BBC News Report Warning About “Fake News” Contains Fake News
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | December 28, 2020
An alarmist BBC News report warning about the dangers of “fake news” contained a claim which was itself a glaring example of fake news.
The article, entitled ‘The casualties of this year’s viral conspiracy theories,’ ominously warned that conspiracy theories were “destroying relationships and endangering lives.”
Prime amongst them according to Marianna Spring, the BBC’s “specialist disinformation reporter,” were a “flurry of online falsehoods about coronavirus.”
“We catalogued mass poisonings and overdoses of hydroxychloroquine – a drug that world leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro falsely claimed cures or prevents COVID-19,” wrote Spring.
However, as LockdownSkeptics points out, the claim that hydroxychloroquine doesn’t cure or prevent COVID-19 or that it is a poison is itself completely fake news.
“I’m afraid that doesn’t pass the fact-checking test, Ms Spring. Over 200 studies have shown HCQ is an effective treatment for Covid. Trump and Bolsonaro may have exaggerated the preventative and curative properties of HCQ, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely ineffective and anyone taking it is likely to poison themselves. On the contrary, it’s almost certainly no more dangerous than any of the Covid vaccines.”
Despite the efficacy of the drug, hydroxychloroquine has been demonized by the mainstream media from the beginning, partly as a way of preventing Trump from claiming success in fighting COVID and partly because it would have reduced the urgency for a vaccine, which is set to be used as a reason to restrict people’s mobility and travel rights.
The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump
The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and information control in the hands of a few corporate monopolies poses enduring threats to political freedom
By Glenn Greenwald | December 28, 2020
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.
But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.
A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.
Virtually every prediction expressed by those who pushed this doomsday narrative of Trump as a rising dictator — usually with great profit for themselves — never materialized. While Trump radically escalated bombing campaigns he inherited from Bush and Obama, he started no new wars. When his policies were declared by courts to be unconstitutional, he either revised them to comport with judicial requirements (as in the case of his “Muslim ban”) or withdrew them (as in the case of diverting Pentagon funds to build his wall). No journalists were jailed for criticizing or reporting negatively on Trump, let alone killed, as was endlessly predicted and sometimes even implied. Bashing Trump was far more likely to yield best-selling books, social media stardom and new contracts as cable news “analysts” than interment in gulags or state reprisals. There were no Proud Boy insurrections or right-wing militias waging civil war in U.S. cities. Boastful and bizarre tweets aside, Trump’s administration was for more a continuation of the U.S. political tradition than a radical departure from it.
The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.
The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.
The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ).
The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines, bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup” consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.
Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.
Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
The U.S. Founders most certainly did not envision or desire absolute economic egalitarianism, but many, probably most, feared — long before lobbyists and candidate dependence on corporate SuperPACs — that economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political and legal equality illusory.
But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.
The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reported The Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:
The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.
Meanwhile, though exact numbers are unknown, “roughly one in five small businesses have closed,” AP notes, adding: “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another.”
Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S., which are thriving. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”
These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.
Those must disgusted by this outcome should not be socialists but capitalists: this is a classic merger of state and corporate power —- also known as a hallmark of fascism in its most formal expression — that abuses state interference in markets to consolidate and centralize authority in a small handful of actors in order to disempower everyone else. Those trends were already quite visible prior to Trump and the onset of the pandemic, but have accelerated beyond anyone’s dreams in the wake of mass lockdowns, shutdowns, prolonged isolation and corporate welfare thinly disguised as legislative “relief.”
What makes this most menacing of all is that the primary beneficiaries of these rapid changes are Silicon Valley giants, at least three of which — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — are now classic monopolies. That the wealth of their primary owners and executives — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai — has skyrocketed during the pandemic is well-covered, but far more significant is the unprecedented power these companies exert over the dissemination of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives by virtue of online surveillance.
Stay-at-home orders, lockdowns and social isolation have meant that we rely on Silicon Valley companies to conduct basic life functions more than ever before. We order online from Amazon rather than shop; we conduct meetings online rather than meet in offices; we use Google constantly to navigate and communicate; we rely on social media more than ever to receive information about the world. And exactly as a weakened population’s dependence on them has increased to unprecedented levels, their wealth and power has reached all new heights, as has their willingness to control and censor information and debate.
That Facebook, Google and Twitter are exerting more and more control over our political expression is hardly contestable. What is most remarkable, and alarming, is that they are not so much grabbing these powers as having them foisted on them, by a public — composed primarily of corporate media outlets and U.S. establishment liberals — who believe that the primary problem of social media is not excessive censorship but insufficient censorship. As Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) told Mark Zuckerberg when four Silicon Valley CEOs appeared before the Senate: “The issue is not that the companies before us today is that they’re taking too many posts down. The issue is that they’re leaving too many dangerous posts up.”
As I told the online program Rising this week when asked what the worst media failings of 2020 are, I continue to view the brute censorship by Facebook of incriminating reporting about Joe Biden in the weeks before the election as one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years. That this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.
These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to assume the presidency. Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the new administration.
The Biden/Harris administration clearly intends to do a great deal for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley is well-positioned to do a great deal for them in return, starting with their immense power over the flow of information and debate.
The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.
All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.
JPost Fabricates Alleged Hezbollah Involvement in ISIL Captagon Ship Seized in Italy, Arab & Lebanese Media Outlets Endorse Slander
Al-Manar | December 26, 2020
The Zionist newspaper, Jpost, fabricated a report which alleged that Hezbollah was behind the captagon ship seized in Italy last July, knowing that the Italian authorities confirmed that drugs were made to fund the takfiri group.
