I Don’t Always Believe CIA Narratives. But When I Do, I Believe Them About China.
By Caitlin Johnstone | July 22, 2020
My social media notifications have been lighting up the last few days with virulent Chinagaters sharing a video which purports to show Uighur Muslims being loaded onto a train to be taken to concentration camps. It’s actually an old video that had already surfaced last year, but it is magically making the rounds again as a new and shocking revelation in 2020 now that western China hysteria has been officially kicked into high gear, at exactly the same time the US enacts one of the most dangerous and incendiary escalations of recent years in the South China Sea.
Everyone tagging me in this video presents it as a self-evident “gotcha” moment, in exactly the same way Russiagaters spent years tagging me in every HUGE BOMBSHELL WALLS ARE CLOSING IN item of thinly sourced narrative fluff in their debunked conspiracy theory that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government.
They are one hundred percent certain that the video shows Uighurs being loaded onto a train to go to a concentration camp, solely because that is what the bit of text over the video tells them that that’s what they are seeing. They aren’t looking at the actual data and thinking critically about it, they’re looking at the narrative and believing it on blind faith. Which, in a post-Iraq invasion world, is an absolutely insane thing to do when presented with information about a nation that is targeted by the US-centralized empire.
In reality there’s nothing in the video which tells us that these are Uighur people being sent to a “re-education camp” and not merely a conventional prison transfer of convicted criminals, the likes of which take place in the far more populous US prison system all the time. It’s an unknown. We are told by the BBC’s Andrew Marr (the same Andrew Marr whose phony journalism Noam Chomsky derided years ago) that it has been “authenticated by western intelligence agencies and by Australian experts”, which in practice are the same thing, and that’s really the extent of the evidence. Again, this is an insane source to take on faith in a post-Iraq invasion world.
There are in fact an abundance of reasons to be highly skeptical of the establishment narrative about what is happening to Uighurs in Xinjiang. But that isn’t the point that I am trying to make here.
The point I am trying to make here is that the only sane response to any narrative that is being promoted by western intelligence agencies and their media stenographers about governments which have resisted absorption into the imperial blob is intense and unrelenting skepticism. These organizations have such an extensive and well-known history of lying about exactly this sort of thing that they have left us no choice but to withhold belief from anything they say absent a mountain of independently verifiable evidence if we want to have a fact-based relationship with reality.
None of this means that China has a wonderful government. It doesn’t even mean that all the bad things we’re being told about what the Chinese government is doing are false. It’s entirely possible that that video shows exactly what we’re being urgently told to believe it shows. There’s simply no way to be sure one way or the other in an information ecosystem that is so severely tainted by propagandistic narrative manipulation.
Surely the Chinese government is far from sinless. It seems to be a constant that power structures which keep secrets and use propaganda will always wind up doing ugly things. But this doesn’t mean you go believing whatever cold war-facilitating story we are fed by western power structures about it. Not if we want to avoid being duped into serving as pro bono CIA propagandists, unwitting tools of a murderous war machine.
There is a slow-motion third world war underway between the US-centralized power alliance and the nations like China which have resisted being absorbed into it, and that war is being largely facilitated by propaganda. If one doesn’t wish to become a propagandist themselves, one ought to withhold belief from the stories they are told about the terrible, awful things the unabsorbed nations are doing which require extensive sanctions, subversion and interventionism in response.
This doesn’t mean you believe the opposite of what you’re told, it simply means you refrain from believing either way and remain agnostic until presented with hard verifiable proof. Believing damaging narratives about US-targeted governments is exactly as stupid as believing the words of a known compulsive liar about someone you know he hates.
China is such a curious anomaly in the narrative matrix. Many who are normally skeptical of claims by western governments immediately swallow anything they’re told about China. They not only believe all such claims, it never even occurs to them to seriously question them. Like they seem to be genuinely unaware that skepticism of establishment China narratives is even an option. The claims just slide right into the “believe” file in their mind, completely unchecked by anything resembling critical thought.
I argue with people all over the political spectrum about China online, and an astonishing percentage of them have clearly put exactly zero research into critically examining these claims, even if they’re people who are normally relatively critical of western foreign policy. They’re often completely unaware that whatever claims they’re advancing are not just disputed but have large amounts of evidence against them. This is because they’ve done no research whatsoever into finding out what they were told is even true. They’ll do that research on Iran, they’ll do it about Russia, they’ll do it about Syria, but with China all skepticism immediately goes right now the window. It’s the weirdest thing.
Always be intensely skeptical of claims made about governments targeted by the known liars who run the US-centralized empire. Always, always, always, always. If you advance imperialist propaganda, then you are just as culpable for the bloodshed and suffering they help facilitate as the people who are actually launching the missiles.
Stay skeptical, my friends.
‘Russia Report’: Once-mighty British intelligence has been reduced to regurgitating sensationalist Buzzfeed stories
By Paul Robinson | RT | July 22, 2020
The ‘Russia Report’ gives us an insight into the dearth of genuine expertise available to British officials on Russia. It also introduces a new style of investigation: Seeking evidence to support predetermined judgements
On Tuesday, the British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee issued a 50-page report detailing its views on the danger Russia poses to British security. “The security threat posed by Russia,” the report says, “appears fundamentally nihilistic… It is clear that Russia poses a significant threat to the UK on a number of fronts – from espionage to interference in democratic processes, and to serious crime.”
The report further argues that the British intelligence community “took their eyes off the ball” and the government “badly underestimated the Russian threat.” In particular, the government and its intelligence agencies failed to investigate claims that the Russian state had interfered in the 2016 Brexit referendum. The government, however, has rejected the committee’s demand that such an investigation now take place.
The reports’ claims are alarming at first glance. When examined, however, they can be seen to lack evidentiary support. Instead, readers are repeatedly told that there have been “widespread allegations” and that “it has been widely reported” that the Russians are up to no good. But allegations are not evidence, and time after time the report fails to substantiate the suspicions it raises.
For instance, the report declares, “There have been widespread public allegations that Russia sought to influence the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU.” But the only evidence it provides to show that those allegations might be true is a reference to “open source studies” which point to pro-Brexit bias by the Russian broadcasters RT and Sputnik.
The committee neither names the studies nor discusses whether their conclusions are valid. Apparently, the committee asked MI5 for evidence, but all it got in reply was “six lines of text” based also on ‘open source studies’. In short, no secret intelligence supporting the claims that Russia interfered with Brexit has been provided.
This is rather embarrassing. The committee has drawn a blank. But still, it presses on. “There has been credible open source commentary suggesting that Russia undertook influence campaigns in relation to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014,” it announces. The relevant footnote fails to say what this credible commentary is. Instead, it merely says that it “was widely reported” that Russians who had observed the Scottish referendum had suggested “that there were irregularities in the conduct of the vote.”
But Russians complaining about the conduct of the vote do not constitute Russians trying to influence the campaign. After all, the observers in question said these things after the vote, and so their statements could hardly have been an attempt to affect the outcome.
This faulty mode of argument is pretty much par for the course. “It has been widely alleged” that Russia was responsible for a computer hack on the French presidential election in 2017, the report says. “It has been widely reported” that Russians were responsible for the hack and leak operation against the Democratic National Committee in the US in 2016. And so on.
Perhaps the nadir of the report is the statement that “on 15 June 2017, Buzzfeed News published the results of its investigation into 14 deaths in the UK of Russian business figures and British individuals linked to them” (Buzzfeed implied, without supporting evidence, that all 14 people were murdered by the Russian intelligence services). This, then, is what the might of British intelligence has been reduced to – regurgitating sensationalist stories from Buzzfeed. It gives you a sense of what the committee considers a ‘credible’ source to be.
The committee goes beyond repeating unsubstantiated claims to making unspecified ones. In the UK, it says, numerous “lawyers, accountants, estate agents, and PR professionals have played a role, wittingly or unwittingly, in the extension of Russian influence which is often linked to promoting the nefarious interests of the Russian state.” No names are named, no evidence produced. All the committee provides is a quote from long-time anti-Russian campaigner William Browder, as if his bold assertions amount to incontrovertible proof.
In 50 pages warning us of the evil ‘influence’ Russia has over the UK, the report fails to provide a single documented example of this influence at work. In short, the entire premise of the report (that Russia poses a significant threat to the UK) is not only not proven, but also not even demonstrated in any tangible way.
That perhaps explains why the committee has chosen to be so harsh on the British government, accusing it of failing to live up to its responsibility to defend the nation. It appears that the committee knows in its bones that all these things are true, but also knows that it lacks any evidence to prove them. The evidence is there; it’s just that the government has failed to do its job and provide it.
A proper intelligence investigation first finds the facts and then comes to a conclusion. It would seem as though the Intelligence and Security Committee wishes to go about it the other way – it has already reached its conclusion; now it wants the government to provide the evidence. The government should not indulge this.
Paul Robinson is a a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics.
US’ War Tactics Might Not Be Useful Anymore
By Prof. Zamir Ahmed Awan | One World | July 21, 2020
The US’ typical war tactics of the past may not be useful against China, Russia, or North Korea. Let us review the Iraq War as a typical case. The first step was the media war by building an anti-Saddam narrative. The BBC reported on the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and termed them a threat to regional and global peace. UN inspectors were dispatched to verify their existence, but could not confirm anything. When the US was sure that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and capability of resistance or retaliation, that was when it decided to attack the country. Later on, the BBC apologized for spreading fake news, but only after the destruction of Iraq.
Simultaneously, the media distorted the image of President Saddam Hussein and instigated the public against him. The US intelligence identified individuals disgruntled with the Saddam regime, provided them training, equipped them, liberally funded them, and organized systematic agitations, demonstrations, and insurgency against the Saddam government.
After the US established a strong network against Saddam Hussein and agents providing them with ground intelligence, they felt comfortable attacking Iraq.
The preparatory work that was undertaken before the attack included spreading anti-Saddam sentiments, supporting insurgencies, spreading fake news, and creating an environment for a smooth attack. Media and intelligence agents were the tools to achieve all of this.
Then the US, along with its allies, launched airstrikes, carpet bombed, and dropped unlimited explosives. After destroying the control and command, dispersing troops, telecommunications, power plants, fuel storage facilities, hospitals, airports, government buildings, and other important installations, they were assured of no resistance or retaliation from the Iraqi forces.
The airstrikes were made as a result of high-tech warfare, jamming radars, and disabling Iraqi defense systems. The US used bombers at a very high altitude where Iraqi anti-air crafts defense systems could not reach so that there were no casualties on the American side. After damaging the whole country so badly, and when they were 100% sure of no resistance from the Iraqi forces, the ground troops conquered Baghdad almost without any resistance or loss of lives.
The Libyan War was a similar case. They tried to do the same thing in Syria. However, this did not succeed because Russia rescued Syria, while it was quite a different story in the case of North Korea. The US could not penetrate into Korea, reach disgruntled individuals, or lobby against the Kim regime. The media war was not successful either. On the other hand, North Korea really has nuclear deterrence. That is why the US never attacked North Korea. In the case of Iran, the US understands the potential of resistance and retaliation. Iran demonstrated its capabilities well when the US assassinated General Soleimani in Baghdad.
I am pretty sure that the US will never come into direct confrontation with China. Although the US tried its best to destabilize China by creating issues like Hong Kong and Xinjiang, China has almost fully overcome such disturbances. The media war is also under the control of the Chinese government. China is officially recognized as the second-largest economy just after the US, but the realities may be different. In the case of weapons, China is not behind the US. In high-tech and advanced technologies, in some respect, China is ahead of America. China might not compete with America in conventional warfare, but it can move swiftly, decisively, and with its most modern advanced defense systems.
