CNN tries to make case for trusting anonymous-source echo chamber despite steady stream of fake news
RT | May 3, 2021
CNN took a holier-than-thou approach to explaining away mainstream media’s penchant for telling anonymously sourced stories that later prove to be false, saying that unlike “MAGA media,” it tries to get the news right.
“There are safeguards in place,” CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy told ‘Reliable Sources’ host Brian Stelter on Sunday. “Unfortunately, human error is still at play, and news organizations sometimes do get burned like this.”
Darcy was referring to the latest correction debacle involving multiple MSM outlets that supposedly confirmed each other’s anonymously sourced reports – only to later issue corrections admitting that their central claim was completely false. The New York Times, NBC News and the Washington Post said on Saturday that their reports claiming that US law enforcement had warned Rudy Giuliani and One America News that they were being targeted by a “Russian influence operation” were not true.
The false claim was so integral to the story that correcting it was not as simple as changing a name or recasting a sentence. “The premise and headline of the article below have been changed to reflect the corrected information,” NBC said in its correction.
Stelter lamented that “a bogus report of this magnitude” tars all mainstream outlets and allows “bad-faith actors” to lump them in with less credible outfits. Darcy argued that “responsible” media outlets set themselves apart by correcting their mistakes, whereas publications such as the New York Post avoid admitting their errors.
“Sometimes, it seems like they are intentionally promoting falsehoods and moving on, some of those folks in MAGA media,” Darcy said.
The Post last week removed an article from its website that said copies of a children’s book written by Vice President Kamala Harris were being put in the welcome kits given to migrant children being held at a shelter in California. In an updated version it issued a correction, saying it turned out there was only one known copy of the book at the shelter.
However, it was the New York Post that broke bombshell news last October, reporting on alleged influence-peddling by then-presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, after obtaining emails from a laptop that the younger Biden had allegedly left at a repair shop. At the time, with the presidential election just a couple of weeks away, CNN called the reports “dubious” and cited anonymous people saying that “US authorities” were investigating whether the Hunter Biden emails were part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
Then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said there was no connection between Hunter Biden’s laptop and Russian disinformation, but only later did the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post admit that the evidence-free conspiracy claims were apparently false.
The Washington Post has had its share of falsehoods lately. In March, the newspaper corrected a January story accusing former president Donald Trump of pressuring a Georgia official to help overturn the election’s result. The Post admitted that it had misquoted the official. In fact, it said that claims Trump urged the official to “find the fraud” and that she would be a “national hero” if she did were completely false.
CNN technical director Charlie Chester suggested that such “mistakes” weren’t accidental – at least at his network. Chester was shown on video telling an undercover Project Veritas reporter that CNN’s main focus was to help oust Trump from office through propaganda and that it purposely fearmongered about Covid-19 to boost ratings. He added that CNN also endeavored to make Black Lives Matter look good, a task made more difficult by the group’s conduct.
Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who helped break the Edward Snowden NSA scoops in 2013, said MSM outlets are able to “independently confirm” each other’s false reports because their meaning of “confirm” is misleading. Rather than confirming that a report is true, they merely get the same anonymous source to make the same false claims to them.
“It’d be one thing if this were some rare occurrence,” Greenwald said. “The opposite is true. Over and over and over, these same big corporate outlets purport to have ‘independently confirmed’ one another’s stories that turn out to be totally false. Is that trustworthy?”
CLAIM: THE FLU HAS DISAPPEARED NOW THAT COVID IS HERE
By Mac Slavo | SHTFplan.com | April 30, 2021
Imagine that. The seasonal flu that has infected hundreds of thousands of Americans every year has magically disappeared since COVID-19 has surfaced.
If you want to read the most blatant propaganda on Earth that only those with absolutely no critical thinking skills would believe, look no further than Scientific American’s reason why there is no more flu:
The reason, epidemiologists think, is that the public health measures taken to keep the coronavirus from spreading also stop the flu. Influenza viruses are transmitted in much the same way as SARS-CoV-2, but they are less effective at jumping from host to host. – Scientific American
If that’s the truth, why aren’t the masks and “public health measures” stopping COVID-19? People who mask religiously are still getting it. Below is an article about a study conducted by the ruling class and their own alphabet agency that has shown that most of those who get sick follow their commands and wear the muzzle around all the time.
Or are people getting the flu and the PCR tests that aren’t diagnostic tools are set to show a positive COVID-19 test for almost anything? How about you decide. Since the mainstream media can’t be bothered to ask questions, only follow orders, it’s up to us to use our discernment.
As Scientific American reported last fall, the drop-off in flu numbers was both swift and universal. Since then, cases have stayed remarkably low. “There’s just no flu circulating,” says Greg Poland, who has studied the disease at the Mayo Clinic for decades. The U.S. saw about 600 deaths from influenza during the 2020-2021 flu season. In comparison, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were roughly 22,000 deaths in the prior season and 34,000 two seasons ago. –Scientific American
It kind of makes one ponder when they’ll bring in COVID-21 to panic the masses? Is that what all the variants in India are for?
The Fear-Mongering Continues: Over 7,000 COVID-19 Mutations In India, Variants Spread In CA
We had better open our eyes and start really asking some questions about this massive hoax. Time will be up eventually and then there is no going back. With massive amounts of the population already convinced to take a falsely labeled “vaccine” that no one knows the long-term side effects of, things could get interesting, to say the least.
More COIVD-19 Vax Deaths: Think They’ll Blame This On COVID-21?
Never stop asking questions. Stay alert and prepared. If we lose our discernment we will be pulled around by the invisible chains the ruling class is desperately trying to fasten on us. Double-check your preps every few weeks because this is not over. They tell us that much several times a day. But what’s next, is anyone’s guess.
UK Gov. awards £320 million tax-payer funded contract for ‘Covid-19 Media Propaganda Campaign’ which runs until April 2022
THE DAILY EXPOSE • MAY 2, 2021
You don’t think things are going to go back to normal on the 21st June 2021 do you? The evidence is mounting to the contrary and the latest piece of the puzzle has cost the British tax-payer £320 million.
Previous pieces of the puzzle have come in the form of a document produced for the UK Government entitled ‘Summary of further modelling of easing of restrictions – Roadmap Step 2’, and a contract currently out for tender for the employment of ‘Covid Marshals’.
The former declares that a third wave is inevitable and that it will be the fault of children and those who refuse the experimental Covid-19 vaccines. Whilst the latter confirms that Covid Marshals will be employed from the 1st July 2021 until the end of January 2022 at the earliest, to the tune of £3 million of tax-payers money.
The latest evidence that things will not be returning to normal on the 21st June 2021 comes in the form of a contract which has been awarded to a single company, costing the British tax-payer £320 million. The contract has a start date of 1st April 2021 and is due to run until the 31st March 2022. It’s stated purpose? “The provision of Media buying services for COVID 19 campaigns.”
The closing date for applications was 12am on the 31st March 2021 and the contract was awarded to ‘OMD Group Limited’. The company is based in London and has a financial director named ‘BELL, Ronald James‘ who has been with the company since the 1st November 2017. But we can also see that there have been three new appointees to the board on the 22nd February 2021. These include FENTON, Laura Claire who has been appointed as CEO. PANESAR, Ravinder who has been appointed as a financial director. And STURGEON, Natalie who has been appointed as CEO.
The three new appointees have certainly struck gold rather quick. We wonder if these people have any ties or links to any members of Boris Johnson’s current Cabinet? Track record would suggest so.
