cent infallible. This was not only a big lie but the crime of the century.
The new generation of biotech medicines are squarely aimed at editing the internal operation of cells, the control system that keeps our physiology and our life flying safely. It shouldn’t be a surprise that handicapping the pilot might crash the plane. The only surprise is that millions of crashed planes worldwide are being ignored. We are living in a very different world from the one we thought we inhabited. I hope we are not so daft that we stop asking questions on the advice of those manifestly profiting from the pandemic.
After reporting earlier that there have been 100,000 extra UK deaths from heart disease alone, the Mail concludes by claiming without evidence that the number of vaccine-related deaths in Britain pales in comparison to the estimated 230,000 lives that Covid inoculation has supposedly saved, a figure widely disputed, impossible to prove and believed to be wildly inflated. Even so, 2/5 are not odds that I would accept if I had to put my life up as collateral – would you?
Once you have told one lie, it is very hard to avoid telling more lies which can eventually become a world of untruth that eats away at your conscience and peace. This has become the fate of society during the pandemic. No one is participating more enthusiastically than the Fourth Estate. Every day, the mainstream media are claiming that excess deaths, which are running into millions worldwide, are normal or non-existent and have nothing to do with the obvious culprit. Governments are looking the other way and piously washing their hands of the matter like Pontius Pilate, while medical authorities are busying themselves hiding the data and refusing to carry out tests and autopsies.
Articles like those I have cited in the Daily Mail and the BBC (and there are many of them published every day) are not just bad journalism: they are part of an insidious promotion of drugs that are known to harm people. The articles are intended to quiet the concern of people worldwide who are waking up to the vaccines’ terrible side effects and complete ineffectiveness. The purpose is the inflation of the profits of a trillion-dollar industry which has proved itself callous and criminal, unfit to dominate public health policy as it does through revolving doors between regulators and industry insiders and through obscene advertising expenditure and gifts to medical professionals.
How has television been used as a vehicle of propaganda? What psychological techniques are deployed in media manipulation? What is the future of media? Join James for this important edition of The Corbett Report podcast on the past, present and future of television, media and brainwashing.
Temperatures are sizzling across Europe this week amid an intense and prolonged period of heat. And it’s only just begun. Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Poland are all facing a major heatwave with air temperatures expected to climb to 48°C on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia – potentially the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Europe.”
The original ESA report continued, only later specifying that it was in fact referring to surface temperature (emphasis added):
The animation below uses data from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission’s radiometer instrument and shows the land surface temperature across Italy between 9 and 10 July. As the image clearly shows, in some cities the surface of the land exceeded 45°C, including Rome, Naples, Taranto and Foggia. Along the east slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily, many temperatures were recorded as over 50°C.”
Meant here were not the standard temperatures recorded at 2 meters above ground level that we always here in daily weather reports, which are much cooler, but rather those right at the ground surface. That crucial difference went totally unnoticed by media and journalists, who reported of new record high temperatures. By the time the ploy was exposed by careful readers, the news had already gone around the world.
Yesterday, the ESA issued a (vague) clarification explaining the difference between surface and air temperature at 2 meters above ground, yet continued to mislead:
Land surface temperature is how hot the ‘surface’ of Earth feels to the touch. Air temperature, given in our daily weather forecasts, is a measure of how hot the air is above the ground.”
The ESA did not bother to mention how the surface temperature is much hotter than the 2 meter air temperature.
“Most intense climate lie”
“What we experienced over the past days was most intense climate lie since temperature recording began,” reported Germany’s Achtung Reichelt on the implications of the ESA’s sloppy, manipulative press release and the media firestorm that ensued: “The problem with that report is that none of it is true.”
In Sicily the temperature reached only 32°C over the weekend – a far cry from 48°C, which illustrates the great difference between ground surface temperature and readings taken 2 meters above the ground.
Once the trickery was exposed, Spiegel quietly changed the wording in its July 14 report.
Nothing beats a good silly-season panic, it seems, but the latest handwringing about Summer heat is surely a step too far. Yes, it’s hot – “Southern Europe on fire” – but is this unusual when the jet stream is aligned as it is now, with hot Saharan air being pulled up from Africa? Judging by recent reporting, you’d be forgiven for thinking the end is nigh. There’s a climate emergency, didn’t you know?
Such scaremongering is of course a free pass, as usually no one really checks up on what actually takes place, but the catastrophic outcome can be milked to its full potential. “Drizzly day in Derby” never did sell any papers.
However, the fourth estate does have an obligation to present its viewers and readers with accurate information. This is where the story gets interesting – this is not just a case of eye-rolling pushback against apocalyptic hyperbole. Ranging from casual sloppy reporting to highly targeted attempts to influence the narrative, there is now a weight of evidence demonstrating the existence of a systemic bias towards catastrophising otherwise run-of-the-mill data.
Consider the following vignettes.