At the same time, the US is losing its reputation worldwide because it was — and in some cases, still is — involved in countless killings in South America, the Middle East, Vietnam, Japan, Africa, Korea, and many other parts of the world. Some people say that “when you have America as your friend, you do not need any enemies”. Even close allies of the US are not satisfied. Anti-American sentiments are growing globally. While this is happening, China is engaged in connectivity, infrastructure development, and the promotion of understanding and harmony among various cultures. The Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) is a message of peace, stability, development, and prosperity. As a result, China enjoys an immense amount of goodwill.
In order to preserve this message of global peace, we must always struggle to avert any conflict in any part of the world and resolve all issues amicably, diplomatically, and politically under the UN Charter.
Prof. Engr. Zamir Ahmed Awan is a Sinologist (ex-Diplomat), Editor, Analyst, Non-Resident Fellow of CCG (Center for China and Globalization), National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan. (E-mail: awanzamir@yahoo.com)
Kremlin pours cold water on anonymous Bloomberg claims about ‘elite’ Covid-19 vaccine
RT | July 20, 2020
President Vladimir Putin has not received the domestic coronavirus vaccine, according to spokesman Dmitry Peskov. The denial comes on the day anonymous claims emerged that the Russian elite has had access to it since April.
Speaking to reporters, Peskov explained that the president had not yet been administered the experimental drug, because it’s “not very good for the head of state to receive an uncertified vaccine.” He was diagnosed with Covid-19 himself in May, and also denied being vaccinated.
On Monday morning, Bloomberg claimed that “scores of members of Russia’s business and political elite have been given early access to an experimental vaccine against Covid-19,” claiming they included business executives, tycoons, and government officials. According to the outlet, the vaccine has been available for Russia’s wealthy elite since April, and has already been administered to “several hundred people.”
Bloomberg did not name any of its sources or provide any evidence, but stated that the vaccine had been received by the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, Kirill Dmitriev, as well as senior managers at aluminum company Rusal and chemical producer PhosAgro. In mid-June, Dmitriev admitted that he had volunteered to take the drug.
According to the news agency, those who received the vaccine “are monitored, and their results logged by the institute.” The establishment in question is Moscow’s Gamalei Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology.
On June 16, the institute received approval from the Ministry of Health to begin testing an experimental coronavirus vaccine on humans. In conjunction with the Ministry of Defense, it completed the drug’s first trial stage, and on July 15, announced that no volunteers had experienced “serious side effects, health complaints, complications or adverse reactions.”
On Monday morning, a second group of trialists was discharged from the hospital, with the test results “unambiguously” showing “the development of an immune response in all volunteers.” This is the same vaccine that Bloomberg claims was administered to Russia’s elite.
Following Bloomberg’s allegations, the director of the Gamalei Institute, Alexander Ginzburg, denied any knowledge of “big or small” businessmen receiving the immunization, with Vadim Tarasov, director of the Institute of Translational Medicine and Biotechnology at Sechenov University, calling the reports “speculation.” Aleksey Kuznetsov, an assistant to Russia’s Minister of Health, also denied that the vaccine is in “civilian circulation.”
Powell & Iraq—Regime Change, Not Disarmament: The Fundamental Lie
By Scott Ritter – Consortium News – July 18, 2020
The New York Times Magazine has published a puff piece soft-peddling former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s role in selling a war on Iraq to the UN Security Council using what turned out to be bad intelligence. “Colin Powell Still Wants Answers” is the title of the article, written by Robert Draper. “The analysts who provided the intelligence,” a sub-header to the article declares, “now say it was doubted inside the CIA at the time.”
Draper’s article is an extract from a book, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq, scheduled for publication later this month. In the interest of full disclosure, I was approached by Draper in 2018 about his interest in writing this book, and I agreed to be interviewed as part of his research. I have not yet read the book, but can note that, based upon the tone and content of his New York Times Magazine article, my words apparently carried little weight.
Regime Change, Not WMD
I spent some time articulating to Draper my contention that the issue with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was never about weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but rather regime change, and that everything had to be viewed in the light of this reality—including Powell’s Feb. 5, 2003 presentation before the UN Security Council. Based upon the content of his article, I might as well have been talking to a brick wall.
Powell’s 2003 presentation before the council did not take place in a policy vacuum. In many ways, the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq was a continuation of the 1991 Gulf War, which Powell helped orchestrate. Its fumbled aftermath was again, something that transpired on Powell’s watch as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the administration of George H. W. Bush.
Powell was part of the policy team that crafted the post-Gulf War response to the fact that Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, survived a conflict he was not meant to. After being labeled the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler whose crimes required Nuremburg-like retribution in a speech delivered by President Bush in October 1990, the Iraqi President’s post-conflict hold on power had become a political problem for Bush 41.
Powell was aware of the CIA’s post-war assessment on the vulnerability of Saddam’s rule to continued economic sanctions, and helped craft the policy that led to the passage of Security Council resolution 687 in April 1991. That linked Iraq’s obligation to be disarmed of its WMD prior to any lifting of sanctions and the reality that it was U.S. policy not to lift these sanctions, regardless of Iraq’s disarmament status, until which time Saddam was removed from power.
Regime change, not disarmament, was always the driving factor behind U.S. policy towards Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Powell knew this because he helped craft the original policy.
I bore witness to the reality of this policy as a weapons inspector working for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), created under the mandate of resolution 687 to oversee the disarming of Iraq’s WMD. Brought in to create an intelligence capability for the inspection team, my remit soon expanded to operations and, more specifically, how Iraq was hiding retained weapons and capability from the inspectors.
SCUDS
One of my first tasks was addressing discrepancies in Iraq’s accounting of its modified SCUD missile arsenal; in December 1991 I wrote an assessment that Iraq was likely retaining approximately 100 missiles. By March 1992 Iraq, under pressure, admitted it had retained a force of 89 missiles (that number later grew to 97).
After extensive investigations, I was able to corroborate the Iraqi declarations, and in November 1992 issued an assessment that UNSCOM could account for the totality of Iraq’s SCUD missile force. This, of course, was an unacceptable conclusion, given that a compliant Iraq meant sanctions would need to be lifted and Saddam would survive.
The U.S. intelligence community rejected my findings without providing any fact-based evidence to refute it, and the CIA later briefed the Senate that it assessed Iraq to be retaining a force of some 200 covert SCUD missiles. This all took place under Powell’s watch as chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
I challenged the CIA’s assessment, and organized the largest, most complex inspection in UNSCOM’s history to investigate the intelligence behind the 200-missile assessment. In the end, the intelligence was shown to be wrong, and in November 1993 I briefed the CIA Director’s senior staff on UNSCOM’s conclusion that all SCUD missiles were accounted for.
Moving the Goalposts
The CIA’s response was to assert that Iraq had a force of 12-20 covert SCUD missiles, and that this number would never change, regardless of what UNSCOM did. This same assessment was in play at the time of Powell’s Security Council presentation, a blatant lie born of the willful manufacture of lies by an entity—the CIA—whose task was regime change, not disarmament.
Powell knew all of this, and yet he still delivered his speech to the UN Security Council.
In October 2002, in a briefing designed to undermine the credibility of UN inspectors preparing to return to Iraq, the Defense Intelligence Agency trotted out Dr. John Yurechko, the defense intelligence officer for information operations and denial and deception, to provide a briefing detailing U.S. claims that Iraq was engaged in a systematic process of concealment regarding its WMD programs.
John Yurechko, of the Defense Intelligence Agency, briefs reporters at the Pentagon on Oct. 8, 2002 (U.S. Defense Dept.)
According to Yurechko, the briefing was compiled from several sources, including “inspector memoirs” and Iraqi defectors. The briefing was farcical, a deliberate effort to propagate misinformation by the administration of Bush 43. I know—starting in 1994, I led a concerted UNSCOM effort involving the intelligence services of eight nations to get to the bottom of Iraq’s so-called “concealment mechanism.”
Using innovative imagery intelligence techniques, defector debriefs, agent networks and communications intercepts, combined with extremely aggressive on-site inspections, I was able, by March 1998, to conclude that Iraqi concealment efforts were largely centered on protecting Saddam Hussein from assassination, and had nothing to do with hiding WMD. This, too, was an inconvenient finding, and led to the U.S. dismantling the apparatus of investigation I had so carefully assembled over the course of four years.
It was never about the WMD—Powell knew this. It was always about regime change.
Using UN as Cover for Coup Attempt
In 1991, Powell signed off on the incorporation of elite U.S. military commandos into the CIA’s Special Activities Staff for the purpose of using UNSCOM as a front to collect intelligence that could facilitate the removal of Saddam Hussein. I worked with this special cell from 1991 until 1996, on the mistaken opinion that the unique intelligence, logistics and communications capability they provided were useful to planning and executing the complex inspections I was helping lead in Iraq.
This program resulted in the failed coup attempt in June 1996 that used UNSCOM as its operational cover—the coup failed, the Special Activities Staff ceased all cooperation with UNSCOM, and we inspectors were left holding the bag. The Iraqis had every right to be concerned that UNSCOM inspections were being used to target their president because, the truth be told, they were.
Nowhere in Powell’s presentation to the Security Council, or in any of his efforts to recast that presentation as a good intention led astray by bad intelligence, does the reality of regime change factor in. Regime change was the only policy objective of three successive U.S. presidential administrations—Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43.
Powell was a key player in two of these. He knew. He knew about the existence of the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group. He knew of the successive string of covert “findings” issued by U.S. presidents authorizing the CIA to remove Saddam Hussein from power using lethal force. He knew that the die had been cast for war long before Bush 43 decided to engage the United Nations in the fall of 2002.
Powell Knew
Powell knew all of this, and yet he still allowed himself to be used as a front to sell this conflict to the international community, and by extension the American people, using intelligence that was demonstrably false. If, simply by drawing on my experience as an UNSCOM inspector, I knew every word he uttered before the Security Council was a lie the moment he spoke, Powell should have as well, because every aspect of my work as an UNSCOM inspector was known to, and documented by, the CIA.
It is not that I was unknown to Powell in the context of the WMD narrative. Indeed, my name came up during an interview Powell gave to Fox News on Sept. 8, 2002, when he was asked to comment on a quote from my speech to the Iraqi Parliament earlier that month in which I stated:
“The rhetoric of fear that is disseminated by my government and others has not to date been backed up by hard facts that substantiate any allegations that Iraq is today in possession of weapons of mass destruction or has links to terror groups responsible for attacking the United States. Void of such facts, all we have is speculation.”
Powell responded by declaring,
“We have facts, not speculation. Scott is certainly entitled to his opinion but I’m afraid that I would not place the security of my nation and the security of our friends in the region on that kind of an assertion by somebody who’s not in the intelligence chain any longer… If Scott is right, then why are they keeping the inspectors out? If Scott is right, why don’t they say, ‘Anytime, any place, anywhere, bring ‘em in, everybody come in—we are clean?’ The reason is they are not clean. And we have to find out what they have and what we’re going to do about it. And that’s why it’s been the policy of this government to insist that Iraq be disarmed in accordance with the terms of the relevant UN resolutions.” (emphasis added, Aletho News )
Of course, in November 2002, Iraq did just what Powell said they would never do—they let the UN inspectors return without preconditions. The inspectors quickly exposed the fact that the “high quality” U.S. intelligence they had been tasked with investigating was pure bunk. Left to their own devices, the new round of UN weapons inspections would soon be able to give Iraq a clean bill of health, paving the way for the lifting of sanctions and the continued survival of Saddam Hussein.
