Washington Post claims RUSSIA behind SolarWinds hack, citing same ‘sources’ as it did for Russiagate
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | December 14, 2020
Having accused Russia of a ‘secret war’ on the US, the Washington Post is apparently trying to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy, citing anonymous sources to blame the alleged hack of US cyber infrastructure on the Kremlin.
“Russian government hackers breached the Treasury and Commerce departments, along with other US government agencies,” the Post declared on Monday. It’s a serious accusation that one would think demands a serious weight of evidence. The Post offers only anonymous “people familiar with the matter,” however, and demands we take their word for it.
The alleged hack in question is what the US authorities described as an “active exploitation” of the SolarWinds Orion Platform, a network monitoring tool used by corporations as well as US government agencies such as the State Department, NASA, the Department of Justice, the Pentagon, the Executive Office and even the spying agency NSA. The breach supposedly happened between March and June.
One of the first to report the hack was FireEye, a cyber-security outfit that last week said its own hacking tools had been stolen. While FireEye didn’t name names, it was the Washington Post that blamed Russia for the theft. The paper’s editorial board then cited the hack of FireEye as one of the arguments for the existence of a “secret war” by Russia against the US.
The others ranged from fake news like the “bounties” for killing US troops in Afghanistan, to esoteric conspiracy theories like the Russian “hacking” of the DNC and attacking US diplomats in Cuba with “microwave weapons.”
The Post was one of the driving forces behind ‘Russiagate’, the conspiracy pushed by Democrats claiming that President Donald Trump “colluded” with Russia to “hack” the 2016 election and serving as the basis for “resisting” his administration ever since.
Its reporters can’t help bringing that up, either, treating as a statement of fact the utterly unproven assertion that Russia hacked the DNC emails in 2016 and leaked them “to the online anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks in an operation that disrupted the Democrats’ National Convention in the midst of the presidential campaign.”
To further bolster its ‘nonpartisan’ bona fides, the Post sought comment from Michael Daniel, White House cybersecurity coordinator during the Obama administration and now president and CEO of the Cyber Threat Alliance, “an information-sharing group for cybersecurity companies.” Huh, no wonder all these cyber outfits always spout the same talking points!
At the very end of the story, the reporters also quote a tweet from Dmitri Alperovitch, identified only as “cybersecurity expert and founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank.” Yet Alperovitch would be far more familiar to the public as a fellow of NATO’s Atlantic Council and a former head of CrowdStrike, the security contractor hired by the DNC that’s the sole source of claims “Russia” hacked them.
Admittedly, CrowdStrike president Shawn Henry told Congress under oath that they never had more than circumstantial evidence the data was actually “exfiltrated” – i.e. that the hack happened – but that tiny detail from a secret testimony was only made public in May. Russiagate is an assumed fact now and Dmitry has moved to bigger and better things. As Hillary Clinton herself once put it: What difference, at this point, does it make?
Meanwhile, other mainstream media outlets were perfectly happy to report Russia was behind the “hack,” citing other “media reports” as sources and conflating them with US officials confirming only the existence of the breach.
One notable example was NPR, previously known for declaring that “Hunter Biden isn’t a story but a distraction.”
Getting back to the Post, however, you can see how the paper that’s basically been spreading disinformation about ‘Russian hackers’ for years is at it again. Never mind that no evidence is offered beyond anonymous sources and the usual suspects, or that the charges are serving a partisan political agenda – and that of their own editorial board.
Then again, why wouldn’t they? What’s stopping them exactly, journalist ethics? Their ‘Russiagate’ activism has only resulted in awards and rewards – and a return to political power. And in Washington, power is everything.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
Science Crushes Rolling Stone’s Claimed Link Between COVID and Climate
By H. Sterling Burnett | ClimateRealism | December 11, 2020
Rolling Stone this week added its voice to a number of media outlets, like Phys.org and Business Insider, falsely asserting a connection between climate change and COVID-19. In reality, if a modestly warming Earth has any impact on viruses and pandemics, it is to make them less likely and less severe.
In the article, “How Climate Change Is Ushering in a New Pandemic Era,” the author writes, “[a] warming world is expanding the range of deadly diseases and risking an explosion of new zoonotic pathogens from the likes of bats, mosquitoes, and ticks.” The article is long on assertions, touching anecdotes, and personal stories but short on facts and scientific evidence.
Transmissible diseases like the flu and the coronavirus are far more prevalent and deadly during the late-fall, winter, and early spring, when the weather is cold and damp, rather than in the summer months when it is warm and dry. That is the primary reason that flu season runs from fall through early spring, and then peters out. Similarly, colds are called colds because they are less common in the summer, as well.
Historically, we know that the Black Plague arose and ran rampant in Europe and elsewhere during the Little Ice Age.
Chapter 7 of the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change’s report of Climate Change Reconsidered: Biological Impacts details the results of dozens of peer-reviewed studies and reports showing premature deaths from illness and disease are far more prevalent during colder seasons and colder climate eras rather than during warmer seasons and warmer climate eras.
In 2010, BBC health correspondent Clare Murphy analyzed mortality statistics from the UK’s Office of National Statistics from 1950 through 2007 and found, “For every degree the temperature drops below 18C [64 degrees Fahrenheit], deaths in the UK go up by nearly 1.5 percent.”
U.S. Interior Department analyst Indur Goklany studied official U.S. mortality statistics and found similar results. According to official U.S. mortality statistics, an average of 7,200 Americans die each day during the months of December, January, February, and March, compared to 6,400 each day during the rest of the year.
In an article published in the Southern Medical Journal in 2004, W. R. Keatinge and G. C. Donaldson noted, “Cold-related deaths are far more numerous than heat-related deaths in the United States, Europe, and almost all countries outside the tropics, and almost all of them are due to common illnesses that are increased by cold.”
More recently, in a study published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Lancet in 2015, researchers examined health data from 384 locations in 13 countries, accounting for more than 74 million deaths—a huge sample size from which to draw sound conclusions. The researchers found cold weather, directly or indirectly, killed 1,700% more people than hot weather. No, that is not a typo – 1,700% more people die from cold temperatures than warm or hot temperatures.
And Rolling Stone’s assertion that climate change will cause vector-borne diseases to spread to new regions is refuted by the vast body of scientific literature detailed in Chapter Four of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels.
Studies from throughout the world repeatedly find any link between global warming and the spread of malaria, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, and other vector-borne diseases, are either grossly overstated or outright false.
For example, a 2010 study in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature compared historical and contemporary maps of the range and incidence of malaria and found endemic/stable malaria is likely to have covered 58% of the world’s land surface around 1900 but only 30% by 2007. They report, ‘even more marked has been the decrease in prevalence within this greatly reduced range, with endemicity falling by one or more classes in over two-thirds of the current range of stable transmission.’ They write, ‘widespread claims that rising mean temperatures have already led to increases in worldwide malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with observed decreasing global trends in both its endemicity and geographic extent.’
Also, in a 2008 article in the Malaria Journal, Pasteur Institute of Paris professor Paul Reiter wrote:
“Simplistic reasoning on the future prevalence of malaria is ill-founded; malaria is not limited by climate in most temperate regions, nor in the tropics, and in nearly all cases, ‘new’ malaria at high altitudes is well below the maximum altitudinal limits for transmission, [continuing] future changes in climate may alter the prevalence and incidence of the disease, but obsessive emphasis on ‘global warming’ as a dominant parameter is indefensible; the principal determinants are linked to ecological and societal change, politics and economics.”
The COVID-19 pandemic is scary enough without pop-media outlets like Rolling Stone hyping unwarranted fears of a link to climate change. Rolling Stone should stick to what it does best, covering music and pop culture. When it comes to science, Rolling Stone is about as knowledgeable and authoritative as Madonna.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is managing editor of Environment & Climate News and a research fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute.
Bottom falls out of Western narrative as Sunday Times claims Navalny was poisoned twice
By Paul Robinson | RT | December 14, 2020
Long known as the “house journal” of British spooks, it now appears the Sunday Times has given up any pretence of critical journalism and is unquestionably publishing what intelligence officials want to place in the public domain.
A prominent liberal Russian journalist once commented that Western writings on Russia were so bad that they were liable to turn even the biggest Putin hater into a supporter. For while there are many very legitimate criticisms that can be made of the country, Western reporting is so exaggerated that it discredits almost everything that comes out of its mouth – even when it’s actually correct.
One prime example is an article published this weekend in Britain’s most prestigious Sunday newspaper, the Sunday Times, on the subject of the poisoning of opposition activist Alexey Navalny.
Navalny was taken ill on a flight in Siberia on August 20, and medically evacuated to Germany two days later. The Russian authorities are sticking to the initial diagnosis of doctors in Omsk, who said that Navalny was suffering from a metabolic disorder. The Germans, however, claim that he was poisoned by the nerve agent Novichok. Since it is said that Novichok can only be produced in state-run facilities, the implication is that the Russian state was responsible for the poisoning.