It is currently hot in Southern Europe. Earlier this month the European Space Agency (ESA) issued an attractively-coloured map as part of a press release forecasting air temperatures of 48°C in Sardinia and Sicily that would be “potentially the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Europe”. The quotable quote was suitably amplified by the media, only this time it was picked up by astute observers who pointed out that the ESA had conflated land temperatures with the much cooler air temperatures at the standard 2m measuring height (i.e. while you might be able to fry an egg on tarmac, the same egg suspended 2m on the ground will take much longer to become a culinary delight). The ESA subsequently issued a clarification, with corrections being issued by media organisations such as Der Spiegel which had picked up the original story.
A recent article in this publication also came to my attention. Walter Ellis wrote a piece about urban migration in Zaragoza in Spain. Fascinating though it was, he included some doom-laden forecasts regarding an ongoing summer drought: “It hasn’t rained here for months and the [official forecast] prognosis is for more – that is to say, less – to come… today, as a direct result of climate change, temperatures even in the more northerly regions, including Aragon, are at record highs”. Walter is just relaying official forecasts – hardly a mortal sin and you would hope official forecasts could be relied upon. But a slightly inconvenient truth is that these forecasters managed to get these (very short-term!) predictions completely wrong – the Iberian Peninsula was given an absolute drenching throughout May and June. Oops.
None of this would particularly matter if this idle chatter about the weather was just that; reporting on meteorological curiosities du jour. But quoting Twain: “A lie can travel halfway round the world and back again while the truth is putting on its boots”. And these weather untruths – whether they be honest mistakes, sloppy reporting or cynical ploys – tend to have one thing in common: they are seemingly always yoked to a great article of faith. That is, they are always indicative of a climate ‘emergency’, or at least ‘climate change’ (the old term ‘global warming’ seems to have temporarily gone out of fashion following various postponements of the previously imminent Armageddon).
Walter Ellis’s passing comment mentioned above lays the blame for an (incidentally totally incorrect) forecast of ongoing drought “directly on climate change”, begging the question about this direct causal link given that the prediction did not come to pass. The ESA is able to state that as “climate change takes grip, heatwaves such as this are likely to be more frequent and more severe, with far-reaching consequences”. A Met Office spokesman recently produced this cryptic quote in The Times : “As we get this climate warming, the extremes are becoming more extreme”, in an article worrying about a temporary warm spell in Greenland when the actual data shows that the snow mass was way above average at the height of summer. Even Reaction – if you can believe it – has managed to publish bold conjecture: “As temperatures continue to rise, heatwaves will become more severe. It’s crucial that governments worldwide take swift and decisive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions immediately… while we can slow down the rate of global warming, the effects of climate change will continue to be experienced in the future”.
These are not cherry picked examples – this climate Lysenkoism is given blanket coverage. The message is ubiquitous (albeit sometimes subliminal) and in starker terms can be summarised as: “hot weather is caused by climate change, and mankind has caused climate change by producing CO2. There is an existential emergency!”
This ‘consensus’ is so consensual that it seemingly needs to be rammed home at every opportunity – almost as if this message (rather than the planet) is fragile, a complex construct that needs protection from awkward questions or detailed analysis. Grand proclamations and joint public statements are made by very serious organisations declaring The Truth that the faithful shall adhere to. Data is continually adjusted such that the graphs have suitable hockey sticks, and academics behind the scenes really know what they are doing. Armies of sycophants can be trusted to hound those who merely report on the weather without anchoring it to a climate scare, and senior sympathisers within the BBC enforce ‘appropriate’ edits and encourage activists to “flag similar cases in the future so they can adapt the content accordingly”.
Or consider Quentin Letts. He was court-martialled to have committed a “serious” breach of BBC rules on impartiality after producing a light-hearted Radio 4 programme entitled “What’s the point of the Met Office?” The recording was so offensive that it was eviscerated from BBC Sounds, lest a member of the public should stumble on such heresy. Not only that, the BBC has claimed that Letts had ignored a pre-production agreement “never to touch on climate change” – Letts categorically denies that this was ever agreed, let alone discussed. And in academia, even if the occasional journal paper with the ‘wrong’ conclusions does slip through the peer-review process, publishers can be relied on to create murky procedural grounds for retraction, especially when newspapers like The Guardianapply a modicum of pressure and editors are made to “think of the implications of publishing”.
That is quite a statement. Scientific curiosity is sidelined by today’s regime, which is tough on thought crime and tough on the causes of thought crime. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”: do not, under any circumstance, ask questions about recent cold weather events and records – which have seemingly abounded of late. Did you know that the Antarctic has been particularly and persistently cold in recent years? That the snow pack in California has been at extraordinarily high levels, resulting in mind-blowing skiing and white-water rafting conditions? That China and much of Siberia experienced recordcold earlier in 2023? And that miserable and cold weather has persisted in Australia for many years now?
