Last ditch media sanctions from the West against Russia are like a sick child crying for help
By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | January 3, 2025
Many analysts will be wondering what Trump will do about Russian sanctions when gets into the Oval office, although there is some optimism that he will try and reverse them. He is cautious not to get into a debate about this subject, which leads me to suspect that this will be one of the bombshells he will drop on the Biden administration which left him the small gift of signing off over a billion dollars of military aid to Ukraine. What almost no Americans understand though, which is largely the fault of mainstream media, is that these military spending sprees are really all about feeding a dual-purpose racket which really has nothing to do with the actual war in Ukraine, which everyone now admits Russia is winning. On one hand, it is of course pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the 5 main arms manufacturers in the U.S. in a move which could arguably be called illegal state aid; on the other hand the kit which is sent to Ukraine from the U.S. – and the UK – is mainly being sold on a number of black markets, with only about 30 percent or thereabouts actually reaching Ukrainian troops. My own investigation has proved that the Zelensky cabal are selling off the heavy equipment like armoured personal carriers (APCs) and lorry loads of American made assault rifles to dealers in the international arms bizarre of Libya – where Middle Eastern terrorists, or their affiliates in the Sahel buy it at bargain prices.
And Trump certainly understands the racket and will want to stop it. Dropping the mother of all bombshells on the Biden legacy by scrapping the sanctions and blocking any more aid would be an effective way to do that.
But it’s the sanctions on Russia media which he should also give priority to, given that, with the state of western media being such a shambles, we had to rely on RT for example, in the UK and U.S., to ask the difficult questions and hold our administrations to account.
The recent news at the end of December that the EU is cracking down even further on Russia media and individuals who are active within it – journalists and others – is another parting shot which smacks of desperation. The West is under no illusions privately that it is losing the war in Ukraine and is wondering how it can tell a fairy tale story to its own voters so as to deflect blame with the sole purpose of staying in power. This is really what media sanctions are all about. Shutting down any narrative that could possibly hold you to account and expose the tawdry reality of the mess the West has made in Ukraine based on the military industrial complex gaining too much power and eating up elites in its path. The Biden administration will be remembered for this. A new dawn in just how much power these arms manufacturers have and what lengths they can go to, to get the big contracts. This will all come out in the Trump administration with documentaries about Biden and his son’s laptop and how Ukraine was a holiday camp for them to go to with empty suitcases and return with a few million dollars. Like a cash machine which keeps churning out cash due to a computer glitch. The lure of Ukraine and corrupt western elites is nothing new. But during Trump’s first term citizens of the West are going to see the dark side to the events which led up to Russia’s invasion. And it stinks.
Part of that racket, going back even to 2013 or 2014 was to try and shut down Russian media. In reality, it was simply RT which elites noticed was gaining popularity in many European countries from people who had lost all faith in their own media which had fallen into the grubby hands of the powerful elites and their dirty games long ago. It used to be the case that in Brussels, the hold that the powerful institutions had on journalists was so strong in such an abusive relationship that what we saw each day on TV and in the newspapers was pure EU propaganda on a scale that even the Soviet Union could not muster. There used to be however the contrast between Brussels and member states where the media were more robust and anti-establishment. But no more. Now the political journalists along with the defence correspondent in the UK for example are practically government propaganda agents who probably think they were journalists once. Their work is to keep the lies about Ukraine, as one example, flowing so that the public are distracted and can’t focus on what is under their nose. Sometimes the plain truth is so close to the person looking for it, that it can’t be seen. Distance is required. When RT operated in the UK, there was this certain environment which questioned more and provided an alternative viewpoint which was needed in any functioning democracy. Trump’s priority should be to finish the sanctions and adopt a more grown-up approach to resolving Ukraine as the Russians want a longer-term solution rather than quick fix buggerydoo. Ending the sanctions on Russian media would be a good message to western elites that have fed from the trough for so long with the lies which have been created that their time is up. Trump’s back.
Manufacturing Dissent
By Joshua Stylman | November 17, 2024
As I often do on Sunday mornings, I was drinking my coffee and scrolling through my news feed when I noticed something striking. Maybe it’s my algorithm, but the content was flooded with an unusual amount of vitriol directed at Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s nomination as HHS Secretary. The coordinated messaging was impossible to miss—talking heads across networks uniformly labeling him a “conspiracy theorist” and “danger to public health,” never once addressing his actual positions. The media’s concerted attacks on Kennedy reveal more than just their opinion of his nomination—they expose a deeper crisis of credibility within institutions that once commanded public trust.
The Credibility Paradox
The irony of who led these attacks wasn’t lost on me—these were largely the same voices who championed our most destructive pandemic policies. As Jeffrey Tucker aptly noted on X this morning:
The Coordinated Response
This hypocrisy becomes even more glaring in the New York Times’ recent coverage, where dismissive rhetoric consistently replaces substantive engagement. In one piece, they acknowledge troubling trends in children’s health while dismissively declaring “vaccines and fluoride are not the cause” without engaging his evidence. In another, Zeynep Tufekci—who notably advocated for some of the most draconian Covid measures—warns that Kennedy could “destroy one of civilization’s best achievements,” painting apocalyptic scenarios while sidestepping his actual policy positions.
Meanwhile, their political desk speculates about how his stance on Big Food might “alienate his GOP allies.” Each piece approaches from a different angle, but the pattern is clear: coordinated messaging aimed at undermining his credibility before he can assume institutional authority.
The Echo Chamber Effect
You can almost hear the editorial conveyor belt opening as senior editors craft the day’s approved reality for their audience. The consistent tone across pieces reveals less independent analysis than a familiar pattern—mockingbird media still in action. As I detailed in How The Information Factory Evolved, this assembly-line approach to reality manufacturing has become increasingly visible to anyone paying attention.
What these gatekeepers fail to grasp is that this smug dismissiveness, this refusal to engage with substantive arguments, is precisely what fuels growing public skepticism. Their panic seems to grow in direct proportion to Kennedy’s proximity to real power. This orchestrated dismissal is more than a journalistic flaw—it reflects a larger institutional dilemma, one that becomes unavoidable as Kennedy gains traction.
The Institutional Trap
The Times faces an emerging dilemma: at some point, they’ll need to address the substance of Kennedy’s arguments rather than rely on dismissive characterizations—especially if he assumes control of America’s health apparatus. Just this morning, MSNBC anchors were literally shouting that “Kennedy is going to get people killed”—yet another example of using melodramatics and fear instead of engaging with his actual positions. Their reflexive ridicule strategy backfires precisely because it avoids engaging with the evidence and concerns that resonate with parents and citizens across political lines. Each attempt to maintain narrative control through authority rather than evidence accelerates institutional credibility collapse.
Beyond Kennedy: Redrawing Political Lines
The NYT’s analysis about Kennedy potentially alienating GOP allies particularly highlights their fundamental misunderstanding of the shifting political landscape. As a lifelong Democrat who still champions many traditional progressive values, Kennedy transcends conventional political boundaries. His message—”We have to love our children more than we hate each other”—resonates precisely because anyone who dismisses this crusade to restore American vitality as mere political theater is blind to the groundswell of people who’ve grown tired of watching their communities crumble under the weight of manufactured decline.