The Government has already spent hundreds of millions of tax payers money since March 2020 to advertise the fact that there is a pandemic and now plan to carry on the tradition for at least another year. The question is, if there was really a deadly pandemic would authorities need to advertise it?
The answer of course lies in the fact that this has never been about a virus, and has always been about control. This £320 million contract is to fund propaganda and maintain the level of fear that they have created in a large amount of the UK population.
The contract also explains why the mainstream media have remained largely silent and toed the line at all times in regards to the narrative being portrayed by the UK Government and their circle of scientific advisors. It would cost them millions of pounds in advertising fees if they refused to do so.
Think things will go back to normal on the 21st June 2021? Think again. This won’t end until we all say it does.
Did Jeremy Scahill’s Analysis Fumble the Ball in Its Indictment of Joe Biden as an “Empire Politician”?
The Intercept series on Biden is marred by omissions and even State Department disinformation
By Jeremy Kuzmarov | CovertAction Magazine | April 30, 2021
Known for his exposés of Blackwater and the U.S. dirty wars in the Middle East, The Intercept reporter Jeremy Scahill’s latest blockbuster is a series on Joe Biden’s history as an “empire politician.”
The series is impressive and informative, however, it ignores certain unflattering historical facts and perpetuates a few popular misperceptions.
CovertAction Magazine commends The Intercept’s investigation into Biden’s influence on U.S. foreign policy over the last half-century, and hopes it will amend and improve it by examining some of the problems with what it reported—and the even greater problems with what it failed to report.
In his introduction, Scahill writes that after poring over congressional reports and speeches among other documents, he came to the conclusion that Biden is a man “dedicated to the U.S. as an empire, who believes that preserving U.S. national interests and ‘prestige’ on the global stage outweighs considerations of morality or even at times the deaths of innocent people.”
The series goes on to provide strong evidence to corroborate this assessment.
Scahill details, for example, Biden’s chairing of congressional hearings that helped build support for the 2003 War in Iraq, his staunch support for the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, and for the kind of military occupation that the U.S. had conducted in Germany and Japan after WW II there.
Biden further supported U.S. aggression in Grenada, Libya and Panama in the 1980s, which resulted in the deaths of many civilians, and in 1981 voted to provide expansive aid to Pakistan in order to arm Islamic fundamentalists fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
One year later, Biden tried to justify Israel’s killing of civilians in Lebanon, which even the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin couldn’t do.
In the 1990s, Biden backed President Bill Clinton as he bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, and supported President George W. Bush’s sending suspected terrorist suspects to Guantanamo Bay.
Biden supported the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan under false pretexts in 1998. [Source: csmonitor.com ]
When he first ran for the Senate, Biden positioned himself as an opponent of the Vietnam War, albeit on tactical grounds, considering the war to have been “lousy policy” rather than a crime.
Before that Biden had obtained a draft deferment because he had asthma as a teenager. However, he never took part in antiwar protests and referred to antiwar protesters who had occupied the chancellor’s office at Syracuse University where he was a law student as “assholes.”
Senator-elect Joe Biden, D-Del., takes his oath of office in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 13, 1972. [Source: theintercept.com ]
During his early years in the Senate, Biden co-sponsored the 1973 War Powers Act, which mandated that presidents obtain congressional authorization before going to war.
Eighteen years later, Senator Biden denounced President George H.W. Bush’s “monarchist” disdain for congressional authority and opposed the Gulf War in Iraq.
Soon after Bush declared victory in the Gulf, Biden, however, determined that his opposition was a political mistake and began a transformation into a top hawk on Iraq and supporter of many subsequent wars.
While early in his career voting to rein in the CIA, he evolved also into a foe of whistleblowers and helped block the nomination of Theodore Sorensen as CIA Director when it was discovered that Sorensen had given an affidavit in the case of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg that sympathized with Ellsberg.
Ted Sorensen, center, arrives with Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., right, at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Sorensen’s nomination for CIA director on Jan. 17, 1977. [Source: theintercept.com ]
Distortions and Omissions
As the above summary indicates, there is much to learn from The Intercept’s series and admire.
However, there are certain topics that are only superficially covered, or inexplicably left out altogether.
Scahill, for example, says nothing about how Biden was mentored when he first came into the Senate “as a young kid” by Averell Harriman, the “father of the Cold War.”
A son of one of the original robber barons who founded the legendary Wall Street firm Brown Brothers & Co., Harriman served as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union 1943-1946, Secretary of Commerce 1946-1948, Governor of New York 1955-1958 and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Harriman’s support for an aggressive anticommunist foreign policy was both ideological and personal; he lost a fortune when zinc mines that he had invested in were nationalized by communist regimes in Eastern Europe.
In the late 1970s, Biden accompanied Harriman and his wife Pamela on a trip to Yugoslavia to attend the funeral of Eduard Kardelj, Tito’s intellectual mentor [Tito was the socialist leader of Yugoslavia from 1953-1980].
W. Averell Harriman, Biden’s political mentor. [Source: wikipedia.org]
Two decades later, as a prominent member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden helped see to it that Harriman’s ambition was fulfilled.
He supported secessionist factions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia that caused the breakup of Yugoslavia and aggressively promoted the bombing of Bosnia, Kosovo and Montenegro, whose end result was the establishment of a giant U.S. military base, Camp Bondsteel.
Aerial photo of Camp Bondsteel. [Source: wikipedia.org]
Scahill’s discussion of the Bosnia war omits any consideration of the geopolitical imperative underlying U.S. policy and presents a misleading narrative about the war.
He writes that “as Yugoslavia’ disintegrated in the early 1990s, Serbia and Croatia began a bloody battle for control of large swaths [of it].” The Serbs, however, had attempted to keep the Yugoslav federation together when Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina seceded with U.S. encouragement.
The IMF and World Bank had contributed to Yugoslavia’s dissolution through its promotion of fiscal austerity and neoliberal economic programs, which Scahill omits.
After his pithy assessment of the war’s origins, Scahill writes that in Bosnia, “Serb forces committed widespread atrocities, particularly against Muslims.” While this statement is true, it reinforces the dominant view of the Muslims as victims of Serb aggression and war crimes.
The Muslims not only committed their own gruesome atrocities, but were led by an Islamic fundamentalist, Alija Izetbegović, who had been arrested in World War II after recruiting Muslims for a military unit organized by the SS Gestapo.
Then Senator Biden speaks with Alija Izetbegović in Sarajevo on April 9, 1993. [Source: aljazeera.com]
The Muslim fighting regiments were also bolstered by 4,000 Arab jihadist fighters from Afghanistan, Algeria, and other Islamic countries and included two future 9/11 hijackers—a fact Scahill ought to have mentioned.
Srebrenica Distortions
The quality of Scahill’s analysis descends further when he promotes misinformation about the July 1995 killings by Bosnian Serb forces of Muslims in Srebrenica.
Scahill writes that “the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)… determined that more than 8,000 people were killed during the massacre and ruled that the Bosnian Serb operations constituted genocide.”