These are just anecdotes about the weather – our climate changes, after all. We should keep a weather (!) eye on this, as it was not that long ago that we were warned of an imminent ice age, and the earth’s magnetic field has been waning over the last century. Why don’t the BBC and The Guardian investigate and report on these fascinating phenomena rather than regale us with anecdotes about hot weather, as decreed by ‘Group Sustainability Directors’ who get to post-edit technical output within their organisations?
Perhaps, though, we should be grateful that the green lobby – this veritable hydra of loosely aligned eco-activists, shrieking media and sustainable energy salesmen – are there to protect ‘The Science’ from coming to harm at the hands of the scientific method.
Because surely – surely? – the public at large will eventually notice this pseudoscientific quackery and reject increasingly desperate attempts to apply cancel culture techniques to silence or ridicule heretics. Consider Dr John Clauser, the recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, who recently criticised the climate emergency narrative, calling it “a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people” and that “there is no climate crisis and that increasing CO2 concentrations will benefit the world”. People with such credentials should have their hypotheses examined — not shouted down.
How much more hot air will we have to put up with until a more reasoned debate ensues? It is clear to many that nihilistic climate alarmism is stopping us from investing in reliable energy and pursuing economic growth. If we continue down this Lysenkoist path, we risk deindustrialisation and pauperisation, which would spell an end to the quality of life that we have enjoyed in recent decades – and that our forebears could only dream of.
As Ukrainian forces continue their much-hyped counteroffensive to take back contested territories in the country’s eastern and southern regions, we’re faced with conflicting coverage of the campaign. Many reports say Ukraine’s forces are struggling to break through the minefields fortifying Russia’s lines. And many admit that even the sudden and dramatic Wagner Group mutiny did not appear to hand Ukraine much of an advantage on the front. Days ago, in a move that looks like damage control, Ukraine’s defense secretary even announced that Kyiv would no longer measure success in recaptured territory but would instead just aim to destroy as much Russian military infrastructure as possible.
Still, according to some Western journalists, this is all part of Ukraine’s plan. They’re just testing Russian resistance to find weak spots so they can better allocate resources during the next phase of the counteroffensive. And that’s when the big gains will take place. Maybe that’s true, but still, other coverage about Ukraine’s losses would have you think the counteroffensive has been a horrific disaster.
Much like the wider war, how you see this counteroffensive playing out depends almost entirely on where you get your news. That is not an accident. As citizens of the wealthiest country whose government controls the most military hardware in the world, it’s important to remember that all coverage of this war ought to be viewed with some baseline degree of skepticism. This is because numerous parties—in both governments and the media outlets themselves—are working hard to bend the American public’s perception of the war to their benefit.
That is, of course, nothing new. In 1941—the last time a European war threatened to go global—the British sent an intelligence officer named William Stephenson to the United States and tasked him with running an information operation to turn American public opinion away from noninterventionism.
The main approach Stephenson’s stories team used was secretly planting carefully crafted—and sometimes outright fake—stories in the biggest American newspapers and magazines. These stories were specifically designed to portray British forces as having more than enough courage to take on the Germans but lacking sufficient resources, regardless of how accurate that depiction was at any given time.
It was a specific tone that the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) believed had the best chance of convincing the American public to support joining the fight. Since then, every group that the American political establishment wants to support militarily gets presented to the American people in a similar fashion—from the Mujahideen to the Syrian Kurds to the current Ukrainian regime.
Though we may not know about the prevalence of covert information operations for some time, a pair of stories published last month offer a window into some more overt efforts to shape our perception of the war in Ukraine. First, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a Ukraine correspondent for the New York Times, wrote a viral story detailing how Ukrainian press officers and some Western journalists have tried to downplay, justify, or cover up the use of Nazi symbols by Ukrainian soldiers.
One specific passage tells of Western photojournalists asking their subjects to remove patches with Nazi emblems before taking photos. By doing so, these journalists crossed the line from documenting their subjects to staging them.
On the same day, former New York Times media columnist Ben Smith published an article reporting that many Western journalists have grown frustrated with how the Ukrainian government uses access and accreditation to shape war coverage. For example, the Ukrainian military threatened to revoke a photojournalist’s credentials after he took pictures of conscripted soldiers in a trench without the presence or permission of a military press officer.
In another example, an NBC News crew traveled to Crimea to interview residents about the war. After reporting that most people they talked to preferred that Crimea belonged to Russia, the Ukrainian government revoked NBC’s credentials and confined their in-country crew to a hotel.
Smith even brings up Thomas Gibbons-Neff from above, who had his access and credentials revoked after reporting on Ukraine’s use of banned cluster munitions. There’s no question that, at least to some extent, the continual threat of a loss of access affects everyone reporting over there in an official capacity.
This is not a new or unusual technique. The US government used similar tactics to help shape the narrative of its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most professional journalists struggle endlessly to find sources. So, by granting extensive access that can always be revoked, governments can run an effective carrot-and-stick ploy to control media coverage.