This isn’t just about Kennedy—it’s about the media’s inability to address the legitimate concerns of a disillusioned public. When institutions refuse to engage with dissenting voices, they deepen mistrust and fracture the shared foundation necessary for democratic discourse. While RFK, Jr.’s message has resonated across political boundaries, the media’s inability to address core issues—like regulatory failures—reveals just how out of touch they’ve become.
The Art of Missing the Point
Consider this fact-check from the same article: The Times attempts to discredit Kennedy’s Fruit Loops example, but inadvertently confirms his central point: ingredients banned in European markets are indeed permitted in American products. By focusing on semantic precision instead of the broader issue—why US regulators allow unsafe ingredients—the media deflects from substantive debates.
Senator Elizabeth Warren declared this week: “RFK Jr. poses a danger to public health, scientific research, medicine, and health care coverage for millions. He wants to stop parents from protecting their babies from measles and his ideas would welcome the return of polio.” Yet this alarmist framing dodges the simple question Kennedy actually raises: Why wouldn’t you want proper safety testing for chemicals we’re expected to inject into our children’s bodies? The silence in response to this basic inquiry speaks volumes about institutional priorities—and their fear of someone with the power to demand answers.
A Referendum on Manufacturing Consent
Say what you want about Trump, but his “fake news” remarks struck a chord that resonates deeper with each passing day. People who once scoffed at these claims are now watching with eyes wide open as coordinated narratives unfold across media platforms. The gaslighting has become too obvious to ignore. As I explored in We Didn’t Change, The Democratic Party Did, this awakening transcends traditional political boundaries. Americans across the spectrum are tired of being told not to believe their own eyes, whether it’s about pandemic policies, economic realities, or the suppression of dissenting voices.
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
It was their final, most essential command.”
–George Orwell, 1984
The Moment of Truth
With Kennedy potentially overseeing America’s health infrastructure, media institutions face a crucial inflection point. Fear campaigns and ad hominem attacks won’t suffice when his policy positions require serious examination. The machinery of coordinated dismissal—visible in identical talking points across networks—reveals more about institutional allegiance than journalistic integrity.
This moment demands something different. When Kennedy raises questions about pharmaceutical safety testing or environmental toxins—issues that resonate with families across political lines—substantive debate must replace reflexive ridicule. His actual positions, heard directly rather than through media filters, often align with common-sense concerns about corporate influence on public health policy.
This institutional pattern of manufactured authority connects directly to themes I explored in Fiat Everything earlier this week—systems built on decree rather than demonstrated value. They don’t sell weapons—they sell fear. The same forces that control monetary policy now seek to dictate public health discourse.
Breaking the Machine
The solution won’t come from institutional gatekeepers (that’s what got us here) but direct examination. We all need to:
- Listen to Kennedy’s complete speeches rather than edited soundbites
- Read his policy positions rather than media characterizations
- Examine the evidence he cites rather than fact-checker summaries
- Consider why certain questions about public health policy are deemed off-limits
I’m not suggesting we accept every contrarian position, but rather that institutional credibility must be earned through rigorous analysis rather than assumed through authority. Until then, coverage like these recent Times pieces will continue to exemplify the very institutional failures that fuel the movements they seek to discredit. As Kennedy approaches real institutional power, expect these attacks to intensify—a clear signal of just how much the guardians of our manufactured consensus have to lose.
Israel’s collateral killing of civilians is finally in the spotlight
The New York Times’ recent “bombshell” presents facts that have been known for a long time – and does its best to sanitize them
By Robert Inlakesh | RT | December 30, 2024
The New York Times recently published a piece admitting that an unprecedented amount of “collateral damage” was permitted by the Israeli military. However, it omits key statistics that were previously revealed in order to sanitize the revelations it claims to be uncovering.
Presented as a bombshell piece, the December 26 article reveals that Israel had sent through an order that permitted killing up to 20 civilians for each low-level Hamas target. “The order, which has not previously been reported, had no precedent in Israeli military history,” the article reads.
However, in early April of 2024, an Israeli media outlet called +972 Magazine had not only published this fact, citing sources within Israel’s military, but uncovered much more damning figures detailing what was to be considered “acceptable” collateral damage.
The +972 article revealed that the Israeli airstrike that killed Hamas’ Shujaiya Battalion Commander, Wisam Farhat, was authorized to kill 100 civilians. Even more shocking was the infamous case of Ayman Nofal, the commander of Hamas’ Central Gaza Brigade, where, according to the sources, “the army authorized the killing of approximately 300 civilians.”
The +972 report was mentioned in passing by The New York Times, with the caveat that Israel’s military had denied it. However, +972 Mag’s investigative work on this topic did not begin in April. In fact, a piece published in November of 2023 cited a source who claimed the following:
“The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage.”
So, while a big deal is made of the fact that such high numbers of collateral damage have “no precedent in Israeli military history,” the IDF has been knowingly writing off civilians as collateral damage for years. One need only look at literally any UN report on Israel’s past military conduct to see it.
It isn’t only in Gaza that such horrendous “collateral damage” has been normalized, it has also been the case in Lebanon. When Israel carried out the assassination of Hezbollah’s Secretary General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, it openly announced that it estimated the total death toll to be around 300, as a result of leveling a number of civilian buildings in southern Beirut.
There is literally nothing in the article published by The New York Times that is new; all it does is affirm what has already been reported, yet it is done in a way that works to water the killings down by omitting key facts and repeating old tropes.
For example, it repeats as proven fact the widespread allegation that Hamas purposely embeds itself amongst civilians to use them as human shields, a point that has been found at least questionable before.
What is undeniable however, is that Israel uses Palestinians as human shields, as has been copiously documented throughout the war and used to be an accepted part of Israel’s military doctrine.
“From November 2023 onward, amid a global outcry, Israel began to conserve ammunition and tighten some of its rules of engagement, including by halving the number of civilians who could be endangered when striking low-ranked militants who posed no imminent threat” states the NYT. The question here is, where did this information come from? According to the article itself, the sources are all Israeli soldiers and officials.
The only evidence presented is the words of the Israelis. Was there any analysis done or examples cited to prove that the IDF would only kill ten civilians on average for every low-ranking Hamas fighter? Absolutely not, because not even Israel can present this information to the public, nor the names of the thousands of supposed “Hamas fighters” it has targeted.
If we go by Israel’s official figures for the number of alleged Hamas militants killed, they rise at such a rate that it doesn’t match the death toll figures accepted by the United Nations. While the official death toll in Gaza is nearly 46,000, with 10,000 missing and presumed dead, the only way Israeli “Hamas fighter” figures make sense is if the toll is much higher. However, accepting a higher death toll in order to give Israel’s claims about Hamas fighters more legitimacy would mean that The New York Times would face another issue: they would then have to wrestle with the fact that the killing only escalated in November of 2023.
In addition to this all, the +972 article from April 3 provides a much more in-depth insight into the artificial intelligence systems used by the Israeli army and points out that the targets it generated were highly inaccurate. The investigation discovered that when the Lavender system chose junior Hamas targets, the Israeli army would actually use its more lethal unguided munitions, because “you don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people.”