The circumstances of Navalny’s illness are indeed suspicious. Furthermore, previous cases, such as the poisonings of Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal in the UK, make it seem plausible that somebody in authority might have wanted to attack the Moscow protest leader in a similar way. That said, suspicions aren’t proof, and the German government has failed to provide any. The lack of transparency is immensely regrettable, and makes it possible for sceptics to argue that the Germans are lying.
This weekend’s article in the Sunday Times is probably meant to undermine the doubters. In reality, it’s likely to have the opposite result. For its claims are so outrageous that many thinking people will react with laughter, and then perhaps start questioning the poisoning story as a whole.
According to the Sunday Times, Navalny wasn’t poisoned by a nerve agent smeared on his water bottle, as has previously been asserted, but rather was attacked by means of his underpants. Moreover, he wasn’t poisoned once, but twice, and despite Novichok’s reputation for extreme deadliness, both attempts failed.
When examined, though, these claims don’t amount to much. The Sunday Times story is nearly 4,000 words long, but 95 percent of it is irrelevant filler, including the comical assertion that the murder of Grigory Rasputin in December 1916 proves “Russia’s penchant for poisoning” (because, of course, nobody other than Russians ever poisoned anyone). The allegations regarding the attack on Navalny take up a mere 100 words of the 4,000-word total. As well as being brief, they are to say the least unproven. The Sunday Times says:
“Vladimir Uglev, a retired Russian chemist who developed nerve agents, believes Navalny’s poisoners would have been instructed to place novichok on the elastic waistband of his pants, where it would come into contact with his skin. … A German laboratory later found traces of a nerve agent on the surface of one of the water bottles. Uglev, the retired chemist, believes that this is because Navalny touched it having got novichok on his fingers after putting on his underpants.”
In other words, the underpants story is just what a single Russian scientist, unconnected to the case, happens to think. Nothing more. Does Uglev provide any evidence to prove his assertion? No. He just “believes” it. Yet, this is sufficient for the Sunday Times to treat the story as essentially true, leading off its article with the claim that, “Navalny was exposed to a nerve agent – not, as initially believed, when he drank a cup of tea in the departure lounge but when he got dressed that morning.” This is not exactly good reporting.
If the underwear story smells a little off, so too does the claim that Russian secret agents tried to murder Navalny not once, but twice. As evidence, the Sunday Times says that, “German security sources have told their associates in the UK that the attackers struck again as Navalny lay in an induced coma before being put on a medical flight to Germany. ‘This was with a view to him being dead by the time he arrived in Berlin,’ one source said.”
To put it another way, an anonymous person (probably a member of the British intelligence or security services) told a journalist that some other anonymous person believes that this is so. In other words, it’s not just hearsay, but anonymous hearsay. One can believe it if one wishes. But there’s no particular reason why one should.
After all, it requires one to imagine that the Russian secret services are so incompetent that they should fail to murder somebody on their own soil, not just once but twice. And further, that they should fail while using what is meant to be one of the deadliest poisons known to man. Maybe that’s what happened. But nobody who is already sceptical about the claim that the Russian state poisoned Navalny with Novichok is going to accept it. Instead, it’s likely to reinforce their scepticism. Add in the underwear, and they’ll probably feel that the bottom has fallen out of the Germans’ story.
And that’s a problem. Western commentators regularly complain that, when faced with evidence of misbehaviour, the Russian state and its supporters respond by inventing conspiracy theories in order to sow doubt about what is real and what is not. But such a tactic can only succeed if people have already lost faith in their original sources of information. In other words, the fundamental problem is not the conspiracy theories themselves, but rather the loss of faith caused by the exaggerations and falsities of so much of what passes as reporting.
The poisoned underwear is a case in point. It stretches the elastic of the imagination so far as to be utterly incredible. In this way, this latest allegation plays right into Moscow’s hands. Alexey Navalny may well have been the victim of a vicious attack. But there will be many who, having stuffed their noses into the Sunday Times, will decide that it doesn’t pass the sniff test, and that the whole Navalny story is a giant load of pants.
Paul Robinson, a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics, and is author of the Irrussianality blog
NBC News reports evidence of alleged Hunter Biden corruption
© REUTERS / Jim Bourg
RT | December 13, 2020
An email seen by NBC News indicates that Hunter Biden failed to pay taxes on profit from his Ukrainian board position. NBC was bombarded with comments explaining how the story is probably false and still irrelevant, if true.
According to the broadcaster, the son of presumed President-elect Joe Biden may have failed to include in his tax returns the $400,000 he received from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma in 2014. This is a conclusion from an email, received by NBC, which was sent to Hunter Biden in 2017 by his business partner, Eric Schwerin, who was then the president of Rosemont Seneca Partners.
“In 2014 you joined the Burisma board and we still need to amend your 2014 returns to reflect the unreported Burisma income,” the email dated January 16, 2017 said as cited by NBC News.
Hunter Biden joined Burisma in 2014, shortly after the ousting of Ukraine’s president at the time Viktor Yanukovich, with the Obama administration showing its support to the protesters. Then-Vice President Joe Biden is considered to be the mastermind behind policy on Ukraine at the time.
Before getting the well-paid gig, Hunter Biden had no background in energy or Eastern European affairs – something that didn’t stop Burisma from hiring him to take a board position.
The Trump administration claimed that Joe Biden had later abused his government office to lean on Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and have him fire a prosecutor, who was investigating Burisma. Biden shared publicly how he pressured the Ukrainian leader, but insisted it was done to get rid of a corrupt Ukrainian official. The incumbent US president was impeached this year at the Democrat-controlled House for asking Poroshenko’s successor to investigate the allegations of impropriety.
The NBC news story comes with a caveat: the email comes from a trove of documents recovered from a laptop that Hunter Biden allegedly left in a Delaware repair shop and which became the centerpiece of a censorship scandal shortly before the November 3 presidential election. The laptop and its contents were reported by the New York Post, but many other US media outlets dismissed it as a likely piece of “Russian disinformation” and refused to cover it.
Facebook and Twitter throttled dissemination of the Post’s reporting on their platform. Users were initially prohibited from sharing links to the story altogether and the newspaper’s account was suspended for days.
After the election, it was reported that federal prosecutors in Delaware were looking into Hunter Biden’s financial affairs and dealings with China since at least 2018. He confirmed that he was under investigation and expressed confidence that the probe would establish that he handled his affairs legally and appropriately.
Social media reaction to the fresh email revelation shows a strong desire to again dismiss alleged corruption in the Biden family. Many latched on to the source of the email to claim that it must be a fabrication.
The Biden campaign dismissed the laptop story as a partisan attack on the ex-VP’s bid for presidency, but never challenged the authenticity of the underlying materials.
Those willing to accept possible wrongdoing by Hunter Biden chose another line of defense – saying that his alleged tax evasion has nothing to do with his father.
And there was of course a great deal of ‘whataboutism’ involving Trump’s undisclosed tax returns and the business affairs of his family.
Days before the election, NBC News published a long explainer of its reaction to the Hunter Biden laptop story. It cited several reasons for not covering it, including not having access to the source material, claims by former intelligence officials that it has “hallmarks” of Russian disinformation and a lack of proof of corruption of then-candidate Biden shown in what was published.
Another major factor, according to the article, was that the laptop was not expected to reveal much new information about Hunter Biden, his apparent cashing in on his family name and allegations that he peddled access and influence of his father.
Frauds: The Election, Media, Congressional Dems, and the FBI
By Clarice Feldman | American Thinker | December 13, 2020
The first of this week’s two biggest stories was Friday evening’s action by the Supreme Court refusing to hear the lawsuit brought by Texas and other states respecting the evident fraud in the balloting in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan. I expressed my views on this yesterday here: ‘A Republic, If You Can Keep It’ | The Pipeline
In short, I believe if the Court had decided to take it, it would not have decided who won these states. Instead, had it decided that the electors from those states were chosen illegally, it would have remanded the complaints to the legislatures of these states, which have the responsibility to fashion a remedy. In any event, had they decided to throw out the electoral votes of those states, Biden would still have one more electoral vote than President Trump, as the majority is determined by the number of electoral votes actually cast. It’s now up to the state legislatures and Congress to decide what to do with the votes from the states in question and the Texas filing provides an excellent template for deciding the votes from those and other states where fraud was rampant — either pick a different slate of electors or provide no slate from those states. If the state legislatures fail in their responsibilities, at the demand of one congressman and one senator, any electoral slate can be challenged and the outcome of the challenge is determined by the House of Representatives voting by delegation, a system in which the Republicans have the most delegations and, therefore, the most votes.