But the 2001 ICTY judgment of Serb commander Radislav Krstic gave a low estimate of seven thousand men that were captured by the Serbian forces at Srebrenica and concluded that only a “few mortal remains” were found near the purported killing site.[1]
The Sarajevo-based International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP), an adjunct of the ICTY, which matched the DNA from bone samples with family members of persons reported as missing, in 2007 identified a total of 6,930 Srebrenica victims.[2]
However, some on this list had gone missing prior to July 1995 and the study could not determine the cause of death.[3] Autopsy reports referred to bodies where only shell or mortar fragments were found, militating strongly against the thesis that they were executed.[4]
Satellite image of alleged mass graves were presented by U.S. ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright at the UN several weeks after the alleged Srebrenica massacre. The problem is that proof of the mass graves has never been firmly established and Albright never made the photos available for public examination. [Source: nsarchive2.gwu.edu]
Another thing Scahil omits is that Muslim regiments under Naser Orić, commander of the Bosnian Army’s 29th Division, killed over 3,000 Serb soldiers and civilians from the Srebrenica area, including the town Mayor, before the Serb massacre took place.[5]
Naser Orić a U.S.-supported warlord who bragged about massacres of Serbs committed near Srebrenica. [Source: serbiamonitor.com ]
Scahill makes a point of contrasting Biden’s agitation for war in the Balkans with his opposition to the use of force in Haiti to restore populist Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power after he had been ousted in a right-wing coup, insinuating that Biden was less concerned about Haitians because they were black.
This is fine, but Scahill could have written more about the politicization of human rights and geostrategic imperatives driving U.S. military intervention in the 1990s.
Biden and DuPont
A principle flaw of “Empire Politician” is that it does not discuss political-economy and the corporate interests that drove Biden’s support for the U.S. empire.
Readers are not made aware of the structural forces that need to be overcome for the forever wars to end. Scahill leaves the impression that Biden’s shifting and mostly odious record is the result of his own misjudgments, rather an oligarchic political system, and that a better man in his position might have done better.
We know that Biden enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the MBNA credit card company and big banks in Delaware along with the DuPont Corporation, the infamous war profiteer and polluter which for decades ruled Delaware like a personal fiefdom.
Biden’s first Senate campaign in 1972 was staffed by DuPont employees, had its office on a road named after DuPont and celebrated its victory in the Gold Ballroom of the Hotel DuPont.
Subsequently, Biden employed a DuPont lawyer as a top adviser and DuPont engineer as Senate chief of Staff and later head of his presidential transition team.
From 1974-1996, Biden lived in the DuPont mansion in Wilmington.
Aerial view of the DuPont mansion in Wilmington which Biden lived in from 1974 until 1996. [Source: housebeautiful.com ]
During the 2020 election cycle, DuPont provided the Biden campaign with $95,729.
Biden further received donations from DuPont lobbyists and executives working for companies owned by the Du Pont family.[6]
In the early 1980s, Biden launched an investigation into Summit Aviation Corp., a Middletown, Delaware company owned by Richard “Kip” DuPont that ferried bombs and guns to the Nicaraguan Contras, a right-wing paramilitary group fighting the left-wing Sandinistas, but never released the findings.[7]
Biden’s job clearly was to help to cover up for criminal activities by a prominent DuPont family member in return for DuPont supporting Biden’s political career.
DuPont later benefited from Biden’s policies in the Middle East, a fast-growing market for DuPont which supplies products to the oil and gas industry, and in Ukraine where the company opened a seed plant to support “increased demand for Pioneer brand corn hybrids.”
Imperial Vice President
Like with Biden’s ties to large corporations, Scahill is weak in analyzing Biden’s record as Vice President.
While acknowledging Biden’s role in supporting drone strikes and covert military interventions in the Middle East, he fails to discuss his advancement of U.S. corporate interests in Central America and record as the Obama administration’s key point man on Iraq.
In that latter capacity, Biden forged close relations with Nouri al-Maliki, the “Shia Saddam,” who helped trigger the growth of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) by oppressing Iraq’s Sunni population.
Biden laughs with Nouri al-Maliki, the “Shia Saddam,” at a press conference in Baghdad in 2009. [Source: sandiegouniontribune.com]
Biden later helped install Haidar al-Abadi as Iraq’s president in an attempt to fulfill the long-standing U.S. ambition of privatizing Iraq’s oil industry, and oversaw the Third Iraq War, which was among the least transparent in modern U.S. history.
Journalists Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal determined that one in five of the 27,500 coalition air strikes over Iraq resulted in at least one civilian death, more than 31 times that acknowledged by the U.S. government.[8]
Scene from Mosul after its sacking by U.S.-coalition forces in 2016. [Source: time.com ]
Ukraine
The biggest elephant in the room is Ukraine.
Biden’s actions there during his Vice-Presidency were arguably the most unethical of his career and showed the maturation of a corrupt political figure.
Biden played a key role in supporting a coup in Ukraine in 2014 that brought to power a regime infiltrated by Neo-Nazis, and was a close confidante of post-coup president Petro Poroshenko, who presided over one of the most corrupt regimes in the world.
Biden enjoys a laugh with Petro Poroshenko, the most corrupt leader in Europe. [Source: covertactionmagazine.com ]
Biden further promoted expanded arms sales to the Ukrainian military while it carried out large-scale human rights atrocities in a dirty war in the East provoked by the coup.
Later Biden bragged about blackmailing Ukraine’s president to secure the firing of an honest Attorney General in order to protect a corrupt energy company, Burisma, which appointed his son Hunter to its board of directors—even though Hunter had no experience in the energy field.
New York Post feature story Biden and his son Hunter’s misdeeds in Ukraine, which Scahill ignores. [Source: nypost.com ]
Evidence has emerged that would indicate that Burisma was a CIA front, controlled by a warlord, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who used it to finance private militias that were relied upon to wage the war in the East.
None of this is mentioned in “Empire’s Politician.”
Besides Ukraine, Scahill fails to address Biden’s support for color revolutions in Eastern Europe that resulted in the overthrow of pro-Russian leaders, and his support for oppressive rulers like Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia (2004-2007; 2008-2013), who provoked a deadly war with Russia that Biden supported.
Saakashvili pins a medal on Biden in July 2009. [Source: facebook.com]
Pierre Omidyar and The Intercept’s Black Hole on Ukraine
Given the shortcomings in Scahill’s study, the question needs to be asked: is Scahill limited in his skills as a researcher and historian—merely a B or B+ level performer, or is he compromised by his work for The Intercept?
The Intercept was launched in 2014 with $50 million in seed money from Pierre Omidyar, the founder of e-bay and owner of PayPal, whom Forbes ranked as the 24th richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $21.8 billion.
Pierre Omidyar [Source: usatoday.com ]
Journalists Max Blumenthal and Alec Rubinstein found that Omidyar has partnered closely with many of the U.S.-funded outfits that fulfill the role the CIA used to play during the Cold War in backing opposition media and civil society in countries targeted for regime change.
One of these countries is Ukraine. In 2011, Omidyar’s foundation, the Omidyar Network, gave $335,000 to “New Citizen,” an NGO that was mobilizing political support against Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, who was overthrown in the 2014 Maidan coup.
The head of New Citizen, Oleh Rybachuk, was a favorite of the State Department, DC neocons, the EU, and NATO—and the right-hand man to Viktor Yushchenko, who had led Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution against Yanukovych, which Biden supported.
Scene from Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution. [Source: pinterest.com]
Before the Maidan Square protests, Rybachuk boasted that he was planning another “Orange revolution.”
Oleh Rybachuk [Source: kyivpost.com ]
In December 2013, The Financial Times reported that Rybachuk’s “New Citizen” NGO campaign “played a big role in getting the [Maidan Square] protest up and running.”
