Fabricated: Video showing release of women from Sednaya jail in Syria
Press TV – December 28, 2024
A new investigation has revealed that a viral video showing women and children allegedly being released from Syria’s Sednaya prison after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad was fabricated.
In a post on X on Saturday, the Syrian fact-checking group Verify-Sy said the circulated footage, videos, and images documenting the moment women and girls were allegedly released were filmed at the “Dafa” organization, a children’s charity located in the Kafr Sousa neighborhood south of Damascus, and not Sednaya jail.
Verify-Sy went on to say that its extensive probe revealed that the claim is false, adding that the viral video conceals various details, including a suspected case of theft and vandalism, which need to be investigated by the relevant authorities.
The video footage circulating on social media platforms such as Facebook, X, and TikTok, along with several Arabic and international media outlets, such as Syria TV and Al Arabiya, showed a man ordering a group of girls and women to return to their homes, while a woman says, “These girls are in my charge,” which raises doubts about the real location.
Meanwhile, Fidaa Daqouri, Chairwoman of the Dafa Organization has clarified to Verify-Sy that on the night of the Assad government’s fall, the organization was attacked by a group of armed civilians, who identified themselves as “rebels.”
She also said the attackers stole buses belonging to the organization, as well as batteries, and forced everyone present to leave the building, adding that they also raided a juvenile detention center on the same street and some nearby institutes.
Daqouri also called on Syria’s de facto new ruler to investigate the incident and hold those who attacked the center accountable, while denouncing as “unacceptable” the misleading spread of this video by media outlets, falsely identifying the location as Sednaya prison.
In order to verify the videos, images, and stories, the Verify-Sy team contacted Diab Sarya, co-founder and director of the Sednaya Prison Detainees Association. He confirmed that Sednaya is “a military prison designated for holding men only.”
He said all circulated stories about secret prisons, hidden floors, or coded doors are fabricated and have no basis in reality.
Militants, led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), took control of Damascus on December 8 and declared an end to Assad’s rule in a surprise offensive that was launched from their stronghold in northwestern Syria, reaching the capital in less than two weeks.
Since then, a wave of propaganda surrounding the prisoners in Sednaya Prison has proliferated across the internet.
They must have their Srebrenica in Syria…
By Stephen Karganovic | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 25, 2024
Following the abrupt and mysterious change of circumstances in Syria, the collective West propaganda machinery went into overdrive to pillory the previous government for a variety of heinous offences, real and imagined. The largely invented horror stories publicised after 8 December are shaped by an unmistakably political agenda. They serve as a cynical alibi for the utter devastation wrought upon Syria by terrorist, head-chopping gangs trained, financed, and unleashed by the very regional and ultramarine powers which are engaged in the spreading of those falsehoods.
Attentive readers will recall numerous false flags and horror porn mantras about “Assad killing his own people” that resonated throughout the decade and a half long assault on Syria. Most were quickly discredited as nasty fabrications. But, of course, the purpose of propaganda is not to demonstrate facts but to influence perceptions and create indelible subliminal impressions. In this infamous category, the alleged Ghouta chemical weapon attack on Syrian civilians, falsely attributed to the Assad government and subsequently debunked, is a salient example. The fabricated incident was thoroughly investigated and ultimately found to be devoid of substance, but attesting to the power of professionally conducted disinformation even many years after discreditation Ghouta remains a vibrant propaganda meme firmly embedded in the public mind as an atrocity typifying the malevolence of the “Assad regime.”
No sooner did the rebranded Al Qaeda terrorists march into Damascus than, as if on cue, on 9 December the collective West media initiated an aggressive attempt to shift public attention away from the victorious radical thugs and their sordid past. Saydnaya Prison, previously (if we disregard a 2017 Amnesty International mention) a virtually unknown venue now unveiled as the “Assad regime slaughterhouse,” suddenly was thrust into the limelight in a sensationalistic narrative that was absurd on its face. It was alleged by the BBC, a known source of trustworthy information, that Saydnaya was a horrific dungeon consisting of multiple underground levels, each independently secured by electronic doors. Within this prison complex, it was further alleged, “more than 100,000 detainees who can be seen on CCTV monitors” were trapped and dying without food or water and choking from lack of ventilation, abandoned by sadistic Assad guards who, when fleeing the premises, malevolently absconded with the codes required to open the electronic door systems.
Left unexplained is how over the years the logistical operation necessary to sustain a prison facility the size of a moderate sized town escaped the notice of aerial surveillance platforms that were observing every inch of Syrian territory for the duration of the conflict. How was it possible after regime change to analyse CCTV monitor data in just a single day in order to reach the conclusion that “over 100,000 prisoners” were trapped inside? And if those CCTV data had indeed been sifted through why have they not been shown to the international public to corroborate beyond doubt the emerging human tragedy of such mind-boggling proportions? Are the electronic portals to the underground cell complexes so impregnable that they may be opened only by the use of the unavailable codes in the guards’ possession, or might there be other means of forcing them and liberating the endangered prisoners?
The latest news on this topic is that “Syria rebels [are] unable to open Assad’s Sednaya ‘Red Cells’ where prisoners are ‘choking to death’.” The problem is that this news item is dated 9 December, but now it is over two weeks later. Since 9 December there has been no follow-up, no updates on how successful the rescuers may have been in opening the electronic doors and gaining access to those trapped inside. In fact, the distressing Saydnaya story has since been obliterated completely from the Western media news radar screen, as abruptly as it appeared. Now that the shocking and unsubstantiated allegations have had their psychological effect on the public mind a complete blackout prevails.
But what has propaganda got to do with logic and coherence?
However after the sensational allegations that have been made, what actually did or did not happen in Saydnaya is important and must be ascertained lest the international public be played for fools. It may reasonably be assumed that after more than two weeks without food, water, or ventilation, by now the vast majority of the wretched prisoners, extravagantly claimed to number over 100,000, should be dead. The stench of their decomposing bodies should be unbearable in a wide radius around the prison complex, perhaps reaching even as far as liberated Damascus, which is 30 kilometres away. It makes no sense to suddenly impose silence over a potential atrocity of such an appalling nature and magnitude which in the eyes of the entire world would irrefutably convict the “Assad regime,” whilst exonerating the collective West from complicity in the crimes of its proxies and in Syria’s callous destruction.
It is now becoming increasingly clear that the Saydnaya affair was conceived as but an overture for a larger propaganda operation that is to follow, to fabricate a Syrian Srebrenica. Besides lending credence to the long list of false flag allegations and outright lies upon which the collective West’s intervention in Syria was based, now crowned with the apparent victory of the terrorists they sponsored, the impending Syrian Srebrenica operation is designed also to diminish Russia’s stature for supposedly sheltering a “perpetrator of genocide.”
As has been reported, the propaganda props, one by one, are meticulously being put in place. Photographs of vast empty spaces are being represented as “killing fields” where allegedly hundreds of thousands of Assad’s victims lie buried. Individuals claiming to have taken part in the mass burials are brought forth to embellish the photographic images with well-rehearsed spin.
We have yet to see however a single disinterred body, not to speak of being shown reliable evidence regarding the time, cause, and manner of death. And even the scant information that is provided is conditioned by weasel words that hundreds of thousands of bodies of Assad regime victims “could be buried in a mass grave east of Damascus.” They could be, but then also perhaps not. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, of which at present there is none. Bare assertions are insufficient.
A dependable indication of how the problem of missing bodies will be solved, and that the fix is already in, is the casual announcement that the task of investigating Syria’s “killing fields” will be entrusted to the notorious White Helmets. They are a fake civil defence outfit set up by British intelligence early in the conflict to pose as a humanitarian organisation. There is an exact parallel between the announced plan and the way that, in the 1990s and early 2000s, Srebrenica forensic issues were handled in order to provide the Hague Tribunal with fake evidence of “genocide.” The International Commission on Missing Persons [ICMP] which did the job then was founded specifically for that purpose in 1996 under the tight control of leading NATO powers, and with the proviso that the chairman of ICMP must always be a U.S. citizen nominated by the State Department. ICMP performed the tasks assigned to it with flying colours, having fabricated in its laboratories much of the Srebrenica “genocide” evidence for the use of the Hague Tribunal.
The White Helmets, founded by MI6 operative James Le Mesurier, will undoubtedly acquit themselves equally well in performing a similarly dishonourable task.
How To Fake An Alien Invasion (2015)
Corbett | December 23, 2024
WATCH ON: 
/ 
/ 
/ 
/ 
/ 
or download the MP3 AUDIO
FROM 2015: We all know about the crude pie-plate-on-string UFO hoaxes that have been perpetrated in the past. But what if I were to tell you the greatest UFO hoax of all time is being prepared right now, and it has Rockefeller backing and UN/Vatican/presidential support? Join us this week as we peek under the bluebeam curtain at the great alien invasion false flag.
Original Post: Episode 301 – How to Fake an Alien Invasion
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
JAMES CORBETT: Welcome back to The Corbett Report, ladies and gentlemen. I’m your host, James Corbett of corbettreport.com, podcasting to you as always from the sunny climes of western Japan, here on this 5th day of February 2015.
Welcome to Episode 301 of The Corbett Report: How to Fake an Alien Invasion.
Now, you’d better be careful who’s watching over your shoulder today, because we are about to broach one of the most top-secret, ultra-classified pieces of information in the entire conspiracy pantheon. A subject so sensitive that its mere exposure threatens to topple the power pyramid itself and, as a result, is never talked about in the establishment mouthpiece media. I’m referring of course to the topic of . . . [whisper] aliens.
Just what was in the skies over Jerusalem, and why did it stop over one of the most treasured sites in Christianity?
SOURCE: Female Anchor Scared Of UFO Sighting Over Jerusalem’s Dome Of The Rock
We bring you this special radio television broadcast in order to give you the very latest information on an amazing phenomenon: the arrival of a spaceship in Washington. The army has taken every precaution to meet any emergency which may develop. Just a minute, ladies and gentlemen, I think something is happening . . .
What’s hovering over Salt Lake City? Is it a rocket? A blimp? A UFO?
SOURCE: A Giant UFO Over Salt Lake City
PRESENTER: Former government UFO expert is warning that Britain is wide open to alien visitors and that the consequences of not monitoring extraterrestrials could be huge. Nick Pope, who resigned from the Ministry of Defense UFO Project, says the department looking into UFOs has all but closed down and despite a higher number of credible sightings. Let’s speak to Nick Pope. He joins us in the studio. . . .
SOURCE: BBC Warns of Alien Invasion
PRESENTER: . . . you want to meet this guy. Joining us now are team leader James Fox, one of the nation’s top UFO experts, and Erin Ryder, who is in charge of tech and recon for this series. Good morning to both of you.
JAMES FOX/ERIN RYDER: Good morning.
FEMALE REPORTER: This is a ufologist? Is that what the actual . . .?
JAMES FOX: So they say.
SOURCE: CBS: UFOs Mounting Preponderance of Evidence & Government Cover Up!
“AWA 517, do you want to report a UFO? Over.”
“Negative. We don’t want a report.”
“Aries 31, do you wish to report a UFO? Over.”
“Negative. We don’t want to report one of those, either.”
“Aries 31, do you wish to file a report of any kind? Over.”