The second most significant matter, in my view, was the clear gaslighting the media and former intelligence officials carried out on the Hunter Biden story, hiding the fact that he’s been under criminal investigation since 2018 for bribery, tax evasion, and money laundering from, among other sources, China. Drew Holden and Arthur Schwartz rounded up the evidence of this gaslighting. That it was effective in its bad faith effort at keeping relevant information about Chinese bribery of the Biden family and their consummate corruption in time to affect the election is clear. One survey reports that nearly 10% of those who voted for Biden in key states would not have, had they known about this scandal which the major media deeply hid from them.
Knowing about the scandals involving Biden’s son Hunter’s dealings with officials and firms in China, Ukraine and Russia would have prompted 9.4 percent of those surveyed to change their vote, according to the survey of 1,750 Biden voters in Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Michigan.
All the fact-free media claims that the Biden corruption was “Russian disinformation” served only to bury the truth that these and other government figures were captives of the Chinese government, a government of ruthless ambitions against both us and their own people. Interestingly, the press that swatted away the report in the NYPost about Hunter as “Russian Disinformation” were the very same people who on zero evidence accused President Trump of Russian collusion for 3 1/2 years.
Just as interesting were the 50 former intelligence officers, including John Brennan and James Clapper, who had not been briefed about Hunter Biden, but all the same claimed that the story about his corruption had all the characteristics of “Russian disinformation.”
Hunter and Joe Biden were not the only people unmasked as Chinese stooges this week. Congressman Eric Swalwell was as well when the story broke that he had been too close — how close he hasn’t denied — to a Chinese honeypot spy while he sat on the House Intelligence Committee, recipients of the most secret of our intelligence gathering. Even more damning is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi put Swalwell in that position after the FBI notified her that he had been compromised. Congressman Adam Schiff, chair of that committee, was also informed and it didn’t bother him. Instead he peddled lies about Trump and Russia for years and bottled up evidence that the claims were baseless. Just as the agency stoked and never rebutted the claims of Russian collusion against Trump, which it knew at the very outset were false, they did nothing to deal with Swalwell’s having been compromised.
Now clear: FBI *knew* Rep. Swalwell was compromised via a Chinese spy, yet spent the last 4 years pushing an accusation against @realDonaldTrump they KNEW was false & helped perpetuate. But don’t worry, our system would totally not compromise the election.
— Tammy Bruce (@HeyTammyBruce) December 8, 2020
Indeed, the FBI has a great deal to answer for and in a better world would be stripped of its counterintelligence functions and more.
Don Surber has dubbed the agency “The KGB for Democrats,” and he has a solid point. It has, as he notes, been in recent years covering up for Democrats and besetting those that the Democrats don’t like. It’s hard to take issue with his examples:
The FBI actually aids and abets crime. Its investigation of Hillary’s sale of state secrets through 33,000 private emails focused not on prosecuting her, but on destroying all evidence of her crimes, including the computer she used. [snip]
Then there is Seth Rich, the man who blew the whistle on the DNC and sent to Wikileaks a thumb drive of incriminating emails. Everyone in DC knows he was murdered. No one is investigating.
Ty Clevenger represents Brian Huddleston in a lawsuit against the FBI. He cannot get the bureau to turn over records. His FOIA lawsuit did get an admission from the bureau.
“After three years of claiming that it could not find any records about murdered Democratic National Committee employee Seth Rich, the FBI admitted today that it has thousands of pages of information about him, further admitting that it has custody of his laptop.” [snip]
The FBI does not work for the American people. If it did, it would have told Obama to pound salt when he demanded the FBI spy on Donald John Trump. Instead it lied to federal judges and spied.
Four years later, only one poor soul has been prosecuted. No other prosecution is expected.
Then there is Hunter Biden’s laptop filled with details of corruption, bribes, and sex with underage women in Red China.
It sat on that laptop for a year. The good citizen who turned it in lost his business and is now in hiding.
The corrupt agency is now involved in a wide-ranging investigation of sexual misconduct, conducted by the Office of the Inspector General.
At week’s end Senator Ted Cruz wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General William Barr, noting that under oath former director James Comey and former deputy director Andrew McCabe‘s testimony about their knowledge and approval of the 2016 Clinton media leak is at odds, that one of them lied under oath, a federal crime. He wants an investigation to determine which one is the liar.
Lying partisans from top to bottom.
With all this going on, it’s no surprise that disinfectants are in such demand and they are hard to find in the market.
Why this campaign of terror?
Never outside war time have populations been subjected to such outrageous assault and battery by government propaganda machines
By Gillian Dymond | OffGuardian | December 13, 2020
In the morning, the world is as the world should be. The sun rises, as predicted for this part of England in early December, at around twenty past eight. Shortly after this, I get up, go through the usual morning routines, have a quick breakfast, wash up, and am at my computer by ten o’clock. The hours pass unexceptionably until lunchtime. And then I can no longer put off the trip to the shops.
Going to the shops is something I do as little as possible nowadays. Once I might have walked in and out of the nearby town centre several times in a day, without thinking twice: but that was when I could move from home to street seamlessly, with no jarring transition between here and there.
Now it’s different. Now, beyond the protective confines of our home lies a parallel universe, a place of outlandish rituals and dogmas, where grotesquely masked figures pass each other warily on the street or, in the supermarket, lurk out-of-touch behind symbolic plastic screens. Instead of muzak, as I follow the prescribed route between the aisles, disembodied voices warn of death and disease, order me to protect myself and others by maintaining distance and keeping my plague-ridden exhalations to myself.
“We’re in this together!” they proclaim.
In less than a year some malign necromancy has transformed the fearless social beings who once thronged shops and cafés in the run-up to each Christmas into an infestation of dangerous, outsized germs: or, if scrupulous examination of the facts has left you confident that “the novel coronavirus” is no more threatening to moderately healthy people than the nastier brands of flu, into the crazed adherents of some apocalyptic cult.
Since I have spent the past nine months scrupulously examining the facts, the eyes now peering out at me over the inadequate face-covering of that woman beating a hasty retreat behind the cans of tuna as I approach are, it seems to me, those of a poor, unhinged lunatic. But then, I am an unbeliever. I do not wear the mask of allegiance. Marked out by the lanyard around my neck, I do my shopping as quickly as possible, and hurry back to the embattled sanity of domestic life.
Yes, even here embattled: for as the onslaught of propaganda continues without remission, only complete divorce from the outside world can afford protection. Fortunately, since the arrival of the computer I am beyond the reach of programmed television, but in order to wake to the accompaniment of pleasant but undemanding music, I used to put up with the intermittent smattering of adverts on Classic FM. Now that government has become the media’s most lucrative source of income, however, this is no longer tolerable. Who wants to be roused abruptly from sleep by inane incantations of “Hands! Face! Place!”, sometimes repeated twice within five minutes ?
“It’s just an actor!” my husband pleads with me, as I hurl execrations, and worse, at the radio. But whether it comes from actors or health ministers, the brain-washing stinks. “Don’t you just long for a nice commercial about sofas?” a friend asks mournfully, as we discuss the incremental take-over of advertising slots by the government’s ‘nudge unit‘. Even bona fide adverts from the likes of Boots and the big supermarkets are made nauseous by mealy-mouthed assurances of “safe” shopping. The only kind of safe shopping I long for is shopping safe from constant reminders of The Virus: shopping unmasked and convivially mingling; the chance to browse unimpeded in bookshops, and linger socially-undistanced over cups of coffee in a crowded café.
Why this campaign of terror, you have to ask? Why, in the midst of a genuine pandemic, would anyone need to be reminded unceasingly that death is dogging their footsteps? That at any moment The Virus, wafted abroad by some super-spreader passed fleetingly in the street, might be insinuating itself into one’s body – or, worse, that we ourselves, infected but unaffected, might be silently contaminating a loved-one?
The short answer is, they wouldn’t. In a genuine pandemic, this constant mental battering would be superfluous. If the Black Death were raging outside my door, government would know full well that they didn’t have to fork out millions to convince me to stay inside; more likely, they would have to pay me to leave the house.
Yet this government has bought the mass media lock, stock and barrel, at vast expense, with the sole purpose, it seems, of hammering home a message of impending doom. Instead of calming our fears with facts and rational arguments, they have seen fit to flood the airwaves with slogans calculated to maintain panic; with disingenuous appeals to the emotions; with out-of-context death counts, wilful obfuscation of the difference between cases and infections, a criminally dodgy PCR test and graphs and computer models (rubbish in, rubbish out) carefully selected to emphasise the worst possible eventualities.
And not content to cow us into submission with a constant diet of skewed and incomplete information, they have unleashed the army’s 77 Brigade to troll social media exchanges and snuff out any lingering dissent – or, as the government prefer to call it, “misinformation“. The aim can only be to induce maximum public terror in the face of a virus which, without all this deceptive ballyhoo, would hardly have been noticed by the population at large.
Why are they doing this? Surely, by now, they must be aware that increasing numbers of highly esteemed and experienced scientists contest policies which are killing vastly more people than they are saving, and which will go on killing well into the future!