New Citizen, along with the rest of Rybachuk’s network of NGOs and campaigns—“Center UA,” which Omidyar’s network provided over $100,000 to in 2012, “Chesno,” and “Stop Censorship”—targeted pro-Yanukovych politicians in an anti-corruption campaign that built its strength in Ukraine’s regions, before massing in Kyiv.
Omidyar’s Network further funded a virulently anti-Russian Ukrainian internet TV station, Hromadske TV, which promoted anti-Yanukovych propaganda during the Maidan protests, and Rappler, another internet TV station that allied with U.S. interests.
Omidyar’s background and support for the Maidan coup could very well explain why The Intercept’s exposé of Joe Biden leaves out Ukraine, and why Scahill watered down his analysis by omitting any discussion of political-economy.
Repression, Censorship, and Ideological Homogeneity on the Left
The Intercept’s black hole with regards to the Ukraine was apparent in the saga of Glenn Greenwald, who resigned after senior editors refused to publish an article of his about Biden and Ukraine before the November 2020 election.
Greenwald was The Intercept’s other star reporter who had published the Snowden leaks and reported on the machinations in Brazil that led to the impeachment of leftist leader Dilma Rousseff and jailing of Lula.
In his resignation letter, Greenwald wrote that “the same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded [The Intercept], culminating in censorship of my own articles.”
In a very subtle way, did Scahill succumb to the censorship and enforcement of ideological homogeneity by limiting the scope of his investigation into Biden?
After writing a puff piece about U.S. bombardiers in World War II entitled Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team, famed author John Steinbeck wrote: “We were all part of the war effort… correspondents were not liars but it is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.”[9]
Scahill is a viable critic of the military, but it is in the things not mentioned—Ukraine, Burisma, Averell Harriman, Naser Orić, Mosul, the Shia Saddam, Camp Bondsteel, Petro Poroshenko, Alija Izetbegović, and Dupont—that the untruth lies.
- “Radislav Krstić becomes the first person to be convicted of genocide at the ICTY and is sentenced to 46 years imprisonment.” UN, ICTY Press Release, August 4, 2001, https://www.icty.org/x/cases/krstic/tjug/en/010802_Krstic_summary_en.pdf ↑
- https://www.icmp.int/press-releases/over-7000-srebrenica-victims-recovered/; David Rohde, “Denying Genocide in the Face of Science,” The Atlantic, July 17, 2015. ↑
- Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “The ‘Srebrenica Massacre’ Turns Twenty Years Old,” Dissident Voice, August 5, 2015, https://dissidentvoice.org/2015/08/the-srebrenica-massacre-turns-20-years-old/ Military service records showed that 140 of the total had been killed in combat months or years before the fall of Srebrenica. Stefan Karganovic, Deconstruction of a Virtual Genocide (Srebrenica Project, 2011), 186. Some on the Red Cross’ missing list also turned up on voter rolls later on and could have been captured or killed in other battles. ↑
- See The Srebrenica Massacre: Evidence, Context, Politics, ed. Edward S. Herman (Evergreen Park, Illinois: Alphabet Soup, 2011); Karganovic, Deconstruction of a Virtual Genocide. ↑
- “The Fall of Srebrenica, July 1995, Bosnia’s Darkest Hour: Srebrenica: Background and Battle,” Clinton Presidential Library, Yugoslavia Genocide, Srebrenica, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/53013. Orić even bragged about killing 114 Serbs in one single incident. Scahill’s discussion of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) is flawed because it omits its involvement in heroin trafficking and ties to Islamic extremism and fact that President Clinton’s special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, referred to them as a “terrorist organization” mere months before the bombing commenced. Scahill misinterprets the reasons why KLA leader Hashim Thaçi was indicted for war crimes; he was accused of criminal involvement in over 100 murders during the war. ↑
- For a critical history of DuPont, see Gerard Colby, Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1984). ↑
- Colby, Du Pont Dynasty, 14, 786, 787. According to an international arms dealer who knew a Summit executive, Summit planes were used by high-ranking members of the Thai military in northern Thailand to protect illegal drug operations along the Cambodian border and for counterinsurgency operations in the Vietnam War and to protect the illegal Southeast Asian heroin connection by which the CIA funded mercenaries. Some of its warplanes–including ones outfitted for spraying crop defoliants–were sold illegally to dictatorships in Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala and Anastasio Somoza’s Nicaragua in operations supported by Theodore Roosevelt III. DuPont may have further set up military training camps at his Maryland farm where there were reports of automatic weapons being fired. ↑
- See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting for the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press Inc., 2019), 178-181. ↑
- John Steinbeck, Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (New York: Penguin Classics, 2009); Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Airpower (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 137. ↑
Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: jkuzmarov2@gmail.com.
The Anti-Lockdown Movement Is Large and Growing
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | AIER | April 29, 2021
Feeling outgunned, outnumbered, overpowered, smothered, and censored? Many people who oppose Covid lockdowns and all their associated restrictions feel this way. It’s hard not to. You can hardly post on social media without triggering warnings, corrections, and sometimes outright blocks.
Bans are part of the mix too, the complete deplatforming of people merely because they want their freedoms back. It’s creepy. We never thought we would see these days but here we are.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media continues to push restrictions – mask mandates and vaccine passports – just as it has for the past 14 months. The technology of intimidation is getting more sophisticated.
But how true is it that anti-lockdown people are a small and increasingly marginalized minority?
Consider:
- The Wall Street Journal is one of the world’s largest circulation newspapers, with twice the physical circulation of the New York Times. Its editorial page has been consistently against lockdowns nearly from the beginning.
- Fox News has been running anti-lockdown commentary for a full year. It very easily dominates all cable TV news, hosting 6 of the top 10 shows. It is trouncing CNN, for example, which is struggling for viewers.
- The top-rated commentary show for this year and last has been Tucker Carlson Tonight, which offers gripping anti-lockdown interviews and commentary on every show, including interviews with scientists and activists left and right.
- Elon Musk, among the most prominent tech entrepreneurs in the world, has fiercely spoken out against lockdowns.
- Joe Rogan has the most popular podcast in the English language, and he has been consistently against lockdowns and Covid mandates for a year, most recently telling his audience the common-sense point that healthy young people should not be forced to be vaccinated since the virus is no threat to them.
- The Onion once ruled satire on the web but the site has been terrible on lockdowns. Its traffic has been sinking steadily. The anti-lockdown Babylon Bee started low and has soared to new highs, often beating The Onion. The Babylon Bee has been ruthless in satirizing Covid hysteria, and is being rewarded for doing so.
- The Epoch Times has as much web traffic as the Wall Street Journal and has been fantastic on lockdowns, running a full 45-minute long interview with Great Barrington Declaration signatory Jayanta Bhattacharya.
- Polls show strong opposition to all stringency measures among Republicans (40% want immediate opening of everything) and much less opposition among Democrats. It’s tragic and wrong that there should be any partisan divide on what is a question of science and good sense but that’s what happens when you politicize a disease.
- The scientists who drafted the Great Barrington Declaration were pilloried last year but now cannot come close to keeping up with interviews, testimonies, article requests, and media contacts. Last year this time, they were quiet scientists; now they are among the most famous epidemiologists in the world.
- Even the CDC is playing catchup to the anti-lockdown position, adjusting its advice on the J&J vaccine in light of Martin Kulldorff’s article in The Hill, even as they shoved him off their vaccine evaluation commission.