Powell knew this was not an option. And thus he allowed himself to be used as a vehicle for disseminating more lies—lies that would take the U.S. to war, cost thousands of U.S. service members their lives, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, all in the name of regime change.
Back to Robert Draper. I spent a considerable amount of time impressing upon him the reality of regime change as a policy, and the fact that the WMD disarmament issue existed for the sole purpose of facilitating regime change. Apparently, my words had little impact, as all Draper has done in his article is continue the false narrative that America went to war on the weight of false and misleading intelligence.
Draper is wrong—America went to war because it was our policy as a nation, sustained over three successive presidential administrations, to remove Saddam Hussein from power. By 2002 the WMD narrative that had been used to support and sustain this regime change policy was weakening.
Powell’s speech was a last-gasp effort to use the story of Iraqi WMD for the purpose it was always intended—to facilitate the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. In this light, Colin Powell’s speech was one of the greatest successes in CIA history. That is not the story, however, Draper chose to tell, and the world is worse off for that failed opportunity.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.
The Russians are coming, again! Poorly understood cybercrimes play perfectly into political agendas
By Helen Buyniski | RT | July 16, 2020
Foreign hackers are determined as ever to steal technology, meddle in elections and skew foreign policy, but fear not! The CIA has apparently been authorized to deliver preemptive cyber-strikes based on partisan mythmaking.
US, UK and Canadian intelligence dropped a 16-page report on Thursday accusing “Russian hackers” – specifically APT29, the “Cozy Bear” hacking group of ‘Russiagate’ fame – of targeting unspecified entities involved in developing the (increasingly controversial) Covid-19 vaccine.
However, the report is fraught with the same factual pitfalls plaguing previous unsubstantiated “Russian hacking” tales, seemingly designed to capitalize on the general population’s ignorance about cyber-attacks – or vaccines, for that matter. While Democrat-linked cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike specializes in attributing state actors to malware attacks, more reputable companies avoid doing so based solely on the malware used, since hacking groups often exchange tools or even collaborate.
The best, or just best-funded hackers are able to not only cover their tracks effectively but create a fake trail leading to someone else. The WikiLeaks Vault 7 release in 2017 exposed the disturbing tools the CIA has at its disposal for simulating foreign cyberattacks, tools that allow the agency to make it seem like Moscow or Tehran is behind a hack when the real culprits are in Langley, Virginia.
Russia is far from the only country to be accused of such behavior, of course – China was accused of attempting to steal coronavirus vaccine research back in May, while US and UK intelligence agencies warned that same month that other “threat groups” were “actively targeting” local governments, pharmaceutical and research firms, healthcare facilities, and universities for virus-related hacking.
Nor is this latest outbreak of finger-pointing limited to the pandemic. On Thursday, UK foreign minister Dominic Raab denounced “Russian actors” for “almost certainly” seeking to meddle in the 2019 election – not by actually breaking any laws, but by “amplifying” documents leaked by other people on Reddit and circulated around social media in the run-up to December’s contest
Raab didn’t name any of the Russians responsible for circulating the material, perhaps mindful of the embarrassment that befell his ideological brother-in-arms, Atlantic Council bot-hunter Ben Nimmo, who accused several real people of being “Russian bots.” Further covering his bases, Raab in the same statement acknowledged that there was “no evidence of a broad-spectrum Russian campaign against the General Election.”
Even the most nonspecific shrieking about Russian hackers plotting to steal vaccine data, however, distracts from the inconvenient reality that the vaccines under development in the UK and US are performing abysmally. Neither the US company Moderna – initially hailed as the frontrunner despite never having brought a vaccine to market before – nor the UK’s collaboration between Oxford University and pharma giant AstraZeneca have produced any encouraging results in their clinical trials.
That didn’t stop the US from ordering 300 million doses of the Oxford jab, though the Trump administration’s coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci has already begun lamenting the “general anti-science, anti-authority, anti-vaccine feeling among some people in this country” he fears will keep Americans away from the needle.
With regard to hacking, however, the world might be more concerned about the CIA than the Russians – especially following Wednesday’s Yahoo News report that the agency had received carte blanche from Trump to wage preemptive (i.e. unjustified) cyber-warfare against any individual or organization it could link to a “handful of adversarial countries.”
According to several former US officials, the CIA has been wielding unprecedented offensive powers against American civilians only tenuously connected to Washington’s geopolitical rivals since 2018, checking off at least 12 cyber-attacks on its “wish list” already. Liberated from the tiresome need to provide “years of signals and dozens of pages of intelligence” justifying raining computer-borne chaos and destabilization on its victims, the CIA has wrought “a combination of destructive things – stuff is on fire and exploding – and also public dissemination of data: leaking or things that look like leaking.”
News of the CIA being given carte blanche appears at the same point in the US election cycle as the 2018 report about a similar measure that freed the hands of the Pentagon to conduct its own cyberattacks without interference from the State Department or any intelligence agencies.
With a hotly anticipated election coming up in November, it’s not hard to imagine how a few well-placed “leaks” or “destructive things” might convince voters to put aside their concerns about the administration’s response to the pandemic – or to place it front and center, depending on whether the CIA has decided it can live with four more years of Trump.
One thing is certain: the “Russian meddling” narrative isn’t going away anytime soon.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
“Putin Hacked Our Coronavirus Vaccine” Is The Dumbest Story Yet
By Caitlin Johnstone | American Herald Tribune | July 17, 2020
OMG you guys Putin hacked our coronavirus vaccine secrets!
Today mainstream media is reporting what is arguably the single dumbest Russiavape story of all time, against some very stiff competition.
“Russian hackers are targeting health care organizations in the West in an attempt to steal coronavirus vaccine research, the U.S. and Britain said,” reports The New York Times.
“Hackers backed by the Russian state are trying to steal COVID-19 vaccine and treatment research from academic and pharmaceutical institutions around the world, Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said on Thursday,” Reuters reports.
“Russian news agency RIA cited spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying the Kremlin rejected London’s allegations, which he said were not backed by proper evidence,” adds Reuters.
I mean, there are just so many layers of stupid.
First of all, how many more completely unsubstantiated government agency allegations about Russian nefariousness are we the public going to accept from the corporate mass media? Since 2016 it’s been wall-to-wall narrative about evil things Russia is doing to the empire-like cluster of allies loosely centralized around the United States, and they all just happen to be things nobody can actually provide the public with hard verifiable evidence of.
Ever since the shady cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike admitted that it never actually saw hard proof of Russia hacking the DNC servers, the already shaky and always unsubstantiated narrative that Russian hackers interfered in the US presidential election in 2016 has been on thinner ice than ever. Yet because the mass media converged on this narrative and repeated it as fact over and over again they’ve been able to get the mainstream headline-skimming public to accept it as an established truth, priming them for an increasingly idiotic litany of completely unsubstantiated Russia scandals, culminating most recently in the entirely debunked claim that Russia paid Taliban-linked fighters to kill coalition forces in Afghanistan.
Secondly, the news story doesn’t even claim that these supposed Russian hackers even succeeded in doing whatever they were supposed to have been doing in this supposed cyberattack.
“Officials have not commented on whether the attacks were successful but also have not ruled out that this is the case,” Wired reports.
Thirdly, this is a “vaccine” which does not even exist at this point in time, and the research which was supposedly hacked may never lead to one. Meanwhile, Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University reports that it has “successfully completed tests on volunteers of the world’s first vaccine against coronavirus,” in Russia.
Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, how obnoxious and idiotic is it that coronavirus vaccine “secrets” are a even a thing??? This is a global pandemic which is hurting all of us; scientists should be free to collaborate with other scientists anywhere in the world to find a solution to this problem. Nobody has any business keeping “secrets” from the world about this virus or any possible vaccine or treatment. If they do, anyone in the world is well within their rights to pry those secrets away from them.
This intensely stupid story comes out at the same time British media are blaring stories about Russian interference in the 2019 election, which if you actually listen carefully to the claims being advanced amounts to literally nothing more than the assertion that Russians talked about already leaked documents pertaining to the UK’s healthcare system on the internet.
“Russian actors ‘sought to interfere’ in last winter’s general election by amplifying an illicitly acquired NHS dossier that was seized upon by Labour during the campaign, the foreign secretary has said,” reports The Guardian.
“Amplifying”. That’s literally all there is to this story. As we learned with the ridiculous US Russiagate narrative, Russia “amplifying” something in such allegations can mean anything from RT reporting on a major news story to a Twitter account from St Petersburg sharing an article from The Washington Post. Even the foreign secretary’s claim itself explicitly admits that “there is no evidence of a broad spectrum Russian campaign against the General Election”.
“The statement is so foggy and contradictory that it is almost impossible to understand it,” responded Russia’s foreign ministry to the allegations. “If it’s inappropriate to say something then don’t say it. If you say it, produce the facts.”
Instead of producing facts you’ve got the Murdoch press pestering Jeremy Corbyn on his doorstep over this ridiculous non-story, and popular right-wing outlets like Guido Fawkes running the blatantly false headline “Government Confirms Corbyn Used Russian-Hacked Documents in 2019 Election”. The completely bogus allegation that the NHS documents came to Jeremy Corbyn by way of Russian hackers is not made anywhere in the article itself, but for the headline-skimming majority this makes no difference. And headline skimmers get as many votes as people who read and think critically.
All this new cold war Russia hysteria is turning people’s brains into guacamole. We’ve got to find a way to snap out of the propaganda trance so we can start creating a world that is based on truth and a desire for peace.
NYT Acknowledges Coup in Bolivia—While Shirking Blame for Its Supporting Role
If the New York Times (6/7/20) has had second thoughts about its coverage of the 2019 Bolivian election and subsequent coup, it hasn’t shared them with its readers.
By Camila Escalante with Brian Mier | FAIR | July 8, 2020
The New York Times (6/7/20) declared that an Organization of American States (OAS) report alleging fraud in the 2019 Bolivian presidential elections—which was used as justification for a bloody, authoritarian coup d’etat in November 2019—was fundamentally flawed.
The Times reported the findings of a new study by independent researchers; the Times brags of contributing to it by sharing data it “obtained from Bolivian electoral authorities,” though this data has been publicly available since before the 2019 coup.
The article never uses the word “coup”—it says that President Evo Morales was “push[ed]…from power with military support”—but it does acknowledge that “seven months after Mr. Morales’s downfall, Bolivia has no elected government and no official election date”:
A staunchly right-wing caretaker government, led by Jeanine Añez… has not yet fulfilled its mandate to oversee swift new elections. The new government has persecuted the former president’s supporters, stifled dissent and worked to cement its hold on power.
“Thank God for the New York Times for letting us know,” must think at least some casual readers, who trust the paper’s regular criticism of rising authoritarianism within the US—perhaps adding, “Well, I guess it’s too late to do anything about Bolivia now.”
The fact is, the Times has been patting itself on the back for acknowledging authoritarianism in neofascist regimes that it helped normalize in Latin America for at least 50 years. The only surprise to readers who are aware of this ugly truth is that this time it took so long.