True, non-scientists could get lost in all the reams of conflicting information churned out since we were first put on terror alert back in February and March, but one question is both fundamental and easily answered: are excess mortality figures for this year significantly above average? Only a huge and sustained divergence from the norm would indicate the presence of a new disease deadly enough to justify the extraordinary measures the government have taken.
The Euromomo charts for the UK show no such anomaly. In Northern Ireland there has never been any substantial increase in deaths overall. In Wales, too, mortality has hardly diverged from the normal range. Scotland had a well-above-average peak in the spring, but since then has remained almost entirely within the bounds of normality. Even populous England, despite a death rate which soared sharply to a great height in March before falling equally sharply back by the middle of June, has spent most of the year chugging along below the “substantial increase” line, with the usual increase as winter approaches. A further chart at Covid-19 in Proportion? shows that,
Levels of mortality in 2019/2020 are very similar to those suffered in 1999/2000
Definitely not the Black Death, then, nor even the 1918 influenza. In fact, one of the world’s premier epidemiologists, John Ioannidis, has long been assuring us that the infection fatality rate of Covid-19 is comparable with that of a bad flu. His early estimate, in March, of a case fatality rate in the general population of between 0.05% and 1.0%, as indicated by the outbreak on the cruise ship Diamond Princess – a conclusion for which the eminent professor was, hilariously, censored by the non-scientists at YouTube.
Yet now we are being told that only mass vaccination against this fairly run-of-the-mill virus will allow us to return to any semblance of normal life. By special dispensation, millions of doses of insufficiently tested vaccine are already in the pipeline, with a guarantee of no come-back for Big Pharma or for doctors turning a blind eye to the precept “First to do no harm”, should those treated be hit with damaging repercussions on their health or, indeed, on life itself.
We are told that we should all accept the suspect panacea regardless, in order to beat “this dreadful virus”: it’s quite safe – honest, you’ve got my word for it, says Matt Hancock. Yet, side-effects apart, there is no assurance that the Pfizer vaccine, received with jubilation on 8th December by its first grateful recipient, will be effective in preventing either the disease or its transmission: and even if it does turn out to offer initial protection, this may last for as little as three months, so presumably regular repeat injections will be required.
What? Repeat injections! Are the young and healthy facing a lifetime of booster shots against a disease that is dangerous almost exclusively to the old and sick? And if this isn’t crazy enough, we are being told that, even while being turned into human pin-cushions, we will probably need to go on wearing masks and holding our friends and family at arm’s length well into the future: a future, it is hinted, of health passports and routine mass surveillance, if we wish to travel on public transport or generally engage in life beyond our doorstep.
This, it seems, will be the New Normal – but not to worry! After all, you’re already masking up automatically when you leave the house, aren’t you, and following the one-way footsteps on the pavement as a matter of course? And if it becomes too much of a nuisance to carry your proof of vaccination around with you, well, we should soon be able to offer you the trouble-free alternative of an implanted microchip, to cover all eventualities: health; finance; your social credit score …
Sometimes I think it would be better to be one of the masked zombies. Trusting, obedient, they live in a world which, though threatening, they understand and accept. It is real to them. They know, unquestioningly, that a dreadful plague has been visited upon us, a plague which threatens to wipe out the species: and they know that if they wear their masks faithfully, wash their hands a thousand times a day and steer clear of other human beings, they will be doing their bit to save the nation, and, eventually, be granted the supreme unction of a vaccine; after which, they believe, everything will go back to normal – perhaps with a few more bicycle lanes and wind farms, and somewhat fewer jobs – but hey! – what will that matter, when the nice, compassionate government is promising us all a Universal Basic Income?
For the rest of us, it’s not so simple. The rest of us must live in a world where our own perceptions are remorselessly challenged by the prevailing lie. Guided by rational thought processes and the evidence, we know that we are at no more risk from Covid-19 this year than we were in previous years from one of the more aggressive strains of influenza, but as soon as we venture into the outside world, everything contradicts our inner reality: and though we may not participate actively in the masquerade, we are condemned to a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance, compelled to acquiesce silently in the grand illusion being played out all around us, under the direction of the government.
And to what end ?
If it were ever possible to put the enormities which have taken place since last March down to mere blundering, it certainly is not now. The argument that the government has simply blundered, and is now trying to save face by digging itself in deeper does not wash. Nor does the line about saving the NHS. The NHS has regularly survived winter flu seasons which saw beds lined up in corridors and staff rushed off their feet.
Besides, the Nightingale hospitals were quickly whisked into existence: and if the amount of money poured by the government into fear porn and the purchase of dud PCR tests and hastily concocted vaccines had been diverted into more beds, plus better pay for nurses and other non-administrative staff, the lesson might at last have been learned, and future winters made less chaotic.
It was obvious from the start to anyone with a basic education who bothered to check the facts that closing down the economy would be more damaging to life and limb than any virus. Why was this not also obvious to a prime minister with a PPE degree from Oxford, who is surrounded by whole cohorts of colleagues and advisers armed with equally prestigious qualifications?
Even granting an initial surge of panic when faced with hysterical predictions from the Imperial College fortune-telling team, it would have been possible to withdraw in fairly good order after the first lockdown, when many scientists were already saying that the danger had been exaggerated, that the virus was now endemic, and widespread natural immunity was in sight.
Why didn’t our government seize the opportunity, in June, to give themselves a pat on the back, announce that the lockdown had worked, and ease us all back into rationality via an interval of sensible voluntary precautions, as practised in Sweden?
Given a modification of the propaganda, the country would have believed them. When adroitly handled by the Behavioural Insights Team the country, it appears, will believe anything.
Why, then, insist on sticking to the advice of SAGE, and continuing to give credence to the serially failed speculations of Neil Ferguson, rather than attending to the more balanced suggestions offered by Carl Heneghan and Sunetra Gupta?
Instead, the government chose to fan the flames of fear with an intensification of propaganda and orders to mask up, extending the reign of unjustified terror into the autumn, when the annual onset of respiratory diseases began to fill up hospital beds, and allowed the death counts and lockdowns to resume. One by one, those small businesses which survived the first onslaught are giving up the ghost, and it seems that our rulers will not rest content until every last man, woman and child in Britain has been thrown into the linked arms of corporate and state dependency.
What price conspiracy “theories” now? What we are dealing with are facts.
As countries throughout the world commit consensual suicide to a rousing chorus of “Build Back Better!”, what makes more sense? To shake the head in puzzlement, that so many nations, with one accord, should not only have made exactly the same mistakes earlier this year, but are now insisting, in unison, on entrenching the evils that have been unleashed?
Or to contemplate the possibility that a network of powerful supranational agencies – banks, corporations, NGOs – have for some time been collaborating to direct the course of world events through placemen and beneficiaries in local and national governments and their attendant bureaucracies, and that “the novel coronavirus” is being used to achieve the final push into an era of artfully camouflaged “global governance”: an era where policies devised by centralised, unelected committees are handed down to elected heads of state in the shells of what were once independent nations, and passed on by them to regional mayors and administrators for implementation and enforcement.
I caught the Asian flu in 1957. So did my mother: the only time I ever knew her to take a couple of days off work. The infection swept through the country, and tens of thousands died. In 1968 the Hong Kong flu passed me by, but once again the death toll was in the tens of thousands.
On neither occasion was it considered necessary to destroy millions of lives and livelihoods by closing the country down, nor was any attempt made to terrorise its inhabitants. Covid-19 is no more lethal than either of those previous infections – less so, unless you actually believe that all those currently described as dying “with Covid”, or dying within 28 days of testing positive, actually died from Covid. Never before have such destructive policies been inflicted on the nation in a futile attempt to wipe out a virus. Never before, outside war time, has the population of the UK been subjected to such outrageous assault and battery by a government propaganda machine.
Draw what conclusion you will. I’m off to feed the ducks. They don’t do anti-social distancing, and they don’t wear masks.
Latest evasions and cover-ups by Western governments over funding of terrorist groups in Syria are unraveling
People walk past damaged buildings at the Yarmouk refugee camp on the southern outskirts of Damascus © Reuters
By Vanessa Beeley | RT | December 13, 2020
Evidence of Dutch and British funding for extremists who’ve beheaded children & carried out ethnic-cleansing grows by the day. Yet most of the mainstream media – including the BBC – still try to keep this truth silent.
Recently, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte effectively blocked a Parliamentary motion to allow an external independent investigation of Dutch government funding of terrorist groups in Syria.
Rutte initially tried to deny his involvement in the burial of the investigation but tenacious questioning from journalists forced him to admit his personal interference. According to Rutte, such an investigation could result in “tensions with our allies […] the lives of former members of opposition groups could be put at stake.”