- Protests are rarely reported by the national media but they are happening. The Five Freedoms campaign pushed by the DailyClout is gaining traction. Those freedoms are: no vaccine passports, no mask mandates, no emergency law, open schools up 100%, and freedom of commerce, worship, and petition.
- Noncompliance is nationwide. Many parts of the country were speakeasies since last April but now the push to live life normally is spreading even to New York, where the Hardcore scene this past weekend publicly flouted all regulations and is thus being investigated.
The most important reason why anti-lockdowners should not feel demoralized is that the facts are overwhelming on the side of freedom and traditional public health principles.
Consider for example this CDC chart of 3 states that imposed strict measures (Michigan, California, and Massachusetts), and still enforce many measures plus mask mandates, versus 3 states that have been open with no such mandates (Florida, Texas, and South Carolina). Look at the trajectory of severe outcomes from the virus:
The early spikes in Massachusetts and Michigan are obvious, tracing to a surprising extent to the number of nursing homes in each state. In Michigan, 31% of the deaths are in nursing homes, and, though the numbers in Massachusetts are always being revised, it could be anywhere from 40% to 61%.
Following that fiasco in which regulations often failed to protect the vulnerable, the trajectory of the virus follows a common pattern, reducing in severity as it mutates over time and herd immunity creates endemicity through natural immunity and vaccines. It’s the path of a respiratory virus that has been known for the better part of 100 years. Nothing surprising here. Perhaps the only real surprise in the data is how the completely open states did not perform badly compared with the closed states. Texas is a case in point. It’s open with no disaster.
The lesson: lockdown policies failed to protect the vulnerable and otherwise did little to nothing actually to suppress or otherwise control the virus. AIER has assembled fully 35 studies revealing no connection between lockdowns and disease outcomes. In addition, the Heritage Foundation has published an outstanding roundup of the Covid experience, revealing that lockdowns were largely political theater distracting from what should have been good public health practice.
Finally, it appears that even Mayor Bill de Blasio is promising a “full reopening” of New York City by July 1, a change he credits to vaccines (which is fine but unprovable) but also reflects a huge shift in public opinion. Other states are racing to open as well. These people track polls. They sense the shift.
Here’s what I see coming in the rest of the year. Once most everything is opened, and more and more people calm down from disease panic, there will be a realization, slow at first and then all at once, that what happened over these 14 months was a catastrophic disaster of public health without precedent. The collateral damage is unfathomable.
The reason why the lockdown advocates are intensifying their perception and exercise of hegemony right now is to forestall the possibility that the entire lockdown praxis will fall into massive disrepute. They will not get their way. Let the blowback begin.
Daisies Under Threat From Climate Change! says the Telegraph
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | April 30, 2021
Where do they dredge up these dolts?
From the Telegraph :
Perhaps somebody should tell Dr Dines the difference between “weather” and “climate”!
Spring last year was a dry one, but there is nothing at all unusual in that, and there have been eight drier springs on record. Nor is there any sort of trend in spring rainfall:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-temperature-rainfall-and-sunshine-time-series
Shame on the increasingly absurd Telegraph, not to mention dopey Olivia Rudgard for printing this nonsense.
Doctor Breaks Ranks With Elite For Truth And Freedom
Principia Scientific | April 29, 2021
Until recently, Dr Christiane Northrup was a rock star of the Liberal media, with three New York Times Bestsellers, 10 appearances on Oprah! and numerous TV appearances on The Dr. Oz Show, Today, Rachel Ray Show, The View, 20/20 and eight PBS Specials, which raised millions of dollars for the network. She was a celebrated Feminist on the front lines of women’s Mind-Body Medicine, when doing this was still OK – before the Big Pharma global coup d’état.
Today, she is eviscerated on her Wikipedia page for having “embraced QAnon ideology during the COVID-19 pandemic,” based on this article, which is totally laughable. “QAnon” has become the latest iteration of the term, “conspiracy theorist”, used to discredit truth-telling opponents of the criminal establishment.
I’ve seen it used against others and it was recently used against me, as if I live and breathe “QAnon” and therefore, I am garbage, so don’t listen to anything I say. It looks like low-rent “journalists” are being hired to systematically deploy the “QAnon” label in hit pieces against those who question the corporatist narrative that has hijacked the planet since March, 2020. These derogatory articles are designed to appear in internet searches of the target’s name.
The “QAnon” trope is one of total disparagement, falsely associating those to whom it is ascribed with “extreme right wing” “white supremacist” “domestic terrorism” (despite Q promoting none of this); even PBS’ very own Dr Northrup, with eight blockbuster seasons, not including re-runs is now a suspected Nazi. The patent absurdity of this beggars belief.
As Dr Northrup explains here, “In 2013, I was one of Reader’s Digest Most Trusted People in America, and now, in 2021, I am one of the ‘Disinformation Dozen’, along with Sherri [Tenpenny], those of us accused of 70% of the disinformation about vaccines on the internet – which is an astounding fall from grace, until you understand who is determining what grace is.”
That “who” is Big Pharma and the world’s largest corporations, which have been weaponized by the Globalists to bypass the world’s legal systems and to commit a litany of COVID crimes against humanity over the past 14 months, not the least of which are the so-called “vaccines”.
Dr Northrup, who unlike Clif High is a physician and was a clinical assistant professor of OBGYN for 25 years corroborates Clif’s report last week of miscarriages and other reproductive dysfunction in both men and women.
Disturbingly, she also corroborates what Clif said about these problems being seen in non-vaccinated women working in proximity to vaccinated people, all but confirming his most serious concern, that the synthetic spike protein antibodies shed by the vaccinated could conceivably lead to the complete sterilization of the human species – including the unvaccinated.
Dr Sherri Tenpenny has described the spike protein antibodies produced by the COVID injection as “Absolutely deadly.” According to her, these injections and their synthetic spike proteins have so far been found to do the following, usually by Day 19 after exposure:
- Attack your lung tissue and break it down.
- Attack your pancreas: Cause diabetes in non-diabetics and aggravate diabetes symptoms in diabetics.
- Cause adverse reactions in 27 out of 55 of the tissue types exposed to the serum.
- Cause anaphylaxis, probably from the polyethylene glycol.
- Inhibit your anti-inflammatory M2 macrophages, sometimes resulting in a deadly cytokine storm.
- Attack your astrocytes and oligodendrocytes, which are two different kinds of brain/nerve cells; attacking by two different mechanisms, through the inner mitochondria membrane and through the neurofilament protein of the motor neurons, leading to uncontrolled seizures.
- Cause debilitating fatigue by attacking your mitochondria and the intracellular antigen, GAD 65 inside of your mitochondria.
- Cause autoimmune disease in roughly 48 weeks and;
- Cause mutant strains of COVID, in what Dr Tenpenny describes as “A perfectly-designed kill machine.”
Worst of all, there is no “off” switch to stop the cells’ manufacture of these spike protein antibodies, once the messenger RNA (mRNA) in the COVID shots instruct the cells to start making them. Therefore, this mRNA may not only lead to a runaway train of adverse health consequences for the vaccinated but it may also lead to the mass sterilization of the unvaccinated.
During her speech at Clay Shaw’s Health & Freedom conference in Tulsa, Dr Northrup warned those who wished to remain unvaccinated about the potential hazards of being exposed to the bodily fluids of those who are.