Furthermore, +972 noted that while a human has to verify targets chosen by the AI before a strike is ordered, eventually this boiled down to simply making sure the target is male – spending about 20 seconds on average before pulling the trigger.
Nowhere in the New York Times article is there any mention of the slaughter of civilians where no military target is located, there is no mention of the mass torture, sexual abuse, or demolition of homes for the pure vanity of soldiers. Everything is framed as a military that went a little overboard after the Hamas-led October 7 attack.
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’.
Germany whining it’s defenseless against ‘Oreshnik’ after initially mocking it
By Drago Bosnic | December 30, 2024
After the Russian military’s Strategic Missile Forces (RVSN) used the latest “Oreshnik” missile in Dnepropetrovsk on November 21, the world was left shocked, with news ranging from “end of the world” scaremongering to ridicule. Some major German media outlets resorted to the latter, with Julian Roepcke (better known as Jihadi Julian), one of the more prominent “military experts” at the Bild, a German tabloid, saying that the missile “likely carried no explosive charge and did not cause any significant damage”. Roepcke’s report, published on November 23, says that the launch was “a propaganda and political action rather than a military one”, as there was “neither a nuclear charge nor explosives inside”. The German author insists “that’s the reason the damage was so insignificant”. As many analysts have already suggested (myself included, both last year and in April), Roepcke also believes that the missile is most likely based on the RS-26 “Rubezh” (although this is yet to be confirmed). However, he erroneously thought that “the ‘Oreshnik’ didn’t contain explosives or a warhead and would have been equipped with a substitute of the same size and weight to simulate the appearance of a nuclear warhead”. While this is true for regular missile tests, the launch of the “Oreshnik” was anything but. Namely, the RVSN used 36 advanced kinetic penetrators to strike heavily fortified targets, including those deep underground. Thus, it’s quite clear that Roepcke’s virtually immediate disregard of the “Oreshnik’s” capabilities was a careless miscalculation, to say the least.
President Vladimir Putin himself stated that the missile is effectively unstoppable, but this too was met with disregard and even ridicule. For some inexplicable reason, neither the mainstream propaganda machine nor its bosses in the political West’s leadership seem to be able to learn from their mistakes. Namely, when President Putin says something, it should be taken very seriously. For instance, back in 2004, just two years after the United States announced its unilateral withdrawal from the ABM (anti-ballistic missile) Treaty, he publicly promised that Russia would resume the development of hypersonic weapons started during the (First) Cold War. However, nobody listened, as NATO was convinced that the Eurasian giant was “finished” (nothing could be further from true).
Just two years after that speech, Moscow inducted the “Iskander-M” missile system, along with its 9M723 hypersonic missile. Since then, the Russian military acquired at least a dozen types of such weapons, resulting in an advantage measured in decades. Back in 2019, I argued that the Kremlin was at least 20 years ahead of its NATO adversaries, including the US. This turned out to be not only true, but it can even be argued that the “Oreshnik” ensured this advantage grows further. Now, much unlike Roepcke, it seems that the German military understands just how outclassed it is, especially by such weapons. Namely, Roepcke’s own newspaper, the Bild, disagrees with his previously mentioned report about the “Oreshnik”. First, the outlet lamented that Russia deployed the missile in Belarus.
According to the report, a recently leaked internal document showed that the Federal Foreign Office (AA) warned that “Germany is not adequately protected against this deadly danger”. Interestingly, the document also posits that “the current protection provided by ‘Patriot’ systems is not sufficient” and that “the federal government now wants to close the gap”. The report also points out that interception rates are atrocious and that the extremely overhyped US-made ABM/SAM (surface-to-air missile) system would “base their performance on sheer luck” when it comes to intercepting Russian missiles (particularly something like the “Oreshnik”). The Bild also added that Berlin would purchase the Israeli “Arrow” ABM system to “help strengthen Germany’s defense against new types of missiles”.
It’s quite interesting that the Germans openly said that the “Patriot” cannot effectively intercept hypersonic weapons. Namely, for nearly three years, the Neo-Nazi junta has been saying its forces regularly “shoot down” Russian hypersonic missiles. I’ve argued numerous times that such claims are virtually guaranteed to be nothing more than war propaganda. Simply put, the numbers behind all this just don’t add up. This fact is supported by other globally renowned experts, including senior military officers. Namely, retired Group Captain Uttam Kumar Devnath from the Indian Air Force recently stated that “Russia’s ‘Oreshnik’ missile system is beyond the interception capabilities of Western defense systems like the ‘Patriot’ and THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense)”.
“The ‘Oreshnik’, described as a hypersonic, intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), is claimed to travel at speeds that exceed Mach 10, making it, according to Devnath, ‘too fast for radar targeting’. This speed, coupled with its maneuverability, purportedly renders it impervious to interception by current Western missile defense technologies,” the Indian Defence Research Wing reported, quoting Group Captain Devnath and adding: “The ‘Oreshnik’s’ velocity and ability to alter its trajectory are cited as key reasons why systems like the ‘Patriot’, designed to counter ballistic threats, would fail to engage it effectively. Devnath highlighted the missile’s design, suggesting it leverages stealth technologies and hypersonic flight principles to evade detection and interception.”
President Putin has already publicly called on NATO to pick any target, deploy its much-touted SAM/ABM systems to defend it and promised that the Russian military would neutralize it either way. Such confidence serves as a testament to Moscow’s unrivaled hypersonic capabilities. Obviously, the political West would never accept such a proposal, which speaks volumes about the veracity of the claims that NATO-sourced missile defenses are supposedly “shooting down” Russian hypersonic weapons left and right. It should also be noted that the usually quoted speed of Mach 10 for the “Oreshnik” is quite misleading, as the missile it was based on, namely the RS-26 “Rubezh”, can actually fly at speeds of anywhere between Mach 20 and Mach 25 (7-8,5 km/s or 25,000-30,000 km/h).
The “Oreshnik” is not only a major asset for Russia, but also for the whole multipolar world, as it offers a massive advantage in non-nuclear strategic deterrence. Although surely nuclear-capable, the “Oreshnik” is armed with a conventional MIRV/MaRV/HGV payload composed of 36 advanced kinetic penetrators (six in each of the six warheads). Coupled with its speed and maneuverability, this makes it the most powerful conventional weapon ever devised. This combination is what makes hypersonic weapons effectively impossible to track and intercept. Namely, unlike traditional ballistic missiles which fly at a predictable path, hypersonic weapons maneuver, making the interception based on the calculations of ballistic computers completely useless and void.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Deborah Birx’s Bird Flu Fearmongering Campaign
By Daniel McAdams | Peace and Prosperity Blog | December 29, 2024
In June, I wrote about Deborah Birx, one of the key “public health” officials from the orchestration of the American coronavirus scare, being back in action stirring up fear of another disease. This time Birx’s fearmongering was about bird flu. And she was advocating for government to follow a similar disastrous course to supposedly counter this disease as had been pursued in regard to coronavirus in the crackdown begun years back.