Rutte’s protection of illegal armed groups wreaking havoc in Syria is reminiscent of the UK Government’s response to similar Parliamentary questions requesting clarity on the armed groups supported by its Foreign Office (UK FCO). The standard line is, “for security reasons, we do not disclose the names of those moderate opposition groups supported.”
This article will demonstrate that Rutte is very probably preventing tensions with the UK by quashing an investigation, and that the “moderate opposition” promoted by both governments actually consists of savage, extremist gangs who think nothing of conducting ethnic cleansing pogroms in Syria.
Turning ‘non-lethal aid’ into deadly weapons
In 2018, Dutch officials were accused of providing equipment to terrorist groups in Syria. Equipment that included Toyota and Isuzu trucks that were, probably, later converted into machine-gun carriers by groups such as Jabhat al-Shamiya, considered a “Salafist” group by the Dutch Prosecution Service. This equipment was euphemistically described as non-lethal aid, a convenient caveat for governments ensuring the armed groups are given the means to recast this ‘aid’ into military hardware.
Dutch journalist Eric Van Den Beek has followed this affair from the outset. He wrote recently: “It’s a mystery why the Dutch Public Prosecution Office still has not launched a criminal investigation against current and former political officials who were involved in the support of Jabhat al-Shamiya.”
In October 2020, Dutch media reported that a former leader of a terrorist group operating in Syria had been receiving funding from the Dutch Foreign Ministry for years. The group, Ahrar Al Sham, was designated a terrorist organisation by the Dutch Court in 2019.
It is worth noting that Ahrar Al Sham merged with Nour Al Din Zinki in 2018, to form the “Syrian Liberation Front.” Zinki had been formerly funded as “moderates” by the US, but this aid was withdrawn after the group tortured and beheaded a 12-year-old boy, Abdullah Issa, in Al Ansari square, Aleppo in July 2016.
White Helmets soaked in blood
Incidentally, the square where this heinous crime took place was only 200 meters from the White Helmet center that featured in the Oscar-nominated promotional movie for the FCO-midwived, terrorist-linked organisation, “Last Men in Aleppo.” The Dutch government only withdrew funding from the White Helmets in 2018, citing lack of assurances that funds would not be funneled to terrorist groups in Syria. Up until this point, the Netherlands had given the White Helmets $14.5 million.
It was Dutch media that broke the story of the suspected involvement of the White Helmets founder, James Le Mesurier, in defrauding Mayday Rescue – the organisation Le Mesurier established to siphon UK and EU funding to his organisation.
The BBC has recently produced a 15-part radio documentary ‘probe’ into the Le Mesurier fraud allegation and the White Helmets. The “Mayday” series, produced by Chloe Hadjimatheou, turned out to be nothing more than an attempt to smear and discredit researchers, academics, scientists and journalists whose work has exposed the White Helmets to be an armed-group-auxiliary, an extension of power for the UK/US-led regime-change coalition, whose failed agenda is the removal of the Syrian government and President Bashar Assad.
Rutte’s denial of a rigorous and transparent investigation into Dutch sponsorship of terrorist groups in Syria is likely to be connected to the BBC-Mayday series and the FCO’s support for sectarian armed groups in Syria as part of an externally managed “political process.” A recent leak of FCO documents has revealed the extent to which the British government and intelligence agencies have been involved in extensive public relations and media operations to clean up the image of bands of war-crime-committing extremist groups.
This context is important to understand why the alleged financial support provided to the leader of Ahrar Al Sham by the Dutch Foreign Ministry, is very likely connected to the UK efforts to create a vast complex of PR and media back-up for these mercenary armed groups in Syria.
The ex-UK student turned fundraiser for Islamism
The former “foreign affairs minister” of Ahrar Al Sham is a UK-educated, Spanish-Syrian called Labib Al Nahhas. Dutch media has reported that documents show that the country awarded two million euros in subsidies to the European Institute of Peace (EIP), based in Brussels. Much of this funding went on to the Syrian Association for Citizens’ Dignity (SACD). Al Nahhas is the program director and he, personally, receives 700 euros per day, for an average of more than ten days per month as a senior consultant for EIP. This funding covers 2018-2021.
A recent article by journalist Kit Klarenberg revealed the role that Le Mesurier’s widow, Emma Winberg, played in the PR support for Syrian armed groups. Winberg was co-founder of Incostrat, a FCO-outreach agency funded by the Conflict Stability and Security Fund that also finances Mayday Rescue and the White Helmets. The BBC, curiously, made no mention of Winberg’s involvement in what is effectively a clandestine black-op run by the British government in an effort to destabilise Syria and to effect “regime change.”
Among the groups believed to be provided with PR and media support via Incostrat, are Jaish Al Islam, and, according to French journalist Thierry Meyssan, Ahrar Al Sham. In 2016, The Guardian ran a story on an “ex-UK student clock[ing] up air miles on mission to rebrand Syrian Islamists” (emphasis added). The Guardian admits that Ahrar Al Sham had fought in alliance with Nusra Front (Al Qaeda in Syria) and that their goal was to establish an Islamist theocracy in Syria. The Guardian also reports that one of the original leaders of AS had “personal connections with Osama Bin Laden.”
Al Nahhas had deep connections to the US, EU and UK, where he had established a tech company in a West London suburb. IKPA Communications Ltd was set up in October 2012 and apparently liquidated in 2014. Two other directors were named at Company House, Labib Shalak and Swedish-born UK resident, John Carl Gandeborn. This background builds the picture of someone who would be an ideal candidate for the UK FCO-sponsored agencies to promote as an acceptable frontman of an unacceptably sectarian, brutal armed group.
Al Nahhas resigned as director of his tech company in April 2014, the same year he joined Liwa al-Haq, a faction that merged with Ahrar Al Sham in late 2014. Al Nahhas was appointed Ahrar Al Sham’s “foreign minister” after the assassination of the majority of the armed group’s leaders in September 2014. This event is recorded in the leaked FCO documents, in a submission by Analysis Research and Knowledge (ARK) for the “Rapid Response” contract. ARK was also responsible for the creation of the White Helmets in Turkey and Jordan in 2013, with James Le Mesurier at the helm while an employee of ARK.
Turning a blind eye to outrages
Immediately after the largely unexplained assassination of Ahrar Al Sham leaders, Al Nahhas was dispatched on a mission to secure US/UK/EU support for the armed group, visiting Western diplomats and publishing “opinion pieces” in the Washington Post and the Telegraph that called on the West to “engage with Ahrar Al Sham”. Former US Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, accused by Syrian officials of fomenting the armed uprising in 2011, joined the campaign (in 2015) to whitewash Ahrar Al Sham and to distance them from their alliance with Nusra Front.
The access and UK/US state-aligned-media support given to Al Nahhas and the timing of his moves to join armed groups fighting on behalf of the US Coalition in Syria, must lead to speculation that his role was managed by entities like Incosrat with the backing of the FCO and intelligence agencies. Ahrar Al Sham did not cease their ethnic cleansing atrocities in Syria despite the elevation of the group to “political process” status. In May 2016, just before Nour Al Din Zinki beheaded Abdullah Issa, Ahrar Al Sham and Nusra Front carried out the massacre of Syrian Alawite civilians in Zara, in the Aleppo governorate. The UK and US still refused to bow to pressure from Russia to designate Ahrar Al Sham a terrorist group.
Ahrar Al Sham’s involvement with the BBC dates back to the 2013 BBC Panorama report, “Saving Syria’s Children,” when the armed group escorted the BBC production team during the fabrication of what is suspected to be an elaborate hoax based on the forensic analysis of independent researcher Robert Stuart.
As late as 2017, it was reported that Kenan Al Nahhas, Labib’s brother, was appointed the new “political” leader of Ahrar Al Sham. At this time, the group was participating in the brutal siege and daily targeting of Shia Muslim Syrian civilians in the villages of Kafarya and Foua in Idlib. Ahrar Al Sham was also present, with Nusra Front, in Rashideen, Aleppo, in April 2017, when a terrorist suicide car attack massacred recently evacuated children and families from Kafarya and Foua.
The western campaign to rebrand and decriminalise this armed group continued unaffected by the war crimes they were systematically committing against the Syrian people. An opinion piece by Al Nahhas was published by the Guardian in February 2020. The Guardian has also been instrumental in maintaining the criminalisation of the Syrian government, an effort designed to corroborate the FCO’s “regime change” policy. The Guardian was drafted in to posthumously rebrand James Le Mesurier as a “mainstream saint” and was heavily involved in the White Hemet PR industry, alongside the BBC and Channel 4.
Al Nahhas allegedly distanced himself from Ahrar Al Sham in November 2016, but his brother stepped up to lead the armed group. While the Dutch officials involved in the financial sponsorship of a terrorist group profess ignorance of this, opposition members of Parliament say this suggests a lack of robust screening of recipients of government funding. This, combined with the 2018 revelations of the funding of Jabhat Al Shamiya, paint a damning picture of Dutch government involvement in the promotion and material support for violent, criminal armed groups involved in ten years of bloodshed in Syria.