“I wouldn’t know what kind of report to file.”
“Aries 31, me neither. I’ll try to track traffic at destination. Over.”
SOURCE: (Close Encounters) Indianapolis Air Traffic Control detects the UFOs
ADRIENNE MOORE: While the family knows their story sounds out of this world, they are convinced they witnessed a close encounter and will be keeping a watchful eye on the sky.
STACEY GIBSON: I think we’re definitely believers now.
SOURCE: UFO near San Diego — El Cajon, California — CBS News
Sorry, my mistake, my mistake. No, this is clearly a subject that is propounded time and again ad nauseam in the establishment mouthpiece media—that same media that we know is lying to us about most major world events, either through direct lying or lying by omission.
So, why are they not omitting this little idea from the cultural context? Why are they constantly returning to the idea of “alien presence,” “alien cover-up,” “alien invasion,” “alien threat”?
Why is this propounded so often, not just in the news media but also in those cultural entertainment productions that I hope we understand are, in the end, a product of the culture-creation industry that has been predictably programming us for decades—generations, perhaps—to accept various memes and ideas, including this idea of “alien invasion,” “alien threat” and the fallout and consequences thereof?
It is a theme that has been returned to time and time and time and time and time again for the better part of the century by this point. It’s almost as if the billionaire power players at the top of this pyramid are actually connected to an idea to implant this idea of alien invasion in the public consciousness for the purpose of manipulating public opinion. And that’s because . . . they are connected to such an agenda, demonstrably so.
RADIO NEWSCASTER (archival): Ladies and gentlemen, here is the latest bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News, Toronto, Canada: Professor Morris of Macmillan University reports observing a total of three explosions on the planet Mars between the hours of 7:45 PM and 9:20 PM Eastern Standard Time. This confirms earlier reports received from American observatories. Now, nearer home, comes a special bulletin from Trenton, New Jersey. It is reported that at 8:50 PM a huge flaming object, believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in the neighborhood of Grovers Mill, New Jersey, twenty-two miles from Trenton. The flash in the sky was visible within a radius of several hundred miles, and the noise of the impact was heard as far north as Elizabeth.
NARRATOR: Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. Never before had a radio broadcast provoked such outrage—or such chaos. Upwards of a million people convinced, if only briefly, that the United States was being laid waste by alien invaders, and a nation left to wonder how they possibly could’ve been so gullible.
By a quarter past eight Eastern time, telephones were ringing madly all across the country, as concerned Americans tried to determine the whereabouts of relatives, warn friends and acquaintances, and most of all, corroborate what they were hearing.
MAN ON THE PHONE (archival): City Desk. A what?? Wait a minute.
NARRATOR: For the next several hours, newspapers, radio stations and police precincts from coast to coast would be swamped with calls.
MAN ON THE PHONE (archival): Well, I can’t help that, ma’am, we just don’t know anything about it. Did I say something about a quiet Sunday evening?
SECOND MAN (archival): What’s going on, anyway?
NARRATOR: Soon, strange bulletins began coming in over the press service wires. In Bergenfield, New Jersey, just north of Grovers Mill, some twenty families turned up at a police station, with all of their household possessions piled into their cars. In Indianapolis, a woman rushed to the pulpit in a Methodist church, shouting that the end of the world had come. And in Washington state, a spectacularly ill-timed power failure plunged the small town of Concrete into darkness and sent terrified residents fleeing into the mountains.
RADIO NEWSCASTER (archival): The battle which took place tonight at Grover Mills has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by an army in modern times: 7,000 men armed with rifles and machine guns pitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders from Mars. One hundred and twenty known survivors . . .
SEYMOUR CHARLES HAYDEN (archival): Well, my wife, she came in, my wife did, just wringing her hands and wailing away, her eyeballs about to pop out onto her lap, going, “What is it? What is it? What could it be? Is it the Germans?” Well, she hadn’t heard the word “Martians,” but I had.
RADIO NEWSCASTER (archival): . . . There’s a brief statement informing us that the charred body of Carl Phillips has been identified in a Trenton hospital.
DAVID ROEPIK (archival): We think that we’re really smart, but if there’s a cue out there that could possibly be dangerous, we’re going to react to it protectively, autonomically, instinctively—fear first, and reason and fact second.
SOURCE: War of the Worlds: The Panic Broadcast | PBS America
Now, I’m sure that the majority of the listening and viewing audience will be familiar with the story of Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 radio dramatization of the famous H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds and the resulting hysteria and panic that ensued, driving people insane, believing there to be a real alien invasion taking place, and farmers running out into the fields shooting at grain silos and the like. That story is a fascinating one for a number of reasons—namely, because it is a confluence of different events in world history at that time that had a very interesting and profound effect on shaping an entire field of study.
This relates to the advent of mass communication technologies like the radio, which was still, to some extent, in its infancy as a broadcast medium at that time, capable of reaching across a nation as wide and diverse as America and reaching many millions of people at the same time and inducing this kind of mass panic and psychosis.
It is interesting to study in that regard. So, it is not surprising that it was immediately made the subject of such a study, funded by—who else? The Rockefellers. We can take more on this from a very, very important article that was published on GlobalResearch.ca back in 2012: Early ‘Psychological Warfare’ Research and the Rockefeller Foundation by Prof. James Tracy.
Reading from that article:
The “founding fathers” of mass communication research could not have established their field without Rockefeller largesse. Alongside World War One propagandist and University of Chicago political scientist Harold Lasswell, psychologist Hadley Cantril was a principal contributor to the knowledge and information that helped propel Rockefeller-controlled enterprises and American empire in the postwar era. Throughout this period Cantril provided the Rockefeller combine with important information and new techniques in public opinion measurement and management in Europe, Latin American, and the United States.
A roommate of Nelson Rockefeller’s at Dartmouth College in the late 1920s, Cantril took a doctorate in psychology at Harvard, coauthoring The Psychology of Radio with his doctoral mentor Gordon Allport in 1935. “Radio is an altogether novel medium of communication,” Cantril and Allport observed, “preeminent as a means of social control and epochal in its influence upon the mental horizons of men.”
The work garnered the attention of Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Division officer John Marshall, commissioned by the Foundation with convincing commercial broadcasters to include more educational programming into their advertiser-driven schedules. To this end Rockefeller was funding fellowships at the CBS and NBC broadcasting networks.
Aware of the Dartmouth connection, Marshall encouraged the enterprising Cantril to apply to the Foundation for support. Cantril’s request resulted in a $67,000 grant for a two-year charter of the “Princeton Radio Project” (PRP) at Princeton University. There Cantril proceeded to develop studies assessing radio’s effects on audiences. In 1938 Cantril also became a founding editor of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Public Opinion Quarterly, an organ closely associated with US government’s psychological warfare endeavors following World War Two.
When the Princeton venture commenced, another trained psychologist close to Rockefeller, CBS Director of Research Frank Stanton, was named PRP lead researcher but took a secondary role of Associate Director due to his position at his broadcast network. At this time Austrian émigré social scientist Paul Lazarsfeld was recruited to join Cantril. Thus Cantril, Stanton, and Lazarsfeld were closely affiliated and ideally positioned to embark on a major study involving public opinion and persuasion.
The opportunity for such an analysis presented itself when CBS broadcast Orson Welles’ rendering of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938. Lazarsfeld saw the event as especially noteworthy and immediately asked Stanton for CBS funds to investigate reaction to what at the time was the largest immediate act of mass persuasion in human history. Over the next several months interviews with War of the Worlds listeners were collected, provided to Stanton at CBS, and subsequently analyzed in Cantril’s 1940 study, The Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic.
SOURCE: Early ‘Psychological Warfare’ Research and the Rockefeller Foundation
A fascinating little tidbit from history, I trust that you’ll agree. And if you do, I hope you’ll go and follow the link in the show notes to that original article so you can continue reading about Hadley Cantril’s adventures providing studies and information about psychological persuasion to the Rockefeller Foundation and how that developed and contributed to world psychological warfare techniques for the US Army and things of that nature.
I think it is interesting to see this confluence of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds becoming a radio dramatization, which incites this mass panic, the largest immediate act of mass persuasion in human history, which is then studied by the Princeton Radio Project backed up by the Rockefeller Foundation.
But you could argue that that’s a tangential connection or just a coincidental connection—that this doesn’t mean that the Rockefellers are interested in mass persuasion in terms of alien invasion per se, it’s just that that was the immediate proximate cause of this particular study.
So, you might fruitfully ask, “Are there any other connections between the Rockefellers and this idea of faking an alien invasion or an alien presence of some sort?” And the answer is: yes! Yes, there is such evidence . . .
RESEARCHER ANTONIO HUNEEUS: Mr. Rockefeller backed many UFO-related projects in the period between the late ’80s and 2000. But, for the purposes of this hearing, we will concentrate on his political initiatives in these areas.
Laurance Rockefeller’s first forays into ufology started sometime in the late ’80s through Dr. Cecil B. Scott Jones, a parapsychologist and former US Navy Commander who had worked as naval attaché́ in Asia and at the Naval Scientific and Technical Intelligence Center. Between 1985 and 1991, Jones was Special Assistant to Sen. Claiborne Pell (1918–2009), the powerful Rhode Island Democrat Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1987–1994) who was deeply interested in parapsychology and who probably many of you met personally. Sen. Pell was also friends with Laurance Rockefeller, and both served on the board of the Human Potential Foundation, a small think tank launched in 1989 in Vienna, Virginia, by Jones to conduct “research into all conditions of humankind: physiological, psychological and spiritual.”
Many of the papers released by the White House OSTP [Office of Science and Technology Policy] come from Scott Jones, who knew Dr. John Gibbons, a physicist who worked for many years as Director of the Office of Technology Assessment for the US Congress and was appointed in 1993 by the Clinton administration to direct the OSTP.
What was the exact turning point of Laurance Rockefeller’s evolution from a general interest in consciousness studies into the specific area of UFOs and Extraterrestrial Intelligence is still unclear. But the end of the Cold War and the arrival in Washington of a younger generation represented by Bill and Hillary Clinton are key factors. He felt the time was ripe for a new and fresh approach into an area that had been previously dominated by a Cold War mentality.
Rockefeller recruited for these efforts a long-time associate, Henry L. Diamond, an environmental attorney from Washington, D.C., whose links to the family went all the way back to the 1960s, when he worked with Laurance in his conservation activities. Diamond also knew John Gibbons, and so he was the right person to make the first contact with the OSTP chief when he sent a Memorandum on March 29, 1993, requesting a meeting. I’m quoting now the first paragraph:
“Laurance S. Rockefeller, who is a leading US conservationist, businessman, and philanthropist, is anxious to have a brief meeting with Dr. Gibbons to discuss the potential availability of government information about unidentified flying objects and extraterrestrial life. As one who has had a long-time interest in environmental and spiritual issues, Mr. Rockefeller, with other leading citizens, is planning to make an approach to President Clinton on this subject . . . .”
STEPHEN BASSETT: I invite all of the political media, all media in general but certainly the political media, to look at the Rockefeller Initiative. It is one of the stories in American history—it’s one of the great political stories, certainly in this or any other time. It is filled with amazing people who are still around and still very powerful.