In this video, Dr Northrup says,
“My feeling on this is there is some kind of bioweapon; some kind of bioweapon that the body is now secreting, transmitting, as it were, as you said, Sherri, from somebody who’s had the shot. Because, as we know: this is not a normal immunization. This is something that causes the body to make a synthetic protein against a SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. It is a synthetic protein that’s never been seen and the body begins to produce this as a factory. It doesn’t shut off.
I’ve had people say ‘Well, maybe, you know, in two weeks, this will stop.’ There is no way this is going to stop, because it’s made your body into a factory for a synthetic protein that’s never been seen before, that theoretically can be in your saliva, urine, feces, sweat, seminal fluid, blood, flatus, maybe.
And so when you’re around a person, then I think this is coming out of their bodies and possibly adversely affecting the most delicate hormonal system. I mean, to get pregnant and stay pregnant is an enormously complex system and we know that that spike protein antibody cross-reacts with syncytin 1 and 2, and those are proteins absolutely essential for the placenta, for fertilization, for maintaining a pregnancy.
We now have women who are miscarrying, they are unable to get pregnant, they’re having heavy bleeding. We don’t know why. But my feeling about this is that something is being produced by the body of a vaccinated person that is possibly adversely affecting others and it is of great concern to me.”
See more here: forbiddenknowledgetv.net
India Situation: What does the Current Data Say?
Ivor Cummins | April 27, 2021
So then, what DOES the actual DATA say? Surely we should care, right?
*** NOTE THIS IS NON-CENSORABLE – NO medical advice or information here, NO conflicting with the WHO (remember they shared the Prof Ioannidis paper in their Oct 2020 bulletin).
Just the data and some scientific inferences – period. DOWNLOAD here and use with my permission (just click yes to cookies – no need to subscribe): https://we.tl/t-aRo1uhxv2c
My Odysee link: https://odysee.com/@IvorCummins:f
CNN’s New “Reporter,” Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist and Scandal-Plagued CIA Propagandist
CNN’s new national security reporter Natasha Bertrand, then of Politico and NBC News, with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Sept. 19, 2019
By Glenn Greenwald | April 27, 2021
The most important axiom for understanding how the U.S. corporate media functions is that there is never accountability for those who serve as propagandists for the U.S. security state. The opposite is true: the more aggressively and recklessly you spread CIA narratives or pro-war manipulation, the more rewarded you will be in that world.
The classic case is Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote one of the most deceitful and destructive articles of his generation: a lengthy New Yorker article in May, 2002 — right as the propagandistic groundwork for the invasion of Iraq was being laid — that claimed Saddam Hussein had formed an alliance with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. In February, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, NPR host Robert Siegel devoted a long segment to this claim. When he asked Goldberg about “a man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” Goldberg replied: “He is one of several men who might personify a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.”
Needless to say, nothing could generate hatred for someone among the American population — just nine months away from the 9/11 attack — more than associating them with bin Laden. Five months after Goldberg’s New Yorker article, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of military force to impose regime change on Iraq; ten months later, the U.S. invaded Iraq; and by September, 2003, close to 70% of Americans believed the lie that Saddam had personally participated in the 9/11 attack.
Goldberg’s fabrication-driven article generated ample celebratory media attention and even prestigious journalism awards. It also led to great financial reward and career advancement. In 2007, The Atlantic‘s publisher David Bradley lured Goldberg away from The New Yorker by lavishing him with a huge signing bonus and even sent exotic horses to entertain Goldberg’s children. Goldberg is now the editor-in-chief of that magazine and thus one of the most influential figures in media. In other words, the person who wrote what is arguably the most disastrous article of that decade was one most rewarded by the industry — all because he served the aims of the U.S. security state and its war aims. That is how U.S. corporate journalism functions.
Another illustrative mascot for this lucrative career path is NBC’s national security correspondent Ken Dilanian. In 2014, his own former paper, The Los Angeles Times, acknowledged his “collaborative” relationship with the CIA. During his stint there, he mimicked false claims from John Brennan’s CIA that no innocent people were killed from a 2012 Obama drone strike, only for human rights groups and leaked documents to prove many were.
A FOIA request produced documents published by The Intercept in 2015 that showed Dilanian submitting his “reporting” to the CIA for approval in violation of The LA Times’ own ethical guidelines and then repeating what he was told to say. But again, serving the CIA even with false “reporting” and unethical behavior is a career benefit in corporate media, not an impediment, and Dilanian rapidly fell upward after these embarrassing revelations. He first went to Associated Press and then to NBC News, where he broadcast numerous false Russiagate scams including purporting to “independently confirm” CNN’s ultimately retracted bombshell that Donald Trump, Jr. obtained advance access to the 2016 WikiLeaks archive.
On Monday, CNN made clear that this dynamic still drives the corporate media world. The network proudly announced that it had hired Natasha Bertrand away from Politico. In doing so, they added to their stable of former CIA operatives, NSA spies, Pentagon Generals and FBI agents a reporter who has done as much as anyone, if not more so, to advance the scripts of those agencies.
Bertrand’s career began taking off when, while at Business Insider, she abandoned her obsession with Russia’s role in Syria in 2016 in order to monomaniacally fixate on every last conspiracy theory and gossip item that drove the Russiagate fraud during the 2016 campaign and then into the Trump presidency. Each month, Bertrand produced dozens of Russiagate articles for the site that were so unhinged that they made Rachel Maddow look sober, cautious and reliable.
In 2018, it was Jeffrey Goldberg himself — knowing a star CIA propagandist when he sees one — who gave Bertrand her first big break by hiring her away from Business Insider to cover Russiagate for The Atlantic. Shortly after, she joined the Queen of Russiagate conspiracies herself by becoming a national security analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. From there, it was onto Politico and now CNN : the ideal, rapid career climb that is the dream of every liberal security state servant calling themselves a journalist. Her final conspiratorial article for The Atlantic before moving to Politico is the perfect illustration of who and what she is:
CNN’s new national security star was no ordinary Russiagate fanatic. There was no conspiracy theory too unhinged or evidence-free for her to promote. As The Washington Post‘s media reporter Erik Wemple documented once the Steele Dossier was debunked, there was arguably nobody in media other than Rachel Maddow who promoted and ratified that hoax as aggressively, uncritically and persistently as Bertrand. She defended it even after the Mueller Report corroborated virtually none of its key claims.
In a February, 2020 article headlined “How Politico’s Natasha Bertrand bootstrapped dossier credulity into MSNBC gig,” Wemple described how she was rewarded over and over for “journalism” that would be regarded in any healthy profession with nothing but scorn:
Where there’s a report on Russian meddling, there’s an MSNBC segment waiting to be taped. Last Thursday night, MSNBC host Joy Reid — subbing for “All In” host Chris Hayes — turned to Politico national security reporter Natasha Bertrand with a question about whether Trump “wants” Russian meddling or whether he can’t accept that “foreign help is there.“ Bertrand responded: “We don’t have the reporting that suggests that the president has told aides, for example, that he really wants Russia to interfere because he thinks that it’s going to help him, right?”
No, we don’t have that reporting — though there’s no prohibition against fantasizing about it on national television. Such is the theme of Bertrand’s commentary during previous coverage of Russian interference, specifically the dossier of memos drawn up by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. With winks and nods from MSNBC hosts, Bertrand heaped credibility on the dossier — which was published in full by BuzzFeed News in January 2017 — in repeated television appearances.