In a curious turn of fate, Chloe Hadjimatheou, the producer of the BBC “Mayday” series, had been “the driving engine” behind a King’s College London, War Department, paper, entitled “The New Jihadism: A Global Snapshot”. The paper concluded that Ahrar Al Sham should be placed alongside Nusra Front and ISIS as a “Salafist,” in other words, a terrorist organisation operating in Syria.
Hadjimatheou refused to answer when asked if she subscribed to the view that the organisation that collaborated closely with the BBC Panorama team was deemed to be a terrorist group. It seems that the promoters, financiers and supporters of terrorism in Syria are not too keen to own up to their involvement in sustaining the illegal war against the Syrian people for ten years.
Vanessa Beeley is an independent journalist and photographer who has worked extensively in the Middle East – on the ground in Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Palestine, while also covering the conflict in Yemen since 2015. Follow her on Twitter @VanessaBeeley
There is no ‘Russian secret war’ on the US, but WaPo fantasy risks Biden starting a very real one
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | December 12, 2020
In a normal world, the Washington Post claiming the existence of a Russian ‘secret war’ against the US based on far-fetched conjecture and debunked conspiracy theories would be a laughing matter. We don’t live in such a world.
Democrat Joe Biden, anointed by the US mainstream media and Silicon Valley as the next president, “must call out Putin’s secret war against the United States” when he assumes office, the Post’s editorial board argued this week.
But this “secret war” exists only in their feverish imagination. Each and every one of the things they list as examples of it consists of assertions based on insinuation at best, or has otherwise been debunked as outright fake news.
Exhibit A is the “mysterious attacks” that supposedly “targeted” US diplomats and spies in Cuba, China, Australia and Taiwan. This ‘Havana Syndrome’ was blamed on Russia last week in a coordinated media campaign, but the “scientific” paper it was based on carefully avoids actual attribution, saying only that the vague symptoms were “consistent” with a posited microwave weapon.
This is an evolution of the original story, which claimed that Russia had used “sonic weapons,” not microwave ones. Even the New York Times later admitted that the headaches, sleep deprivation and other problems were more likely caused by the loud chirping of Cuban crickets.
Exhibit B is another doozy, the infamous “Russian bounties” story. The New York Times claimed in June that some money captured from local mobsters in Afghanistan was somehow proof that Russia was paying the Taliban to kill US soldiers – again, not on the basis of actual evidence, but on conjecture that this was “consistent” with what the CIA and US military said were Russian objectives.
Thing is, neither the US intelligence community nor the Pentagon were ever able to confirm the story, having investigated it for months. It just so happened that it was brought up just as the DC establishment sought to torpedo President Donald Trump’s plan to pull out of Afghanistan and end the 20-year war that has long since forgotten its purpose.
Exhibit C is the “looting of valuable hacking tools” from the cybersecurity firm FireEye, announced earlier this week. FireEye itself never named the culprit, with its CEO Kevin Mandia only saying it was “consistent with a nation-state cyber-espionage effort.”
That didn’t stop the Post from claiming that “spies with Russia’s foreign intelligence service” are “believed” to have hacked FireEye, citing “people familiar with the matter.” Well there you go, anonymous and unverifiable sources asserted it, therefore it must be true!
Last but not least, Exhibit D is the assertion that the “Democratic National Committee’s computers were raided by Russian military intelligence to disrupt the 2016 election.” That is another assertion, based on allegations listed in indictments by special counsel Robert Mueller. As a federal judge helpfully reminded Mueller in another ‘Russiagate’ case, which the government later dropped, allegations made in indictments aren’t statements of fact.
If the phrase “consistent with” jumps out at you here, that’s no accident. Notice there is no actual evidence offered for any of these claims, only an insinuation that these alleged attacks would be “consistent” with what the US spies, anonymous sources and mainstream media think might be Russian objectives.
That’s exactly the claim made by the infamous January 2017 “intelligence community assessment,” which the media falsely attributed to “17 intelligence agencies” instead of a hand-picked team involved in spying on the Trump campaign at the time.
Keep in mind that these are the same spies and media that never saw the demise of the Soviet Union coming, and have been predicting Russia’s impending collapse any day now – for the past 20 years. So much for their actual knowledge of Russian goals or thinking.
Speaking of ‘Russiagate,’ the Post has been on the leading edge of that conspiracy theory from the start. It won Pulitzers for pushing it on the American public. It also played a key role in smearing Trump’s first national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, so he would be fired – and later cheered his railroading by Mueller. At least they’re consistent, so to speak.
Now, the Post editors may be privileged people, living comfortably off of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon fortune even as their country collapses under pandemic lockdowns. However, it would be a mistake to write off this editorial as a mere product of their vivid and feverish imaginations. After four years of Russiagate hysteria that even the Trump administration has internalized, this kind of rhetoric is actually dangerous.
That’s because the Post is literally in bed with what Trump called the Washington “swamp,” the entrenched US political establishment. What they print is what that establishment thinks and wants Americans to believe. With Joe Biden in the White House, the objectives of that establishment and the official US government would be, to use their own phrase, consistent.
Which is why the Post’s “secret war” fantasy is, shall we say, highly likely to become an actual shooting war with Moscow. As the US and Russia have enough nuclear weapons between themselves to destroy the world several times over, that can’t possibly be good for Amazon’s bottom line. Someone ought to tell Bezos.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
Texas Launches SCOTUS Bid to Save Trump, and Maybe Even the Republic
By Robert Bridge | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 11, 2020
In a dramatic and unprecedented turn of events amid the 2020 presidential election fiasco, the Lone Star State is leading the charge to overturn results in four swing states where multiple irregularities were alleged to have occurred in delivering the presidency to the Democrat Joe Biden. Nothing less than the survival of the Republic as we know it hangs in the balance.
President Donald Trump and 17 Republican-ruled states filed motions this week in support of the Texas’ ‘Hail Mary’ effort to get the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn results in four major swing states – Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – where alleged fraud and irregularities catapulted Biden into the White House. The legal challenge comes just days before the Electoral College is scheduled to formally pronounce on the outcome.
Trump’s legal team has experienced multiple setbacks in its efforts to present its case at the state level. Those failures were not wholly unexpected considering that three of the states being sued are Democrat-run; not exactly places where the scales of justice would tip in Trump’s favor. As for Georgia, Republican Governor Brian Kemp, proving his credentials in the RINO club (‘Republican In Name Only’) has impeded efforts for a recount every step of the way.
The charges being leveled against the states by Rudy Giuliani, the head of Trump’s legal team, are serious despite being almost totally ignored by the mainstream media. The suit accuses both local voting officials as well as Dominion Voting Systems of potential fraud and “severe irregularities.” Several IT experts testified that the voting systems were not only hooked up to the internet, but the votes were tallied at overseas points.
Giuliani outlined the grievances in Atlanta, Georgia, where an alleged water-pipe break, later determined to be a hoax, halted vote counting at a time when Trump’s lead over Biden was looking insurmountable.
“In the city of Atlanta, Republicans were not allowed to watch the absentee mail-in ballot process. Inspections completely cast aside. We have numerous double voters. We have numerous out-of-state voters. And we have specific evidence of intimidation and changes of votes.”
The lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton this week presents a compelling argument, yet has attracted mockery and disdain from some legal experts who argue that no state has the right to interfere in the affairs i.e. conducting elections of another state. The Texas-led lawsuit, however, makes the fascinating counter-argument that those four states where fraud is alleged to have happened “threaten the liberty, not just of their own citizens, but of every citizen of the United States who casts a lawful ballot in that election.” In other words, by not holding fair and transparent elections, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have infringed upon the rights of the citizens of other states.
“States have a strong interest in ensuring that the votes of their own citizens are not diluted by the unconstitutional administration of elections in other States,” the amicus brief reads. “When non-legislative actors in other States encroach on the authority of the “Legislature thereof” in that State to administer a Presidential election, they threaten the liberty, not just of their own citizens, but of every citizen of the United States who casts a lawful ballot in that election—including the citizens of amici States.”
The legal motion went on to mention the unconstitutionality of the Supreme Courts in each state overriding the legislative branch by codifying mail-in ballots that were not properly managed. To support its claim it cited Anderson v. United States (1974), which ruled that every voter in a federal election “has a right under the Constitution to have his vote fairly counted, without its being distorted by fraudulently cast votes.”
Whether or not the filing on behalf of 17 states, as well as U.S. President Donald Trump ultimately succeeds or fails to be heard by the Supreme Court is not really the main point. What is significant is not only have so many Republican states joined together in defense of the populist leader, something that many people did not believe would happen, but it underscores the level of anger and frustration so many Americans are feeling over the outcome to this election of extreme consequence. Indeed, many believe the outcome of this presidential contest, given the strange winds now blowing through Capitol Hill, may actually mean the difference between the United States becoming more of a socialist country than a capitalist one.