At the time that Rockefeller approached, through his attorney, President Clinton, Clinton’s key adviser—or one of his very key advisors—was John Podesta. The Chief of Staff at the time was Leon Panetta. The wife of the President at the time was Hillary Clinton. A good friend of the family at the time, soon to be Clinton’s Secretary of Energy, was Bill Richardson. This Initiative went on for six years. The press completely ignored it, as if “What’s the news there? It’s just a billionaire Rockefeller trying to get the President to release all the files on these phenomena. Possibly put a letter into every newspaper in the country, and release . . . and basically end the Truth Embargo. There’s no news there.”
SOURCE: Citizens Hearing April 29th Steven Bassett Rockefeller Initiative and John Podesta or Annotated Proceedings of the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure [PDF])
Now, for those of you not immersed in the topic of the Disclosure Movement, you may not be familiar with some of these names and faces. But some of the main ones to take note of are Dr. Stephen Bassett, who founded and ran something called the Paradigm Research Group at ParadigmResearchGroup.org. He defines himself as a political activist, lobbyist, commentator, the executive director of Paradigm Research Group and the Extra-Terrestrial Phenomena Politicalist Action Committee, and executive producer of the X Conference: The Citizens Hearing on Disclosure and the Congressional Hearing Initiative, and Dr. Steven Greer, who runs something called the Disclosure Project. He describes himself as “The Father of the Disclosure Movement” and the person who presided over the groundbreaking National Press Club Disclosure Event in May of 2001.
So, these are some of the biggest names if not the biggest names in this Disclosure Movement. And, well, they don’t really make a secret of the fact that the Rockefellers are . . . well, specifically Laurance Rockefeller was a big help in getting this movement launched back in the mid-1990s. We can document this. In order to do so, let’s turn to a very important website, which I will commend to your attention. I hope you guys out there have . . . well, I know some of you have already found it and have emailed me about it.
I have found it myself, and it seems that the author of this website and I are in accord on a number of our political views—especially the overall way in which the BRICS—China and Russia—and other aspects of the New World Order system are being used as the good cop in a good cop/bad cop system.
Also on this subject of the UFO Disclosure Movement, [there is] a very important article called “Why are the Rockefellers and the Jesuits guiding the UFO disclosure movement?” at RedefiningGod.com. I will put the link in the show notes so you can go and follow it.
Reading from that article:
The Rockefeller role in getting the Disclosure ball rolling is something of an open secret among the Disclosure people (the Disclosuristas, as I call them). On Stephen Bassett’s own Research Group website, a specific Rockefeller effort referred to as the “Rockefeller Initiative” is openly touted. The same effort is also touted on Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project website as “Project Starlight” . . . .
“This letter from the Project Starlight Coalition was the result of the historic Asilomar, California, meeting that Dr. Greer organized and Laurance Rockefeller paid for in June 1995, just before Clinton’s meeting with Rockefeller in August 1995.”
[. . .]
Who is Laurance Rockefeller? Well, according to Laurance Rockefeller’s biography:
In 1937 he inherited his grandfather’s seat on the New York Stock Exchange. He served as founding trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund for 42 years, from its inception in 1940 to 1982. During this time, he also served as its president (1958 to 1968) and later its chairman (1968 to 1980) for 22 years, longer than any other leader in the Fund’s history. He was also a founding trustee of the Rockefeller Family Fund from 1967 to 1977.
SOURCE: Why are the Rockefellers and the Jesuits guiding the UFO Disclosure Movement?
So, not only was Laurance deeply involved in the financial industry, but he was also among the founders of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Family Fund. These funds are notorious for advancing globalist aims under the pretense of ‘philanthropy.’ Laurance also served on the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Special Studies Project.” End quote.
Now, I’ll let you continue reading about that Special Studies Project and the interesting fact that even now, four decades after the publication of the final report, The Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports, certain sections of that report are still classified, which is interesting in and of itself. But there are also screenshots of some of the pages of this report shown here in this very important article talking about how they are steering America towards shaping a new world order and things that you would expect to find in a typical Rockefeller study.
I suppose the point here is to emphasize that Laurance Rockefeller is very much in the heart of the Rockefeller matrix, pushing this global government agenda, which David Rockefeller so gleefully admitted to in his memoirs, as I’m sure we all know—or we all should know by now.
And I would again suggest you go to see this original article, if for no other reason than to click on such things as The Rockefeller Initiative or the Disclosure Project’s own Project Starlight’s page, where you can browse through and see all of the main characters who are connected through this Initiative that ran from 1993 to 1996. They include, of course, President Clinton and Laurance Rockefeller, along with Hillary [Clinton] and Dr. John Gibbons and John Podesta and Vice President Al Gore and this cast of Congress critters and [other] very unsavoury characters—including Dr. Steven Greer, the aforementioned “Father of the Disclosure Movement.”
All of these letters are archived here online, so you can read through them all and the various correspondence between some of the players, including between Laurance Rockefeller and John Gibbons and between Laurance Rockefeller and the Clintons.
I mean, this is a pretty interesting and openly admitted non-secret—that the Disclosure Movement was really launched with the aid of Laurance Rockefeller and the Clinton administration. So, I think that should at least get our antennas up toward the possibility that this is going to be used towards the furtherance of some sort of staged or faked alien invasion.
Now, that sounds like an outlandish prospect to those poor souls coming in from mainstream media land who are just landing on this site randomly. I hope you will be able to at least appreciate that there might be a reason why the very rich and powerful and well-connected would be interested in doing something as ridiculous and outlandish— I agree with you there—as staging some sort of alien threat, alien presence—whatever it may be.
But there are reasons why this might be done, and these aren’t reasons we have to speculate on. We can find all of the usual suspects talking about these reasons in all of the usual places, with the big ones—global religion, global finance and global government—uniting the world around this perceived alien threat.
FATHER JOHN MORRIS, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: What is exceptional is that the Vatican was taking very seriously what science might tell us about the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligent life forms. That’s what the conference was about. I can’t tell you that the Vatican found any alien life. I don’t think that’s what they were looking for, but they were taking very seriously the issue.
TRISHA THOMAS, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: We probably won’t be seeing aliens at Mass anytime soon, but the Vatican’s chief astronomer does say that there could exist other forms of life outside Earth, and he says if they do exist they are God’s creatures.
SOURCE: The Vatican’s Take on Aliens?
INTERVIEWER: So, how does this actually work? When Discovery [Channel] decided they were going to do a show on alien invasions, your phone rings because you’re sort of on the speed dial for theoretical physicists who can help them do the war game for how this might play out?
DR. MICHIO KAKU: Well, believe it or not, we physicists have actually studied the question of what happens if we do encounter a hostile advanced civilization in space, and Hollywood gets it all wrong. Hollywood assumes that the aliens are maybe a hundred years more advanced than us and that if only we had a secret weapon, we could defeat the aliens. Wrong. Either the aliens don’t bother with us because we’re simply too primitive or, if they do invade, it’ll be more like Bambi versus Godzilla.”
REPORTER: Now the United Nations is getting ready for contact with aliens from outer space. This is Mazlan Othman. She’s out of Malaysia. She will be planet Earth’s first interstellar diplomat.”
MAZLAN OTHMAN: First, I have to categorically deny that I was appointed or will be appointed the ambassador for aliens, the ambassador for the United Nations for aliens. No, the committee is not discussing this very . . . this subject matter. But yes, I was in the UK to attend a meeting—which I can quote to you—called “Towards a Scientific and Societal Agenda on Extraterrestrial Life,” which is why this whole thing came about, because the British press caught hold of the fact that I was going to be at this meeting, and I was on a panel that was discussing . . . they call it the Great Panel Debate. I like that name. It says: “Extraterrestrial Life and Arising Political Issues for the UN Agenda.”
SOURCE: Dr. Mazlan Othman z ONZ na temat debaty w sprawie UFO (UN ET panel debate at UK) – napisy PL
PAUL KRUGMAN: It’s very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy, but if you had a program of government spending plus an expansionary policy by the Fed, you could get that. So, if you think about using all of these things together, you could accomplish a great deal. If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive build-up to counter this space alien threat, and inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then, if we discovered, “Whoops, we’ve made a mistake. There actually aren’t any space aliens . . .”
PROFESSOR KENNETH ROGOF: We need Orson Welles, is what you’re saying . . .
PAUL KRUGMAN: No, there was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time . . . we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.”
RONALD REAGAN: Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.
SOURCE: Reagan’s ALIEN speech to UN
BILL PULLMAN (AS “PRESIDENT THOMAS J. WHITMORE”): And should we win, the day the 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday but as the day when the world declared in one voice, “We will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight We’re going to live on. We’re going to survive. Today we celebrate our Independence Day.”
SOURCE: Independence Day
JIMMY KIMMEL: If you saw that there were aliens there, would you tell us?
BILL CLINTON: Yeah.
KIMMEL: You would?
CLINTON: I would. I think, look, what do we know? We know now we live in an ever-expanding universe. We know that there are billions of stars and planets literally out there. And the universe is getting bigger. We know from our fancy telescopes that just in the last two years more than twenty planets have been identified outside our solar system that seem to be far enough away from their sun and dense enough that they might be able to support some form of life. So, it makes it increasingly less likely we are alone.
KIMMEL: Oh, you’re trying to give me a hint that there are aliens.
CLINTON: No, I’m trying to tell you I don’t know, but if we were visited someday, I wouldn’t be surprised. I just hope that it’s not like Independence Day. That it, you know—a conflict. Maybe that’s the only way to unite this increasingly divided world of ours. If they’re out there, we’d better think of how all the differences among people on earth would seem small if we felt threatened by a space invader. That’s the whole theory of Independence Day: everybody gets together and makes nice and you know . . .
KIMMEL: You and Bill O’Reilly would be hiding in a bunker together . . .
SOURCE: Bill Clinton Talks About The Coming FAKE Alien Invasion — April 1st 2014
What an interesting milieu of characters we have floating around there. We have the Vatican and the UN and Nobel Prize-winning economist/Keynesian wingnut Paul Krugman and multiple presidents of the United States—and all of these people talking about the same thing: “Wouldn’t it be great if we had this idea of an alien threat that would unite us all behind . . . fill in the blank . . . a world government or a world financial system or baptizing the aliens. Wouldn’t that be wonderful!”
And it’s interesting to look at this. I mean, I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday. I understand and can smell the public preparation for some sort of staged event when I see one, and, well, if it looks and smells and quacks like a false flag operation, it probably is one.
Being supported by some of the most prominent and powerful and well-connected political and financial elites, clearly there is something very, very stinky here. In order to really understand this stink . . . again, we know why this would potentially be a valuable thing for these “power elites” to consolidate their power in a world government or what have you.
But the question is: could they do it? If so, how could they do it? These are important questions that we need to address if we want to really approach the subject. And, I guess, if we’re going to address it, we have two different routes we can take. We can go down the unverifiable, unsourceable, unfalsifiable, undocumented route, or we can go down the sourced, verified, falsifiable documented route. Me being me, I’m going to go down the sourced, falsifiable, documented route. But if you want to go down that unsourced, unknowable, unverifiable route, you can go, for example, with something called Project Blue Beam.