JPost’s fabricated report was not confirmed by the Italian authorities which did not even comment on the rumors, according to Al-Manar correspondent in Italy.
The correspondent stressed that even the Italian media outlets disregarded JPost’s fabricated report , except a modest agency called Agenzia Nova which republished it so that the anti-Hezbollah media outlets in Lebanon and the Arab countries can endorse it.
Indeed, the anti-Hezbollah propaganda in Lebanon and the Arab countries waged a war of accusations against Hezbollah, knowing that the fabricated report has not been conformed by any Italian official.
With Biden’s New Threats, the Russia Discourse is More Reckless and Dangerous Than Ever
The U.S. media demands inflammatory claims be accepted with no evidence, while hacking behavior routinely engaged in by the U.S. is depicted as aberrational.
By Glenn Greenwald | December 23, 2020
To justify Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump, leading Democrats and their key media allies for years competed with one another to depict what they called “Russia’s interference in our elections” in the most apocalyptic terms possible. They fanatically rejected the view of the Russian Federation repeatedly expressed by President Obama — that it is a weak regional power with an economy smaller than Italy’s capable of only threatening its neighbors but not the U.S. — and instead cast Moscow as a grave, even existential, threat to U.S. democracy, with its actions tantamount to the worst security breaches in U.S. history.
This post-2016 mania culminated with prominent liberal politicians and journalists (as well as John McCain) declaring Russia’s activities surrounding the 2016 [election] to be an “act of war” which, many of them insisted, was comparable to Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attack — the two most traumatic attacks in modern U.S. history which both spawned years of savage and destructive war, among other things.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) repeatedly demanded that Russia’s 2016 “interference” be treated as “an act of war.” Hillary Clinton described Russian hacking as “a cyber 9/11.” And Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) on MSNBC in early February, 2018, pronounced Russia “a hostile foreign power” whose 2016 meddling was the “equivalent” of Pearl Harbor, “very much on par” with the “seriousness” of the 1941 attack in Hawaii that helped prompt four years of U.S. involvement in a world war.
With the Democrats, under Joe Biden, [presumably] just weeks away from assuming control of the White House and the U.S. military and foreign policy that goes along with it, the discourse from them and their media allies about Russia is becoming even more unhinged and dangerous. Moscow’s alleged responsibility for the recently revealed, multi-pronged hack of U.S. Government agencies and various corporate servers is asserted — despite not a shred of evidence, literally, having yet been presented — as not merely proven fact, but as so obviously true that it is off-limits from doubt or questioning.
Any questioning of this claim will be instantly vilified by the Democrats’ extremely militaristic media spokespeople as virtual treason. “Now the president is not just silent on Russia and the hack. He is deliberately running defense for the Kremlin by contradicting his own Secretary of State on Russian responsibility,” pronounced CNN’s national security reporter Jim Sciutto, who last week depicted Trump’s attempted troop withdrawal from Syria and Germany as “ceding territory” and furnishing “gifts” to Putin. More alarmingly, both the rhetoric to describe the hack and the retaliation being threatened are rapidly spiraling out of control.
Democrats (along with some Republicans long obsessed with The Russian Threat, such as Mitt Romney) are casting the latest alleged hack by Moscow in the most melodramatic terms possible, ensuring that Biden will enter the White House with tensions sky-high with Russia and facing heavy pressure to retaliate aggressively. Biden’s top national security advisers and now Biden himself have, with no evidence shown to the public, repeatedly threatened aggressive retaliation against the country with the world’s second-largest nuclear stockpile.
Congressman Jason Crow (D-CO) — one of the pro-war Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee who earlier this year joined with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) to block Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan — announced: “this could be our modern day, cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor,” adding: “Our nation is under assault.” The second-ranking Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin (D-IL), pronounced: “This is virtually a declaration of war by Russia.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who has for years been casting Russia as a grave threat to the U.S. while Democrats mocked him as a relic of the Cold War (before they copied and then surpassed him), described the latest hack as “the equivalent of Russian bombers flying undetected over the entire country.” The GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee also blasted Trump for his failure to be “aggressively speaking out and protesting and taking punitive action,” though — like virtually every prominent figure demanding tough “retaliation” — Romney failed to specify what he had in mind that would be sufficient retaliation for “the equivalent of Russian bombers flying undetected over the entire country.”
For those keeping track at home: that’s two separate “Pearl Harbors” in less than four years from Moscow (or, if you prefer, one Pearl Harbor and one 9/11). If Democrats actually believe that, it stands to reason that they will be eager to embrace a policy of belligerence and aggression toward Russia. Many of them are demanding this outright, mocking Trump for failing to attack Russia — despite no evidence that they were responsible — while their well-trained liberal flock is suggesting that the non-response constitutes some form of “high treason.”
Indeed, the Biden team has been signalling that they intend to quickly fulfill demands for aggressive retaliation. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Biden “accused President Trump [] of ‘irrational downplaying’” of the hack while “warning Russia that he would not allow the intrusion to ‘go unanswered’ after he takes office.” Biden emphasized that once the intelligence assessment is complete, “we will respond, and probably respond in kind.”
Threats and retaliation between the U.S. and Russia are always dangerous, but particularly so now. One of the key nuclear arms agreements between the two nuclear-armed nations, the New START treaty, will expire in February unless Putin and Biden can successfully negotiate a renewal: sixteen days after Biden is [tentatively] scheduled to take office. “That will force Mr. Biden to strike a deal to prevent one threat — a nuclear arms race — while simultaneously threatening retaliation on another,” observed the Times.