With so much riding on the line, conservative Trump supporters are growing desperate, not only with the implications of a Biden-Harris presidency, but by the absolute lack of media coverage throughout the saga. And when there is media attention devoted to the legal challenges, it is an arrogant and condescending tone, as if fraud and corruption has suddenly become a new thing.
This is where not the media and the Big Tech social media platforms are playing with real fire. If enough Republican voters come around to the conclusion that Trump was not only cheated out of another term in office, but was never given a fair hearing to forward those grievances, then we may be heading for some very rough times in the land of the free. To lose in an election is one thing, but to lose under highly dubious terms while lacking both the legal and media methods of voicing those concerns, is a recipe for disaster.
By Wednesday, the general attorneys from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia have filed motions with the Supreme Court. Should the highest court in the land agree to hear the case, Texas senator Ted Cruz has agreed to argue on Trump’s behalf.
Not only would such a court case make for some epic television, it may very well save the Republic from another civil war.
“Free Speech Is Being Weaponized”: Columbia Dean and New Yorker Writer Calls For More Censorship
By Jonathan Turley | December 11, 2020
We have been discussing how reporters, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and key advisers. This includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Now, Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. That’s right. A journalism dean and writer declaring that the problem is that free speech itself is allowing too much freedom on the Internet and other forums.
Coll’s comments came in a discussion on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” when he was asked by Kasie Hunt about the need for Big Tech to censor speech. Rather than defend the right of people to express themselves freely, Coll lashed out at companies like Facebook as “motivated, as all companies are, to make money” though at the same time is “acting like a public square.” He decried the failure to have more expansive regulation of free speech and showed little concern or merit for arguments from free speech advocates. Like Harvard academics who recently declared “China was right” about censorship, Coll just assumed that it was self-evident that too much free speech is a bad thing and that these companies need to protect people from harmful or false ideas.
“And yes, Facebook has moved somewhat. They’ve had a better election in 2020 than they did in 2016. They’ve learned to put some brakes on, you know, here and there, but you can’t get away from the fact that their mission is to connect everybody in the world. That’s what motivates Mark Zuckerberg and it’s his passion and he profoundly believes in free speech.”
What is most maddening is that Coll spoke on behalf of journalists in calling for less freedom:
“Those of us in journalism have to come to terms with the fact that free speech, a principle that we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the principle of journalism and what do we do about that,. As reporters, we kind of march into this war with our facts nobly shouldered as if they were going to win the day and what we’re seeing that is because of the scale of this alternative reality that you’ve been talking about, our facts, our principles, our scientific method–it isn’t enough. So what do we do?”
That used to be an easy question. What you do is allow free speech to combat bad speech. What you do is support the right of citizens and journalists to publish without censorship. What you do is to embrace the freedom of expression while reinforcing the need to use that freedom to counter disinformation. Instead, Coll is joining the forces seeking to silence or curtail the speech of others. You do not support free speech by calling for its curtailment. For free speech advocates, it is as compelling as saying that we needed to “save” villages by destroying them in Vietnam. Worse yet, he is doing it in the names of “good journalism.”
CNN: ‘Don’t Be Alarmed’ if People Start Dying After Taking the Vaccine
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | December 8, 2020
In an article on the COVID vaccine rollout, CNN says that Americans shouldn’t be alarmed if people start dying after taking the vaccine because “deaths may occur that won’t necessarily have anything to do with the vaccine.”
The advisory appeared in an article titled ‘Why vaccinate our most frail? Odd vote out shows the dilemma’ in which Dr. Kelly Moore, associate director of the Immunization Action Coalition, cautions that vaccines don’t work as well on the frail and elderly compared to healthy people.
“When shots begin to go into arms of residents, Moore said Americans need to understand that deaths may occur that won’t necessarily have anything to do with the vaccine,” states the report.
“We would not at all be surprised to see, coincidentally, vaccination happening and then having someone pass away a short time after they receive a vaccine, not because it has anything to do with the vaccination but just because that’s the place where people at the end of their lives reside,” Moore said.
She then said Americans shouldn’t be alarmed to see people dying a day or two after receiving the COVID vaccination.
“One of the things we want to make sure people understand is that they should not be unnecessarily alarmed if there are reports, once we start vaccinating, of someone or multiple people dying within a day or two of their vaccination who are residents of a long-term care facility. That would be something we would expect, as a normal occurrence, because people die frequently in nursing homes.”
While deaths in care homes of people who take the vaccine are described as normal and nothing to do with the vaccine, some would suggest that you could make the exact same argument about deaths of those with multiple comorbidities in care homes that were put down to COVID.
Many have and have been shouted down for doing so.
White Helmets founder Le Mesurier is now a mainstream saint, but leaked docs raise questions about his widow’s role
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | December 8, 2020
An extraordinary, concerted establishment campaign to rehabilitate the reputation of White Helmets founder James Le Mesurier has unfolded over recent months.
First, in late October, came a 6,000-word hagiography in The Guardian — less than a fortnight later, the BBC transmitted a 15-part radio documentary on his firm, Mayday Rescue.
Emma Winberg, Le Mesurier’s spouse and Mayday’s Chief Impact Officer, played a starring role in both efforts, in the process breaking the public silence she’d rigidly maintained since her husband’s mysterious death in November 2019.
Strangely though, discussion of her professional history was almost entirely absent. The Guardian was slightly more informative on this point than the BBC, sparingly describing Winberg as “a former British diplomat” working for a “communications firm in northern Iraq” when she became romantically involved with Le Mesurier in March 2016, before joining Mayday in January 2017.
‘Some of the funds will go missing’
The communications firm in question was Innovative Communications and Strategy (Incostrat), cofounded by Winberg in November 2014 with military intelligence veteran Paul Tilley, former director of Strategic Communications for the UK Ministry of Defence in the Middle East and North Africa. Like Le Mesurier, he attended Sandhurst Royal Military Academy.
Media references to Incostrat are sparse, although in December 2016 Rania Khalek revealed the company had approached a Middle East journalist and offered them US$17,000 per month to produce pro-opposition propaganda.
Private correspondence between the reporter and Incostrat indicates the company positioned itself as one of “three partners” of the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) “working on media surrounding the Syrian conflict.”
Incostrat’s work was funded by the FCO’s Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF). In February 2017, a parliamentary report stated CSSF had “substantial allocations” in Syria, amounting to £60 million.
The same report noted there was significant risk the CSSF was “being used as a ‘slush fund’ for projects that…do not collectively meet the needs of UK national security,” and some of the financing it afforded “will go missing or be linked to groups that may carry out human rights abuses.”
‘Using media to create events’
Significant light was shed on Incostrat’s cloak-and-dagger activities in September, when ‘hacktivist’ collective Anonymous dumped a vast number of FCO files on the web, exposing a variety of covert information warfare actions undertaken by the UK government against the Syrian state over many years.
The overriding objective behind all the initiatives was to destabilise the government of Bashar Assad, convince Syrians, Western citizens, foreign governments, and international bodies the Free Syrian Army (FSA) was a legitimate alternative, and flood media the world over with pro-opposition propaganda.
In one document, Incostrat boasts of surreptitiously “initiating events to create media effect” and of “using media to create events.” One example of this dual-strategy saw the company create mock Syrian currency in three denominations, imploring citizens to “be on the right side of history.”
The campaign was intended to ensure international opinion remained arrayed against Assad, at a time “media attention has shifted almost exclusively towards ISIS and some influential voices are calling for co-operation with the Syrian regime to combat ISIS.”
“The notes are due to be smuggled into regime-held parts of Syria once formal clearance has been authorized by [UK government] officials,” the file states. “We will engage the international media to create a story around the event… The message to the regime [is] covert but active resistance continues.”
Another saw Incostrat produce “postcards, posters and reports” to “draw behavioural parallels” between the Assad government and ISIS, and dishonestly further the conspiracy theory that “a latent relationship exists between the two.”
Incostrat also provided “a credible, Arabic-English speaking Syrian spokesperson” to the media to further the campaign’s messaging, securing interviews in “major news outlets” such as Al-Jazeera, Buzzfeed, CNN, The Guardian, New York Times, Times, and Washington Post.
‘Human interest stories’
Another document indicates the company was staffed by veterans of covert Whitehall-funded psyops, noting Incostrat partners previously established a local media platform in Iraq “immediately following the fall of Saddam Hussein,” training “a cadre of journalists” who were “instrumental in reporting on events in Basra.”
The same file also makes clear Incostrat personnel had been providing support to Syrian media platforms and civil society organisations since 2012, before the firm was founded.
In the process, Incostrat operatives played a role in creating eight FM radio stations and six community magazines across the country, developing and managing the Syrian National Coalition’s media office, and helped establish Basma – “a media platform providing human interest stories and campaigns that support [UK government] policy objectives.”