Here is an update.
Birx is continuing on her quest to stir up a new bird flu scare in America, and to build public support for a government response harmful to health and liberty. A recent stop on Birx’s bird flu fearmongering campaign was a Friday interview at CNN in which she warned that, like coronavirus early on, bird flu is not being addressed sufficiently by the United States government. Now, she said, routine weekly testing of people who may have been exposed to bird flu needs to be undertaken.
This testing which Birx suggested mirrors testing that was pursued to build up fear of coronavirus through jacking up the number of coronavirus cases via testing that shot out many false positive results. Indeed, Birx stated in the interview that with bird flu much increased testing is needed because “we know from covid most of the spread was asymptomatic.” Got that? The testing is purposed to identify people as sick despite the fact that they are not sick.
Birx has her pandemic propaganda process down pat.
In her CNN interview pitch, Birx tried to butter up her potential victims, declaring “I find the American public to be incredibly smart.” Hopefully, most Americans will prove too smart to fall for Birx’s new fearmongering campaign and the attacks on health and liberty it supports.
Fabricated: Video showing release of women from Sednaya jail in Syria
Press TV – December 28, 2024
A new investigation has revealed that a viral video showing women and children allegedly being released from Syria’s Sednaya prison after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad was fabricated.
In a post on X on Saturday, the Syrian fact-checking group Verify-Sy said the circulated footage, videos, and images documenting the moment women and girls were allegedly released were filmed at the “Dafa” organization, a children’s charity located in the Kafr Sousa neighborhood south of Damascus, and not Sednaya jail.
Verify-Sy went on to say that its extensive probe revealed that the claim is false, adding that the viral video conceals various details, including a suspected case of theft and vandalism, which need to be investigated by the relevant authorities.
The video footage circulating on social media platforms such as Facebook, X, and TikTok, along with several Arabic and international media outlets, such as Syria TV and Al Arabiya, showed a man ordering a group of girls and women to return to their homes, while a woman says, “These girls are in my charge,” which raises doubts about the real location.
Meanwhile, Fidaa Daqouri, Chairwoman of the Dafa Organization has clarified to Verify-Sy that on the night of the Assad government’s fall, the organization was attacked by a group of armed civilians, who identified themselves as “rebels.”
She also said the attackers stole buses belonging to the organization, as well as batteries, and forced everyone present to leave the building, adding that they also raided a juvenile detention center on the same street and some nearby institutes.
Daqouri also called on Syria’s de facto new ruler to investigate the incident and hold those who attacked the center accountable, while denouncing as “unacceptable” the misleading spread of this video by media outlets, falsely identifying the location as Sednaya prison.
In order to verify the videos, images, and stories, the Verify-Sy team contacted Diab Sarya, co-founder and director of the Sednaya Prison Detainees Association. He confirmed that Sednaya is “a military prison designated for holding men only.”
He said all circulated stories about secret prisons, hidden floors, or coded doors are fabricated and have no basis in reality.
Militants, led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), took control of Damascus on December 8 and declared an end to Assad’s rule in a surprise offensive that was launched from their stronghold in northwestern Syria, reaching the capital in less than two weeks.
Since then, a wave of propaganda surrounding the prisoners in Sednaya Prison has proliferated across the internet.
CNN Loses Chunks of Viewership as Ratings Dive Into Death Spiral
By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 26.12.2024
CNN, just like a bunch of other liberal news networks, has been hemorrhaging viewership at lightning speed since Donald Trump’s electoral victory in November.
The Cable News Network (CNN) has seen overall prime-time viewership plummet by 45% scooping up only 394,000 total viewers since November 5, according to Nielsen Media Research. When it comes to the prime 25-to-54 age demographic, CNN suffered a 52% decline, with just an average audience of 77,000 having tuned in after Trump’s win.
Overall, CNN witnessed its worst-ever performance among viewers in this key demographic. Audiences feel that CNN “didn’t meet the mark” when covering Trump during the campaign, The Washington Post cited one journalist as saying.
Trump’s campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt had repeatedly criticized the “hostile environment” the network offered to the Republican contender.
CNN is also reportedly heading for major layoffs as part of an overhaul by its corporate parent Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD), which is up to its eyeballs in debt after its Warner Brothers and Discovery merger deal in 2022.
By the end of the third quarter of 2023, WBD’s gross debt stood at $45.3 billion, according to Forbes. MSNBC’s ratings have also collapsed post-election, with the audience down 46% compared with the first 10 months of 2024, according to Nielsen.
They must have their Srebrenica in Syria…
By Stephen Karganovic | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 25, 2024
Following the abrupt and mysterious change of circumstances in Syria, the collective West propaganda machinery went into overdrive to pillory the previous government for a variety of heinous offences, real and imagined. The largely invented horror stories publicised after 8 December are shaped by an unmistakably political agenda. They serve as a cynical alibi for the utter devastation wrought upon Syria by terrorist, head-chopping gangs trained, financed, and unleashed by the very regional and ultramarine powers which are engaged in the spreading of those falsehoods.
Attentive readers will recall numerous false flags and horror porn mantras about “Assad killing his own people” that resonated throughout the decade and a half long assault on Syria. Most were quickly discredited as nasty fabrications. But, of course, the purpose of propaganda is not to demonstrate facts but to influence perceptions and create indelible subliminal impressions. In this infamous category, the alleged Ghouta chemical weapon attack on Syrian civilians, falsely attributed to the Assad government and subsequently debunked, is a salient example. The fabricated incident was thoroughly investigated and ultimately found to be devoid of substance, but attesting to the power of professionally conducted disinformation even many years after discreditation Ghouta remains a vibrant propaganda meme firmly embedded in the public mind as an atrocity typifying the malevolence of the “Assad regime.”
No sooner did the rebranded Al Qaeda terrorists march into Damascus than, as if on cue, on 9 December the collective West media initiated an aggressive attempt to shift public attention away from the victorious radical thugs and their sordid past. Saydnaya Prison, previously (if we disregard a 2017 Amnesty International mention) a virtually unknown venue now unveiled as the “Assad regime slaughterhouse,” suddenly was thrust into the limelight in a sensationalistic narrative that was absurd on its face. It was alleged by the BBC, a known source of trustworthy information, that Saydnaya was a horrific dungeon consisting of multiple underground levels, each independently secured by electronic doors. Within this prison complex, it was further alleged, “more than 100,000 detainees who can be seen on CCTV monitors” were trapped and dying without food or water and choking from lack of ventilation, abandoned by sadistic Assad guards who, when fleeing the premises, malevolently absconded with the codes required to open the electronic door systems.
Left unexplained is how over the years the logistical operation necessary to sustain a prison facility the size of a moderate sized town escaped the notice of aerial surveillance platforms that were observing every inch of Syrian territory for the duration of the conflict. How was it possible after regime change to analyse CCTV monitor data in just a single day in order to reach the conclusion that “over 100,000 prisoners” were trapped inside? And if those CCTV data had indeed been sifted through why have they not been shown to the international public to corroborate beyond doubt the emerging human tragedy of such mind-boggling proportions? Are the electronic portals to the underground cell complexes so impregnable that they may be opened only by the use of the unavailable codes in the guards’ possession, or might there be other means of forcing them and liberating the endangered prisoners?