Our views of war are warped by design. Sure, the Russian regime is mounting a similar effort to control how the Russian people view the war, but it would be absurd to say that the Kremlin holds an influence over the American public that’s even comparable to the US or Ukrainian governments.
Despite what the media, the government, or your middle school civics teacher wants you to think, you don’t need to frantically keep up with the hourly developments in Eastern Europe to be a good citizen. But if you choose to follow this war, understand which parties have a hand in delivering whatever information you’re consuming because not everyone is trying to tell you the truth.
Connor O’Keeffe produces media and content at the Mises Institute. He has a masters in economics and a bachelors in geology.
In 2000, Mohammed Yousef Hamoud – one of the most wanted ‘terrorists’ in the United States – was arrested while living in Charlotte, North Carolina, based on allegations that he sent a $3,500 check to the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah, an allegation for which no actual evidence was presented.
Based on testimony from a single questionable witness, an American prosecutor accused Hamoud of leading a Hezbollah cell in Charlotte, and declared him to be one of the most dangerous ‘terrorists’ in the world.
The prosecutor, Ken Bell, who acknowledged that a successful prosecution of Hamoud would be the “case of a lifetime” for advancing his own career, successfully garnered a sentence of 155 years in prison for Hamoud. The jury voted to convict Hamoud amid the anti-Muslim bigotry and paranoia that swept through the United States following the September 11 attacks.
Years later, the sentence was reduced to 30 years, and Hamoud was finally released 3 years early and allowed to return to his family and friends in Lebanon.
Now 49, Hamoud was forced to spend more than half his life in prison without cause. But defying all odds, he obtained degrees in business management and psychology while also studying law to provide advice to his fellow inmates.
Below is an interview conducted by The Cradle with Mohammed Yousef Hamoud, after he was released from a US maximum security prison two months ago from serving a 27-year sentence on charges of providing “material support” to a terrorist organization. The interview took place at his brother’s home in the southern Lebanese town of Srebbine, originally Hamoud’s hometown.
The Cradle: As you were growing up in Lebanon, what were your political views?
Hamoud: Just like everyone growing up here, I was with the resistance and against occupation. I was pro-liberation and against poverty, and mainly the people with those views were Hezbollah, so I was supporting Hezbollah basically.
The Cradle: You said in a previous interview that you were the first Muslim to be convicted in the United States following the September 11 attacks. Do you feel this influenced the sentence that was issued against you?
Hamoud: Absolutely. I was the first Muslim after September 11 to go to trial. And I was the first Muslim in United States history to be tried under the law [passed in 1996] regarding providing material support [to a terrorist group]. Prior to me there was no blueprint on how to prosecute someone under that law. I was the first one, and the judge acknowledged those two things in his decision when he released me.
The Cradle: Of all the charges leveled against you, do you maintain your innocence against all of them?
Hamoud: No, actually. I did admit in court that from 1996 to 1998, I did sell cigarettes, and I did not pay the federal taxes during those years. And I did not fight those charges in court. I said am guilty of those, but as I said, the federal government acknowledged if it wasn’t for [the charges regarding] Hezbollah, I wouldn’t be there. The government was misinformed apparently, because [even though] the prosecutor had given a press conference announcing that he had arrested a Hezbollah cell in North Carolina, and I was its leader, years later, he did not find a single piece of evidence to show I sent money to Hezbollah.
But he wasn’t about to back off and lose his career because they spent millions of dollars [on prosecuting me]. So, they got this guy named Said Harb [to testify against me]. This guy had a lot of incentive to lie. He was facing decades of time in prison, and the government knew he was desperate to bring his family to the United States. He spent tens of thousands of dollars to bring his family and his dream was about to be fulfilled. So when they gave him that offer to testify against me, Said was the happiest person on earth, you know? So, he was granted his freedom, and he brought 12 members of his family to the United States using American taxpayers’ money.
The Cradle: Did you know Said Harb before he testified against you?
Hamoud: I did. He was one of the [Lebanese] guys who used to live in Charlotte, and from time to time, we used to meet and play soccer together, but he was not my good friend, which is how the government portrayed him. In fact, from 1999 to 2000, as he also admitted to the FBI, he said he was not associating with us. Said’s life went in a completely different direction than my life, and we barely saw each other. I was building my gas station and going to college, and he was doing whatever he was doing for his home, so from 1998 to 1999, we did not see each other much.
The Cradle: Do you feel that where you are from, and your religion, was a factor during your trial?
Hamoud: Definitely. At the time, most of the American people did not know the difference between Muslims. They did not know the difference between Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda. To them, my name is Mohammad, and I am from the Middle East [West Asia], so I’ve got to be a follower of Bin Laden.
And the prosecutor did a great job insinuating to the jury, although indirectly, that I was guilty. The way he structured security in the court, and the way he brought me from the jail to the court, no one could think of me as an innocent person. The government was spending millions of dollars in security. I was transported along with my brother in a motorcade, in an armored truck. The area around the court was like a battlefield. Marshalls [federal police] were everywhere.