Other files leaked by Anonymous indicate Basma was the primary creation of ARK, a shadowy “conflict transformation and stabilization consultancy” headed by veteran FCO operative Alistair Harris, implying significant overlap between the pair.
Le Mesurier himself worked at ARK 2011 – 2014, and Mayday Rescue was spun out of the company – yet The Guardian’s lengthy elegy alleges Winberg had only been “briefly introduced” to him twice at “garden parties” prior to their formal March 2016 meeting.
Moderate torturers and murderers
As with other FCO contractors operating in Syria, including ARK, Incostrat produced propaganda promoting extremist groups as credible alternatives to the Assad government, and whitewashing their barbarous nature.
One document refers to the firm “providing strategic communications support to the moderate armed opposition.” An FCO tender for the project indicates some of the “moderate” groups to which Incostrat may have provided “strategic communications support” — “the Free Syrian Army, the Supreme Military Council, Revolutionary Forces Syria and… mid-level units such as Syrian Revolutionaries Front, Jaysh al-Islam [and] Harakat al-Hazm.”
The inclusion of Jaysh al-Islam (JAI) on this list is striking, for more reasons than one. While none of the collectives mentioned would adhere even vaguely to any definition of the term ‘moderate’, except perhaps broadly relative to the most murderous ‘rebel’ elements in Syria — with which each group regularly collaborated in any event — JAI was an especially and notoriously brutal fraternity.
For years, it ran the assorted areas it occupied under extremely vicious interpretations of Sharia law, kidnapping, imprisoning, torturing and executing innocent men, women and children for even the mildest infringements of strict Islamist code. Along the way, JAI carried out many atrocities, including parading caged Alawite families in the streets, using hostages as human shields, and attacking Kurdish civilians with chemical weapons.
While the UK government denies providing any backing to JAI, the files released by Anonymous confirm the other groups mentioned by the FCO all did receive Whitehall support of various kinds. Moreover, independent journalists who visited areas the group occupied found JAI worked closely with the White Helmets, which received tens of millions in funding from London.
Other files released by Anonymous indicate ARK reaped vast sums promoting the Helmets at the FCO’s behest, developing “an internationally focused communications campaign to raise global awareness” of the group in order to “keep Syria in the news.”
Along the way, ARK produced a documentary on the Helmets and ran their various social media accounts, including the Facebook page for Idlib City Council, at one time mooted as a potential interim government to replace Bashar Assad. When Al-Nusra overwhelmed the city, numerous Helmets were filmed celebrating the ‘victory’ in its main square.
The linkage between JAI and the Helmets gains an acutely sinister dimension given the former’s primary base of operations was the city of Douma, the site of a highly controversial alleged chemical weapons attack 7th April 2018.
The Helmets were central to Western news reporting in the initial hours and days following the contested strike, its operatives claiming two Syrian Air Force helicopters dropped barrel bombs containing the nerve agent sarin on the city.
Images they provided of cylinders embedded in buildings circulated widely on social networks and media platforms the world over, along with footage of local residents being hosed down in hospitals, children foaming at the mouth, and piles of dead bodies in a housing complex.
Paris, London and Washington claimed to possess secret proof Assad’s forces had attacked the city with chemical weapons, and in response launched a series of military strikes against multiple government sites in Syria 14th April 2018.
In March 2019, the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) issued a final report on the incident, which concluded there were “reasonable grounds” to believe a chemical weapons attack had occurred in Douma, and “the toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.”
However, a number of the organization’s previously suppressed files are now in the public domain — they make clear the report’s findings were directly contrary to the overwhelming majority of evidence collected by investigators who actually visited Douma, which pointed strongly to a staged ‘false flag’ incident.
An illicit affair
The documents imply witness and forensic evidence contradicting the notion a chemical weapons attack occurred in Douma, excluded from the OPCW’s final report on the incident, was collected in Turkey. The BBC’s radio series on Mayday confirmed this evidence was provided to investigators by Le Mesurier and the White Helmets.
While the OPCW website makes no reference to this assistance, not merely in respect of the Douma investigation but its probes of at least three other alleged government chemical weapon attacks in Syria, in June 2018 Mayday’s deep and cohering ties with the organization were exposed by none other than Emma Winberg.
Speaking at an Atlantic Council event alongside Bellingcat founder and chief Eliot Higgins, she described how the Helmets had in 2015 specifically been provided with OPCW-standard training and equipment to collect samples from the scenes of airstrikes for the organization. The ease with which this privileged position could be abused was apparently not considered, or indeed of no concern.
This followed two years in which the group’s status as ‘first responders’ in the Syrian crisis had become ever-more firmly established in the mainstream, thanks in no small part to the endless deluge of footage posted on the group’s social media channels, which was frequently broadcast by Western news platforms subsequently.
In 2014, Winberg said, human rights organisations began “taking an interest” in the footage and reaching out to Mayday directly, seeking witness testimony from Helmets among other things.
She also suggested the attention generated by the group’s video clips was serendipitous, as the helmet-mounted cameras they wore were originally intended to be a “training aid” — it wasn’t until later, allegedly, they thought to publicise the content captured.
Fittingly, Winberg’s brief talk fed into a speech by Higgins, in which he demonstrated how Bellingcat and other media organisations made use of the White Helmets’ footage.
‘How communications influence’
It’s highly implausible the FCO-funded information warfare specialists that trained and promoted the Helmets weren’t well-aware in advance of the propaganda value of imagery from the conflict.
Yet, Winberg’s narrative is even more incredible given ARK, the firm so intimately intertwined with Incostrat and Mayday, extensively tutored and equipped hundreds of Syrians in “camera handling, lighting, sound, interviewing, filming a story,” post-production techniques including “video and sound editing and software, voice-over, scriptwriting,” and “graphics and 2D and 3D animation design and software.”
ARK’s students were also instructed in practical propaganda theory, such as “target audience identification, media and media narrative analysis and monitoring, behavioral identification/understanding, campaign planning, behavioral change, and how communications can influence it,” and more. Such disciplines would no doubt be extremely effective in the staging of a ‘false flag’ attack.
The FCO continued funding Incostrat to the tune of millions after Winberg’s departure, and does so to this day. Cofounder Paul Tilley also left the company at around the same time, and founded IN-2 Comms, which“provides a more tailored product to the public and private sector focussing on specialised communication campaigns.” The firm has likewise reaped vast sums from Whitehall ever since.
One wonders whether the FCO’s extensive network of psyops cutouts played any role in the recent propaganda blitz surrounding Le Mesurier, Winberg, and the Helmets.
The BBC’s Mayday series credits Abdul Kader Habak as having provided “Arabic translation and additional research” to the project. According to his Facebook page, he worked for ARK 2013 – 2019.
Chloe Hadjimatheou, the documentary’s producer and presenter, has previously reported on events in Syria. In 2016, she produced a five-part documentary, Islamic State’s Most Wanted, on citizen activist collective Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently.
The group was founded by journalist Naji al-Jerf, who subsequently served as its primary spokesperson — he was also an ARK employee, playing a pivotal role in training and coordinating the firm’s vast network of stringers in Syria, and managing its distribution networks. He was murdered by ISIS operatives for these activities in December 2015.
On 18th November, Winberg announced her retreat from the public eye via Twitter, saying she would be “offline for the foreseeable” in order to “get to work”. It’s not certain what this “work” will entail, but mainstream efforts to deify her husband and obscure the reality of his professional history, the group he founded, and how and why he died, are evidently ongoing.
Kit Klarenberg, an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow Kit on Twitter @Kit Klarenberg
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From the Archives
US murdering 1 million Iraqis is democracy, Iran giving yogurt to Iraq is “domination”
By Ali Salaam | American Herald Tribune | July 31, 2017
The New York Times, owned by the Zionist Jewish supremacist Ochs-Sulzberger family, has no problem with Iraqi suffering as long as Iran is not the one behind it.
The Iraq War was a genocide of the Iraqi people by Zionist supremacists in the Bush administration. Over 1 million innocent people were killed based on a lie. American soldiers died in an Israeli war and now an average of 22 soldiers commit suicide every day because their consciences cannot cope with the fact they committed crimes in an illegal war that served no purpose other than to benefit Israel, not America.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the Zionist regime, once said “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”
Paul Wolfowitz had his sights on Iraq since his time in the first Bush administration. Former Israeli official and Bush administration official Richard Perle had his eyes on Iraq since at least his authorship of the Clean Break white paper. The Zionist regime had their eyes on Iraq since the 1980s when strategist Oded Yinon wrote his white paper in support of dividing the Arab-Muslim world along ethnic and sectarian lines. The global Zionist lobby has had their eyes on Iraq since Theodor Herzl stated that Eretz Israel’s true borders go from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq. … continue
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