The latest news on this topic is that “Syria rebels [are] unable to open Assad’s Sednaya ‘Red Cells’ where prisoners are ‘choking to death’.” The problem is that this news item is dated 9 December, but now it is over two weeks later. Since 9 December there has been no follow-up, no updates on how successful the rescuers may have been in opening the electronic doors and gaining access to those trapped inside. In fact, the distressing Saydnaya story has since been obliterated completely from the Western media news radar screen, as abruptly as it appeared. Now that the shocking and unsubstantiated allegations have had their psychological effect on the public mind a complete blackout prevails.
But what has propaganda got to do with logic and coherence?
However after the sensational allegations that have been made, what actually did or did not happen in Saydnaya is important and must be ascertained lest the international public be played for fools. It may reasonably be assumed that after more than two weeks without food, water, or ventilation, by now the vast majority of the wretched prisoners, extravagantly claimed to number over 100,000, should be dead. The stench of their decomposing bodies should be unbearable in a wide radius around the prison complex, perhaps reaching even as far as liberated Damascus, which is 30 kilometres away. It makes no sense to suddenly impose silence over a potential atrocity of such an appalling nature and magnitude which in the eyes of the entire world would irrefutably convict the “Assad regime,” whilst exonerating the collective West from complicity in the crimes of its proxies and in Syria’s callous destruction.
It is now becoming increasingly clear that the Saydnaya affair was conceived as but an overture for a larger propaganda operation that is to follow, to fabricate a Syrian Srebrenica. Besides lending credence to the long list of false flag allegations and outright lies upon which the collective West’s intervention in Syria was based, now crowned with the apparent victory of the terrorists they sponsored, the impending Syrian Srebrenica operation is designed also to diminish Russia’s stature for supposedly sheltering a “perpetrator of genocide.”
As has been reported, the propaganda props, one by one, are meticulously being put in place. Photographs of vast empty spaces are being represented as “killing fields” where allegedly hundreds of thousands of Assad’s victims lie buried. Individuals claiming to have taken part in the mass burials are brought forth to embellish the photographic images with well-rehearsed spin.
We have yet to see however a single disinterred body, not to speak of being shown reliable evidence regarding the time, cause, and manner of death. And even the scant information that is provided is conditioned by weasel words that hundreds of thousands of bodies of Assad regime victims “could be buried in a mass grave east of Damascus.” They could be, but then also perhaps not. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, of which at present there is none. Bare assertions are insufficient.
A dependable indication of how the problem of missing bodies will be solved, and that the fix is already in, is the casual announcement that the task of investigating Syria’s “killing fields” will be entrusted to the notorious White Helmets. They are a fake civil defence outfit set up by British intelligence early in the conflict to pose as a humanitarian organisation. There is an exact parallel between the announced plan and the way that, in the 1990s and early 2000s, Srebrenica forensic issues were handled in order to provide the Hague Tribunal with fake evidence of “genocide.” The International Commission on Missing Persons [ICMP] which did the job then was founded specifically for that purpose in 1996 under the tight control of leading NATO powers, and with the proviso that the chairman of ICMP must always be a U.S. citizen nominated by the State Department. ICMP performed the tasks assigned to it with flying colours, having fabricated in its laboratories much of the Srebrenica “genocide” evidence for the use of the Hague Tribunal.
The White Helmets, founded by MI6 operative James Le Mesurier, will undoubtedly acquit themselves equally well in performing a similarly dishonourable task.
How To Fake An Alien Invasion (2015)
Corbett | December 23, 2024
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FROM 2015: We all know about the crude pie-plate-on-string UFO hoaxes that have been perpetrated in the past. But what if I were to tell you the greatest UFO hoax of all time is being prepared right now, and it has Rockefeller backing and UN/Vatican/presidential support? Join us this week as we peek under the bluebeam curtain at the great alien invasion false flag.
Original Post: Episode 301 – How to Fake an Alien Invasion
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
JAMES CORBETT: Welcome back to The Corbett Report, ladies and gentlemen. I’m your host, James Corbett of corbettreport.com, podcasting to you as always from the sunny climes of western Japan, here on this 5th day of February 2015.
Welcome to Episode 301 of The Corbett Report: How to Fake an Alien Invasion.
Now, you’d better be careful who’s watching over your shoulder today, because we are about to broach one of the most top-secret, ultra-classified pieces of information in the entire conspiracy pantheon. A subject so sensitive that its mere exposure threatens to topple the power pyramid itself and, as a result, is never talked about in the establishment mouthpiece media. I’m referring of course to the topic of . . . [whisper] aliens.
Just what was in the skies over Jerusalem, and why did it stop over one of the most treasured sites in Christianity?
SOURCE: Female Anchor Scared Of UFO Sighting Over Jerusalem’s Dome Of The Rock
We bring you this special radio television broadcast in order to give you the very latest information on an amazing phenomenon: the arrival of a spaceship in Washington. The army has taken every precaution to meet any emergency which may develop. Just a minute, ladies and gentlemen, I think something is happening . . .
What’s hovering over Salt Lake City? Is it a rocket? A blimp? A UFO?
SOURCE: A Giant UFO Over Salt Lake City
PRESENTER: Former government UFO expert is warning that Britain is wide open to alien visitors and that the consequences of not monitoring extraterrestrials could be huge. Nick Pope, who resigned from the Ministry of Defense UFO Project, says the department looking into UFOs has all but closed down and despite a higher number of credible sightings. Let’s speak to Nick Pope. He joins us in the studio. . . .
SOURCE: BBC Warns of Alien Invasion
PRESENTER: . . . you want to meet this guy. Joining us now are team leader James Fox, one of the nation’s top UFO experts, and Erin Ryder, who is in charge of tech and recon for this series. Good morning to both of you.
JAMES FOX/ERIN RYDER: Good morning.
FEMALE REPORTER: This is a ufologist? Is that what the actual . . .?
JAMES FOX: So they say.
SOURCE: CBS: UFOs Mounting Preponderance of Evidence & Government Cover Up!
“AWA 517, do you want to report a UFO? Over.”
“Negative. We don’t want a report.”
“Aries 31, do you wish to report a UFO? Over.”
“Negative. We don’t want to report one of those, either.”
“Aries 31, do you wish to file a report of any kind? Over.”
“I wouldn’t know what kind of report to file.”
“Aries 31, me neither. I’ll try to track traffic at destination. Over.”
SOURCE: (Close Encounters) Indianapolis Air Traffic Control detects the UFOs
ADRIENNE MOORE: While the family knows their story sounds out of this world, they are convinced they witnessed a close encounter and will be keeping a watchful eye on the sky.
STACEY GIBSON: I think we’re definitely believers now.
SOURCE: UFO near San Diego — El Cajon, California — CBS News
Sorry, my mistake, my mistake. No, this is clearly a subject that is propounded time and again ad nauseam in the establishment mouthpiece media—that same media that we know is lying to us about most major world events, either through direct lying or lying by omission.