This escalating rhetoric from Washington about Russia, and the resulting climate of heightened tensions, are dangerous in the extreme. They are also based in numerous myths, deceits and falsehoods:
First, absolutely no evidence of any kind has been presented to suggest, let alone prove, that Russia is responsible for these hacks. It goes without saying that it is perfectly plausible that Russia could have done this: it’s the sort of thing that every large power from China and Iran to the U.S. and Russia have the capability to do and wield against virtually every other country including one another.
But if we learned nothing else over the last several decades, we should know that accepting claims that emanate from the U.S. intelligence community about adversaries without a shred of evidence is madness of the highest order. We just had a glaring reminder of the importance of this rule: just weeks before the election, countless mainstream media outlets laundered and endorsed the utterly false claim that the documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop were “Russian disinformation,” only for officials to acknowledge once the harm was done that there was no evidence — zero — of Russian involvement.
Yet that is exactly what the overwhelming bulk of media outlets are doing again: asserting that Russia is behind these hacks despite having no evidence of its truth. The New York Times’ Michael Barbaro, host of the paper’s popular The Daily podcast, asked his colleague, national security reporter David Sanger, what evidence exists to assert that Russia did this. As Barbaro put it, even Sanger is “allowing that early conclusions could all be wrong, but that it’s doubtful.” Indeed, Sanger acknowledged to Barbaro that they have no proof, asserting instead that the basis on which he is relying is that Russia possesses the sophistication to carry out such a hack (as do several other nation-states), along with claiming that the hack has what he calls the “markings” of Russian hackers.
But this tactic was exactly the same one used by former intelligence officials, echoed by these same media outlets, to circulate the false pre-election claim that the documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop were “Russian disinformation”: namely, they pronounced in lockstep, the material from Hunter’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information.” This was also exactly the same tactic used by the U.S. intelligence community in 2001 to falsely blame Iraq for the anthrax attacks, claiming that their chemical analysis revealed a substance that was “a trademark of the Iraqi biological weapons program.”
These media outlets will, if pressed, acknowledge their lack of proof that Russia did this. Despite this admitted lack of proof, media outlets are repeatedly stating Russian responsibility as proven fact.
“Scope of Russian Hacking Becomes Clear: Multiple U.S. Agencies Were Hit,” one New York Times headline proclaimed, and the first line of that article, co-written by Sanger, stated definitively: “The scope of a hacking engineered by one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies became clearer on Monday.” The Washington Post deluged the public with identically certain headlines.
Nobody in the government has been as definitive in asserting Russian responsibility as corporate media outlets. Even Trump’s hawkish Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, crafted his accusation against Moscow with caveats and uncertainty: “I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”
If actual evidence ultimately emerges demonstrating Russian responsibility, it would not alter how dangerous it is that — less than twenty years after the Iraq WMD debacle and less than a couple of years after media endorsement of endless Russiagate falsehoods — the most influential media outlets continue to mindlessly peddle as Truth whatever the intelligence community feeds them, without the need to see any evidence that what they’re claiming is actually true. Even more alarmingly, large sectors of the public that venerate these outlets continue to believe that what they hear from them must be true, no matter how many times they betray that trust. The ease with which the CIA can disseminate whatever messaging it wants through friendly media outlets is stunning.
Second, the very idea that this hack could be compared to rogue and wildly aberrational events such as Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 attack is utterly laughable on its face. One has to be drowning in endless amounts of jingoistic self-delusion to believe that this hack — or, for that matter, the 2016 “election interference” — is a radical departure from international norms as opposed to a perfect reflection of them.
Just as was true of 2016 fake Facebook pages and Twitter bots, it is not an exaggeration to say that the U.S. Government engages in hacking attacks of this sort, and ones far more invasive, against virtually every country on the planet, including Russia, on a weekly basis. That does not mean that this kind of hacking is either justified or unjustified. It does mean, however, that depicting it as some particularly dastardly and incomparably immoral act that requires massive retaliation requires a degree of irrationality and gullibility that is bewildering to behold.
The NSA reporting enabled by Edward Snowden by itself proved that the NSA spies on virtually anyone it can. Indeed, after reviewing the archive back in 2013, I made the decision that I would not report on U.S. hacks of large adversary countries such as China and Russia because it was so commonplace for all of these countries to hack one another as aggressively and intrusively as they could that it was hardly newsworthy to report on this (the only exception was when there was a substantial reason to view such spying as independently newsworthy, such as Sweden’s partnering with NSA to spy on Russia in direct violation of the denials Swedish officials voiced to their public).
Other news outlets who had access to Snowden documents, particularly The New York Times, were not nearly as circumspect in exposing U.S. spying on large nation-state adversaries. As a result, there is ample proof published by those outlets (sometimes provoking Snowden’s strong objections) that the U.S. does exactly what Russia is alleged to have done here — and far worse.
“Even as the United States made a public case about the dangers of buying from [China’s] Huawei, classified documents show that the National Security Agency was creating its own back doors — directly into Huawei’s networks,” reported The New York Times’ David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in 2013, adding that “the agency pried its way into the servers in Huawei’s sealed headquarters in Shenzhen, China’s industrial heart.”
In 2013, the Guardian revealed “an NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed through satellite links to Moscow,” and added: “foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts.” Meanwhile, “Sweden has been a key partner for the United States in spying on Russia and its leadership, Swedish television said on Thursday,” noted Reuters, citing what one NSA document described as “a unique collection on high-priority Russian targets, such as leadership, internal politics.”