Wemple systematically reviewed the mountain of speculation, unproven conspiracies and outright falsehoods Bertrand shoveled to the public as she was repeatedly promoted. But it was the document that gave us deranged delusions about pee-pee tape blackmail and Michael Cohen’s trip to Prague that was her crown jewel: “The Bertrand highlight reel features a great deal of thumb-on-scale speculation regarding the dossier,” Wemple wrote.
And when information started being declassified that proved much of Bertrand’s claims about collusion to be a fraud, she complained that there was too much transparency, implying that the Trump administration was harming national security by allowing the public to know too much — namely, allowing the public to see that her reporting was a fraud. A journalist who complains about too much transparency is like a cardiologist who complains that a patient has stopped smoking cigarettes, or like a journalist who voluntarily rats out her own source to the FBI or who agitates for censorship of political speech: a walking negation of the professional values they are supposed to uphold. But that is Natasha Bertrand, and, to the extent that there are some people who still believe that working at CNN is desirable, she was just rewarded for it again yesterday — just as journalists who rat out their own sources to the FBI and advocate for internet censorship are now celebrated in today’s rotted media climate.
Bertrand’s trail of journalistic scandals and recklessness extend well beyond her Russiagate conspiracies. Last October, she published an article in Politico strongly implying that Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe was speaking without authorization or any evidence when he said Iran was attempting to undermine President Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. But last month, the Biden administration declassified an intelligence report which said they had “high confidence” that Iran had done exactly what Ratcliffe alleged: namely, run an influence campaign to hurt Trump’s candidacy. A former national security official, Cliff Sims, said upon hearing of CNN’s hiring that he explicitly warned Bertrand’s editors that the story was false but they chose to publish it anyway.
It was also Bertrand who most effectively laundered the extremely significant CIA lie in October, 2020 that the documents obtained by The New York Post about the Biden family’s business dealings in China and Ukraine were “Russian disinformation.” Even though the John-Brennan-led former intelligence officials admitted from the start that they had no evidence for this claim, Bertrand not only amplified it but vouched for its credibility by writing that the Post‘s reporting “has drawn comparisons to 2016, when Russian hackers dumped troves of emails from Democrats onto the internet — producing few damaging revelations but fueling accusations of corruption by Trump” (that those 2016 DNC and Podesta documents produced “few damaging revelations” would come as a big surprise to the five DNC operatives, led by Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who were forced to resign when their pro-Hillary cheating was revealed).
It was this Politico article by Bertrand that was then used by Facebook and Twitter to justify their joint censorship of the Post‘s reporting in the weeks before the 2020 election, and numerous media outlets — including The Intercept — gullibly told their readers to ignore the revelations on the ground that these authentic documents were “Russian disinformation.” Yet once it did its job of helping defeat Trump, that claim was debunked when even the intelligence community acknowledged it had no evidence of Russian involvement in the appearance of these materials, and Hunter Biden himself admitted he was the subject of a federal investigation for the transactions revealed by those documents.
Politico, Oct. 19, 2020
But even when her fantasies and conspiracies are debunked, Bertrand — like a good intelligence soldier — never cedes any ground in her propaganda campaigns. She was, needless to say, one of the journalists who most vocally promoted the CIA’s story — published as Trump was announcing his plans to withdraw from Afghanistan — that Russia had paid bounties to the Taliban for the death of U.S. soldiers. Yet even when the U.S. intelligence community under Joe Biden admitted last week that it has only “low to moderate” confidence that this even happened — with the NSA and other surveillance agencies saying it could find no evidence to corroborate the CIA’s story — she continued to insist that nothing had changed with the story, denying last week on a Mediaite podcast that anything had happened to cast doubt on the original story: “I think it’s much more nuanced than it being a walk-back. I don’t think that’s right actually.”
Even a cursory review of Bertrand’s prolific output reveals an endless array of gossip, conspiracy and speculative assertions masquerading as journalism. The commentator Luke Thomas detailed many of these transgressions on Monday and correctly observed that “arguably no single reporter has contributed more to the deranged and paranoid national security fantasies of the center-left than Natasha Bertrand. She’s an embarrassment to her profession and will, therefore, fit right in at CNN.”
As Thomas noted, beyond all of Bertrand’s well-documented and consequential propaganda, “she sees conspiracies and perfidiousness around every corner,” pointing to this demented yet highly viral tweet that deciphered comments from former Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) as inadvertently revealing some secret scheme to expand Trump’s pardon powers. That scheme, like most of her speculative predictions, never materialized.
Then there is her garden-variety ethical scandal. In January, freelancer Dean Sterling Jones accused Bertrand of stealing his work without credit or payment. In a post he published, Jones documented how he emailed Bertrand a draft with reporting he had been working on, and in response she agreed to report it jointly with him on a co-byline. Yet two weeks later, the article appeared in The Atlantic with Bertrand as the only named reporter. Only after Jones complained did they insert a sentence into the story begrudgingly citing him as a source. “By my count,” Jones wrote, “Bertrand’s article contains at least six unequivocal examples of direct copying and revisions of my work.” When he published his post detailing his accusations, Bertrand arrogantly refused even to provide comment to the freelancer whose work she pilfered.
Natasha Bertrand has spent the last five years working as a spokesperson for the alliance composed of the CIA and the Democratic Party, spreading every unvetted and unproven conspiracy theory about Russiagate that they fed her. The more loyally she performed that propagandistic function, the more rapidly she was promoted and rewarded. Now she arrives at her latest destination: CNN, not only Russiagate Central along with MSNBC but also the home to countless ex-operatives of the security state agencies on whose behalf Bertrand speaks.
Once again we see the two key truths of modern corporate journalism in the U.S. First, we have the Jeffrey Goldberg Principle: you can never go wrong, but only right, by disseminating lies and propaganda from the CIA. Second, the organs that spread the most disinformation and crave disinformation agents as their employees are the very same ones who demand censorship of the internet in the name of stopping disinformation.
I’ve long said that if you want to understand how to thrive in this part of the media world, you should study the career advancement of Jeffrey Goldberg, propelled by one reckless act after the next. But now the sequel to the Goldberg Rise is the thriving career of this new CNN reporter whose value as a CIA propagandist Goldberg, notably, was the first to spot and reward.
The Truth About the Covid ‘Crisis’ in India
By Will Jones • Lockdown Sceptics • April 27, 2021
Now that Chile is settling down a bit, the latest Covid cautionary tale is India, which never seems to be out of the news at the moment as its positive cases and deaths have rocketed in the past few weeks.
Even the usually level-headed Kate Andrews in the Spectator has been painting the situation in lurid colours.
As it happened, the UK’s worst nightmares were never realised. The Nightingale hospitals built to increase capacity were barely used. But what the British Government feared most is now taking place elsewhere. India is suffering an exponential growth in infections, with more than 349,000 cases reported yesterday, as well as nearly 3,000 deaths. Hospitals are running out of oxygen for patients and wards are overflowing. There are reports of long queues as the sick wait to be seen by medical professionals. It’s expected the situation will deteriorate further before it gets better.
Jo Nash, who lived in India until recently and still has many contacts out there, has written a very good piece for Left Lockdown Sceptics putting the current figures in context – something no mainstream outlet seems to have any interest in doing.
Jo makes the crucial point that we need to keep in mind the massive difference in scale between India and the UK. At 1.4 billion people, India is more than 20 times larger than the UK, so to compare Covid figures fairly we must divide India’s by 20. So 2,000 deaths a day is equivalent to a UK toll of 100. India’s current official total Covid deaths of approaching 200,000 is equivalent to just 10,000 in the UK.