So, why are they not omitting this little idea from the cultural context? Why are they constantly returning to the idea of “alien presence,” “alien cover-up,” “alien invasion,” “alien threat”?
Why is this propounded so often, not just in the news media but also in those cultural entertainment productions that I hope we understand are, in the end, a product of the culture-creation industry that has been predictably programming us for decades—generations, perhaps—to accept various memes and ideas, including this idea of “alien invasion,” “alien threat” and the fallout and consequences thereof?
It is a theme that has been returned to time and time and time and time and time again for the better part of the century by this point. It’s almost as if the billionaire power players at the top of this pyramid are actually connected to an idea to implant this idea of alien invasion in the public consciousness for the purpose of manipulating public opinion. And that’s because . . . they are connected to such an agenda, demonstrably so.
RADIO NEWSCASTER (archival): Ladies and gentlemen, here is the latest bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News, Toronto, Canada: Professor Morris of Macmillan University reports observing a total of three explosions on the planet Mars between the hours of 7:45 PM and 9:20 PM Eastern Standard Time. This confirms earlier reports received from American observatories. Now, nearer home, comes a special bulletin from Trenton, New Jersey. It is reported that at 8:50 PM a huge flaming object, believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in the neighborhood of Grovers Mill, New Jersey, twenty-two miles from Trenton. The flash in the sky was visible within a radius of several hundred miles, and the noise of the impact was heard as far north as Elizabeth.
NARRATOR: Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. Never before had a radio broadcast provoked such outrage—or such chaos. Upwards of a million people convinced, if only briefly, that the United States was being laid waste by alien invaders, and a nation left to wonder how they possibly could’ve been so gullible.
By a quarter past eight Eastern time, telephones were ringing madly all across the country, as concerned Americans tried to determine the whereabouts of relatives, warn friends and acquaintances, and most of all, corroborate what they were hearing.
MAN ON THE PHONE (archival): City Desk. A what?? Wait a minute.
NARRATOR: For the next several hours, newspapers, radio stations and police precincts from coast to coast would be swamped with calls.
MAN ON THE PHONE (archival): Well, I can’t help that, ma’am, we just don’t know anything about it. Did I say something about a quiet Sunday evening?
SECOND MAN (archival): What’s going on, anyway?
NARRATOR: Soon, strange bulletins began coming in over the press service wires. In Bergenfield, New Jersey, just north of Grovers Mill, some twenty families turned up at a police station, with all of their household possessions piled into their cars. In Indianapolis, a woman rushed to the pulpit in a Methodist church, shouting that the end of the world had come. And in Washington state, a spectacularly ill-timed power failure plunged the small town of Concrete into darkness and sent terrified residents fleeing into the mountains.
RADIO NEWSCASTER (archival): The battle which took place tonight at Grover Mills has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by an army in modern times: 7,000 men armed with rifles and machine guns pitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders from Mars. One hundred and twenty known survivors . . .
SEYMOUR CHARLES HAYDEN (archival): Well, my wife, she came in, my wife did, just wringing her hands and wailing away, her eyeballs about to pop out onto her lap, going, “What is it? What is it? What could it be? Is it the Germans?” Well, she hadn’t heard the word “Martians,” but I had.
RADIO NEWSCASTER (archival): . . . There’s a brief statement informing us that the charred body of Carl Phillips has been identified in a Trenton hospital.
DAVID ROEPIK (archival): We think that we’re really smart, but if there’s a cue out there that could possibly be dangerous, we’re going to react to it protectively, autonomically, instinctively—fear first, and reason and fact second.
SOURCE: War of the Worlds: The Panic Broadcast | PBS America
Now, I’m sure that the majority of the listening and viewing audience will be familiar with the story of Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 radio dramatization of the famous H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds and the resulting hysteria and panic that ensued, driving people insane, believing there to be a real alien invasion taking place, and farmers running out into the fields shooting at grain silos and the like. That story is a fascinating one for a number of reasons—namely, because it is a confluence of different events in world history at that time that had a very interesting and profound effect on shaping an entire field of study.
This relates to the advent of mass communication technologies like the radio, which was still, to some extent, in its infancy as a broadcast medium at that time, capable of reaching across a nation as wide and diverse as America and reaching many millions of people at the same time and inducing this kind of mass panic and psychosis.
It is interesting to study in that regard. So, it is not surprising that it was immediately made the subject of such a study, funded by—who else? The Rockefellers. We can take more on this from a very, very important article that was published on GlobalResearch.ca back in 2012: Early ‘Psychological Warfare’ Research and the Rockefeller Foundation by Prof. James Tracy.
Reading from that article:
The “founding fathers” of mass communication research could not have established their field without Rockefeller largesse. Alongside World War One propagandist and University of Chicago political scientist Harold Lasswell, psychologist Hadley Cantril was a principal contributor to the knowledge and information that helped propel Rockefeller-controlled enterprises and American empire in the postwar era. Throughout this period Cantril provided the Rockefeller combine with important information and new techniques in public opinion measurement and management in Europe, Latin American, and the United States.
A roommate of Nelson Rockefeller’s at Dartmouth College in the late 1920s, Cantril took a doctorate in psychology at Harvard, coauthoring The Psychology of Radio with his doctoral mentor Gordon Allport in 1935. “Radio is an altogether novel medium of communication,” Cantril and Allport observed, “preeminent as a means of social control and epochal in its influence upon the mental horizons of men.”
The work garnered the attention of Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Division officer John Marshall, commissioned by the Foundation with convincing commercial broadcasters to include more educational programming into their advertiser-driven schedules. To this end Rockefeller was funding fellowships at the CBS and NBC broadcasting networks.
Aware of the Dartmouth connection, Marshall encouraged the enterprising Cantril to apply to the Foundation for support. Cantril’s request resulted in a $67,000 grant for a two-year charter of the “Princeton Radio Project” (PRP) at Princeton University. There Cantril proceeded to develop studies assessing radio’s effects on audiences. In 1938 Cantril also became a founding editor of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Public Opinion Quarterly, an organ closely associated with US government’s psychological warfare endeavors following World War Two.
When the Princeton venture commenced, another trained psychologist close to Rockefeller, CBS Director of Research Frank Stanton, was named PRP lead researcher but took a secondary role of Associate Director due to his position at his broadcast network. At this time Austrian émigré social scientist Paul Lazarsfeld was recruited to join Cantril. Thus Cantril, Stanton, and Lazarsfeld were closely affiliated and ideally positioned to embark on a major study involving public opinion and persuasion.
The opportunity for such an analysis presented itself when CBS broadcast Orson Welles’ rendering of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938. Lazarsfeld saw the event as especially noteworthy and immediately asked Stanton for CBS funds to investigate reaction to what at the time was the largest immediate act of mass persuasion in human history. Over the next several months interviews with War of the Worlds listeners were collected, provided to Stanton at CBS, and subsequently analyzed in Cantril’s 1940 study, The Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic.