It only took the Times 15 days and the arrest of 20,000 leftists, for example, to counter nine articles supportive of the April 1, 1964, Brazilian military coup (Social Science Journal, 1/97) with a warning (4/16/64) that “Brazil now has an authoritarian military government. ” As was the case with Brazil in 1964, recognizing that Bolivia has now succumbed to authoritarianism may help the New York Times’ image with progressive readers, but it doesn’t do anything for the oppressed citizens of the countries involved.
While the coup was unfolding, and when Northern solidarity for Bolivia’s Movement for Socialism government (MAS in Spanish) might have helped avert disaster, the New York Times was whistling a different tune. The day after Morales’ re-election (10/21/19), it portrayed the paramilitary putschists who were carrying out violent threats against elected officials and their families as victims of repressive police actions perpetrated by the socialist government. “Opponents of Mr. Morales angrily charged ‘fraud, fraud!’” read the post-election article:
Heavily armed police officers were deployed to the streets, where they clashed with demonstrators on Monday night, according to television news reports.
One day after Morales was removed from power, the Times (11/11/19) engaged in victim-blaming, with a news analysis headlined ‘This Will Be Forever’: How the Ambitions of Evo Morales Contributed to His Fall.” The first Indigenous president in Latin American history was not being deposed illegally, after winning a fair election, by groups of armed paramilitary thugs, amid threats of murder and rape to his family members, the Times implied; rather, he was being brought down due to his own character faults as a Machiavellian back-stabber.
I arrived in Bolivia on November 13, 2019, shortly after Jeanine Añez’ unconstitutional swearing in as unelected, interim president, on a cartoonishly oversized Bible. I was there as a reporter for MintPress News and teleSUR, and two of the active sites I reported from were in the most militantly MAS-dense areas: In Sacaba, where the coup regime’s first massacre took place on November 15, and in El Alto, where the Senkata massacre took place on November 19.
The third, and most extensively covered, resistance to the coup was in the heart of the city of La Paz, where daily protests were staged. Beyond these major conflict areas, there were large mobilizations in Norte Potosí, the rural provinces of the department of La Paz, Zona Sud of Cochabamba, Yapacani and San Julian. The vast majorities within all rural areas across the country were also in deep resistance to the coup.
The November coup represented the ousting of a government deeply embedded in the country’s Indigenous campesino and worker movements, by internal colonial-imperialist actors, led in large part by Bolivia’s fascist and neoliberal opposition sectors, most notably Luis Fernando Camacho and Carlos Mesa, who received ample support from the US government and the far-right Bolsonaro administration of Brazil. The Indigenous and social movement bases resisting the coup were deeply distrusting of Bolivian media, which they immediately deemed as having played a key role in it.
Those same groups that were hostile towards major Bolivian news networks and journalists lined up to be heard by myself and those who accompanied me, once they recognized my teleSUR press credentials. One woman attending a cabildo (mass meeting) of the Fejuves (neighborhood organizations) of El Alto detailed how her workplace, Bolivia TV, had been attacked by right-wing mobs as the coup authorities got rid of those deemed sympathizers of the constitutional government, replacing them by force almost immediately.
Indigenous Bolivian communities were at the very forefront of the protests and resistance actions against the coup, namely the blocking of key highways and roads, as in the case of Norte Potosí, the blocking of the YPFB gas plant in Senkata, and 24-hour camps blocking the entry to the Chapare province. La Paz was militarized, making it impossible to get near Plaza Murillo, the site of the Presidential Palace and the Congress. I witnessed daily violent repression by security forces against those who gathered in protest near the perimeter of the Plaza, including unions and groups such as the Bartolina Sisa Confederation, a nationwide organization of Indigenous and campesina women, and the highly organized neighborhood associations of El Alto.
One might think this kind of grassroots, pro-democracy mobilization coordinated by working-class people against an authoritarian takeover would be the type of thing the New York Times would applaud. After all, it ran over 100 articles championing Hong Kong’s protesters in the last six months of 2019 alone.
Anatoly Kurmanaev, author of this New York Times piece (12/5/19) that ignored real-time critiques of the OAS’s complaints about the Bolivian election, was a co-author of the piece (6/7/20) acknowledging that some have “second thoughts” about the OAS attacks on Evo Morales.
As resistance grew on the streets of Bolivia, however, the New York Times only continued the rationalization of the unconstitutional, authoritarian taking of power, using the now-discredited OAS report to do so.
“Election Fraud Aided Evo Morales, International Panel Concludes,” read a December 5 article—one of several the paper ran discrediting the democratic electoral process. Like the others, it failed to challenge dubious claims by the right-wing coalition in charge of the OAS—which received $68 million, or 44% of its budget, from the Trump administration in 2017—that Evo Morales was elected via “lies, manipulation and forgery to ensure his victory.”
A newspaper that prides itself on showing the full picture could have cited the debunking of the OAS study conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), an organization with two Nobel Laureate economists on its board, whose co-director Mark Weisbrot has written over 20 op-ed pieces for the New York Times. Even before the coup, CEPR (11/8/19) published an analysis of the Bolivian vote that concluded, “Neither the OAS mission nor any other party has demonstrated that there were widespread or systematic irregularities in the elections of October 20, 2019.”
The fatal flaws in the report the OAS used to subvert a member government, long obvious, are now undeniable even to the New York Times. But the paper still hasn’t acknowledged, let alone apologized for, the credulous reporting that gave it a leading role in bringing down an elected president and the violence that followed.
A Few Historical Frauds
Einstein, Bell & Edison, Coca-Cola and the Wright Brothers
By Larry Romanoff • Moon of Shanghai • July 11, 2020
There are only two nations in the world whose existence seems to be founded primarily on historical myths. In the US, false historical mythology permeates every nook and cranny of the American psyche, the result of more than 100 years of astonishing and unconscionable programming and propaganda, a massive crime against an entire population. This condition pertains not only to past events we think of as history, but to the extent that most items permitting Americans to “feel good by being an American” are fabricated Disney fairytales. This essay is a brief introduction to only a minor aspect of this subject.
In the introduction to my series of books (soon to be published) I wrote that “Perhaps 90%, or even 95%, of everything we know, or think that we know, or that we believe to be true about history, is wrong. To express this another way, if we were to take the history of the entire world for the past 500 years and compress it into a book of 100 pages, a full 50 of those pages would be blank. That is the extent to which our true history has been suppressed, entirely deleted from the record and from our consciousness. Of the remaining 50 pages, 45 are false in whole or in part, photoshopped, sanitised, twisted, and with critical details omitted to deliberately lead the public to the wrong conclusions.”[1]
Einstein, the Mythical Genius
One of the greatest mythical frauds in history is that of Albert Einstein, the famous physicist who invented the Theory of Relativity, E=mc² and so many other esoteric things. But this is all fabrication. The claims about Einstein inventing any theory of relativity, or light and photons, or time, are false. Almost every claim – almost everything – attributed to Einstein is simply a lie. Einstein was an inept who contributed nothing original to the field of quantum mechanics, nor any other science. Far from being a competent physicist, he once even flatly denied that the atom could be split and, much later, admitted that the idea of a chain reaction in fissile material “had never occurred to me”.[2][3]
Einstein was a third-class clerk at the government patent office in Bern, and never progressed beyond this level even with years of experience. By all contemporary reports, Einstein wasn’t even an accomplished mathematician. It has been well documented that much of the mathematical content of Einstein’s so-called theories were well beyond his ability. Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute, stated that Einstein’s first wife Mileva Marić was a “Serbian physicist who had helped him with (his) math . . .”[4] Other prominent scientists have made the claim that his wife did most of his math for him.
Henri Poincaré was the foremost expert on relativity in the late 19th century and the first person to formally present the theories, having published more than 30 books and over 500 papers on the topics. Extensive documentation exists that Einstein and his associates had studied Poincaré’s theories and mathematics for years, yet when Einstein published his almost wholly-plagiarised versions he made no reference whatever to these other works.
In the accepted historical account, Einstein is credited with having written the correct field equations for general relativity, an enormous falsehood. It is an undisputed fact that David Hilbert sent Einstein a draft of his work (which had already been submitted for publication), containing precisely these equations, evidenced by the existence of a letter from Einstein to Hilbert thanking him for doing so. Yet a few weeks later, Einstein delivered a public speech of Hilbert’s work, claiming full credit for the derivation of Hilbert’s equations. Similarly, E=mc², the famous equation relating mass, energy, and the speed of light, had been published several times by Italian physicist Olinto De Pretto, long before Einstein was suddenly given credit for it. In multiple thorough reviews of scientific literature, prominent scientists have unanimously stated that there is “absolutely nothing to connect Einstein to the derivation of this formula.”[5]
Einstein’s papers, theories, mathematics, documentation, were almost 100% plagiarised from others. He combined the prior published works of several people into one paper and claimed ownership of all of it. His so-called theories were nothing more than a composition encompassing the prior work of men like James Maxwell, Hendrik Lorentz, Joseph Larmor, Olinto De Pretto, Robert Brown, Ludwig Boltzmann, Friedrich Hasenöhrl, and many more.
In a paper he wrote in 1907, in part responding to (already-virulent) accusations of plagiarism, Einstein declared that plagiarism was perfectly acceptable as a form of ethical research, stating “… the nature [of physics is] that what follows has already been partly solved by other authors. I am [therefore] entitled to leave out a thoroughly pedantic survey of the literature…”[6][7][8] In other words, scientists all build on each others’ work, so Einstein could freely compile the work of everyone before him and re-present it as his own, with no obligation to even mention them or their work. His view of ethical science was like building a tower where each person adds one stone and, if I add the last stone, I not only take credit for the entire design and construction of the tower, but I own the building.
Perhaps the most damning evidence was when in 1953 Sir Edmund Whittaker published a very detailed account of the origin and development of all these theories and equations of physics, with extensive reference to the primary sources, documenting beyond doubt that Einstein had no priority in any of it, and clearly stating so. Einstein was alive and well when Whittaker published his book, yet he offered no dispute to the conclusions, no refutation of Whittaker’s claim that he (Einstein) had been irrelevant to the entire process. Einstein made no attempts in his own defense but simply hid in the bushes and refused to make any public comment whatever.[9]
Einstein was almost certainly the greatest fraud and plagiarist in modern science, an unashamed intellectual thief but, according to sources like Wikipedia, this is all just a minor “priority dispute” about who said what first in the realm of relativity physics. These sources misleadingly imply that several people made a discovery independently and more or less simultaneously, and we are simply debating who went public first. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Wikipedia is renowned as being virtually useless as an information source due to widespread ideological bias and censorship.
Einstein was Jewish and had the support of the Jewish-controlled media who conspired to create yet another historical myth. His fame and popularity today, his status as a hero of the scientific world, are due only to decades of a well-planned force-feeding of the Einstein myth to the masses by the media. The propaganda machine simply airbrushed out of the history books all the physicists who formulated these theories, and credited everything to Einstein. Without the extravagant generations-long PR and propaganda campaign, Einstein would have remained in the dustbin of obscurity where he belongs.
There are many Einstein apologists who produce reams of heavily-documented irrelevancies masquerading as proof, items such as a schoolmate who claimed “the flight of his mathematical genius was so high that I could no longer follow.” Many scientists and scientific historians know the truth of all this, and the accurate historical record is readily available, but many appear afraid to speak out for fear of damaging their careers. I have put the question to several prominent physicists in different countries, eliciting similar responses, namely that “it will not further one’s career to open a debate which will inevitably produce a tsunami of invective and slander, to say nothing of accusations of anti-Semitism.”