To terrify the jury, they were taking them to a secret place, taking them secretly to the court, and giving them numbers. So, if you are a juror in the court, would you think that person is innocent if the government is doing all of this? They closed off downtown streets just because of my case. They put extra metal detectors in the courthouse just because of my case, just to scare and terrify the people and make them think that I was a really serious [dangerous] guy.
The Cradle: At one point you were considered one of the most wanted ‘terrorists’ in the United States.
Hamoud: Yes, that’s the way one of the magazines, Reader’s Digest, described me, as one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists. Before going through this ordeal, my impression of the American media was it was the most honest in the world. But I found out it’s fake, I mean some stuff they exaggerated so much just to portray me as a real terrorist who deserved to spend his entire life in prison.
The Cradle: While the media was writing this way about you, did they ever approach you and try to speak with you directly?
Hamoud: No, they were just reporting from the government’s perspective. The only one that approached me was Fox News, but the prison would not allow them to come. So my voice was never heard in the American media.
The Cradle: You said that the only piece of evidence they had against you was that you sent $1,300 to the office of Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, who is known as the spiritual mentor of Hezbollah. (Fadlallah was a spiritual mentor of millions of Shia around the world, not to Hezbollah members, who generally follow the guidance of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei). You say that money was for your family?
I did send that check in 1995, but at the time, it was not illegal to send money to Sayyed Fadlallah. But I was convicted for allegedly sending a check for $3,500 to Hezbollah in 1999. You would imagine a check in 1999 would be much easier to find. Because that guy who said I sent $3,500 to Hezbollah, he said I sent an official check. So here is the irony, why would they find a check in 1995 to Sayyid Fadlallah, but they would not find a $3,500 check in 1999? The answer is very simple, because that check did not exist. The government subpoenaed all my bank documents, all my credit cards, everything. They had thousands and thousands of documents and they could not find this check and yet I was convicted for that check.
Its very interesting what the judge in the 1st District appellate court said in that regard. He said Said Harb was the sole witness against me on that count, and Said Harb was described throughout the trial as a manipulator and a liar who would do anything for his own interest. Those are not my words, those are the words of Judge Gregory of the appellate court. Yes, I was given 155 years based on one person’s word. No evidence, no checks, nothing whatsoever.
The Cradle: So why do you think they targeted you?
Hamoud: That’s interesting. Look, I came from Lebanon during the war, and I never hid my feeling towards Hezbollah and the Islamic resistance in Lebanon. And as I mentioned earlier, I really did believe there was freedom in the United States. So I was more active in speaking about the resistance. I was born in Bourj al-Barajneh, and I grew up there, so all my friends and people I interacted with were from that area and were pro-resistance. But I spoke about it more than anyone else, and I ended up with those charges.
The Cradle: You were sentenced to 155 years in prison. When you heard that sentence, what went through your mind?
Hamoud: The first thing that came to my mind was my mother, because she really struggled so much and cried so much so that she could have me in a peaceful place [away from the war in Lebanon]. And now I was thinking, “Look what happened to me. I left the war, I left everything to live in peace, and now I’m going to spend the rest of my life in prison.” But God always gave me hope in my heart, and that kept me alive.
The Cradle: So, how old were you when you were sentenced?
Hamoud: I was arrested when I was 26, so I was sentenced when I was 28.
The Cradle: Today, you are 49, so you spent half of your life in prison. Where were you held?
Hamoud: I went through several prisons but spent most of the time at a prison called CMU (Communication Management Unit), which was built specifically for people who were convicted of things perceived as dealing with national security. CMU breaks basically every single rule that the United States claims to uphold. It has all the violations that no one would imagine a prison in the United States would have. There is no recreation yard. We were limited with phone calls, unlike other prisons that gave 500 minutes. We had only 2 calls a week. We had to preschedule them, and if for any reason the prison got locked down, we were not allowed to make them. Mainly there was nothing to do at that place except to sit down and wait for your time.
The Cradle: You are Shia Muslim, and they put you with Al-Qaeda members [who view the Shia as their enemies]. Did you ever protest this decision?
Hamoud: Of course. And that is the hypocrisy of the system. They would not put two rival gangs in the same prison, let alone in the same unit, because they know they’re going to harm each other. Yet they did not care about my safety, they did not care about my life. They put me with people who they know view killing Shia as permissible and sometimes as their duty. So, they [prison authorities] did not care. I protested that, I filed petitions complaining that they were putting my life in jeopardy with people that perceive me as an enemy. I was afraid if Hezbollah killed an ISIS leader, those people would retaliate and kill me. And what’s important too, one ISIS guy killed an older prisoner and tried to cut off his head. He tried to do what ISIS does on the TV, but the guards saw what was happening before he finished with the head and they took him.
The Cradle: How were you treated by prison authorities and the guards?