SOURCE: Early ‘Psychological Warfare’ Research and the Rockefeller Foundation
A fascinating little tidbit from history, I trust that you’ll agree. And if you do, I hope you’ll go and follow the link in the show notes to that original article so you can continue reading about Hadley Cantril’s adventures providing studies and information about psychological persuasion to the Rockefeller Foundation and how that developed and contributed to world psychological warfare techniques for the US Army and things of that nature.
I think it is interesting to see this confluence of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds becoming a radio dramatization, which incites this mass panic, the largest immediate act of mass persuasion in human history, which is then studied by the Princeton Radio Project backed up by the Rockefeller Foundation.
But you could argue that that’s a tangential connection or just a coincidental connection—that this doesn’t mean that the Rockefellers are interested in mass persuasion in terms of alien invasion per se, it’s just that that was the immediate proximate cause of this particular study.
So, you might fruitfully ask, “Are there any other connections between the Rockefellers and this idea of faking an alien invasion or an alien presence of some sort?” And the answer is: yes! Yes, there is such evidence . . .
RESEARCHER ANTONIO HUNEEUS: Mr. Rockefeller backed many UFO-related projects in the period between the late ’80s and 2000. But, for the purposes of this hearing, we will concentrate on his political initiatives in these areas.
Laurance Rockefeller’s first forays into ufology started sometime in the late ’80s through Dr. Cecil B. Scott Jones, a parapsychologist and former US Navy Commander who had worked as naval attaché́ in Asia and at the Naval Scientific and Technical Intelligence Center. Between 1985 and 1991, Jones was Special Assistant to Sen. Claiborne Pell (1918–2009), the powerful Rhode Island Democrat Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1987–1994) who was deeply interested in parapsychology and who probably many of you met personally. Sen. Pell was also friends with Laurance Rockefeller, and both served on the board of the Human Potential Foundation, a small think tank launched in 1989 in Vienna, Virginia, by Jones to conduct “research into all conditions of humankind: physiological, psychological and spiritual.”
Many of the papers released by the White House OSTP [Office of Science and Technology Policy] come from Scott Jones, who knew Dr. John Gibbons, a physicist who worked for many years as Director of the Office of Technology Assessment for the US Congress and was appointed in 1993 by the Clinton administration to direct the OSTP.
What was the exact turning point of Laurance Rockefeller’s evolution from a general interest in consciousness studies into the specific area of UFOs and Extraterrestrial Intelligence is still unclear. But the end of the Cold War and the arrival in Washington of a younger generation represented by Bill and Hillary Clinton are key factors. He felt the time was ripe for a new and fresh approach into an area that had been previously dominated by a Cold War mentality.
Rockefeller recruited for these efforts a long-time associate, Henry L. Diamond, an environmental attorney from Washington, D.C., whose links to the family went all the way back to the 1960s, when he worked with Laurance in his conservation activities. Diamond also knew John Gibbons, and so he was the right person to make the first contact with the OSTP chief when he sent a Memorandum on March 29, 1993, requesting a meeting. I’m quoting now the first paragraph:
“Laurance S. Rockefeller, who is a leading US conservationist, businessman, and philanthropist, is anxious to have a brief meeting with Dr. Gibbons to discuss the potential availability of government information about unidentified flying objects and extraterrestrial life. As one who has had a long-time interest in environmental and spiritual issues, Mr. Rockefeller, with other leading citizens, is planning to make an approach to President Clinton on this subject . . . .”
STEPHEN BASSETT: I invite all of the political media, all media in general but certainly the political media, to look at the Rockefeller Initiative. It is one of the stories in American history—it’s one of the great political stories, certainly in this or any other time. It is filled with amazing people who are still around and still very powerful.
At the time that Rockefeller approached, through his attorney, President Clinton, Clinton’s key adviser—or one of his very key advisors—was John Podesta. The Chief of Staff at the time was Leon Panetta. The wife of the President at the time was Hillary Clinton. A good friend of the family at the time, soon to be Clinton’s Secretary of Energy, was Bill Richardson. This Initiative went on for six years. The press completely ignored it, as if “What’s the news there? It’s just a billionaire Rockefeller trying to get the President to release all the files on these phenomena. Possibly put a letter into every newspaper in the country, and release . . . and basically end the Truth Embargo. There’s no news there.”
SOURCE: Citizens Hearing April 29th Steven Bassett Rockefeller Initiative and John Podesta or Annotated Proceedings of the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure [PDF])
Now, for those of you not immersed in the topic of the Disclosure Movement, you may not be familiar with some of these names and faces. But some of the main ones to take note of are Dr. Stephen Bassett, who founded and ran something called the Paradigm Research Group at ParadigmResearchGroup.org. He defines himself as a political activist, lobbyist, commentator, the executive director of Paradigm Research Group and the Extra-Terrestrial Phenomena Politicalist Action Committee, and executive producer of the X Conference: The Citizens Hearing on Disclosure and the Congressional Hearing Initiative, and Dr. Steven Greer, who runs something called the Disclosure Project. He describes himself as “The Father of the Disclosure Movement” and the person who presided over the groundbreaking National Press Club Disclosure Event in May of 2001.
So, these are some of the biggest names if not the biggest names in this Disclosure Movement. And, well, they don’t really make a secret of the fact that the Rockefellers are . . . well, specifically Laurance Rockefeller was a big help in getting this movement launched back in the mid-1990s. We can document this. In order to do so, let’s turn to a very important website, which I will commend to your attention. I hope you guys out there have . . . well, I know some of you have already found it and have emailed me about it.
I have found it myself, and it seems that the author of this website and I are in accord on a number of our political views—especially the overall way in which the BRICS—China and Russia—and other aspects of the New World Order system are being used as the good cop in a good cop/bad cop system.
Also on this subject of the UFO Disclosure Movement, [there is] a very important article called “Why are the Rockefellers and the Jesuits guiding the UFO disclosure movement?” at RedefiningGod.com. I will put the link in the show notes so you can go and follow it.
Reading from that article:
The Rockefeller role in getting the Disclosure ball rolling is something of an open secret among the Disclosure people (the Disclosuristas, as I call them). On Stephen Bassett’s own Research Group website, a specific Rockefeller effort referred to as the “Rockefeller Initiative” is openly touted. The same effort is also touted on Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project website as “Project Starlight” . . . .
“This letter from the Project Starlight Coalition was the result of the historic Asilomar, California, meeting that Dr. Greer organized and Laurance Rockefeller paid for in June 1995, just before Clinton’s meeting with Rockefeller in August 1995.”
[. . .]
Who is Laurance Rockefeller? Well, according to Laurance Rockefeller’s biography:
In 1937 he inherited his grandfather’s seat on the New York Stock Exchange. He served as founding trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund for 42 years, from its inception in 1940 to 1982. During this time, he also served as its president (1958 to 1968) and later its chairman (1968 to 1980) for 22 years, longer than any other leader in the Fund’s history. He was also a founding trustee of the Rockefeller Family Fund from 1967 to 1977.
SOURCE: Why are the Rockefellers and the Jesuits guiding the UFO Disclosure Movement?