Time Magazine published more than a dozen issues on Einstein, including a special Collector’s Edition, and even ran an issue naming Einstein the “Person of the Century”. As with all other American heroes, the PR machine has worked for decades to embellish the myth with a collection of possibly hundreds of wise sayings attributed to this man where there is absolutely no historical evidence he ever said any of those things. The NYT published an article on a small cleverly-selected scientific dispute, in which it claimed “Findings Back Einstein in a Plagiarism Dispute”.[10] And thus is history spun by those who control the microphone. This is why so many pages in our history book consist of misrepresentations and omitted facts, painting a picture so considerably at odds with the truth. As with Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers and so many others, the false historical myths have been so deeply entwined in American and world history that they cannot be unraveled.
Einstein, the “Man of Peace”
Similarly, there has been a great campaign by Einstein’s revisionist apologists to disavow his strong support for the development of the atomic bomb, claiming him to be “a man of peace”. I have copies of correspondence from Einstein where he stated his conviction that the United States should “demonstrate” the atomic bomb to disfavored foreign countries. In one letter to then-US President Roosevelt, he wrote, “… extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. I am convinced as to the wisdom and the urgency of creating the conditions under which that and related work can be carried out with greater speed and on a larger scale than hitherto”.[11]
That statement is part of one of Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt, suggesting he (Einstein) be “entrusted with the task” of managing the project. Roosevelt refused Einstein’s fervent requests to manage, or even to participate in, the project, because it was an open secret that nobody trusted him and the FBI had conducted extensive investigations against him. One FBI file labeled “Secret”, stated that Einstein was affiliated with 33 organisations which had been cited by the Attorney-General and/or Congress, as being politically suspect.
It is interesting that the respected National Geographic is one of the world’s worst publications for spinning historical fact and truth. In 2017, this magazine ran an article on Einstein claiming that Hoover and the FBI despised Einstein and built a 1,400-page file on him because “the world-famous physicist was outspoken against nuclear bombs”.[12][13]
The second portion of the same letter is rather more disturbing, and has to my knowledge never been publicly referenced anywhere. It clearly reveals that Einstein had had detailed discussions with some wealthy acquaintances in Europe who were eager to personally finance the US development of atomic bombs from their own pockets. Einstein was informing the President he had access to these individuals with whom he had already confirmed available funding, baiting Roosevelt with an offer that, should he be ‘entrusted’ with management of the bomb project, he could bring the necessary financing with him. He states that, as project manager, one of his tasks would be: “providing funds … through his contacts with private persons who are willing to make contributions for this cause.”
It would be appropriate for us to ask who were these “private persons” who had the money to finance the development of the world’s first atomic bombs, and why they would want to personally fund such a project. Einstein does not mention these individuals by name, but they would surely have been Jewish and who in Europe (in the 1930s) had the kind of money to offer open-ended funding for a scientific project the cost of which was unknown and unknowable, but clearly massive.[15] This offer was not spurred by patriotism but by the prospect of financial gain and control of both the technology and the application of this ‘science’. We can therefore further question who would have taken ownership of the technology, and who would have been the intended victims of this large personal investment.
One plausible theory; I would add here that many of Einstein’s propagandists and apologists have made repeated efforts to pass the blame for the development of the atomic bomb onto Enrico Fermi, another monstrous falsehood. The US government offered Fermi a cash payment of US$100,000[16] to lead the research and development of the atom bomb, but Fermi refused. I have seen a copy of a letter from Fermi to the US President claiming that something so evil had “no right to exist”. In fact, it was Oppenheimer and Szilard who led the development of what was almost in totality a Jewish project, so much so that for many years in scientific circles the atomic bomb was widely known as “The Jewish hell-bomb”.[17] I believe it was Eustace Mullins who first coined the phrase, and I believe it was he who first suggested there was “circumstantial but compelling evidence” that the Jewish motivation for offering to finance the A-bomb’s development was to take control of the technology and use it for Germany’s total destruction.”[18] The theory is more than plausible if you are familiar with the heavily-evidenced proposition that the underlying purpose of both world wars was the total destruction of Germany). You can understand why items like this are restricted to the blank pages in our history book.
Alexander Graham Bell – The Man Who Didn’t Invent the Telephone
History books tell us the famous American, Alexander Graham Bell, invented the telephone. This claim has only two flaws; Bell was Canadian, not American, and he did not invent the telephone.
An Italian named Antonio Meucci patented a working telephone many years before Bell did anything.[19] Bell had obtained copies of Meuci’s drawings and patents and had attempted to obtain US patents on Meuci’s phone. Meucci discovered Bell’s attempted patent of his invention and filed a lawsuit against Bell, in support of which he brought from Italy all his documents, working models, original sketches and his patent, to present to the court as evidence of his prior invention. The delivery company – Western Union – was charged with the responsibility as trustee to hold this evidence for delivery to the court, but all of it “amazingly disappeared without a trace immediately prior to the court hearing, leaving Meucci with no proof of anything and thus losing his lawsuit against Bell.” It is worth noting that at the time Bell was employed at the Western Union lab where Meucci’s evidence was being stored.
The Italians are still angry about this. The Italian Historical Association informed us that their investigation produced evidence of illegal relationships between employees of the patent office and Bell’s company. And later, during a lawsuit between Bell and Western Union, it was revealed Bell had agreed to pay Western Union 20% of all profits from ‘his’ telephone, for 17 years, representing millions of dollars, sufficient temptation for Western Union to justify “losing” Meucci’s invention. US media have fabricated at least dozens of tales excusing Bell, a common one that “due to hardships, Meucci could not renew his patent” and therefore Bell could take it, but in fact the US government filed charges against Bell for fraud because of his telephone patent, but powerful friends had the lawsuit delayed year after year until Meucci died.[20] American history books and sources like Wikipedia omit these critical facts and twist the remaining information, and thus Americans grow up believing yet one more false myth about their country and their innovative ability.
I would make a note here that when doing historical research we sometimes discover that the landscape has been so badly polluted by countless individuals amending details to conform to opinion or ideology (or patriotism) that it becomes nearly impossible to ferret out the actual facts without an extraordinary amount of work. In this case, some have claimed (without evidence) that Meucci lost his patent because he hadn’t the funds to renew it. Others ignore Meucci’s lawsuit against Bell and claim Bell delivered his phone patent and samples to Western Union for evaluation and who later claimed to have lost all of it. And so on. Here are several articles purporting to tell “the real truth”[21][22][23][24]
Thomas Edison – The Man Who Didn’t Invent Anything
Every American child is taught in school that the famous American Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, Wikipedia claiming that Edison was “the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the UK, France, and Germany”. Edison is given full credit for inventing the light bulb, electricity transmission, electric power utilities, sound recording and motion pictures. All these claims are completely false.[25] Not only was Edison not one of the most prolific inventors in history, he never invented anything. Edison himself made the statement: “patents 1047 – inventions 0”, in recognition of his situation.
The inventions for which Edison is credited by the Americans were all achieved by others, and his “1,093 US patents” were all either stolen, bullied, extorted or purchased from those same inventors. As another author pointed out, “a man who kidnaps or adopts 1,000 children can hardly be deemed the world’s most prolific father, and a man who steals 1,000 inventions and patents can hardly be deemed the world’s most prolific inventor”. Thomas Edison was unquestionably one of the world’s most prolific thieves, and widely known as a con-man and common thug who often resorted to threats and extortion, but he was no inventor. Edison was mostly just a thieving opportunist who extorted or stole everything that is listed to his credit, but in US history books Edison is revered in totally fabricated myths as the father of the light bulb and America’s most prolific inventor.
The light bulb had been invented by several people in Europe, one of whom, Heinrich Goebel, unsuccessfully tried selling it to Edison who claimed to see no value in it though he was more than happy to purchase the patent from Goebel’s estate when the man died, cheating his widow out of a substantial sum of money. In any case, another man, Joseph Wilson Swan developed and patented a working incandescent light bulb using a carbon filament 20 years before Edison made any such claim.[26][27] Edison first tried to steal Swan’s invention and, when that proved legally dangerous, he made Swan a minor partner in the Ediswan United Company, buying both Swan and his patented light bulb and claiming the invention for himself. Swan also invented sound recording and other items which are today credited to Edison.[28]
Every American is taught from birth that Edison labored for years, trying at least 1,000 different substances (some say 2,000) before he discovered that twisted carbon would function acceptably as the filament in a light bulb. The story is entirely false, a myth fabricated after the fact, a little religious morality play to support faith in the American Dream – that persistence and hard work will lead to unlimited fame and riches in the end. Edison did indeed try – and repeatedly failed – to create a light bulb, and he may well have attempted some of those filament trials. But all that is irrelevant because Swan had already proven the effectiveness of a carbon filament when Edison took ownership of his invention and patent.
Edison is given credit for the device which made x-rays possible, but the actual inventor was German scientist Wilhelm Roentgen who publicly displayed x-rays of his wife’s hand years prior to Edison’s fluoroscope. Similarly, Edison is given credit for inventing electrical transmission in various forms, but Nicola Tesla brought this invention to the US and offered it to Edison who took ownership of the process and patents under a promise of $50,000, then refused to pay Tesla and spent years in attempts to destroy his name and reputation.
The US-based Science website dismisses the entire truth about Edison in one cute sentence: “Even though many of his “inventions” were not unique – and he engaged in some well-publicized court battles with other inventors whose ideas he “borrowed” – Edison’s skill at marketing and using his [political] influence often got him the credit.”[29] And that means Edison patented items that already existed, created by others, and that had sometimes already been patented. Plus, he had a habit of stealing and patenting any ideas brought to him by other inventors. Hence, the lawsuits. But his marketing ability and some powerful political and judicial contacts kept him out of jail. Nevertheless, the myth has been so thoroughly weaved into American history, it could never be recalled.
The US government even issued a special silver dollar coin to commemorate Edison’s non-achievements. And we have an Edison museum complete with the requisite US flag, providing Americans with the unique opportunity to experience delusion and patriotism simultaneously. But the man did invent one thing the history books seem to have quietly deleted. Edison was a believer in spirits and regularly attended séances where mediums would receive and transmit messages from the dead. To more easily conduct these affairs, Edison invented a telephone that he claimed could talk to people in the spirit world, though he didn’t specify what numbers to dial. In a conversation with B.C. Forbes, the founder of Forbes magazine, Edison claimed, “I have been at work for some time building an apparatus … for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us”. No idea what the spirits said to him, and no idea why his promoters deleted this important item from the history of the world’s greatest inventor.[30]
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola, originally called Kola Coca, was invented more than 140 years ago in a small town in Spain, the creators of the formula for the world’s best-selling soft drink having been cheated of its ownership and billions of dollars. The process was a well-kept secret at the time and quickly became a world-famous product, winning dozens of international gold medals and other awards. Unfortunately, Bautista Aparici, one of the company’s founders, attended a trade fair in Philadelphia and made the mistake of giving a sample and a brief description of the process to an American he happened to meet, and a short time later US pharmacist John Pemberton changed the name to Coca-Cola and patented the product and process, the US government refusing to recognise the original Spanish patent.[31][32][33]
The official story is that this drink was “invented by Dr. John Smith Pemberton on May 8, 1886, at Atlanta, Georgia”, in the USA, and was named Coca-Cola because at that time it contained extracts of Coca leaves and Kola nuts, and that the company’s book-keeper renamed the drink because he thought the two ‘C’s’ would look better in advertising. None of that is true. The drink was indeed made from kola nuts and coca leaves, but the new name was a cheap attempt to differentiate itself after Pemberton stole and patented the original formula. All the stories about Pemberton inventing Coke’s secret formula in his laboratory are fabricated nonsense, with the company’s website cleverly designed to airbrush out the drink’s early history and avoid the truth becoming known. Beverage World magazine produced a special issue to commemorate the one-hundredth (American) anniversary of Coca-Cola, claiming Coke was:
“A totally American product born of a solid idea, nurtured throughout the past century with creative thinking and bold decision-making, and always plenty of good old-fashioned hard work. That is as it should be; it is the American way”.