Hamoud: They claim they treat people the same and they don’t care about peoples’ charges, but in reality, of course, they are human, and they were told I was a terrorist, so they looked at me like a terrorist and some of them would try to not give me my rights. For example, I had a medical skin condition, and they did not treat me for three years, and so I feel I was tortured. I complained to officials all the way to Washington, and nobody cared.
The Cradle: How did the other prisoners treat you? Since you were being treated in the media as one of the world’s most dangerous men?
Hamoud: Well, thanks to the fabricated media in the United States, which portrayed me as a dangerous person that is well connected, that gave me respect from the prisoners because no one tried to mess with me, and they were scared of me. With the guards, it depended on the guards. Some of them gave me respect, knowing what my charges were, while some of them hated Muslims, and they would try to annoy me, feeling it was their duty.
The Cradle: You were released about two months ago. When did you find out you were going to be released?
Hamoud: When the judge granted a hearing after we filed for a compassionate release based on the disparity between my sentence and the sentences of defendants who had a similar situation to mine. I was optimistic that something good was going to come because usually, the judge always ruled against me, but for the judge to now grant me a hearing was something special, so I was waiting for it.
I was in the recreation yard working out when the case manager called me. When she told me I had to go to her office, I immediately knew I would get good news, and indeed it was. She told me to pack my stuff because I would be leaving. That was November 30, 2022. I then went to immigration detention for almost six months before finally coming home to Lebanon.
The Cradle: Do you think your release was politically motivated? Recently the US and Iran have been involved in nuclear talks and have discussed prisoner releases.
Hamoud: It has nothing to do with politics. The judge only reduced my sentence by three years because I have time for good conduct. It has nothing to do with politics, it was a judge’s opinion after all those years, he decided to do the right thing. If you look at the judge’s decision when he released me compared to the one he issued when he gave me 30 years, you would think he is speaking about two totally different people. When he ordered my release, he described me as a peaceful person, versus the last time I went to see him, he said I should spend more time in prison because I am still dangerous to US national security.
The Cradle: While you were in prison, were you approached with offers to reduce your sentence in exchange for something?
Hamoud: Before my trial, I was approached, but the prosecutor insisted I had to give him names of Hezbollah operatives in the United States. I told him I don’t know anyone. Either he did not believe me, or he did not want to believe me. My lawyer told me, “Look, he will never give you a settlement or a good plea deal unless you give him a name, because he wants to show the media that he got something.” I told my lawyer, “I left Lebanon when I was 18, do you really believe Hezbollah is going to trust me with information about the United States?” So, the prosecutor sent me a message through my attorney that if I don’t have anything for him, I will never see the streets again. And that was his word, and he tried hard to make that happen in the trial.
The Cradle: If today, someone you know tells you they want to emigrate to the United States, what would you tell them?
Hamoud: I would tell them, if you want to go there, don’t imagine you are living in freedom. Imagine yourself in a country that persecutes people. So, if you go there, just behave. Yes, you have the freedom to go with girls and party, but when it comes to politics and your religion, you’re going to be under surveillance just because of your belief, especially if you are Muslim.
The Cradle: During the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, how were you following it?
Hamoud: I was reading the newspaper and following events on CNN. Of course, it was a very hard time because all of my family live in Beirut, and Israel was bombing everywhere. So, I was in a very bad situation, trying to make phone calls, and the calls were very expensive, each minute cost a dollar, but I got through it.
The Cradle: What are your plans now?
Hamoud: I am working now on my memoir, which I’m almost finished with. Hopefully, I’ll be able to publish it soon in English. After that I’ll see, I haven’t decided what to do.
The Cradle: Are you with Hezbollah now?
Hamoud: I am still not a member of Hezbollah, but as I said, I do support Hezbollah. These are basically my people, you know. I would love to support Hezbollah with everything that I could because, as I said you know, I believe in their cause, I believe they are heroes. They liberated my country. If it wasn’t for them, we probably couldn’t have this interview because ISIS or Israel would be here [in Lebanon].
The Cradle: While you were in prison, how was your family? Did Hezbollah ever approach them since you were in jail for allegedly being connected to them?
Hamoud: As far as I know, Hezbollah declared from the first day that I was not a member, just like I did. When I first left Lebanon, Hezbollah did not know I was leaving. Because I felt embarrassed to leave Lebanon when people who were my age were going to support my country and defend my country. So I felt like I was betraying everything I believed in. But I was in a tough situation because, on the one hand, my mother was crying all the time and wanted me to be away from Lebanon, and on the other hand, I believed in my cause and that I should defend my country. In the end, I said I can go to the United States. I can support the poor and orphans, I can support my people instead of carrying arms.
The Cradle: So you believed you could support the cause by sending money home? Because this is common among emigrants.
Hamoud: I do not believe that Hezbollah needs my $100, because, according to the CIA, Hezbollah receives over $500 million dollars a year. So to me, I would just send it to my mom, and just tell her, to give it to people who are around you, who are poor or orphans, to anyone who needs it, but not to Hezbollah.