Other reports revealed that the U.S. had hacked into the Brazilian telecommunications system to collect data on the whole population, and was spying on Brazil’s key leaders (including then-President Dilma Rousseff) as well as its most important companies such as its oil giant Petrobras and its Ministry of Mines and Energy. The Washington Post reported: “The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.” And on and on.
[One amazing though under-appreciated episode related to all this: the same New York Times reporter who revealed the details about massive NSA hacking of Chinese government and industry, Nicole Perlroth, subsequently urged (in tweets she has now deleted) that Snowden not be pardoned on the ground that, according to her, he revealed legitimate NSA spying on U.S. adversaries. In reality, it was actually she, Perlorth, not Snowden, who chose to expose NSA spying on China, provoking Snowden’s angry objections when she did so based on his view this was a violation of the framework he created for what should and should not be revealed; in other words, not only did Perlroth urge the criminal prosecution of a source on which she herself relied, an absolutely astonishing thing for any reporter to do, but so much worse, she did so by falsely accusing that source of doing something that she, Perlroth, had done herself: namely, reveal extensive U.S. hacking of China].
What all of this makes demonstrably clear is that only the most deluded and uninformed person could believe that Russian hacking of U.S. agencies and corporations — if it happened — is anything other than totally normal and common behavior between these countries. Harvard Law Professor and former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, reviewing growing demands for retaliation, wrote in an excellent article last week entitled “Self-Delusion on the Russia Hack: The U.S. regularly hacks foreign governmental computer systems on a massive scale”:
The lack of self-awareness in these and similar reactions to the Russia breach is astounding. The U.S. government has no principled basis to complain about the Russia hack, much less retaliate for it with military means, since the U.S. government hacks foreign government networks on a huge scale every day. Indeed, a military response to the Russian hack would violate international law . . . .
As the revelations from leaks of information from Edward Snowden made plain, the United States regularly penetrates foreign governmental computer systems on a massive scale, often (as in the Russia hack) with the unwitting assistance of the private sector, for purposes of spying. It is almost certainly the world’s leader in this practice, probably by a lot. The Snowden documents suggested as much, as does the NSA’s probable budget. In 2016, after noting “problems with cyber intrusions from Russia,” Obama boasted that the United States has “more capacity than anybody … offensively” . . . .
Because of its own practices, the U.S. government has traditionally accepted the legitimacy of foreign governmental electronic spying in U.S. government networks. After the notorious Chinese hack of the Office of Personnel Management database, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said: “You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did. If we had the opportunity to do that, I don’t think we’d hesitate for a minute.” The same Russian agency that appears to have carried out the hack revealed this week also hacked into unclassified emails in the White House and Defense and State Departments in 2014-2015. The Obama administration deemed it traditional espionage and did not retaliate. “It was information collection, which is what nation states—including the United States—do,” said Obama administration cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel this week.
But over the last four years, Americans, particularly those who feed on liberal media outlets, have been drowned in so much mythology about the U.S. and Russia that they have no capacity to critically assess the claims being made, and — just as they were led to believe about “Russia’s 2016 interference in Our Sacred Elections” — are easily convinced that what Russia did is some shocking and extreme crime the likes of which are rarely seen in international relations. In reality, their own government is the undisputed world champion in perpetrating these acts, and has been for years if not decades.
Third, these demands for “retaliation” are so reckless because they are almost always unaccompanied by any specifics. Even if Moscow’s responsibility is demonstrated, what is the U.S. supposed to do in response? If your answer is that they should hack Russia back, rest assured the NSA and CIA are always trying to hack Russia as much as it possibly can, long before this event.
If the answer is more sanctions, that would be just performative and pointless, aside from wildly hypocritical. Any reprisals more severe than that would be beyond reckless, particularly with the need to renew nuclear arms control agreements looming. And if you are someone demanding retaliation, do you believe that Russia, China, Brazil and all the other countries invaded by NSA hackers have the same right of retaliation against the U.S., or does the U.S. occupy a special place with special entitlements that all other countries lack?
What we have here, yet again, is the classic operation of the intelligence community feeding serious accusations about a nuclear-armed power to an eagerly gullible corporate media, with the media mindlessly disseminating it without evidence, all toward ratcheting up tensions between these two nuclear-armed powers and fortifying a mythology of the U.S. as grand victim but never perpetrator.
If you ever find yourself wondering how massive military budgets and a posture of Endless War are seemingly invulnerable to challenge, this pathological behavior — from a now-enduring union of the intelligence community, corporate media outlets, and the Democratic Party — provides one key piece of the puzzle.
Media Blackout: Moderna’s FDA Report Lists 13 Total Deaths, 6 In The Vaccine Group 7 In The Placebo
Spiro Skouras | December 18, 2020
The Pfizer Covid vaccine is already being administered to the public in the UK and the first doses have been given in the US ahead of a mass vaccination campaign on a global scale.
It is important to recognize that the Pfizer Covid vaccine has not been approved by the FDA. It has only received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) meaning the vaccine has not gone through the standard process to get official approval from the regulatory agency.
Now Moderna’s experimental Covid vaccine is set to get the same Emergency Use Authorization allowing the shot to be distributed to millions of people.
We have already witnessed short term adverse events (side effects) from the Pfizer vaccine. Truth is, nobody knows what the long term effects could be and it appears the public is being subjected to an experiment on a global scale.
In this report, we examine discrepancies in the FDA Moderna report that was voted on by an advisory panel. The panel voted 20-0 recommending EUA.
Some of the discrepancies include cherry picked trial participants to achieve the desired results to gain EUA. As well as 13 total deaths in the trials, 6 in the vaccinated group and 7 in the placebo. Something the media refuses to address.