Not by a long shot. Coca-Cola is just one of hundreds of products the Americans have stolen and patented with the full protection of their courts operating under the peculiarly American definition of ‘rule of law’. It isn’t widely-known, though well-documented, that for decades surrounding the turn of the last century, the US government offered between $20,000 and $50,000 to anyone who could steal a foreign patent or product, that amount representing a lifetime’s earnings for an average person.
To add insult to injury, Coca-Cola moved into Spain in 1953, sued the original Spanish owners, then bullied, extorted and bought the rights for a pittance, permitting the firm to continue producing only a single alcoholic beverage under their name. USA Today reported on this without even a hint of regret or shame about the rule of law or fair play or the evils of IP theft. Their only comment: “The Spanish factory has just four employees left and probably won’t last another generation.” Even more insultingly, ABC News dismisses this story as “The Spanish firm that inspired Coke”, although they do state correctly the claim: “Locals believe that the Spanish town of Aielo de Malferit is where Coca-Cola originated — and that the factory which developed the formula that inspired the world’s best-selling soda has been cheated of its rightful place in history. Not to mention profits.”[34]
The Wright Brothers
For more than 100 years, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington has had on display an aircraft that was piloted by Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1903 in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in man’s first powered, manned aircraft flight, Americans therefore having created “The Age of Flight”.
But that was never true, and the Smithsonian was in on the fraud from the very beginning. In an agreement with the Wright family to donate the aircraft to the Institution, its officials signed a pledge to perpetuate the story that the Wrights had made the first flight, when all present were fully aware the claim was false. And for more than 100 years the Smithsonian Institution of Historical Mythology, with the full support of the US government and the media, has done everything in its power to dismiss, contradict, and just ignore, extensive documentation of other prior flights in an effort to prevent the dethroning of America in the public mind.[35][36]
Several people have thoroughly researched the matter and have written authoritative books on other prior flights but these have been “denounced by leading aeronautic agencies” (like the Smithsonian Institution), with the authors dismissed as “unqualified” and their books “unreliable”. In fact, there were many prior flights, some in Europe, Canada, South America, and others in the US itself, and the Smithsonian was fully aware of this. Recently, the editors of the authoritative Jane’s Aircraft firmly declared that Gustave Whitehead had flown years before the Wright Brothers. Alberto Santos-Dumont had done the same in Paris, as had another group in Alberta, Canada.
Moreover, there exists sufficient evidence the Wrights had access to all that prior knowledge in building their own aircraft, then claimed it as their own. In addition to other design features, the Wright brothers claimed ownership of the curved airfoil – without which no aircraft would ever have gotten off the ground anywhere, but, as one historian noted, “the Wrights stole both the concept and the actual design from an Australian who had recorded it years before, and who had himself deduced the concept from the boomerang of the Australian aboriginals.” The Wright Brothers stole the idea to build their aircraft, then patented it and sued others for using it.
Rumors had been circulating for decades that the Smithsonian had signed what was essentially a contract of fraud with the Wright family, agreeing to perpetuate the myth of the first manned flight, in exchange for having the aircraft on permanent display. But the Directors of the Smithsonian repeatedly denied the existence of such an agreement, stating that would be “tampering with history” and that they “would never agree to such a thing.” But then one day a US Senator collected a few lawyers and descended on the Smithsonian in a kind of political raid. And they did indeed locate the document, which reads in part: “Neither the Smithsonian Institution nor its successors nor any museum or other agency, bureau or facilities administered by the United States of America, shall publish or permit to be displayed a statement … in respect of any aircraft model … of earlier date than the Wright Aeroplane of 1903, claiming … that such aircraft was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight …”[37]
And now you know how the Wright Brothers became famous as the first men to fly. One historian wrote that the Smithsonian had no authority “to engage in political engineering of this sort”, noting that this “compromises history”. But compromising history is an American specialty. And this children’s tale will never end. Scientific American wrote a long, biased, and foolish article, claiming the other stories as myths and their myth as the truth.[38] Other eminent publications have done the same. This is how history is spun.
To give you an idea of the enormous influence of the US media and book publishers in maintaining these myths, in 2015 David McCullough ignored the judgment by Janes (and the world outside the US), and wrote a new book for Americans that not only perpetuates the myth but enhances it, with the major US media immediately writing glowing book reviews to help push sales and get the propaganda back into the public mind. The Washington Post modestly tells us how “two [American] boys taught the world to fly.” The publishers, Simon and Schuster, tell us the Wright brothers had “exceptional courage and determination”, and “ceaseless curiosity”.[39]
Daniel Okrent, in a review of McCullough’s book in the NYT,[40] adds that their progress was achieved through “excruciating patience and obsessive attention to detail” and with “an elegant demonstration of the creativity of their thinking”. They were “possessed by genius”. Their discovery of the necessity of a curved airfoil was not copied from Australia, but was the result of “endless calculation, application and recalculation”, every concoction being “a dazzling piece of reasoning” pursued with a “grandness of vision”, with the end result being “the most astonishing feat mankind has ever accomplished”. Yes. Except that it wasn’t.
Notes
[1] Jim Quinn: A Nation Built On Lies; https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-10/jim-quinn-nation-built-lies-part-2
[2] Einstein’s Plagiarism of the General Theory of Relativity 1st Edition; by Christopher Jon Bjerknes; https://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Plagiarism-General-Theory-Relativity/dp/1544900872
[3] Einstein A Plagiarist Special Relativity; https://educheer.com/term-paper/einstein-a-plagiarist-special-relativity
[4] Time magazine, July 2006; http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1211594,00.htm
[5] The Guardian, November 11, 1999; “Einstein’s E=mc² was Italian’s idea”; Clark, R. W. [1984], Einstein: The Life and Times, Avon Books, New York. De Pretto, O. [1904], ‘Ipo tesi dell ” et ere nell a vita dell ” universe’, Reale Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Feb.
[6] http://www.cartesio-episteme.net/episteme/epi6/ep6-bjerk-rec.htm
[7] https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_einstein.htm
[8] https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/02/was-einstein-a-wife-beater-womanizer-plagiarizer-and-eugenicist/
[9] A history of the theories of aether and electricity: https://archive.org/details/historyoftheorie00whitrich
[10] Findings Back Einstein In a Plagiarism Dispute; https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/18/science/findings-back-einstein-in-a-plagiarism-dispute.html
[11] Photo included:
[12] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/04/science-march-einstein-fbi-genius-science/
[13] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/09/eins-s03.html
[14] Photo included:
[15] In the end, the Manhattan Project cost the US military between US$2 and US$3 billion, in dollars of the day.
[16] The average annual income in the US in 1935 was about $1,500, thus this represents about 65 years of average income.
[17] The Secret History Of The Atomic Bomb by Eustace C. Mullins; http://whale.to/b/mullins8.html
[18] http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/2013/08/the-jewish-bomb-that-ended-world-war-ii/
[19] Antonio Meucci – Biography, Facts and Pictures; https://www.famousscientists.org/antonio-meucci
[20] The United States Government vs. Alexander Graham Bell; www.chezbasilio.org/us_bell.htm
[21] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jun/17/humanities.internationaleducationnews
[22] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/aug/06/bellvwestern
[23] http://wondermark.com/true-stuff-western-union-bell/
[24] https://sciencetechworld.com/10-famous-stolen-inventions/
[25] http://newsreeling.com/about-thomas-edisons-lies-and-19-stolen-inventions
[26] Joseph Swan – Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swan
[27] Joseph Swan | Biography, Lightbulb, & Facts; https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Wilson-Swan
[28] Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company is Established; https://worldhistoryproject.org/1883/edison-swan-united-electric-light-company-is-established
[29] Thomas A. Edison and the Founding of Science: science.sciencemag.org/content/105/2719/142
[30] Thomas Edison, B.C. Forbes And The Mystery Of The Spirit Phone; https://www.forbes.com/…/2019/10/25/thomas-edison-bc-forbes-mystery-spirit-phone
[31] Spanish town claims origins of Coca-Cola; https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/10/newser-spanish-town-coca-cola/2638515/
[32] https://www.spiegel.de/thema/coca_cola/
[33] https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/locals-say-coca-cola-originated-in-aielo-de-malferit-in-spain-a-915371.html
[34] Fizzing Out: The Spanish Firm that Inspired Coke – ABC News; https://abcnews.go.com/International/fizzing-spanish-firm-inspired-coke/story?id=19918738
[35] https://www.foxnews.com/science/smithsonian-releases-wright-brothers-contract-detailing-first-in-flight-claims
[36] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/5/130503-wright-brothers-first-flight-gustave-whitehead-aviation-smithsonian-institution-adventure-world/
[37] http://historybycontract.org/?tag=smithsonian-wright-agreement-1948
[38] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/myths-about-the-wright-br/
[39] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Wright-Brothers/David-McCullough/9781476728759
[40] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/books/review/the-wright-brothers-by-david-mccullough.html
How the Pentagon failed to sell Afghan government’s bunk ‘Bountygate’ story to US intelligence agencies
By Gareth Porter | The Grayzone | July 7, 2020
The New York Times dropped another Russiagate bombshell on June 26 with a sensational front-page story headlined, “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says.” A predictable media and political frenzy followed, reviving the anti-Russian hysteria that has excited the Beltway establishment for the past four years.
But a closer look at the reporting by the Times and other mainstream outlets vying to confirm its coverage reveals another scandal not unlike Russiagate itself: the core elements of the story appear to have been fabricated by Afghan government intelligence to derail a potential US troop withdrawal from the country. And they were leaked to the Times and other outlets by US national security state officials who shared an agenda with their Afghan allies.
In the days following the story’s publication, the maneuvers of the Afghan regime and US national security bureaucracy encountered an unexpected political obstacle: US intelligence agencies began offering a series of low confidence assessments in the Afghan government’s self-interested intelligence claims, judging them to be highly suspect at best, and altogether bogus at worst.
In light of this dramatic development, the Times’ initial report appears to have been the product of a sensationalistic disinformation dump aimed at prolonging the failed Afghan war in the face of President Donald Trump’s plans to withdraw US troops from it.
The Times quietly reveals its own sources’ falsehoods
The Times not only broke the Bountygate story but commissioned squads of reporters comprising nine different correspondents to write eight articles hyping the supposed scandal in the course of eight days. Its coverage displayed the paper’s usual habit of regurgitating bits of dubious information furnished to its correspondents by faceless national security sources. In the days after the Times’ dramatic publication, its correspondent squads were forced to revise the story line to correct an account that ultimately turned out to be false on practically every important point.