Finally, I would like to mention my attorney, because after all those years in prison, I saw two faces of the justice system. One face was presented by the prosecutor, Ken Bell, who did everything to make a name for himself at the expense of me and my family, despite claiming to be seeking justice, because, as a prosecutor, he’s supposed to seek justice, not just convictions. He didn’t care about everything he swore to uphold, he just cared about getting a conviction so he could destroy my life and make a name for himself.
And another face I saw presented in the United States justice system was of a person named Jim McLaughlin, who represented me through all those years and who helped me with everything I needed, and treated me very kindly. He volunteered to work on my case, and we keep in touch still. He is one of the great American people. So now, when I think about the United States, I like to think about Jim McLaughlin, not Ken Bell, the person who oppressed me and prosecuted me just because he could.
A US military veteran, who claimed battlefield victories as a combatant in Ukraine and gained fame through media interviews and Twitter posts by boasting about his exploits against Russian forces, has been exposed for lying to create a false image that he could take advantage of after the end of the conflict to become rich. This again demonstrates the unprofessionalism of Western media, which knowingly advanced the lies of a mercenary for propaganda reasons.
James Vasquez, who has amassed more than 400,000 followers on Twitter and is regularly quoted by CNN and the New York Times, has falsely claimed exploits on the Ukraine battlefield, Insider reported on July 16.
The portal, which cited allegations by four other foreign volunteers in Ukraine, also confirmed through the Pentagon that Vasquez lied about his military history when he claimed to have had combat deployments as a sergeant in the US Army in Iraq and Kuwait. It is revealed that he served as an electrical systems repairman in the US Army Reserve.
Vasquez’s social media posts often went viral, purportedly about his exploits on the front lines.
“In his videos and posts, he bragged about capturing Russians and taking out tanks, was regularly interviewed by the news media, and made catchy claims including that he imagined the ‘punchable’ Tucker Carlson when preparing for battle,” wrote the portal.
Other fighters told the media that Vasquez boasted he would become a millionaire when the conflict ended.
“James said, and I quote, ‘I’m never gonna go back to work as a handyman. I’m probably never gonna have to work again after this war. I’m gonna be famous,’” said Tim, an American man working with the Ukrainian army who spoke to Insider on the condition of withholding his last name.
Vasquez created his claims by going to areas where battles had recently occurred, filming videos of destroyed equipment and claiming achievements as his own, say other foreigners. In one case, he claimed on Twitter that he was heading to Soledar, where heavy fighting was allegedly occurring. However, Ukrainian forces had withdrawn from the area days earlier.
Accusations against Vasquez apparently began to surface earlier this year. Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, an American who works in the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces media department, said in a Twitter post in March that Vasquez could not have legally gone on combat missions because he did not have a contract with the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
“I met James Vasquez three times for a total of about four hours,” she told Insider. “During our last meeting, in the presence of another person, he gave himself up and confirmed what I had known since last summer, that he was never a member of the AFU. That night he stated clearly he never had a contract nor had he ever been paid. This was in January. It was the last time I saw him.”
Although Vasquez was often accused of being a fraud or a scammer who exploited the situation in Ukraine for personal gain or fame, one of the most serious accusations against him was that he endangered the safety of his fellow fighters for social media clout. In one instance, he posted a video on Twitter that showed him standing next to a sign that indicated the exact coordinates of the unit he was with, which could have exposed them to a Russian attack.
Ashton-Cirillo told Insider : “As someone who notified a large media outlet about James Vasquez in June of 2022 and stated to them clearly that Vasquez had no combat experience and was filming fake fight scenes, it is disgraceful that they and so many other journalists advanced his lies for so long.”
This is far from being the only example of propaganda deployed by Western media in relation to Ukraine, and Ashton-Cirillo is fully aware of this fact considering her own position. In fact, she engages in such propaganda. Rather, her main concern was that Vasquez became too obvious in his propaganda stunts, and she knew it was only a matter of time until it all is exposed.
For her part, April Huggett, a Canadian volunteer who knew Vasquez, told Insider in a text message that he would exaggerate how close he was to the heavy fighting.
“I did realise very quickly he was sitting comfy right in Maidan and he was not leaving Kiev very often,” she said. “He also drank so much.”
“James just kept talking about becoming a millionaire after this,” Huggett continued.
“I’m tired, but I’m not sorry I exposed the lying scammer. […] We took away his fame and fortune, we made people see him for the disgrace he is,” she added.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
The Daily Mail sensationally claimed on Sunday that Wagner is plotting to invade the Suwalki Corridor from Belarus, after which this narrative virally spread across the global information ecosystem to take on a life of its own. There’s no truth to this allegation, however, since it’s solely the editorial spin that this British tabloid put on the words of a leading Russian parliamentarian. The present piece will debunk this fake news about Russia’s intentions prior to analyzing the importance of what was really said.