The Washington Post Can’t Stop Babbling About Russians ‘Hacking Our Minds’
By Caitlin Johnstone | December 19, 2020
The Washington Post has published another article warning its readers that the Russians are “hacking our minds”, this one authored by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.
“Russia hasn’t just hacked our computer systems. It’s hacked our minds.” blares the ridiculous, propagandistic headline for an article about “the Russian model” of propaganda which “rests on the principle that people get convinced when they hear the same message many times from a variety of sources, no matter how biased.”
Which is funny, since this is not the first time WaPo itself has repeated this cartoonish narrative about Russian mind-hackers.
Just two months ago the Washington Post editorial board published an article titled “The US may be safe from foreign interference in this election. But what about perception hacking?“, which opens with the line “Russia and other adversaries may not need to hack the election if they can hack something else: our minds.”
The paranoid screed unironically argued that Russia is using its super powerful propaganda engine to make people paranoid and doubtful of US electoral systems, which could actually have an adverse effect on the US election. As though telling people their mental and perceptual faculties are being hacked by a hostile foreign enemy with the goal of influencing the election would not make them paranoid and doubtful of US electoral systems.
Zakaria’s piece builds on this already established theme by parroting the still completely evidence-free claim that Russia was responsible for the far-reaching cyber intrusion into the IT company SolarWinds, whose cybersecurity we recently learned was left so unprotected that its update server’s password was literally “solarwinds123”.
“But what about the perhaps more insidious Russian efforts at disinformation, which have helped to reshape the information environment worldwide?” Zakaria asks. He then does a few mental gymnastics to tie Russia’s propaganda campaign to Donald Trump, because of course he does, and leaves the reader with the closing line, “The problem is not just that Russia has hacked America’s computer systems. It seems to have hacked our minds.”
WaPo keeps hammering this narrative about powerful Russian mind-hackers as though Russia is the only nation with an existing propaganda campaign on the world stage and not one of the weaker ones doing so. The US government itself openly uses propaganda on foreigners with programs like Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, which actually serve the more important function of presenting the illusion that those are the only form of US government propaganda.
In reality the plutocratic class which owns the mass media works closely with the US government and sets up its institutions to only elevate voices which advance narratives that are favorable to the status quo those plutocrats have built their kingdoms upon. WaPo itself is owned by the richest man in the world who is also a CIA contractor and sits on a Pentagon advisory board. The unofficial propaganda operations of the oligarchic empire give it a massive edge in international narrative control that dwarfs both official US propaganda programs and anything the Russian government could ever come up with.
Among some very stiff competition, one of the dumbest recurring themes in western imperialist media is the idea that world affairs, entire electoral and governmental systems, and even our very minds, are being controlled by a nation with the same GDP as South Korea. Russia does not have an especially strong sway over the world stage, it just happens to be one of the few remaining power structures which have resisted absorption into the US-centralized empire and is being targeted with a propaganda campaign aimed at changing that.
Russia is not hacking your mind. If anyone is hacking your mind, it’s the vast globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States which has been aggressively propagandizing you into supporting the continuation of status quo politics since you were born.
The dawn of political insight comes when you realize that propaganda is not just something that is done by other nations to other people. It is done by your own rulers, in your own nation, and it is being done to you.
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Utopia, Coming to a World Near You

Utopia 2013 (Kudos; Channel 4) — Created by Denis Kelly; Produced by Rebekah Wray-Rogers
By Patrick Corbett | OffGuardian | December 21, 2020
We’ve been told by the promoters of the pandemic, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, and others that it’s ushering in an opportunity for a Great Reset and that Covid 19 is the doorway to it.
Independent reporters like Cory Morningstar and Whitney Web have told a similar story without the glossy optimism.
The WEF has been running ads showing attractive young people having a great time and saying…
It’s 2030, I don’t own anything and I’ve never been happier.
They don’t go into just who will own everything but as they haven’t proposed eliminating capitalism it isn’t hard to guess.
According to the consortium of capitalists and their organizations such as the World Economic Forum, World Bank and even the UN we have a technocratic revolution led by AI, robotics and nanotechnology to look forward to. There will be a huge reduction in the need for workers. Scenarios are proposed which anticipate some form of UBI for the unfortunate masses.
From that majority position it looks like a very gray dystopian future. And maybe that’s what they want the people who are wise to the Covid deception to be thinking as the worst case scenario. Because there’s something far more sinister embedded within the Great Reset. And that is depopulation.
And by depopulation I mean on a grand scale; perhaps taking the planet’s roster of humans down to around a billion.
When I previously thought of this idea, the image that came to mind was of an horrific blood spattered massacre not unlike a scene from The Walking Dead. Now I don’t think they plan actual physical mayhem, although god knows they don’t shy away from that sort of thing .
I suspect they’ve come up with something diabolically clever and, as often is the case, it’s hiding in plain sight.
Are they planning on using their mandatory vaccines they’ve hyped so relentlessly to vaccinate virtually the entire world’s population? And will the vaccine be programmed to sterilize 60% or more of the women in the world? At this point I think most people would have to sit with that for a while, if not outright snort their coffee out their nose.
And I am not a lone nut in considering this or contemplating the possibility. Dr. Mike Yeadon and Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg both warn that the Pfizer vaccine will likely impair our ability to procreate.
The vaccine* contains a spike protein… called syncytin-1, vital for the formation of human placenta in women. If the vaccine works so that we form an immune response AGAINST the spike protein, we are also training the female body to attack syncytin-1, which could lead to infertility in women of an unspecified duration.
* This link no longer takes you to the above quote as WordPress has since suspended Health and Money News for violation of “Terms of Service.”