The Bountygate saga began on June 26, with a Times report declaring, “The United States concluded months ago” that the Russians “had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.” The report suggested that US intelligence analysts had reached a firm conclusion on Russian bounties as early as January. A follow-up Times report portrayed the shocking discovery of the lurid Russian plot thanks to the recovery of a large amount of U.S. cash from a “raid on a Taliban outpost.” That article sourced its claim to the interrogations of “captured Afghan militants and criminals.”
However, subsequent reporting revealed that the “US intelligence reports” about a Russian plot to distribute bounties through Afghan middlemen were not generated by US intelligence at all.
The Times reported first on June 28, then again on June 30, that a large amount of cash found at a “Taliban outpost” or a “Taliban site” had led U.S. intelligence to suspect the Russian plot. But the Times had to walk that claim back, revealing on July 1 that the raid that turned up $500,000 in cash had in fact targeted the Kabul home of Rahmatullah Azizi, an Afghan businessmen said to have been involved in both drug trafficking and contracting for part of the billions of dollars the United States spent on construction projects.
The Times also disclosed that the information provided by “captured militants and criminals” under “interrogation” had been the main source of suspicion of a Russian bounty scheme in Afghanistan. But those “militants and criminals” turned out to be thirteen relatives and business associates of the businessman whose house was raided.
The Times reported that those detainees were arrested and interrogated following the January 2020 raids based on suspicions by Afghan intelligence that they belonged to a “ring of middlemen” operating between the Russian GRU and so-called “Taliban-linked militants,” as Afghan sources made clear.
Furthermore, contrary to the initial report by the Times, those raids had actually been carried out exclusively by the Afghan intelligence service known as the National Directorate of Security (NDS). The Times disclosed this on July 1. Indeed, the interrogation of those detained in the raids was carried out by the NDS, which explains why the Times reporting referred repeatedly to “interrogations” without ever explaining who actually did the questioning.
Given the notorious record of the NDS, it must be assumed that its interrogators used torture or at least the threat of it to obtain accounts from the detainees that would support the Afghan government’s narrative. Both the Toronto Globe and Mail and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) have documented as recently as 2019 the frequent use of torture by the NDS to obtain information from detainees. The primary objective of the NDS was to establish an air of plausibility around the claim that the fugitive businessman Azizi was the main “middleman” for a purported GRU scheme to offer bounties for killing Americans.
NDS clearly fashioned its story to suit the sensibilities of the U.S. national security state. The narrative echoed previous intelligence reports about Russian bounties in Afghanistan that circulated in early 2019, and which were even discussed at NSC meetings. Nothing was done about these reports, however, because nothing had been confirmed.
The idea that hardcore Taliban fighters needed or wanted foreign money to kill American invaders could have been dismissed on its face. So Afghan officials spun out claims that Russian bounties were paid to incentivize violence by “militants and criminals” supposedly “linked” to the Taliban.
These elements zeroed in on the April 2019 IED attack on a vehicle near the U.S. military base at Bagram in Parwan province that killed three US Marines, insisting that the Taliban had paid local criminal networks in the region to carry out attacks.
As former Parwan police chief Gen. Zaman Mamozai told the Times, Taliban commanders were based in only two of the province’s ten districts, forcing them to depend on a wider network of non-Taliban killers-for-hire to carry out attacks elsewhere in the province. These areas included the region around Bagram, according to the Afghan government’s argument.
But Dr. Thomas H. Johnson of the Naval Postgraduate School, a leading expert on insurgency and counter-insurgency in Afghanistan who has been researching war in the country for three decades, dismissed the idea that the Taliban would need a criminal network to operate effectively in Parwan.
“The Taliban are all over Parwan,” Johnson stated in an interview with The Grayzone, observing that its fighters had repeatedly carried out attacks on or near the Bagram base throughout the war.
With withdrawal looming, the national security state plays its Bountygate card
Senior U.S. national security officials had clear ulterior motives for embracing the dubious NDS narrative. More than anything, those officials were determined to scuttle Trump’s push for a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan. For Pentagon brass and civilian leadership, the fear of withdrawal became more acute in early 2020 as Trump began to demand an even more rapid timetable for a complete pullout than the 12-14 months being negotiated with the Taliban.
It was little surprise then that this element leapt at the opportunity to exploit the self-interested claims by the Afghan NDS to serve its own agenda, especially as the November election loomed. The Times even cited one “senior [US] official” musing that “the evidence about Russia could have threatened that [Afghanistan] deal, because it suggested that after eighteen year of war, Mr. Trump was letting Russia chase the last American troops out of the country.”
In fact, the intelligence reporting from the CIA Station in Kabul on the NDS Russia bounty claims was included in the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) on or about February 27 — just as the negotiation of the U.S. peace agreement with the Taliban was about to be signed. That was too late to prevent the signing but timed well enough to ratchet up pressure on Trump to back away from his threat to pull all US troops out of Afghanistan.
Trump may have been briefed orally on the issue at the time, but even if he had not been, the presence of a summary description of the intelligence in the PDB could obviously have been used to embarrass him on Afghanistan by leaking it to the media.
According to Ray McGovern, a former CIA official who was responsible for preparing the PDB for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the insertion of raw, unconfirmed intelligence from a self-interested Afghan intelligence agency into the PDB was a departure from normal practice.
Unless it was a two or three-sentence summary of a current intelligence report, McGovern explained, an item in the PDB normally involved only important intelligence that had been confirmed. Furthermore, according to McGovern, PDB items are normally shorter versions of items prepared the same day as part of the CIA’s “World Intelligence Review” or “WIRe.”
Information about the purported Russian bounty scheme, however, was not part of the WIRe until May 4, well over two months later, according to the Times. That discrepancy added weight to the suggestion that the CIA had political motivations for planting the raw NDS reporting in the PDB before it could be evaluated.
This June, Trump’s National Security Council (NSC) convened a meeting to discuss the intelligence report, officials told the Times. NSC members drew up a range of options in response to the alleged Russian plot, from a diplomatic protest to more forceful responses. Any public indication that US troops in Afghanistan had been targeted by Russian spies would have inevitably threatened Trump’s plan for withdrawal from Afghanistan.
At some point in the weeks that followed, the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency each undertook evaluations of the Afghan intelligence claims. Once the Times began publishing stories about the issue, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe directed the National Intelligence Council, which is responsible for managing all common intelligence community assessments, to write a memorandum summarizing the intelligence organizations’ conclusions.
The memorandum revealed that the intelligence agencies were not impressed with what they’d seen. The CIA and National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) each gave the NDS intelligence an assessment of “moderate confidence,” according to memorandum.
An official guide to intelligence community terminology used by policymakers to determine how much they should rely on assessments indicates that “moderate confidence” generally indicates that “the information being used in the analysis may be interpreted in various ways….” It was hardly a ringing endorsement of the NDS intelligence when the CIA and NCTC arrived at this finding.
The assessment by the National Security Agency was even more important, given that it had obtained intercepts of electronic data on financial transfers “from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account,” according to the Times’ sources. But the NSA evidently had no idea what the transfers related to, and essentially disavowed the information from the Afghan intelligence agency.
The NIC memorandum reported that NSA gave the information from Afghan intelligence “low confidence” — the lowest of the three possible levels of confidence used in the intelligence community. According to the official guide to intelligence community terminology, that meant that “information used in the analysis is scant, questionable, fragmented, or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from the information.”
Other intelligence agencies reportedly assigned “low confidence” to the information as well, according to the memorandum. Even the Defense Intelligence Agency, known for its tendency to issue alarmist warnings about activities by US adversaries, found no evidence in the material linking the Kremlin to any bounty offers.
Less than two weeks after the Times rolled out its supposed bombshell on Russian bounties, relying entirely on national security officials pushing their own bureaucratic interests on Afghanistan, the story was effectively discredited by the intelligence community itself. In a healthy political climate, this would have produced a major setback for the elements determined to keep US troops entrenched in Afghanistan.
But the political hysteria generated by the Times and the hyper-partisan elements triggered by the appearance of another sordid Trump-Putin connection easily overwhelmed the countervailing facts. It was all the Pentagon and its bureaucratic allies needed to push back on plans for a speedy withdrawal from a long and costly war.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012. His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.
Not Fact Checkers
By Iain | In This Together | February 28, 2020
Fact Checkers claim they check facts for you, so you don’t have to. The dictionary definition of a fact is:
“Something that is known to have happened or to exist, especially something for which proof exists, or about which there is information”
The legal definition of a fact is:
“An actual and absolute reality, as distinguished from mere supposition or opinion; a truth, as distinguished from fiction or error.”
Like reality and truth, a fact is absolute. It never changes, it is immutable and eternal. Our understanding of the facts may differ because we only have the available evidence to inform our knowledge of the facts. The availability of evidence is vital if we are to have any hope of knowing the facts. Our access to evidence doesn’t change the facts, it merely limits or expands our knowledge of them.
The definition of knowledge is:
“[Noun]… awareness, understanding, or information that has been obtained by experience or study, and that is either in a person’s mind or possessed by people generally.”
Access to information is the key component for developing knowledge of the facts. Knowledge doesn’t mean we always get the facts right, but we have no chance if information is limited or deliberately restricted.
Some facts are relatively easy to understand. The boiling point of water is a fact we can physically measure with consistent results. Others are more difficult to know and therefore less certain from our perspective. For example, history comprises of nothing other than facts but for us to know what they are we need to sift through the evidence, some reliable some not, to build our knowledge of the historical facts.
The same is true with current affairs and public issues. The facts are fixed but our knowledge of them is determined by our access to information. Information is subject to many competing forces. Censorship, propaganda, commercial interest, fabrication, omission and basic human error all combine to distort, obfuscate or over emphasise information (evidence). This makes knowing the facts about contemporary public issues just as tricky as knowing the historical facts, often more so.
Fortunately, we can all employ critical thinking skills, cross reference the evidence from various sources and decide the facts for ourselves. Thanks to the current iteration of the internet, the logical pursuit of information, forming our own balanced judgments of the facts, has never been more accessible for ordinary folk. The process called thinking is the service the fact checkers are selling.
Fact checkers claim their knowledge of the information (evidence), which identifies fact, is both complete and indisputable. They are certain about what happened, thoroughly understand all the relevant circumstances, have a complete grasp of reality, knowledge of all the relevant information and are accurately able to determine what is fact.
In short, they say they possess the truth. If you disagree with them, you don’t know the truth and are therefore wrong, regardless of the evidence you cite.
If you rely upon the fact checkers for your facts you must accept this. You no longer need to think critically or examine the evidence yourself. The fact checkers will do the hard work for you. They will tell you what the information is, give you your knowledge and cement the facts in your mind. All you need do is “Google it.”
What Do Fact Checkers Do?
The State has decided people are incapable of critical thinking and can’t tell the difference between facts and disinformation. Further, they propose legislation that will fundamentally change the nature of the internet. It is in this political environment that fact checkers have been commissioned to discern the facts and present the truth to the confused public.
In 2014 there were just 44 Fact checkers worldwide. As of June 2019 there were 188. While the whole of Africa, Asia, Australasia and South America have 67 fact checkers between them, the much smaller geographical and less populated regions of Europe and North America have 121. So there must be more incorrect information in the U.S. and Europe than anywhere else in the world.
Fact Checking is a rapidly changing startup industry. In 2014 nearly 90% of Fact Checkers were directly funded by mainstream media corporations. Today that figure has dropped to just 56% with many more claiming they are independent. We are going to look at how independent they are.