Now, Project Blue Beam is something I’m sure most of the listeners out there have heard of at some point—at least in a vague sense—as some sort of plan that was uncovered. There must be documents backing this up—talking about staging an alien invasion with holograms in order to create a world government. Something along those lines.
Well, if you really want to open the Pandora’s Box of Project Blue Beam, it’s much more specific than that and, well, somewhat more outlandish and much less documented than you might expect.
This really all dates back and sources back to one particular French Canadian journalist, Serge Monast, who was talking in the mid-1990s about this Project Blue Beam—this NASA project that he had uncovered and was unveiling to the public. It had a multiple stage process for creating a world religion, world government—world tyranny. This involved the induction of earthquakes in order to expose archaeological finds—manipulated, planted archaeological finds—that would change our view of human history and a staged extraterrestrial invasion and the appearance of a new Messiah to be the head of this world religion and the imposition of UN World Government, etcetera. This is a detailed plan that was talked about, but there is literally no document behind this. There is no NASA secret paper that was ever exposed about this. It really all sources back to this Serge Monast and a couple of interviews that are available online.
There’s a transcript of a speech. There’s a translation of what I guess is some sort of summary of a book he apparently wrote on this subject. He did write a book, apparently in French, on this subject, but it’s never been reprinted, and it’s basically unobtainable. There are a couple of different translations of something that may have sourced from this book, more or less, but that’s basically it. I mean, there are just a few scraps. And from those scraps there’s been a lot of talk, and a lot of people have run with this idea. But I think not a lot of people know where it actually sources from.
I will put some links in the show notes, so you can actually follow them and read about them and come to your own conclusion: “Is this worth following?” and “Why should we believe this particular piece of information?” Call me a doubting Thomas. I’ll believe it when I see something, anything documentable, verifiable in terms of this plan.
If we want to go down the other route and look at actual verifiable, sourced and knowable technologies that we know exist, let alone those technologies that we don’t know exist that are being worked on in the skunkworks of DARPA, down in the bowels of the Pentagon—and for more on DARPA I’ll direct you to a previous Corbett Report radio episode, where we talked about DARPA and its various projects—we can source that in a number of different ways, from a number of different, seemingly disparate threads, but definitely technologies that we now know exist.
One place to start: we can get the clue from the book by previous Corbett Report guest James Perloff, Truth Is A Lonely Warrior, where he talks about an Air Force military publication that was available on the Air Force website. You can still access it on the Wayback Machine. The link will be in the show notes. This is about an airborne holographic projector which, this AF.MIL website notes, is:
” . . . a three-dimensional visual image in the desired location, removed from the display generator. The projector can be used for psychological operations and strategic perception management. It is also useful for optical deception and cloaking, providing a momentary distraction when engaging an unsophisticated adversary.”
SOURCE: Airborne Holographic Projector
You can see the unsophisticated visualization that is accompanying this on the website itself. But, yes, very crudely, it’s a plane projecting an image of another plane elsewhere in the sky. Now that is a very crude implementation of this type of holographic technology that, at the very least, would be required for making the world believe we were under some sort of alien invasion threat or what-have-you, but that is twenty years old now and sources from an Air Force military website.
I’m thinking that the actual technology would be somewhat more advanced. But we don’t have to speculate about that. We can take a look at the very real developments in technology, including such incredible things as beaming sound directly into people’s ears, touchable holograms, and being able to manipulate people’s perceptions and incite fear and panic through brain wave technology.
PRESENTER: “The ultimate weapon in the infowar would be so secret, so invisible, so undetectable, you would never know your mind was under attack. At Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada, a young student is about to undergo one of the strangest experiences of her life. They’re hooking Denise’s brain up to an electroencephalograph, or EEG machine. For thirty to forty minutes, this will monitor her brain waves while these electric coils attached on either side of her head will immerse her brain in an electromagnetic field. Her brain actually completes the circuit between the two coils. The field pulsing through her brain is less powerful than one given off by a digital clock radio. But, acutely controlled and focused on specific parts of the brain, it will open Denise’s mind to outside suggestion by this man. Dr. Michael Persinger is a professor of psychology and neuroscience. He is designing ways to put the power of mind control to good use. Dr. Persinger’s research focuses on brain trauma, and he uses carefully controlled doses of electromagnetic radiation to induce relaxation and alleviate pain.
DR. PERSINGER: So what Sandra did was to initiate an opiate-releasing pattern. That’s a burst-firing field that is stimulated once every four seconds and that produces relaxation and a very pleasant sensation. Similarly, using the appropriate field we can induce fear and apprehension, but clearly that would be unethical in that setting.
PRESENTER: Dr. Persinger’s tests suggest that carefully programmed electromagnetic frequencies can tap into individual brains and influence people’s emotions.
DR. PERSINGER: The cognitive processes of the human brain are really quite simple. And, if you understand how they work, you can make entire populations think and decide in the manner which you wish.
PRESENTER: Many experts are skeptical of such an Orwellian scenario, but Persinger thinks the implications are chillingly real.
DR. PERSINGER: Suppose you generate a field that produces fear—fundamental fear—in large numbers of people, and then over the television or in traditional ways you say, “The reason we’re having this fear is because of this particular group.” Now you start to move the population, believing in a direction that you wish.
PRESENTER: To influence 250 million people, the equivalent of the entire population of the United States, may not be difficult. According to Dr. Persinger, we already have the technology—satellites and television and radio transmitters. Mind control may already be happening. We know the mysterious psyops plane can beam persuasive sounds and pictures into people’s television sets. Will it someday beam disturbing frequencies directly into the mind?”
PRESENTER: First, your voice is transformed into high-frequency ultrasound—a sound so high no one can hear it. Ultrasound is highly directional, so, like a torch, it can be pointed at someone standing a long way away. Although they cannot hear the ultrasound, it causes secondary vibrations in the air around them, and it’s that sound the person hears.
DR. JOSEPH POMPEI: So, if you imagine you’re in a room and I shine a flashlight at you, it’s very bright for you but it’s very dark for everybody else. Much the same way, the audio spotlight creates a very narrow beam of sound that can shine at a listener. They hear it very clearly, and it doesn’t create noise that might bother other people in the same space.
SOURCE: Voice to Skull Time
PRESENTER: Researchers at Tokyo University have come up with the technology that is a first and significant step away from the mouse and keyboard: touchable holograms.
HIROYUKI SHINODA (translated): Up until now, holography has been for the eyes only. If you tried to touch it, your hand would go right through. But now we have the technology that also adds the sensation of touch to holograms.”
Now, look, I’m not necessarily saying that there’s going to be a staged alien invasion tomorrow and that we should all be concentrating on this, nor am I saying that there is no such thing as alien life in the universe. I would be shocked, flabbergasted, if there was not. Whether or not it’s visiting Earth well, what do I know? How do I know? I mean, I haven’t seen it myself, but does that mean it doesn’t exist? Well, of course not.
I’ll let you guys . . . you’re grown-up boys and girls out there. I’m sure you can decide for yourself on things like that. But we should know that there is a coordinated plan, or an agenda in place, to capitalize on such things as fake alien invasions that is being funded and promoted by the financial power elite at the top of the pyramid and is being promoted and pushed out into the cultural sphere by the politicians and economists and the Vatican and the UN, and then, underneath them, the culture-creators in the entertainment industry, to prepare the public for such a possibility. And we should be on guard against such manipulations.
These technologies that are now coming together . . . the ones that we know about, let alone the ones that are secretly in development that we don’t have access to . . . are clearly along the path towards making such an event possible.
You can look at something like the Norway spiral and believe the official response—that this was a Russian ICBM test that went awry. If you believe that, I have a bridge on the moon to sell you.
But all of these are just different pieces of the puzzle. I think they add up to something very interesting and something that is potentially coming sometime in the future.
Even if this particular instantiation—this fake alien invasion or what have you—doesn’t come together, still, the concept of psychological manipulation through manipulated events in manipulated reality is an important one—obviously one that we have to continue to keep in mind. Now that the technology for making these events possible is more and more a documentable reality, I think we should have our mental guards up for such eventualities.
So, that’s, I think, where we’re going to leave things today.
This is an open-source investigation. I invite and encourage and applaud the input of all of you out there. So, if you are a Corbett Report member, please do leave your comments on the website with any relevant links or information. Any comments, questions, complaints, criticisms, concerns or otherwise—all invited at corbettreport.com.
Once again, I’m your host James Corbett of corbettreport.com thanking you for joining me for this edition of The Corbett Report podcast and inviting you to join me again next week.
Sednaya: Investigating Syria’s most notorious prison
The Cradle | December 24, 2024
When militants from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by former Al-Qaeda leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani – who now goes by his real name Ahmad al-Sharaa – finally toppled Bashar al-Assad’s government on 8 December 2024, they quickly released the prisoners in Sednaya.
A flood of new media reports about the horrors of the prison quickly emerged.
But which reports about the crimes of Assad’s government are true, and which are fabricated as part of a new propaganda campaign to legitimize Julani’s rule and whitewash the opposition’s similar past atrocities?
Vast underground prison complex?
On 9 December, one day after Assad’s fall, The Guardian journalist William Christou was among the first journalists to reach Sednaya.
Christou claimed that a day after Julani’s forces had taken control of the prison, a door had been found leading to a “vast underground complex, five stories deep, containing the last prisoners of the Assad regime, who were gasping for air.”
He reported rumors that there “were 1,500 prisoners trapped underground that needed rescuing; perhaps your loved ones are among them.”
As a result, hundreds of panicked Syrians rushed to the prison, located 30 kilometers outside Damascus, to search for loved ones missing from the war. Due to the crowds, “Cars were ditched by the roadside and people began to walk,” Christou wrote.
In subsequent days, numerous fake videos professing to show prisoners in the underground complex went viral, while CNN journalist Clarissa Ward faked the discovery of a prisoner in a detention facility in Damascus.
“We came to see the prisons under the ground,” one woman wandering the halls of Sednaya told The Cradle during its visit to the prison.
She said her brother had been missing since 2018. She first went to the Mezzeh military prison in Damascus, and now she was looking for any sign of him at Sednaya.
However, despite efforts by the White Helmets and Turkish rescue organizations, no secret underground complex holding thousands of prisoners has been found.
During its visit to Sednaya, The Cradle was able to walk freely through the facility and verified that there is just one underground basement level containing small individual isolation cells and an adjoining toilet.
Human slaughterhouse?
In the days after Assad’s fall, more and more western journalists visited Sednaya and filed reports. Virtually all begin by citing a 2017 investigation by Amnesty International, which called the prison a “human slaughterhouse.” The investigation claimed up to 13,000 civilians were executed in mass hangings over a four-year period.
The US State Department tried to reinforce the findings of the Amnesty report by claiming the bodies of the executed were burned in a “crematorium” located in a building adjacent to the main prison.
However, the State Department gave zero proof of the crematorium, and no one has claimed to find it since the prison was opened.
Further, Amnesty’s report acknowledges the number killed was just an “estimate” (between 5,000 and 13,000) based on testimony from alleged former guards and prisoners taken by the rights group in Turkiye. The report said the mass execution process was “secret” but then somehow claimed to reveal its intimate details.