Dr. Mike Yeadon and Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg are not some fringe medics with pet theories forged in fevered imaginations.
Dr. Yeadon was former Head of Research and vice-president at Pfizer and Dr. Wodarg is an MD, PhD, epidemiologist, lung specialist and former Chairman of the Health Committee of the Council of Europe.
Professor Sir John Bell, top UK Covid advisor and member of SAGE, startled his interviewer when he said:
these vaccines are unlikely to completely sterilize a population… say 60-70%.
Of course they wouldn’t include their own billionaire class. They, along with the Royals, seem to be extremely fertile as well as long lived. And they would need a cohort of people to serve them, both in high level positions and low. Below them (in economic class) are their political operatives, presidents on down, professionals, scientists, and the few specialized workers they still need.
And vaccines being used for birth control is not a new idea. They have been studied for some time for their efficacy towards that goal.
Here’s a worrisome quote from an August 1994 article in the FASEB Journal (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology), (“highly cited and consistently ranks among the top biology journals” ):
The authors conclude that their “findings provide insights to possible endocrinological effects of an hCG 3CTP-based WHO promoted birth control vaccine on which a phase I clinical trial has already been completed” and that “might not reliably fulfil major expectations with respect to safety and efficacy?’ We submit that the authors provided only a repetition of old information and biased speculation, which could be damaging to progress in this field.
The article is defending the WHO against claims of some researchers about the safety of their birth control vaccine 26 years ago.
Just imagine how neat that is for their plans. While they have the majority of people terrified they vaccinate them. Then, as easily as they ramped up their Potemkin pandemic, they wind it down. People, the great mass anyway, are kept perpetually on the back foot by bizarre policy shifts always in the interest of biosafety, of course. The sterilization plan takes some time for people to catch on. When it becomes apparent there are far fewer children being born they will have a plan to explain it. It was the Cvd; it was something.
It was at this point in writing this I became aware of a streaming television series (late to the game I was here). UTOPIA. Great title, rhymes with Dystopia.
Spoiler alert: I am going to reveal plot lines and incidents in what I consider an extremely well done dramatic series. Whether it was created with a purpose or was just a product of the zeitgeist, I don’t know. It could easily be classified as “predictive.”
It was initially a 2 season series 2013/14 in the UK followed in 2018 by an American version produced by Amazon and released this past September on Amazon Prime (more below).
The plot of both is the same in its essence. A thumbnail off the top of my head: A plucky band of misfits who share an obsession with a graphic novel entitled Utopia discover that a sequel has been produced and they set out to find it. But it seems some very deep state type forces also want it and will maim, kill and steal to get it.

Utopia 2020 (Endemol Shine North America, Kudos, Trallume Productions, Picrow, Amazon Studios; Prime Video) Created by Gillian Flynn; Produced by Huey M. Park
The novel was apparently the work of a somewhat unhinged genius who saw the world as far too populous and wanted to do something about it. The resulting dramas were (imo) very well done, compelling, fast paced frightening with obligatory plot twists and denouements. It was first shown on Channel 4 in the UK. The plot in broad strokes was that a frightening flu pandemic — the Russian flu — is let loose on the world resulting in widespread panic. (Starting to sound familiar?)
In the Amazon version: A mysterious “Mr. Rabbit” (billionaire?) has let loose a deadly pandemic which kills children with a case fatality rate Dr. Fauci would envy. And the billionaire owner of a pharmaceutical company (played by John Cusak) has a vaccine which offers a cure. Pretty soon the population is marching in the streets demanding to get the vaccine. Our ragtag gang of heroes deduces that the vaccine is meant to kill and maim people. That is until the character played by John Cusack tells them that the beauty of the vaccine is that it is not designed to kill, only to sterilize people.
He says (paraphrasing) “Imagine a world of only a billion people. Plenty to go around for everybody and they’ll be free to screw up as much as they want without destroying the planet.”
He is not a ranter like Hitler or even Klaus Schwab, he’s more like, well … Bill Gates. Only John Cusack doesn’t quite reach the level of creepy that Gates is able to convey.
In the UK version there is an oblique reference to the Georgia Guidestones at one point where one of the characters says that the optimal population of the world is 500 million, roughly 7% of what it is now. And another character says that they didn’t need to have a deadly pandemic, only one that people believed was one, to frighten them into taking a vaccine.
In 2014 HBO planned an American version of Utopia but dropped it over budget concerns. Amazon picked it up in 2018 and the American version starring John Cusak was released just months ago, September 2020. The American version keeps the same basic plot and in the beginning is almost identical to it’s British sire. It does diverge somewhere past the mid-point although the core of the plot remains.
Amazon Prime has now cancelled the series although the first season is still online as apparently is the UK version seasons 1 and 2.
Some of the press are saying it was cancelled because it…
failed to connect with an audience.
That is pure bullshit. It was a hit.
The very liberal online magazine, SLATE, vehemently argues that Utopia should never have been shown so they must be at least happy that it was cancelled. I would wager from their point of view far too many people already saw it. SLATE : said:
the results [ of broadcasting Utopia] are catastrophic —
Really? Are we not capable of discerning fiction and reality and if fiction is reality don’t we need to know that too?
This is what SLATE has to say is the problem with showing Utopia (my emphasis, bold and italics):
We are in the middle of an actual pandemic, a staggering number of Americans sincerely believe that that pandemic is a politically motivated hoax, and an equally staggering number believed vaccines were harmful years before COVID-19 emerged. It’s not the filmmakers’ fault we’re in this mess; it’s not their fault so much of the public is superstitious and gullible; and it won’t be their fault if Utopia gives some dumbass the confidence they need to quit wearing a mask and infect and kill you or the people you care about.