In a country the size of India and with the huge number of health challenges faced by the population, the number of Covid deaths needs to be kept in perspective. As Sanjeev Sabhlock observes in the Times of India, 27,000 people die everyday in India. This includes 2,000 from diarrhoea and 1,200 from TB (vaccinations for which have been disrupted by the pandemic). The lack of adequate hospital provision for Covid patients may be more a reflection of the state of the health service than the severity of the disease.
Jo Nash also points out that poor air quality plays a role.
Delhi, the focus of the media’s messaging, and the source of many of the media’s horrifying scenes of suffering, has the most toxic air in the world which often leads to the city having to close down due to the widespread effects on respiratory health…
Respiratory diseases including COPD, TB, and respiratory tract infections like bronchitis leading to pneumonia are always among the top ten killers in India. These conditions are severely aggravated by air pollution and often require oxygen which can be in short supply during air pollution crises…
According to my contacts on the ground, people in Delhi are suffering from untreated respiratory and lung conditions that are now becoming serious. I’ve also had breathing problems there when perfectly healthy and started to mask up to keep the particulate matter out of my lungs. I used to suffer from serious chest infections twice yearly during the big changes in weather in India, usually November/December and April/May. When I reluctantly masked up that stopped. My contacts have reported that the usual seasonal bronchial infections have not been properly treated by doctors afraid of getting Covid, and people’s avoidance of government hospitals due to fear of getting Covid. Undoubtedly, these fears will have been fuelled by the media’s alarmist coverage of the situation. Consequently, the lack of early intervention means many respiratory conditions have developed life-threatening complications. Also, people from surrounding rural areas often travel to Delhi for treatment as it has the best healthcare facilities and people can go there for a few rupees by train. This puts pressure on Delhi’s healthcare system during respiratory virus seasons.
Positive cases look like they may be peaking in many regions now.
One mystery, as yet unexplained, is why India, which has not experienced a strong surge like this so far, suddenly did in March and April. Adding to the mystery is that the simultaneity of the surge across the regions is unexpected in a country as large as India and contrary to earlier outbreaks last year. Nick Hudson from Panda suggests it means there must be something artificial about it as it is not a natural pattern, since viruses naturally spread across the country with some delay and variation evident between regions.
It hasn’t escaped people’s attention that one novel factor is the nationwide vaccine programme rollout, beginning in January and accelerating during March. Is this a further example of the post-vaccine infection spike seen in the various trials and population studies, possibly caused by temporary suppression of the immune system?
Testing is another possible factor, as the number of tests being carried out surged in March and April – though so did the positive rate, suggesting this can’t be the only explanation.
Whatever is going on, it’s a pity there is not more curiosity among our scientists and journalists. Instead, it’s just the usual scaremongering driven by the misrepresentation of data.
Stop Press: Former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations Professor Ramesh Thakur has been in touch with a comment he left on a story in the Australian.
Some context and perspective. India’s Covid deaths yesterday were 2,163 (seven-day rolling average). India’s average daily death toll is 25,000 from all causes.
Second, despite this surge, as of now India’s Covid mortality rate is 140 dead per million people. This compares to 401 for the world average, 1,762 for the US, and 1,869 for the UK. It puts India 119th in the world on this, the single most important statistic for comparison purposes.
Third, the crux of the problem in India is not the proportion of cases and deaths from Covid. Rather, it is the lack of a fit-for-purpose public health infrastructure and medical supplies of equipment and drugs.
Fourth, although Government neglect of public health while prioritising vanity projects like a new Parliament building during the pandemic, building temples and statues etc. is a contributory factor, the real cause of a poor public health system is poverty. Put bluntly, poverty is the world’s biggest killer.
Fifth and finally, this is why a strong economy is not an optional luxury but an essential requirement for good health.
ITV’s Lorraine Show Caught Lying! Photoshops Picture To Push For Climate Lockdowns
WE GOT A PROBLEM
Show was aired thursday 22/04/21 https://www.itv.com/hub/lorraine/1a93…
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The Dirty Little Secret behind the “Global Terrorism Index”
The Omission of Israeli Terrorism in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
By Karin Brothers | Global Research | December 6, 2014
… The Israeli settlements — all of which are illegal – have been identified as a major impediment to peace. The refusal of a major “global” terrorism report to name the Israeli settlers as one of the groups most responsible for terrorism not only misrepresents a major source of regional violence but exposes the Global Terrorism Index as a propaganda tool that supports a U.S. agenda.
In recent years, governments have been attempting to thwart terrorism by blocking supportive fund-raising. When it comes to Israeli settlements, however, the US and Canada actually encourage fund-raising by giving organizations (such as Christian Friends of Israeli Communities (CFOIC) and the Jewish National Fund) financial support in the form of donor tax-deductions.
Charities which provide funds for the Israeli settlements should be regarded as terror-financing organizations. They should not only lose their tax-deductible status, but they should be banned because they support the violation of international humanitarian law. The terror-financing laws that are being strictly enforced for Muslim charities should be applied to Christian and Jewish charities as well. … Read full article
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Chinese jet fuel and the myth of energy independence
- Ukraine Sea Drone Fired From Libya Hit Russian Tanker in Mediterranean
- IRGC: Iranian forces launched no attacks during ceasefire hours
- Trump Administration Moves To Automate U.S. Military Draft Registration
- Spain orders reopening of Tehran embassy, condemns Israel’s carpet bombing of Lebanon
- Israel faces ‘unsustainable’ strategic crisis following 40-day war against Iran: Analyst
- Iran restricts Hormuz access to 15 vessels per day under ceasefire terms: Report
- The ‘Opposition Party’ Has Done Nothing to Stop the Iran War and Much to Goad Trump Into Continuing It
- Moscow backs Tehran on status of Lebanon in US-Iran deal
- How UK Regulator Ofcom Quietly Bypassed International Law to Police American Speech
- If Americans Knew
- Amnesty: Urgent – Protect Lebanese civilians from brutal escalation in Israeli attacks
- Is The War Against Iran Over?
- Inside the Israeli army’s propaganda wing
- Hundreds of Gaza Amputees Stranded in Legal Limbo
- The gallows law: Israel moves toward executing Palestinian children
- Tucker Carlson: The Path to Peace requires ending ‘special alliance’ with Israel
- This is ceasefire? Israel’s biggest massacre yet in Lebanon, another journalist killed in Gaza – Daily Update
- Tucker Carlson on Israel: This Is the Behavior of an Ally? Really?
- Gazans face a triple crisis: severe shortages of water and bread, healthcare in tatters
- NY Times reports how Netanyahu took the US into Iran War
- No Tricks Zone
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
- New Study Finds Warming Saves Lives…Cold Temperatures 12 Times More Deadly Than Excess Heat
- German Science Blog Accuses PIK Climate Institute Of Hallucinating Climate Tipping Points
- Devastating Assessment Of Comirnaty Vaccine By Former Senior Pfizer Europe Toxicologist
- New Study: CO2 Is ‘Effectively Negligible’ As An Explanatory Climate Change Factor Since 2000
- Former Pfizer Toxicologist Dr. Helmut Sterz Tells Bundestag Hearing Pfizer Vaccine Should Have Never Been Approved
- Energy Expert: Germany’s Nuclear Phaseout Was A “500 Billion Euro Mistake”
- New Research: South Australia’s Mid-Holocene Sea Surface Temperatures Were 4°C Warmer Than Today
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