The report also ignores that the Syrian government was detaining people during this period in the context of facing an Al-Qaeda-led insurgency, including from the Nusra Front and ISIS.
When The Cradle asked a Syrian who is supportive of the opposition about his view of the Sednaya issue, he noted that the prison is Syria’s “Guantanamo.” In other words, the prison is reserved for high-security prisoners from Islamist armed groups detained on terrorism charges.
This is evident by the famous Sednaya prison uprising in 2008, in which primarily Islamist prisoners revolted against their guards.
But Amnesty claims that the prisoners were held in Sednaya and mass executed “as part of an attack against the civilian population.”
Iraqi and US forces have also long held large numbers of Al-Qaeda militants in prisons in Iraq, such as at Abu Ghraib. However, the fact that the Syrian government was holding Al-Qaeda militants in its prisons is somehow ignored by Amnesty and others.
Psychological operations
Another question is whether the testimony of the former alleged prisoners and guards given to Amnesty in 2017 and to western media outlets after the prison was opened in 2024 is reliable.
A Spanish journalist who visited Sednaya in the days after Assad’s fall told The Cradle that he was suspicious of the testimony given to him by alleged former prisoners. Fixers associated with Julani’s new government had arranged the interviews, he said, and some of the details of their testimony seemed too fantastic to be true. “But there was no way to verify if they were true or not,” the journalist said.
As a case in point, recent western media reports almost all include interviews with Omar al-Shogre, an alleged former Sednaya prisoner who was the star witness of the 2017 Amnesty report.
However, a close review of Shogre’s testimony shows it was clearly fabricated.
For example, he told Amnesty the guards would regularly force the prisoners to rape each other while being escorted from their cells to the bathroom.
“As we walked to the bathroom, [the guards] would select one of the boys, someone petite or young or fair. … They would then ask a bigger prisoner to rape him … No one will admit this happened to them, but it happened so often,” Shogre claimed.
However, during its visit to Sednaya, The Cradle observed that each cell has its own toilet and sink. In one cell, The Cradle observed items of clothing hanging on lines above the sink to dry after washing. There was no possibility that the guards were escorting prisoners out of their cells to go to the bathroom, as Shogre’s scenario claims.
Over the years, Shogre has made many wild and completely implausible claims, which further undermine his credibility.
The Nation wrote that according to Shogre, “Guards would deliberately execute a prisoner right before serving inmates their only meal of the day, often placing the corpse’s head over the platter of food, so that it would bleed into the daily mound of bread and potatoes.”
The former prisoner’s fabrications have long been part of a broader propaganda campaign to impose crushing sanctions on Syria.
Shogre works for the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a group established and funded by the US government to facilitate the overthrow of the Syrian government. SETF provided alleged non-lethal aid to US-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups that fought the Syrian army starting in 2011.
While working for the SETF, Shogre advocated for the US Congress to impose the Caesar sanctions on Syria, which helped strangle his home nation’s economy and resembled the US sanctions on Iraq, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in the 1990s.
The Caesar sanctions were themselves named after a psychological operation claiming that a Syrian military photographer had smuggled 55,000 photographs out of the country, documenting the torture and killing of some 11,000 detainees by the Syrian government.
But as journalist Rick Sterling observed, Human Rights Watch (HRW) acknowledged that almost half of the photos do not show people tortured to death by the Syrian government. Instead, they show dead Syrian soldiers and victims of car bombs and other violence from the opposition groups. Such deaths are normal for any government to document in a time of war.
Syria’s missing
Despite the propaganda surrounding Sednaya, there are many indications that the Syrian government detained large numbers of Syrians during the war who were either tortured to death or shot and killed.
While in a restaurant in Damascus shortly after Assad’s fall, The Cradle witnessed two employees, a father and his son, emerge from the back room in tears. They told the owner and fellow staff that they had just received word that the names of their three uncles, taken by the government and missing since 2014, had been found in the records at Tishreen military hospital, confirming their deaths.
One reason that many Syrians may have been detained and disappeared is because Syrian intelligence operated in many ways like a mafia. The feared ‘mukhabarat’ often abused their power to extract bribes from Syrians in many aspects of everyday life.
One Syrian from Damascus told The Cradle that there was little rule of law in Syria. Instead, Syrians lived by the “rule of the phone numbers.” Your privileges and ability to protect yourself depended on whether you had the phone number of someone powerful to call if the local security agents tried to extort you, or worse.
Those with money or political connections were often released, including those detained on terrorism charges, while others continued to rot in prison. As a result, many were tortured and killed.
Writing for Al-Akhbar in 2013, journalist Qassem Qassem stated it is an “undeniable fact” that the Palestinian filmmaker from the Yarmouk Palestinian camp in Damascus, Hassan Hassan, was “killed in the regime prisons.” He said that Hassan was not a terrorist or “takfiri,” and “never carried a gun nor blew himself up with an explosive vest,” but was killed anyway.
The “Repentance” prison
But in addition to those who disappeared or were tortured by the government, the armed opposition groups also tortured and disappeared huge numbers of people.
When asked about the issue of those gone missing in Assad’s prison, one Syrian from Aleppo told The Cradle that the militant groups fighting the former president ran mafia-style kidnapping rings of their own.
“The opposition, since the start of the war, has killed tens of thousands of Syrians, and the ones they didn’t bury in mass graves, they sent, in parts, to several families when the ransoms weren’t paid. Try also asking them where the missing are.”
While walking through Sednaya prison, The Cradle spoke with a man who was looking for his missing son – a commander in a militant opposition group called Burkan al-Sham in the eastern Ghouta area of Damascus.
The man said he and his son were accused of being Syrian government agents by another armed opposition group, the Saudi-backed Jaish al-Islam.
Led by Zahran Alloush, the son of a prominent Salafist preacher in Ghouta, the group was described by the UK foreign office as part of the “moderate armed opposition.”
The man told The Cradle that he and his son were both held at Jaish al-Islam’s “Tawba,” or “repentance,” prison in the town of Duma, in the Ghouta region. He said they were tortured in ways “worse than in Sednaya.”
The father said he was later released, but his son remains missing. He later heard rumors his son had ended up in a government prison in Mezzeh. After looking there and finding nothing, he came to Sednaya to search.
Pro-opposition Enab Baladi reported in 2017 that while there is a large network of activists in Duma, there are no accurate statistics on the number of detainees in Tawba.
Abu Khaled, a 31-year-old media activist from Duma, told the outlet he was surprised by the absence of such reports.
“Random arrests take place all around Eastern Ghouta,” he stated. These prisons, especially Tawba, “are as bad as those of the Syrian regime, and, according to former prisoners, many detainees stay in prisons for months without trial.”
“A man’s body was recently returned to his family three days after his arrest,” pro-opposition Syria Direct reported in 2017. “Jaish al-Islam directly threatened them, telling them that if they spoke to the media or published pictures of the body, they would all be killed.”
Julani’s prisons
Abu Mohammad al-Julani’s Nusra Front also imprisoned and tortured many Syrians. We know this from the testimony of Theo Padnos. A freelance journalist from the US, Padnos was kidnapped by the FSA in 2012 and handed over to Nusra. He remained a hostage for two years before Qatar paid a large ransom to release him.
While imprisoned at the Eye Hospital, the Nusra guards beat and shocked the journalist with an electric cattle prod. Other prisoners were hung by their wrists from ceiling pipes. Their feet mimicked the riding of a bicycle in the air.
When Julani’s Nusra conquered Idlib province in 2015 and formed a National Salvation government, the group established new prisons where torture was also common.
An opposition media activist, Jawdat Malas, was imprisoned by the group in a dark and dirty cell, Enab Baladi reported.
For hours every day, he would be tortured until his body was heavily bruised. “I reached a point where I was constipated. My whole body was dark blue,” he said. “Other detainees were taking care of me. I had no idea what I did wrong. I was terrified.”
In April 2020, Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ) issued a report stating that women were detained and killed in Idlib, including for “insulting deity,” “espionage” for the benefit of the Syrian army, and “adultery.”
Conclusion
No one in Syria now knows what the future holds. But what is sure is that Syrians have suffered from more than a decade of horrific war and economic sanctions. Violence has been inflicted on Syrian civilians by the former government under Bashar al-Assad, but also by the foreign-backed extremist groups who functioned as tools of the US and its allies to topple Assad. Most crucial to recall is that the vast majority of this violence occurred after 2011, when the US launched its covert war on Syria on Israel’s behalf.
Fact-checking Fortune: Has Polio Vaccine Saved 20 Million Children From Paralysis?
The Defender | December 23, 2024
A Dec. 13 article in Fortune called the polio vaccine used in the U.S. today “not only safe but also effective.”
The article also claimed that because 3 billion children have been vaccinated against polio since 1988, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, that means “20 million people who would’ve otherwise been paralyzed by polio are walking today.”
How accurate is the 20 million figure?
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) website, in 1988, there were 350,000 reported polio cases worldwide in a global population of 5.1 billion people. If, as the WHO website states, “One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis,” that would amount to 1,750 cases of irreversible paralysis linked to polio in 1988.
Using that figure — 1,750 cases in 1988 — and factoring in 1.2% annual population growth, the estimated number of cases of irreversible paralysis between 1988 and 2024 would total approximately 80,910 — not 20 million, as Fortune reported.
Here are four other facts about polio vaccines the Fortune article doesn’t address.
1. Polio vaccines used in U.S. don’t prevent infection or transmission.
According to Fortune, the polio vaccine is “safe and effective.” Here’s why that statement oversimplifies the issue of polio vaccines and leads to misleading conclusions.
There are two kinds of polio vaccines used in the world today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They are the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) and the oral polio vaccine (OPV).
The OPV is used for mass vaccination campaigns of children outside the U.S., as was recently done in Gaza. However, the U.S. exclusively uses IPV polio vaccines, according to the CDC.
The IPV products, which are injected, contain an inactivated — or dead — poliovirus. According to the CDC, the IPV protects against “severe disease caused by poliovirus” but “does not stop transmission.”
According to the Polio Global Eradication Initiative, the IPV also doesn’t prevent infection.
Two stand-alone IPV products are licensed in the U.S. by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Both are manufactured by Sanofi. The other five are combination vaccines that target polio plus other illnesses, including diptheria, pertussis and tetanus.
One of the two stand-alone IPV products, Poliovax, was discontinued. The FDA page on licensed polio vaccines doesn’t explain why.
That leaves IPOL as the sole stand-alone polio vaccine licensed in the U.S.
2. Global polio vaccine campaigns can lead to ‘vaccine-derived’ polio outbreaks.
As its name suggests, the “oral polio” vaccine, or OPV — used only outside the U.S. — is delivered orally. The OPV contains a weakened vaccine-virus that activates an immune response in the body, according to the WHO.
Unlike the IPV products used in the U.S., the OPV prevents transmission, according to the CDC and the WHO. However, the weakened vaccine-virus used in the OPV can cause polio variant outbreaks.
The CDC states that the U.S. stopped using OPV “to eliminate the risk of polio variants that can occur with OPV.”
According to the WHO, the continued use of the OPV “poses a risk to wiping out the disease” because the weakened vaccine-virus originally contained in the OPV can begin to circulate among people who didn’t get the vaccine.