It will probably not be a revelation to you that SLATE is totally on board with the Covid narrative and thinks we who aren’t are dumbasses, superstitious, gullible and, without masks, loaded guns ready to kill people.
But even with the hyperbole above SLATE isn’t finished, they have to bring President Trump in via the back door, ie. QAnon (bold emphasis mine):
Even if everyone who sees Utopia is capable of distinguishing fact from fantasy — and that’s vanishingly unlikely in a nation that is sending QAnon followers to Congress — it’s impossible to enjoy a story where the heroes convince themselves that shadowy forces have manufactured a phony pandemic to trick people into taking a dangerous vaccine when those exact beliefs are helping to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Although it’s interesting to speculate, I don’t think it’s vitally important to know the intention of a drama that, sans the action movie veneer, is playing out in real time as we speak.
Leaving fiction aside for the time being, I am one of those “staggering numbers” who believe the novel coronavirus pandemic to be a gross exaggeration and was deployed as a controlled demolition of our lives as we have been living them.
So the question is do they plan a Great Reset of the current population (to 1804’s 1 billion) as well as all of their modern 4th Industrial Revolution wet dreams?
I’m seriously contemplating the prospect that, just as portrayed in Utopia, the vaccine they are clearly desperate for us to take — or else why would they need to force us — will not actually kill people. Or at least that will not be its principal target. It will be to sterilize us.
If that is the case it is genocide on a scale never seen before. Cusak in his role presents it as a benign solution to the intractability of overpopulation. But family is the beating heart of most of our lives. To rob people of the chance to create their own families is to take everything. It will make zombies of the people left.
But, of course, the people left will be too weak and demoralized to do much of anything. They may be offered distractions to live out their years, which will no doubt be shortened by those very same vaccines and the withholding of healthcare. But throughout there will be very little actual state killing. Just the drip drip turning into a tide of unborn children until their Utopia arrives: the world cleansed of the useless eaters. Billionaires can then enjoy their Neverland Ranch of a planet without those unwashed crowds of homo sapiens stinking the place up.
Do I think this is what they’re planning? I don’t know for sure but it’s my primary suspicion. It all fits once you can get your mind around the immense evil of it. They have never had much use for us. Railroad magnate Jay Gould famously said, “I can hire half the working class to kill the other half.”
His musing bespeaks a horrific fantasy of elimination.
We, the working class, were at best only to be tolerated for what use we could be to them. Now that we’re no longer that, it’s sayonara.
There’s one thing that puzzles me greatly though and that’s the role of China and Russia. The Great Reset seems to be run out of Klaus Schwab’s Fuhrer Bunker at the WEF and we can be certain that the globalist billionaire class, aka the ruling class Americans, Europeans and that gang of suckhole countries, the rest of The Five Eyes, are all on board.
Russia and China both seem to be getting along without the need of population reduction. And why would they mind if the West crashes their population? It would actually seem to be a benefit to them, unless the West is planning to be the Sparta of the future. And conversely wouldn’t the prospect of depopulation of their people just seem like an attempt to dupe them? I mean why would Russia and China go along with it when it would probably be seen as an attempt by the West to weaken them?
However I have a sneaking feeling that the Great Reset gang missed something somewhere that is going to backfire on them. I honestly have no idea except that when they destroy what it means to be human in the way that we are and they aren’t, they will have destroyed their own humanity and the result will be a painful implosion of their own selfhood. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking. And if they get that far there won’t be anything left of us either.
Imagine the dinosaurs lived for hundreds of millions of years. We know that because in our great hubris we studied them learning more than we know about ourselves. In comparison our time here will have been a very brief but spectacular strut across the stage.
Patrick Corbett is a retired writer, producer, director and editor who’s worked for every major network in Canada and the US except for Fox. His journalistic credits include Dateline NBC, CTV’s W-5 and the CTV documentary unit where he wrote and directed ‘Children’s Hospital’, the first Canadian production to be nominated for an International Emmy. You can follow Patrick on Twitter.
Trump’s China tweet ‘destructive & deceitful’ as there isn’t ‘ANY QUESTION’ Russia behind latest hacking scare, Adam Schiff claims

RT | December 20, 2020
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has joined Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in blaming Russia for a recent massive cyber attack. He also slammed President Donald Trump for the inconvenient suggestion China could have been the culprit.
“Based on what I’ve seen, I don’t think there’s any question that it was Russia,” Schiff, who is the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC on Sunday, commenting on the hack.
The hacking operation in question targeted the SolarWinds Orion Platform, a network monitoring tool used by US government agencies and numerous corporations. There has been no evidence presented that Russia was behind the hack, but Pompeo alleged otherwise in a recent interview.
The president broke with his secretary of state on Saturday and called out “fake news media” for their anonymous reports pinning the hack on Russia. He also suggested China may have been behind the hack, tying it to his ongoing allegations of voter fraud in key swing states during November’s election.
Schiff, one of the president’s most vocal critics in the House and a supporter of evidence-free claims Russia colluded to influence the 2016 presidential election, called Trump’s tweets “uniformly destructive and deceitful and injurious” to the country’s “national security.”
In a previous tweet, Schiff called the president’s China accusation “another scandalous betrayal of our national security.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) also pushed back against the president on Sunday, accusing him of having a “blind spot” when it comes to Russia.
“What Russia has done is put in place a capacity to potentially cripple us in terms of our electricity, our water, our communications,” the senator told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
The Republican called for the cyber attack to be “met with a very strong response, not just rhetorical, important as that is, but also with a cyber response of like magnitude or greater.”