Some independent fact checkers, such as the UK’s Full Fact, have been given charity status. The UK Charity commission accepted Full Fact’s charitable purpose:
“To provide free tools, advice, and information so that anyone can check the claims we hear about public issues.”
Fact Checkers make money by fact checking for multinational corporations, non-governmental organisations (NGO’s), wealthy charitable foundations and the mainstream media. Global corporations, notably the tech giants, are under considerable political pressure to employ fact checkers and devise ways of stopping the spread of so called disinformation. Disinformation being anything that questions official narratives.
Recently Facebook announced that its subsidiary Instagram was working with fact checkers to deploy a rating system. They will apply a rating “label” to all information as either true, partly false or false. Information rated as partly false or false will then be removed from search results and associated hashtags denied. Once the label is activated Facebook and Instagram bots seek out all “matching” content and label it accordingly. Thus effectively removing the offending information from the public domain.
The public will then be redirected to the correct information:
“… If something is rated false or partly false on Facebook, starting today we’ll automatically label identical content if it is posted on Instagram (and vice versa). The label will link out to the rating from the fact-checker and provide links to articles from credible sources that debunk the claim(s) made in the post.”
“Credible sources”, as far as most International Fact Checking Network (IFCN) fact checkers are concerned, often means the mainstream media (MSM) who they cite while seemingly oblivious to the MSM’s never ending stream of fake news.
Independent Fact Checkers?
For fact checkers to have any credibility they need to be scrupulously unbiased, thoroughly independent and as objective as possible. Any evidence that they are not means they are not fact checkers at all but rather political organizations that offer an opinion. If they are paid by people or groups with clear agendas then they have no credibility and everything they say needs to be treated with caution. We would still need to exercise due diligence and examine the evidence ourselves to establish if the fact checkers opinions are indeed facts.
When the UK Government Foreign and Commonwealth Office established the Open Information Partnership (the Expose Network) they suggested their network of actors use approved fact checking services, such as Full Fact in the UK, who are members of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Network (IFCN). Poynter’s major funders include the Charles Koch Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Omidyar Network (Luminate), Google and the Open Society Foundation.
Therefore it is a fact that the IFCN, the “official” trade organisation for “approved” fact checkers, is funded by, among others, the multinational corporation Koch Industries, the C.I.A (NED), globalist venture capitalists (Omidyar), aggressive internet monopolists (Google) and globalist currency speculator & social change agent George Soros (Open Society). Nearly all of the fact checking signatories to the IFCN code have similar agenda driven backers. Members include Politifact, Full Fact, StopFake and AP Fact Check, to name but a few.
Full Fact, for example, list their corporate members to include the City of London Corporation (the UK financial sector and a global center for international finance), the global corporate law firm King & Wood Malleson, St Jame’s Place Wealth Management (a huge global capital investment firm), and the defence contractor Rolls Royce. Their funding partners include Google, The Omidyar Network and the Open Society foundation. They even wrote a policy proposal paper called “Tackling Misinformation In an Open Society.”
Full Fact’s trustees include former BBC Director of News and Current Affairs James Harding. James was responsible for one of the most egregious pieces of fake news war propaganda in modern history when he oversaw production of the BBC’s fake documentary Saving Syria’s Children.
BBC Fake Documentary To Promote War
Chair of the board of trustees is Conservative Party donor Michael Samuel and he is joined by fellow Conservative Lord Inglewood and Labour Peer Baroness Royal. The political establishment is well represented when it comes to making sure we have the right facts.
Another Full Fact trustee is Lord Sharkey Liberal Democrat Peer and former strategic adviser to once UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. Clegg joined Facebook in October 2018 to become Facebook Head of Global Affairs. In January 2019 Full Fact became approved third party fact checkers for Facebook and in September 2019 Nick announced that Facebook won’t “fact check” politicians in the same way that it fact checks the general public. Speaking of Facebook’s approach to the political class Clegg said:
“From now on we will treat speech from politicians as newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard.”
Obviously this carte blanche doesn’t extend to the general public. Presumably because we are all disinformation agents.
Another Full Fact trustee Tim Gordon was also an advisor to Nick Clegg. He co founded Best Practice AI which was the first UK AI firm invited to join the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council (GAIC). The GAIC bring together representatives from tech giants including Microsoft , IBM and Google’s Chinese division with British government ministers, such as former Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Jeremy Wright, who attending their council meeting in 2019.
GAIC is one of six WEF global councils focused upon technology and the fourth industrial revolution. Their stated purpose is:
“… to provide policy guidance and address governance gaps.”
So as Full Fact rolls out automated AI fact checking, fully funded by regular WEF attendees Pierre Omidyar and George Soros, with the full support of GAIC members Google, it is good to know these projects are rooted firmly in Full Fact’s independence. As they only report the facts they state on their website:
“Full Fact fights bad information. We’re a team of independent fact checkers and campaigners who find, expose and counter the harm it does.”
“Bad information” is information that questions government policy agendas and harms globalist interests. These interests are defined for government by global institutions like the World Economic forum, where government ministers attend to get their orders. Independent, in Full Fact speak, must mean “employed by global corporations and oligarchs.”
The extensive political, intelligence, non governmental and globalist network steering Full Fact is by no means unique to them. A cursory glance at the supporters of the other fact checking signatories to the IFCN reveal a similar web of globalist and corporate interests in practically every case. The IFCN, and its members, are paid by people with overt political, financial and social agendas. Independence is non existent and consequently the fact checkers claims of objectivity need to be treated accordingly. They have no credibility at all.
Not Fact Checking
If fact checkers check facts then you would at least expect them to report the evidence accurately. However, all too often, they don’t. For example, AP Fact Check are IFCN members who report that World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC7) collapsed on September 11th 2001 as a result of fires. This “fact” was first reported by AP Fact Check on 13/06/2017 and remains as their statement of fact today (28/02/2020.)
The engineering department of the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) undertook a 4 year long study into the collapse of WTC7. The UAF report is currently open to peer review and cites the evidence it is based upon. It was published in draft form in mid September 2019 and the findings were officially announced at the same time. It categorically states:
“… fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse.”
The UAF study represents the most thorough, up to date, scientific analysis of the collapse of WTC7. Incomplete peer review of the UAF report is no reason for AP Fact Check to ignore it. The NIST report, the sole source for the fire collapse theory, has never been peer reviewed. Anyone using AP Fact Check to check the facts about the collapse of WTC7 would be wrong if they believed AP Fact Check. AP Fact Check haven’t got their facts straight.
This is a common problem with so called fact checkers. Due to the political nature of their role, all too often they stray into opinion rather than fact. There’s nothing wrong with that except the fact checkers falsely claim their opinions are facts not opinions. What’s worse is that the Internet is being policed and information censored on the basis that the fact checkers opinions are facts.
In January this year the HighWire released a video which contrasted clips of Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist for the World Health Organisation (W.H.O). The Video was titled “W.H.O. Chief Scientist Caught Lying To The Public.” There was no commentary in the Highwire video, viewers were simply presented with the two clips of Dr. Swaminathan. It was left to the viewers discretion to decide if they believed Dr. Swaminathan was, in fact, lying.
In the first clip, from an official W.H.O. vaccine promotional video, Dr. Swaminathan states:
“We have vaccine safety systems. Robust vaccine safety systems … [The] WHO works closely with countries to make sure that vaccines can do what they do best: prevent disease without risks.”
The second clip records Dr. Swaminathan’s address to the U.N. Global Vaccine Safety Summit in 2019. She informs the summit:
“… We really don’t have very good safety monitoring systems in many countries…..we’re not able to give clear-cut answers when people ask questions about the deaths that have occurred due to a particular vaccine… One should be able to give a very factual account of what exactly has happened and what the cause of deaths are, but in most cases, there is some obfuscation at that level.”
These two mutually exclusive statements cannot both be true. If one is, the other is a lie. Vaccines cannot both “prevent disease without risks” while “deaths… have occurred due to a particular vaccine.” The intention to deceive is an evident fact. Yet Facebook’s automated fact checking labeling system flagged the video as ‘PARTLY FALSE‘ and directed users to two articles from two credible sources which both presented specious, illogical arguments to discredit the factually accurate HighWire video.
In September 2019 climatologists and environmental experts protested to Facebook after its fact checkers labelled the article “The Great Failure of the Climate Models” as ‘FALSE.’ The article was blocked and users could not share it. The information in the article was censored. The article was based upon the work of scientists and statisticians and was factually accurate. Facebook not only labelled the article FALSE they directed readers to a dubious, poorly evidenced source, calling that “credible.”
Facebook removed the FALSE label shortly after receiving the protest letter, without explanation or apology. They clearly accepted their fact checking wasn’t checking any facts at all, simply censoring factually accurate information. However, in the fast paced modern information environment, the damage was done, and the political objective achieved.
This is not fact checking. This is political opinion masquerading as fact checking, deceiving the public into believing something is factually accurate (or inaccurate) when, in fact, it isn’t.
Poynter and the IFCN also confuse their opinion with fact. In May 2019 Poynter were forced to issue an apology, of sorts, to a number of media organisations after they issued an index of ‘unreliable’ media sources. When some of the listed organisations inquired about the basis for Poynter’s unfounded accusations, requesting Poynter and the IFCN provide some evidence to back up their claims, Poynter quickly removed the suggested “blacklist.”
Poynter’s IFCN make a great deal out of their fact checking principles so it’s a shame they didn’t apply any when they issued their blacklist. Poynter’s managing editor, Barbara Allen, said the purpose of the blacklist was as follows:
“… to provide a useful tool for readers to gauge the legitimacy of the information they were consuming… We began an audit to test the accuracy and veracity of the list, and while we feel that many of the sites did have a track record of publishing unreliable information, our review found weaknesses in the methodology. We detected inconsistencies between the findings of the original databases that were the sources for the list and our own rendering of the final report.”
This was tantamount to the IFCN admitting they chose who to put on their blacklist based upon their feelings. When we look at who funds the IFCN it’s pretty clear who those feelings lean towards.
When requested to evidence their decision the IFCN, guardians of the fact checking industry, couldn’t provide any. They had no relevant information, had no evidence to back up their opinion and were simply stating something as a fact when it was nothing of the sort.
Just because an organisation claims they are a fact checker it doesn’t mean they check facts. They are essentially establishment stooges whose role it is to police information and make sure the wider public doesn’t have access to any evidence that challenges official narratives and policy decisions. These fallible groups of people, no better informed than anyone else, are being used by the internet giants, at the behest of government, to censor what we can say online.
Let’s ignore the establishment’s fact checkers and hang on to our critical thinking skills for a while. It looks like we are going to need them more than ever.
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Wars for Israel: A reminder of who’s giving the marching orders
By Damian Lataan | February 7, 2012
As the West prepares to march off to yet another war in the Middle East, we should perhaps remind ourselves of who is giving the West their marching orders.
In February 2003, just weeks before the US and their allies launched their attack on Iraq and her peoples, a delegation of US congressmen, together with the US Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, a well known pro-Zionist and neoconservative war-hawk, were in Israel at the invitation of the Israeli government then led by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Addressing the congressmen, Sharon told them ‘that Iran, Libya and Syria should be stripped of weapons of mass destruction after Iraq’. Later, Sharon told John Bolton ‘that Israel was concerned about the security threat posed by Iran, and stressed that it was important to deal with Iran even while American attention was focused on Iraq’. … continue
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