“When this happens,” the WHO said, “if it is allowed to circulate for sufficiently long enough time, it may genetically revert to a ‘strong’ virus, able to cause paralysis, resulting in what is known as circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses.”
Vaccine-derived polioviruses were responsible for the recently reported cases of polio in Gaza and the 2022 case reported in New York.
In March 2023, seven children were paralyzed by vaccine-derived polio linked to the novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) developed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, according to health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
In other words, the viral infections in these cases resulted from exposure to the vaccine-virus used in the OPV — not from exposure to a naturally occurring, or “wild,” strain of the poliovirus.
The last wild poliovirus case reported in the U.S. was in 1979, according to the CDC.
3. Risk of paralysis from poliovirus infection is roughly 0.001%.
Approximately 90-95% of poliovirus infections are asymptomatic, according to the FDA package insert for IPOL, the only stand-alone IPV product used in the U.S. The package insert also provides general information on polio, including this:
“Nonspecific illness with low-grade fever and sore throat (minor illness) occurs in 4% to 8% of infections. Aseptic meningitis occurs in 1% to 5% of patients a few days after the minor illness has resolved.
“Rapid onset of asymmetric acute flaccid paralysis occurs in 0.1% to 2% of infections, and residual paralytic disease involving motor neurons (paralytic poliomyelitis) occurs in approximately 1 per 1,000 infections.”
In other words, according to the FDA, the risk of becoming paralyzed as a result of a poliovirus infection is roughly 0.001%.
4. All polio vaccines used today are genetically modified.
Unlike the original polio vaccines developed in the early 1950s by Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Albert Sabin, the IPV and OPV being administered today are genetically modified.
In 2020, the WHO authorized a new genetically modified OPV for emergency use in polio outbreaks. According to a 2023 article in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, nOPV2 was developed through a global partnership between public health, governmental, philanthropic and nonprofit organizations, including the Gates Foundation.
IPOL, the only stand-alone polio vaccine used in the U.S., uses technology that involves growing the poliovirus on monkey kidney cells whose chromones were modified to cause them to multiply forever.
In 2022, attorney Aaron Siri, on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, petitioned the FDA to “withdraw or suspend the approval for IPOL for infants, toddlers, and children until a properly controlled and properly powered double-blind trial of sufficient duration is conducted to assess the safety of this product.”
The petition stated that modified monkey kidney cells “are susceptible to infection by dozens of viruses, including HPV, measles, rubella, reovirus, SV40 virus, and SV-5.”
According to the petition, Sanofi’s IPOL vaccine hasn’t been adequately proven safe because the clinical trials relied on for licensing the product did not include a control group and declared the vaccine safe after following the trial participants for up to only three days after injection.
The FDA has not withdrawn or suspended its approval of IPOL as requested by Siri, and the agency continues to rely on the existing clinical trials and the agency’s own safety assessment lasting only up to three days.
The CDC recommends children receive four doses of IPOL, starting at age 2 months. The second dose is given at 4 months. The third is given at 6-18 months, and the fourth is given anytime between 4 and 6 years.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
This article is part of a series of articles by The Defender responding to the latest media coverage of vaccines, triggered by the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Let’s Retire Overused Words. First, ‘Misinformation’
By Dr. Pierre Kory & Mary Beth Pfeiffer | Real Clear Health | December 16, 2024
In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.
We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.
Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”
These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.
Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.
Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?
Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all-but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.
Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The U.S. and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to- consumer” TV ads.
Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.
Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”
Misinformation?
If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.
The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”
Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky U.S.-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”
Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is outright dismissal of a lab leak.
The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.
Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.
Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.
Truth Muzzled?
Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.
The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false story line that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under law only if no alternative was available.
An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.
The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.
The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.
Dr. Pierre Kory, M.D., a pulmonologist and critical care specialist, is president emeritus of the FLCCC Alliance. Mary Beth Pfeiffer is an investigative reporter and author.
‘Forced labor’ narrative on Xinjiang chili pepper ‘one lie after another’: FM
Global Times | December 20, 2024
Spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Lin Jian on Friday slammed Western media saying that chili pepper products sold in UK and US supermarkets contain ingredients from Xinjiang are probably produced using “forced labor” by citing a report by an anti-China academic Adrian Zenz, noting that the so-called report mentioned by certain media outlets is deeply flawed, and it pretentiously quotes some vague accounts by so-called anonymous witnesses, but does not provide any factual basis, and even lacks the most basic field investigation.
Lin said that, the fact is, the farming process of chili peppers in Xinjiang has largely been mechanized already in some major production areas, 100 percent of the chili peppers are now harvested by machines. “Is the report suggesting that there is ‘forced machine labor?'” he asked.
Earlier this week, an international symposium on employment and social security was held in Urumqi, said Lin, noting that more than 200 participants from over 40 countries, regions and international organizations attended the event, and many said the Xinjiang they saw is very much different from the false propaganda they had seen from sources outside China.
“They condemned the ‘forced labor’ narrative, calling it a lie that deprives people in Xinjiang of their right to work, subsistence and development,” Lin said.
Lin stated that from cotton to tomato and now to chili pepper, a handful of Western media and long-time disinformation manufacturers have concocted one lie after another about Xinjiang.
“But what’s made up will not hide the truth; and a lie is still a lie even if it’s told a thousand times. For those behind these same old clumsy theatrics, it is high time they quit this ‘creative’ business for good,” Lin said.
Wrong, NBC News, Climate Change Isn’t Causing Rising Coffee Prices, Production Is Increasing
By Anthony Watts | Climate Realism | December 16, 2024
NBC News recently published an article asserting that climate change is driving up coffee prices by adversely affecting production titled Your daily cup of coffee could get more expensive because of climate change. Production data proves this claim blatantly false.
NBC News writes:
The price of arabica coffee beans, the high-quality beans found in most restaurants and shops, spiked this month, recently jumping to $3.50 a pound. […]
And today, experts say, climate change is to blame.
“We’ve seen significant drought in some of the key coffee-growing areas in the world, places like Brazil, which is the largest coffee exporter in the world,” said David Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University. […]
“We’re going to see these types of [climate] events just get more frequent into the future. And so we have to start taking this seriously and make investments in agricultural research and development to be able to mitigate and tackle the impacts of climate change on our agricultural production and agricultural system,” Ortega said.
“One impact of this is a rise in cost, which then gets translated to a rise in price for consumers,” he added.
NBC’s article attributes recent coffee price increases to climate change by pointing to specific weather events. This approach wrongly conflates short-term weather phenomena with long-term climate patterns. As discussed at Climate at a Glance, weather refers to short-term atmospheric conditions, while climate denotes long-term averages and trends. Attributing isolated weather events directly to climate change without considering broader climatic data is misleading and scientifically unsound, especially when long-term weather trends show no worsening conditions in coffee growing regions.
NBC’s story also ignores substantial data demonstrating that global coffee production has increased significantly over the past four decades, a fact that Climate Realism has addressed multiple times, highlighting the fact that coffee production has been resilient and even thriving despite concerns over climate change.
Repeated analyses show that both coffee and cocoa have set production records multiple times during the recent period of slight warming, contradicting assertions that climate change is driving price increases.
For example, global coffee production has seen substantial growth over the past 40 years, as data from U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reveals, with countries like Vietnam experiencing a more than 1,500 percent rise in production between 1992 and 2022. Vietnam is not alone. Almost every coffee growing region has experienced significant growth, as the graph below shows:
This upward trend underscores the adaptability and resilience of coffee cultivation practices, even amid the gradual warming experienced globally.
NBC’s portrayal of climate change as a primary driver of rising coffee prices reflects a bias by the media outlet toward blaming nearly every bad thing that occurs on climate change. NBC wrongly aggregates short-term weather events and long-term climate trends, and more importantly, ignores the fact that coffee production has increased significantly over recent decades, regularly setting records for production. Rather than looking at actual data, NBC News relied on “expert opinion” without any factual basis. Such sloppy reporting lacks due diligence and fails to provide a comprehensive view of the factors influencing coffee prices, including economic dynamics and agricultural practices. NBC News completely failed to consider these data and variables, instead resorting to a tired and worn-out false climate catastrophe narrative.
How the Captive Media Divides Us
By Thomas Eddlem | The Libertarian Institute | December 19, 2024
Most political differences in America today aren’t a result of moral differences, or even policy opinions. Rather, they are generated by divergent media consumption. There’s a huge difference between those whose news comes primarily from the corporate Big Five (CBS-Viacom, ABC-Disney, NBC-Universal, Fox-NewsCorp, and CNN-TimeWarner) and that handful of midsize legacy publications like PBS, The New York Times and Washington Post, than from those who get their news from independent media.
While the independent media can be inaccurate, it’s often when they contradict themselves. On the other hand, when the Big Five and its satellites are inaccurate, it’s typically in union, as a bloc, and always in defense of the Washington establishment.
I could detail one hundred of these blatant lies spun by the unified, corporate media over the past two decades, but for purposes of brevity let’s take a quick look at just ten widely reported lies in three sentences or less (and I’ll include extra links to news stories with the same false take, to total five sources for each story), refuted by primary sources or recanted by these same establishment media organs.
- Lie #1: Wearing cloth masks helps prevent COVID. “Public health messages should target audiences not wearing cloth face coverings and reinforce positive attitudes, perceived norms, personal agency, and physical and health benefits of obtaining and wearing cloth face coverings consistently and correctly,” the CDC inveighed on July 17, 2020, even though the same report acknowledged “widespread use of cloth face coverings has not been studied among the U.S. population.” The captive media dutifully lectured the public (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) about the alleged benefits of cloth masks in preventing COVID, even though the CDC had just re-published a meta-study of all nineteen public scientific studies of mass masking in May 2020 which concluded there was no scientific benefit for mass public cloth masking. And a giant study by Yale and Stanford researchers in Bangladesh in 2021 confirmed the earlier research, finding a very small benefit in wearing surgical masks “but see no statistically significant effect for cloth masks.”
- Lie #2: Donald Trump is a Russian spy. “A New Report Adds Evidence That Trump Was a Russian Asset,” a Slate.com headline blared in 2021, adding in the subtitle, “He helped Putin manipulate the U.S. election in 2020, as he did in 2016” (2, 3, 4, 5). But the reality is that the Durham Report of the special prosecutor concluded on May 12, 2023 that “neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation” and found the entire affair was devoid of evidence and had been a joint operation between the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and friendly senior FBI officials, spread by a compliant media.
- Lie #3: COVID vaccines have no serious side effects. “No serious safety concerns were found in the clinical trials of the vaccines that have been authorized for use in the United States,” FactCheck.org claimed on March 4, 2021 (2, 3, 4, 5), but within months the same “fact-checker” site had amended its claim to include deadly reactions in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine (later pulled from the market for these reasons) and several serious side effects including myocarditis from the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. Likewise, the CDC has now published a long list of side effects, including myocarditis, pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, and anaphylaxis.
- Lie #4: Russia put bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan. “American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan—including targeting American troops,” New York Times reporter Charlie Savage claimed on June 26, 2020, in the heat of the election campaign, adding that President Trump “has yet to authorize any step” to counter it (2, 3, 4, 5). But, after the election, even NBC News admitted the whole story was fake from the beginning, as did other establishment-controlled outlets that echoed Biden administration admissions of the lack of proof for the highly politicized claim.