Similarly to 2016, the claim of a major Russian cyber attack on the US comes amid the expected transition of power at the White House – although President Trump continues his legal efforts disputing the election result over the alleged mass-scale voter fraud. When Trump assumed his post in January 2017, the stage had already been set for the worsening of relations with Moscow, which included dozens of Russian diplomats getting expelled by the Obama administration over the allegations of meddling in US affairs and over “hacking” of the election. As Trump’s term progressed, overshadowed by the failed ‘Russiagate’ investigation, initial hopes of a detente with Moscow have all but faded.
Pakistani PM firmly rejects Israeli ties as ‘baseless’, publicity campaign

Press TV | December 19, 2020
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has rejected as “baseless” reports of his government officials visiting Israel, insisting why would any of the ministers visit Tel Aviv when Islamabad does not recognize the occupying regime.
Khan made the remarks during an interview on Friday with the local Samaa TV emphasizing that the Israeli-based news story was part of “an entire campaign” targeting his administration.
The development came following a publicity campaign by the Israeli regime’s news outlets alleging on Wednesday that a senior advisor to Khan had visited the occupied territories last month.
Citing a source close to the Tel Aviv regime, Israel Hayom and other Israeli dailies published a report claiming that the Pakistani aide had met with Israeli officials during an alleged trip to Tel Aviv.
The apparent propaganda story also said the Pakistani official was carrying a message from Khan that reflected his “strategic decision” to open political and diplomatic talks with the regime. The Jerusalem Post also covered the publicity item but later removed it from its website.
Pointing to recent efforts by a coalition of 11 opposition groups — led by the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) and the now London-based former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who was ousted after being convicted and later jailed on official corruption charges – Khan said he was prepared to face everything the opposition alliance aims to throw at him.
“The PDM can do anything that it wants. I am ready,” said the premier, adding that PDM’s recent protest rally in Lahore had damaged the opposition’s alliance.
“I am a jalsa specialist and I am telling you that this was a flop show,” he said.
Khan’s administration had dismissed the Lahore rally as “more [of] a ploy” to distract from the corruption charges against Sharif.
Khan also touched upon the threat of mass resignations by opposition legislators, saying, “If they resign, it would be better for Pakistan.”
He went on to say he would even assist the opposition if they came to Islamabad, but noted, “They cannot even last a week [in Islamabad] even if I support them.”
The Pakistani leader defended the country’s top military commander General Qamar Javed Bajwa against the opposition’s persisting allegations against him and the army, saying that “anger” and “disappointment” prevailed among the ranks after Bajwawas was targeted by opposition leaders during public gatherings.
“Gen Bajwa believes in democracy. Had it been another general, he would have given a quick rebuttal,” Khan said, adding that the army chief was “angry” but he was “controlling it.”
He also emphasized that all institutions — including the army — stood beside him, saying, “There are excellent civil-military ties in the country.”
He said the army serves under him as he is the prime minister, and as the army is a government institution.
India’s scheme to discredit Pakistan
Referring to a recent report by EU DisinfoLab, Khan said the NGO’s research had exposed India’s network that kept spreading misinformation about Pakistan.
The Brussels-based NGO, which works to combat disinformation against the European Union, unveiled earlier this month that a 15-year-old operation run by an Indian entity had used hundreds of fake media outlets and the identity of a dead professor to defame Pakistan.
The report – Indian Chronicles: deep dive into a 15-year operation targeting the EU and United Nations to serve Indian interests – described the effort as the “largest network” of disinformation they have exposed so far.
The report – released on December 9 – said the disinformation network run by the Srivastava Group, a New Delhi-based entity, was designed primarily to “discredit Pakistan internationally” and influence decision-making at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and the European Parliament, Al-Jazeera reported.
The report also revealed that in order to “undermine Pakistan internationally,” the network “resurrected dead NGOs” at the UN, impersonated the EU and laundered content produced by fake media to real media, and reached millions in South Asia and across the world.
British organizations hit by “complex cyber attack”
Press TV | December 19, 2020
A major cyber attack that has hit US government agencies is also believed to have affected a small number of British organizations.
According to Sky News, British officials are “investigating” as to whether government departments have been affected by the big breach.
Hitherto, it is believed only private British companies have been affected.
Paul Chichester, the director of operations at the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is an extension of the GCHQ signals intelligence organization, has urged British companies to take “immediate steps” to protect their networks.
“This is a complex, global cyber incident, and we are working with international partners to fully understand its scale and any UK impact”, Chichester told Sky News.
“The NCSC is working to mitigate any potential risk, and actionable guidance has been published on our website”, he added.
Meanwhile, one of the directors of a leading British cyber security company has claimed the attacks could be the most “impactful national security [cyber] breach” that has ever been seen.
John Hultquist, who is senior director of analysis at Mandiant Solutions (which is part of the cyber security company FireEye), told Sky News that: “They [the hackers] managed clearly to gain access to a lot of secure areas. They are going to be very hard to get out”.
FireEye reportedly was the first cyber security company to discover the trans-Atlantic breach.
Yet another major figure in the British cyber security world echoed Hultquist’s assessment by describing the latest breach is “one of the most significant cyber attacks, really that’s ever been seen”.
Ciaran Martin, who is the founder and former head of the NCSC, told Sky News the attack was motivated by “traditional espionage”.
However, Martin, who is currently an academic at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, cautioned that “it remains to be seen, what the final picture [about the hacking] tells us”.
US media, in addition to British security sources, have reflexively blamed the hacking on Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR) without furnishing any evidence.