Chairman of the Duma’s Defense Committee Andrey Kartapolov inadvertently set this scandal into motion after recently saying the following on a top domestic political talk show:
“It is clear that Wagner [mercenary army] went to Belarus to train the Belarusian armed forces… [But] not only, and not so much. There is such a place as the Suwalki Corridor. Should anything happen, we need this Suwalki Corridor very much… A strike force [based on Wagner forces in Belarus] is ready to take this corridor in a matter of hours.”
As can be seen beyond any credible doubt, Kartapolov was only talking about a hypothetical scenario and not conveying his country’s forthcoming intentions like the Daily Mail falsely alleged in their piece.
They spun his words for clickbait, but this also served to fearmonger about Russia, Wagner, and Belarus, which advances the West’s narrative interests in the New Cold War. That trifecta is smeared as the new “Axis of Evil” by the media, with average Westerners now being misled by the Daily Mail into thinking that President Putin might be about to spark the apocalypse if he isn’t stopped. Accordingly, those who fall for this fake news might therefore be in favor of NATO accelerating its buildup in the east.
The above insight should show the Alt-Media Community how irresponsible it is to spew conspiracy theories about Wagner’s presence in Belarus since claiming that there’s some “5D chess master plan” involved unwittingly fuels Western fearmongering about Russia that hastens NATO’s containment plans. In reality, the group’s role in that neighboring country will be limited to improving its defenses in the face of Western Hybrid War threats such as another coup attempt and/or Belgorod-like proxy incursions.
No foreign offensive actions are planned, but that doesn’t mean that Kartapolov’s words aren’t important to pay attention to. Reading between the lines, he cleverly conveyed several points that observers would do well to reflect on. First, he discredited the conspiracy theories about why Wagner was sent to Belarus by reaffirming that they’ll only focus on training that host country’s armed forces, which protects Russia’s integrity by counteracting false claims about its supposedly aggressive intentions.
The second point is that he indirectly reminded everyone of Wagner’s battlefield finesse by talking about a hypothetical scenario where they might be ordered to go on the offensive. This reinforces their hard-earned reputation as being among the most formidable forces that Russia has fielded since World War II, which directly leads to the third point about how they might be ordered to secure this geostrategic corridor in the event that NATO-Russianproxywar in Ukraine turns into a larger conflict.
What’s so significant about the last-mentioned point is the suggestion that Wagner still takes commands from the Kremlin, thus segueing into the fourth point regarding the outcome of President Putin’s meeting with its leaders in the days after their chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed coup attempt. There was nothing conspiratorial about this as explained in detail here since it simply concerned the Russian leader requesting their feedback about how best to restructure the group while still retaining its efficiency.
And finally, the last point to be discerned by reading between the lines of Kartapolov’s words is that Wagner remains a bastion of Russian patriots in spite of some members previously being misled by their chief into committing treason. After all, if there were any lingering doubts about their reliability, then he’d never suggest that they’d be ordered to secure the Suwalki Corridor in the worst-case scenario of a direct hot conflict with NATO. This shows that the Kremlin and Wagner have truly reconciled.
To summarize the importance of this scandal, it’s worth paying much more attention to what Kartapolov actually said than what the Daily Mail sensationally claimed for clickbait. Although the West is exploiting the latter’s fake news for information warfare purposes, astute observers who read between the lines of this official’s words will learn a lot about what’s really going on behind the scenes in Russia nowadays, namely that Wagner has returned to its role in defending that country’s national security interests.
Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, head of the Shirat Moshe yeshiva (religious school) in the occupied city of Jaffa, called on the Israeli army to kill everyone in Gaza, including babies.
During a conference on 8 March, Mali said that “according to the halachic principle (a religious-ethical system of legal reasoning in Judaism), all residents of Gaza must be killed.”
When asked during the conference if babies should be killed as well, he said: “The same thing. You can’t be clever with the Torah. Today he’s a baby, tomorrow he’s a fighter. There are no questions here. Today’s terrorists were previously 8-year-old children.”
“Those who create the terrorists” should also be killed, he said in reference to women in Gaza.
The Rabbi went on to explain that Israel’s war on Gaza is a “Mitzvah war,” which is defined as a war of “commandment” in Jewish tradition. According to Jewish law, this kind of war does not require permission from a “Sanhedrin,” also known as a council or assembly, such as the war against Amalek – previously declared in a biblical reference by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the start of the war on Gaza.
“There is a difference between a civilian population in other places and a civilian population in Gaza. In Gaza, according to estimates, 95 to 98 percent want us destroyed.”
“Since this is a sensitive issue, and I was told that it is being uploaded on the Internet, I want to be ahead of the curve and say that the bottom line is that you have to do exactly what is said in the IDF’s order,” Mali added.
The rabbi’s students in the Shirat Moshe yeshiva serve in the Israeli army. The Yeshiva is sponsored by the Israeli government. … Full article
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