- Lie #5: Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. “More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter,” Politico claimed of the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020, “outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son ‘has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation’” (2, 3, 4, 5). But the reality is the FBI testified under oath that the laptop story, which was suppressed on Facebook, Twitter and other social media before the election, was legitimate all along. And a congressional investigation revealed the “Russian disinformation” story was a result of the Joe Biden presidential campaign colluding with senior CIA officials.
- Lie #6: Donald Trump said there were “good people on both sides” of a white supremacist rally. “Trump Defends White-Nationalist Protesters: ‘Some Very Fine People on Both Sides’” blared the headline in The Atlantic, adding “The president backtracked from his remarks on Charlottesville just a day earlier” (2, 3, 4, 5). Even the fact-checkers observed this claim that Trump’s “both sides” quote was false from the start, and that the “both sides” quote was about a totally different topic, though establishment organs continue to repeat the lie to this day.
- Lie #7: Donald Trump said Liz Cheney should face a firing squad. “Now he’s talking about a firing squad,” Joe Scarborough ranted on MSNBC, on November 4, 2024, “for a Republican who is long ranked as one of the most conservative Republicans in Washington, DC” (2, 3, 4, 5). But Trump did no such thing. He simply called former Congresswoman Cheney a chicken-hawk, saying she’d have a less bellicose worldview if she were on the front lines. This is why the fact-check sites quickly called out this lie, and even uber chicken-hawk Jonah Goldberg had to recant the same claim as Scarborough.
- Lie #8: Hamas decapitated dozens of babies on October 7. “Dozens of babies were reportedly found dead, including some that had been beheaded,” NBC reported, “in an Israeli kibbutz Tuesday after the terrorist organization Hamas stormed the community” (2, 3, 4, 5). The reality that emerged from the widely spread story of Israeli propaganda was that no babies were beheaded, according to a France 24 investigation that looked through the names of the victims of the terrorist attack several weeks later, though one ten-month-old baby was killed by gunshot wounds in the combat crossfire.
- Lie #9: Joe Biden is in the best shape of his life and sharp as a tack. “F you if you can’t handle the truth,” Joe Scarborough lashed out on MSNBC on March 5, 2024, “This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever” (2, 3, 4, 5). Progressive YouTuber Matt Orfalea did a nice compilation of how official Washington dutifully recited the lines from the “sharp as a tack” talking points memos circulated by the DNC. But the reality was admitted almost universally after Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate with Donald Trump, ending talk about “cheap fakes.” CNN and the Associated Press published stories in July admitting the media ran cover for “forgetful” Biden as they tried to ramp up pressure to unceremoniously dump the winner of all the Democratic primaries that year and replace him with Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention in August.
- Lie #10: Internet censorship was just corporations being responsible. “Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account on Friday,” NBC news reported January 8, 2021, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence” and not mentioning that the decision was based on extraordinary pressure from the FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The removal of the sitting president of the United States from social media and many other prominent people was widely reported as entirely a corporate decision across the establishment media spectrum (2, 3, 4, 5). But the #TwitterFiles revealed these decisions were primarily the result of government pressure and not organic corporate decisions, with the U.S. Court of Appeals ruling in Missouri v. Biden that the censored plaintiffs “presented extensive evidence of escalating threats—both public and private—by government officials aimed at social-media companies concerning their content-moderation decision.”
These lies help explain why independent media personalities like Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan, a comedian with a microphone, regularly get more than twenty million viewers for two-hour interviews with few commercials while CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, with their billion-dollar studios and networks, rarely crack one million viewers with their forty-four minutes of content in an hour. The American people no longer trust what I’ve come to label the “captive media,” and consume far more independent media content. The captive media can call Trump a rapist, a fascist, a threat to democracy, and, as the November election revealed, most Americans will simply no longer believe their claims.
And the #TwitterFiles reveal why the media organs pushing official lies are best labeled the “captive media” and not the mainstream media, legacy media or the corporate media. They have been captured by the U.S. intelligence agencies, often with dozens or even hundreds of “former” intelligence officers in place on-air and on staff.
The American national mental health crisis that emerged as a result of Trump’s election in 2024 was entirely one-sided; the people who raged like infants on social media and said Trump voters were horrible people were limited to those who digested nothing but captive Media outlets like CNN, NBC, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, Fox, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the censorious Big Tech companies.
Why is it only the Democrats who are saying they can’t have Thanksgiving dinner with their family? Why didn’t Republicans have the same reaction after their loss to Joe Biden in 2020? Although many Republicans who watch Fox News did avoid Thanksgiving as a result of fear-mongering over the COVID vaccine skepticism.
Part of the answer to the question “Why just the Democrats?” is the structure of the media which political partisans consume. Democrats consume media solely within the FBI, CIA, ODNI matrix that the #TwitterFiles revealed to the public and rarely or never encounter media that contradicts the official narrative being sold. Google searches, like Facebook and most other social media, are curated by precisely the same intelligence agencies. So it’s possible for Democrats to live entirely within the captive media echo chamber (even as they earnestly believe they are getting “both sides” by listening to Republican Senator Lindsay Graham talk about Israeli babies being slaughtered on October 7 or former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney talk about Trump as a Putin asset) and assume that anyone with a heterodox opinion gets his information from some sketchy “dark web.” Republicans get a slightly different take with Fox News, and more importantly have trended toward relying progressively less on the captive media.
Republicans and independents hear something other than the captive media narrative.
The captive media echo chamber can occasionally be bipartisan, however. Back in 2020, in the throes of the COVID hysteria, Fox News viewers were also running around like fools with cloth masks on, viewing family members as ambulatory disease vectors, and judging those who took rational risks (or in the case of the experimental vaccine on young people who were getting myocarditis, avoided risks rationally) as bad or selfish persons.
Many Democrats are increasingly engaged in classic cult-like behavior as a result of the captive media drumbeat. “If you are going into a situation where you have family members, where you have close friends who you know have voted in ways that are against you,” Dr. Amanda Calhoun of Yale University told ABC’s The View, “it’s completely fine to not be around those people and to tell them why.” The idea that Democrats should separate themselves from family and friends because they have different political opinions has become widespread in the captive media (2, 3, 4, 5). And it’s part of the very definition of cultish behavior, which includes when “subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends.”
The way to bring your friends and family out of the cult of the captive media matrix is to cut cable television out of your home, and to track the lies of the captive media and discuss them with family and friends as they’re exposed and recanted. Nobody likes being lied to.
Many of these captive media organs are engaging in a campaign against “disinformation” (as a ruse to resume government social media censorship), and this can be used to the advantage of people trying to rescue friends and family from the cult. Explaining in detail how the captive media reliably lies on behalf of the military-industrial-complex, the intelligence community and Big Pharma can bring them out as it has brought hundreds of millions of others out of the captive media matrix already.
Congo’s Health Ministry Confirms ‘Disease X’ is Malaria
Outbreak began shortly after Congo’s rollout of the novel R21 virus-like particle malaria vaccine
By Nicolas Hulscher, MPH | Courageous Discourse | December 17, 2024
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s health ministry announced today that the previously unidentified illness coined as ‘Disease X’ by the media and Africa CDC circulating in the Panzi health zone has been confirmed as a severe form of malaria:
“The mystery has finally been solved. It’s a case of severe malaria in the form of a respiratory illness,” the health ministry said in a statement, adding that malnutrition in the area had weakened the local population, leaving them more vulnerable to disease.
This confirms our observations made last week, where we expected this to be malaria based on early testing. However, health agencies continued to ignore that possibility until now:
This entire situation reinforces how the mainstream media consistently attempts to generate as much fear as possible. They were caught propagating severe malaria coupled with malnutrition as the ominous ‘Disease X,’ fueling unnecessary panic:
In an emailed statement to USA TODAY, the World Health Organization (WHO) still claims it hasn’t conclusively determined the cause of the illness yet and lab testing is ongoing. This is similar to when the WHO falsely claimed that an individual in Mexico died of H5N2 bird flu. Soon after the claim, the Mexican government clarified: “A team of experts from the Health sector ruled that the person identified with influenza A (H5N2) did not die because of this virus, but as a result of chronic conditions that generated septic shock.” They added, “The diseases he suffered were long-term and caused conditions that favored the failure of several organs, specialists concluded.” The individual suffered from kidney disease, type 2 diabetes, and systemic arterial hypertension for more than 14 years.
Right before this malaria outbreak began, in late October, the Congo introduced the novel R21 malaria vaccine into their national immunization program. “R21 is a virus-like particle comprising the central repeats of Asn-Ala-Asn-Pro (NANP) and C-terminal sequence of circumsporozoite protein fused to the hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg).” It would not be surprising if this new vaccine played a significant role in triggering or exacerbating the severe malaria outbreak.
Scandal deepens around CNN’s Clarissa Ward staging Syria prison scene
By Wyatt Reed · The Grayzone · December 16, 2024
Footage showing CNN’s regime change-crazed correspondent supposedly freeing a forgotten prisoner from a Syrian jail has been exposed as a scandalous fraud, yet the network continues to re-air it, while defending its correspondent.
“In nearly twenty years as a journalist, this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed.”
That’s how veteran CNN journalist Clarissa Ward described her foray into a Syrian prison on December 12, where she promptly claimed to have rescued a forgotten inmate after three months in jail. But there was just one problem with the “extraordinary moment”: a review of a dramatic story depicted by CNN reveals a number of glaring inconsistencies, the greatest of which is that the man stands accused of being an impostor.
After countless social media users shredded CNN’s story, a fact-checking organization with ties to the US government has exposed the prisoner seemingly liberated in Ward’s theatrical performance turns out to have been a low level Syrian intelligence official jailed for corruption and abuse charges.
CNN finally addressed the deepening scandal on December 15, declaring that it would investigate the subject of Ward’s piece. However, the network continues to protect the correspondent responsible for the journalistic flim-flam, while rebroadcasting the staged report for its viewers day after day.
With Ward still stationed in jihadist-held Damascus, it appears that her bosses are refusing to allow any editorial standards or professional ethics get in the way of a successful Western-backed regime change operation.
“It moved! Is there someone there?”
In CNN’s original Dec. 11 video report, Ward enters a jail she says was previously operated by Syrian Air Force intelligence, which she claims was “one of many secret prisons across [Damascus]” – and was “specifically tasked with surveillance, arrest, and killing of all regime critics.” Ward was apparently searching for signs of Austin Tice, an American journalist who the US government claims was being held by the Assad government prior to its fall.
“We don’t find any hints of Tice,” Ward insists in a voiceover, “but [we] come across something extraordinary.” At this point, “the guard makes us turn the camera off while he shoots the lock off the cell door,” she says. Viewers are not shown their entrance. Afterwards, Ward and her entourage appear in a clean but windowless cell, where a blanket lies heaped on the ground.
“It moved!” Ward exclaims, before asking the blanket, in English: “Is there someone there?”
Upon being prodded by her armed rebel guide, a man crawls out from under the blanket, revealing himself to the CNN crew. Eyes widened, he raises his arms. “‘I’m a civilian,’ he says, ‘I’m a civilian,’” Ward translates. “He tells the fighter he is from the city of Homs and has been in the cell for three months.” Ward is shown pacing in the background, hand clasped dramatically to her chest.
“He clutches my arm tightly with both hands,” she intones, her voice quivering with emotion. She then asks breathlessly: “Does anyone have any water?” Someone off-screen produces a bottle, which the man drinks quickly. As he walks outside, he looks up. “My God, the light,” he says, while staring directly and unflinchingly at the sky. “Left alone for days without food, water or light, the man was unaware Bashar al-Assad’s regime had fallen,” Ward declares gravely.
By her stated estimation, he had been left for dead and deprived of all food and water for at least four days. A 2022 study published in Science determined that “despite adaptations to minimize dehydration, humans can survive for only ~3 days without consuming water.” The Mezzeh Air Force intelligence prison in question was reportedly overtaken by anti-government militants on Dec. 6, a full five days before the report was published.
Yet rather than immediately seeking medical care for the man after his release, a rebel fighter pulls up a chair, and the CNN crew elects to conduct an interview with the supposed former prisoner. At some point, someone hands him a plate of food, and he collapses into Ward’s arms after taking a bite. “He can barely lift it to his mouth. But his body can’t handle it,” Ward declares mournfully.
The segment ends as the man, who Ward identifies as “Adil Gharbal,” is guided into an ambulance by men wearing Red Crescent jackets. “It is the end of a very dark chapter for him and for all of Syria,” Ward concludes.
And perhaps it would be – if it actually happened. But it now appears the man rescued by CNN’s Clarissa Ward was a corrupt Syrian government official, not an innocent political prisoner.
US government aligned site exposes CNN’s Syria prison theater
According to a Western-backed fact-checking organization known as Verify, “Adil Gharbal” is actually Salama Mohammad Salama, who they identified as “a first lieutenant in Syrian Air Force Intelligence,” a figure they claim was “notorious for his activities in Homs.”
Verify, which describes itself as “a verified signatory of the International Fact-Checker Network (IFCN) and a trusted partner of Facebook in the MENA region since 2019,” writes that “residents of the Al-Bayyada neighborhood identified him as frequently stationed at a checkpoint in the area’s western entrance, infamous for its abuses.”
Per Verify, Salama was imprisoned due to his involvement in “theft [and] extortion,” and “his recent incarceration—lasting less than a month—was due to a dispute over profit-sharing” of “extorted funds.”
The IFCN’s parent group, the “Poynter Institute,” has taken huge sums from organizations including George Soros’ Open Society Foundation (OSF) and the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy. In 2017, Poynter took in a whopping $1.3 million from OSF and Omidyar Foundation, the main vessel for spending by Democratic Party-aligned billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Given its US-aligned financial ties, Verify has very little incentive to undercut CNN’s regime change narratives.
Alongside hundreds of social media users, Verify has also pointed out that the timeline described by CNN simply defies belief. As geopolitical analyst Arnaud Bertrand noted, “most humans cannot survive without water for 4-5 days, especially if it’s without food either and in stressful prison conditions. At the very minimum, they would have extremely dry, cracked lips and mouth, severely sunken eyes, a very tight grayish skin and they wouldn’t be able to speak coherently.”
The man CNN claims to have liberated shows no signs of long-term incarceration, however, and instead appears well-fed, neat, and relatively clean-shaven. Another popular post drew attention to “the manicured nails of a man who was in a Syrian dungeon without light for 3 months until CNN rescued him.”
Anti-imperialist commentators weren’t the only ones to push back on CNN’s gratuitous propaganda. One Kurdish activist wrote that the incident “raises some serious serious questions about journalistic integrity” because “the air force intelligence prison was entered by the Syrian rebels and all cells [were already] opened” two days before CNN showed up. “The prison has been liberated for days now; several Syrian reporters were there already – families have come to look for the remains of their family members – prisons were searched by search teams [sent] by the Turkish government; yet somehow all of them ignored this 1 prison cell? – with exactly 1 prisoner inside despite this being a prison cell for multiple prisoners?”
The same activist pointed out that even journalists affiliated with Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, the US-designated terrorist group which largely oversaw the overthrow of the Syrian government, were mocking CNN’s coverage in a post on Telegram: “if it wasn’t a play to achieve a scoop for CNN and laugh at the West’s stupidity, it is more likely that one of the detainees has no place to go and prefers to stay in prison and sleep there.”
Others, who claim to have been jailed by the former Syrian government also questioned the report, with one commenting: “I was detained twice in Syria. I think this is staged. CNN should investigate. Happy to be proven wrong.” Another suggested the video piece did a disservice to those who had actually been jailed: “CNN journalist Clarissa Ward fabricated a scene showing a prisoner inside Syria’s notoriously brutal prisons. This is demeaning and exploitative to Syrian detainees. As a former Syrian detainee, I call for boycotting her and exposing her actions.”
Ward’s history of shameless regime change cheerleading, collaboration with AQ figures
It’s certainly not the first time Ward has been accused of fabricating a story and staging a scene to boost her ratings. While covering Israel’s post-October 7 assault on Gaza, Ward earned widespread mockery when she fell to the ground and took cover from a Hamas rocket attack, when, in fact, no munitions were falling anywhere in her vicinity.
Two weeks later, Ward’s lopsided coverage of the Israeli genocide in Gaza provoked a viral confrontation by Egyptian journalist Rahma Zein, who lambasted the CNN correspondent in a viral video: “Cover this! Say the truth! We understand… You’re just a puppet, you’re just a mouthpiece,” she proclaimed, but in many ways, “you represent your government.”
“We’re watching an occupation” and it’s “the result of your silence,” Zein concluded.
Ward’s presence in Damascus, where jihadist militias have taken control while Israeli forces seize Syrian territory without a fight, represents the culmination of over a decade of propagandizing for regime change.
Back in 2012, Ward claimed to have “sort of slipped off into an alleyway in the [Damascus] old city, put a headscarf on, and went and lived with some activists for a week.” She returned with a de facto commercial for the Free Syrian Army, the Contra-style militia created with CIA arms and support.
CNN’s Clarissa Ward, then of CBS, with the FSA in 2011
In 2017, Ward was granted special entry to Idlib, the Al Qaeda carveout in Northwestern Syria protected by the Turkish military. To gain access to jihadist leaders, Ward hired Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American who joined the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda in 2012 and subsequently served as its top English language propagandist, as her fixer. When Ward won a Peabody Award for her report inside Idlib, Kareem took to Twitter to complain that CNN “barely mentioned my name! I’m telling you, somehow CNN must have forgotten that I was the one that filmed it, I guess they forgot that.”
Ward appeared soon after at the UN Security Council as a guest of the United States delegation. There, she described “the Islamist factions” in the Idlib province as “heroes on the ground” who have “filled the void” in the war to overthrow the Syrian government.
In 2019, when The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal posted a Twitter thread containing non-staged photos and videos documenting his visit to Damascus, including his interviews with Syrians who had been wounded or tortured by Western-backed opposition forces, Ward flew into a petulant frenzy, claiming she was “getting palpitations” that graduated to “spasms of rage,” even wondering if Blumenthal’s critical reporting was driven by drug addiction.
Sober or not, when Ward participated in a clearly staged prisoner rescue – what she called “one of the most extraordinary moments” in her media career – she was clearly drunk on her own entitlement and obsession with advancing the priorities of the US regime change machine. And though her network appears to be protecting her, it seems the morning after has finally arrived.
Featured Video
A New World Emerges: Iran Will Win & Israel May Not Survive
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Who Will The Israelis (Or Their Proxies) Attack During Purim?
By Keith Johnson | Revolt of the Plebs | February 15, 2012
Based on a fable from the Old Testament Book of Esther, the Jewish holiday of Purim celebrates the slaughter of 750,000 Persians and the hanging of Persian Prime Minister Hamam and his ten sons.
Purim is perhaps the only religious holiday that celebrates death, destruction, and pagan decadence. It is more akin to Halloween than Christmas–where rowdy party animals dress like Gene Simmons from Kiss, drink like Charles Bukowski, and wander through town looking for trouble like soccer hooligans whose team just won (or lost) an important match.
This year, Purim will be celebrated from sunset, March 7 until nightfall, March 8.
Over the last twenty years, some of the most egregious war crimes and massacres committed by—or on behalf of—the Israelis have occurred during this holiday. It begs to wonder what they’ll be up to this Purim? […]
Here is a short (but by no means exhaustive) list of some of the more notorious bloody events that transpired while Purim was being celebrated… continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Douglas Macgregor: A New World Emerges: Iran Will Win & Israel May Not Survive
- Stuck in Another Disastrous Middle East War
- Netanyahu Again Uses Genocidal Rhetoric And Compares Iranians To ‘Amalek’
- ‘Trump’s Gift to Iran’: Iranian Media Shows 165 Graves for Minab School Bombing Victims
- Future of the Middle East after the Killing of Khamenei
- Decapitation attacks don’t work against strong countries
- Next Iranian leader should be killed too if hostile to US – Lindsey Graham
- Iran security chief says ‘no negotiations with US,’ confirms readiness for ‘long war’
- Iran posed no imminent threat to US: Pentagon tells Congress
- Iran’s Missile Might vs. America’s Arsenal: Who Will Run Out First?
- If Americans Knew
- Tucker Carlson: A New Middle East War for Israel Started by the U.S.
- Israel launches Bible study program targeting US evangelicals
- Israel’s lonely push for war with Iran
- WATCH: How Israel is controlling the world – in their own words
- Trump Starts a Major Regime-Change War with Iran, Serving Neoconservatism and Israel
- US–Israel illegal aggression in Iran is an abomination
- Meet Bari Weiss’s Israel Flag-Waving News Correspondent
- Oman’s Foreign Minister Said US-Iran Deal Was ‘Within Our Reach.’ Then Trump Started Bombing
- US-Israeli war on Iran rages, as 2 Gaza babies die of starvation – Not a ceasefire Day 142
- Israel, US on a Zionist mission to bring Iran down – Not a ceasefire Day 141
- No Tricks Zone
- Glaciers Worldwide Are Suddendly Surging, Experts Blame Warming!
- Surprising Discovery: Sahara Is Greening…Billions Of Trees Where Once Thought To Be Barren
- New Research Reaffirms Clouds, Aerosols, And Surface Solar Radiation Are ‘Driving The Climate System’
- Germany: Electric Car Catches Fire At Charging Station, Sets Off Local “Inferno”, Widespread Damage
- New Study: Canada’s New Brunswick Was 1°C Warmer Than Today During The Medieval Warm Period
- Coal Power Back In Trend As Globe Tries To Keep Pace With Growing Demand For Power
- New Study: A 4°C Warmer Beaufort Sea Had ‘No Sea Ice’ 11,700 – 8200 Years Ago
- Unfudging The Data: Dutch Meteorological Institute Reinstates Early 20th Centruy Heat Waves It Had Erased Earlier
- German Gas Crisis…Chancellor Merz Allegedly Bans Gas Debate Ahead of Elections!
- Pollen Reconstructions Show The Last Glacial’s Warming Events Were Global, 10x Greater Than Modern
Aletho News 