So, not only was Laurance deeply involved in the financial industry, but he was also among the founders of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Family Fund. These funds are notorious for advancing globalist aims under the pretense of ‘philanthropy.’ Laurance also served on the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Special Studies Project.” End quote.
Now, I’ll let you continue reading about that Special Studies Project and the interesting fact that even now, four decades after the publication of the final report, The Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports, certain sections of that report are still classified, which is interesting in and of itself. But there are also screenshots of some of the pages of this report shown here in this very important article talking about how they are steering America towards shaping a new world order and things that you would expect to find in a typical Rockefeller study.
I suppose the point here is to emphasize that Laurance Rockefeller is very much in the heart of the Rockefeller matrix, pushing this global government agenda, which David Rockefeller so gleefully admitted to in his memoirs, as I’m sure we all know—or we all should know by now.
And I would again suggest you go to see this original article, if for no other reason than to click on such things as The Rockefeller Initiative or the Disclosure Project’s own Project Starlight’s page, where you can browse through and see all of the main characters who are connected through this Initiative that ran from 1993 to 1996. They include, of course, President Clinton and Laurance Rockefeller, along with Hillary [Clinton] and Dr. John Gibbons and John Podesta and Vice President Al Gore and this cast of Congress critters and [other] very unsavoury characters—including Dr. Steven Greer, the aforementioned “Father of the Disclosure Movement.”
All of these letters are archived here online, so you can read through them all and the various correspondence between some of the players, including between Laurance Rockefeller and John Gibbons and between Laurance Rockefeller and the Clintons.
I mean, this is a pretty interesting and openly admitted non-secret—that the Disclosure Movement was really launched with the aid of Laurance Rockefeller and the Clinton administration. So, I think that should at least get our antennas up toward the possibility that this is going to be used towards the furtherance of some sort of staged or faked alien invasion.
Now, that sounds like an outlandish prospect to those poor souls coming in from mainstream media land who are just landing on this site randomly. I hope you will be able to at least appreciate that there might be a reason why the very rich and powerful and well-connected would be interested in doing something as ridiculous and outlandish— I agree with you there—as staging some sort of alien threat, alien presence—whatever it may be.
But there are reasons why this might be done, and these aren’t reasons we have to speculate on. We can find all of the usual suspects talking about these reasons in all of the usual places, with the big ones—global religion, global finance and global government—uniting the world around this perceived alien threat.
FATHER JOHN MORRIS, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: What is exceptional is that the Vatican was taking very seriously what science might tell us about the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligent life forms. That’s what the conference was about. I can’t tell you that the Vatican found any alien life. I don’t think that’s what they were looking for, but they were taking very seriously the issue.
TRISHA THOMAS, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: We probably won’t be seeing aliens at Mass anytime soon, but the Vatican’s chief astronomer does say that there could exist other forms of life outside Earth, and he says if they do exist they are God’s creatures.
SOURCE: The Vatican’s Take on Aliens?
INTERVIEWER: So, how does this actually work? When Discovery [Channel] decided they were going to do a show on alien invasions, your phone rings because you’re sort of on the speed dial for theoretical physicists who can help them do the war game for how this might play out?
DR. MICHIO KAKU: Well, believe it or not, we physicists have actually studied the question of what happens if we do encounter a hostile advanced civilization in space, and Hollywood gets it all wrong. Hollywood assumes that the aliens are maybe a hundred years more advanced than us and that if only we had a secret weapon, we could defeat the aliens. Wrong. Either the aliens don’t bother with us because we’re simply too primitive or, if they do invade, it’ll be more like Bambi versus Godzilla.”
REPORTER: Now the United Nations is getting ready for contact with aliens from outer space. This is Mazlan Othman. She’s out of Malaysia. She will be planet Earth’s first interstellar diplomat.”
MAZLAN OTHMAN: First, I have to categorically deny that I was appointed or will be appointed the ambassador for aliens, the ambassador for the United Nations for aliens. No, the committee is not discussing this very . . . this subject matter. But yes, I was in the UK to attend a meeting—which I can quote to you—called “Towards a Scientific and Societal Agenda on Extraterrestrial Life,” which is why this whole thing came about, because the British press caught hold of the fact that I was going to be at this meeting, and I was on a panel that was discussing . . . they call it the Great Panel Debate. I like that name. It says: “Extraterrestrial Life and Arising Political Issues for the UN Agenda.”
SOURCE: Dr. Mazlan Othman z ONZ na temat debaty w sprawie UFO (UN ET panel debate at UK) – napisy PL
PAUL KRUGMAN: It’s very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy, but if you had a program of government spending plus an expansionary policy by the Fed, you could get that. So, if you think about using all of these things together, you could accomplish a great deal. If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive build-up to counter this space alien threat, and inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then, if we discovered, “Whoops, we’ve made a mistake. There actually aren’t any space aliens . . .”
PROFESSOR KENNETH ROGOF: We need Orson Welles, is what you’re saying . . .
PAUL KRUGMAN: No, there was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time . . . we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.”
RONALD REAGAN: Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.
SOURCE: Reagan’s ALIEN speech to UN
BILL PULLMAN (AS “PRESIDENT THOMAS J. WHITMORE”): And should we win, the day the 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday but as the day when the world declared in one voice, “We will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight We’re going to live on. We’re going to survive. Today we celebrate our Independence Day.”
SOURCE: Independence Day
JIMMY KIMMEL: If you saw that there were aliens there, would you tell us?
BILL CLINTON: Yeah.
KIMMEL: You would?
CLINTON: I would. I think, look, what do we know? We know now we live in an ever-expanding universe. We know that there are billions of stars and planets literally out there. And the universe is getting bigger. We know from our fancy telescopes that just in the last two years more than twenty planets have been identified outside our solar system that seem to be far enough away from their sun and dense enough that they might be able to support some form of life. So, it makes it increasingly less likely we are alone.
KIMMEL: Oh, you’re trying to give me a hint that there are aliens.
CLINTON: No, I’m trying to tell you I don’t know, but if we were visited someday, I wouldn’t be surprised. I just hope that it’s not like Independence Day. That it, you know—a conflict. Maybe that’s the only way to unite this increasingly divided world of ours. If they’re out there, we’d better think of how all the differences among people on earth would seem small if we felt threatened by a space invader. That’s the whole theory of Independence Day: everybody gets together and makes nice and you know . . .
KIMMEL: You and Bill O’Reilly would be hiding in a bunker together . . .
SOURCE: Bill Clinton Talks About The Coming FAKE Alien Invasion — April 1st 2014
What an interesting milieu of characters we have floating around there. We have the Vatican and the UN and Nobel Prize-winning economist/Keynesian wingnut Paul Krugman and multiple presidents of the United States—and all of these people talking about the same thing: “Wouldn’t it be great if we had this idea of an alien threat that would unite us all behind . . . fill in the blank . . . a world government or a world financial system or baptizing the aliens. Wouldn’t that be wonderful!”
And it’s interesting to look at this. I mean, I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday. I understand and can smell the public preparation for some sort of staged event when I see one, and, well, if it looks and smells and quacks like a false flag operation, it probably is one.
Being supported by some of the most prominent and powerful and well-connected political and financial elites, clearly there is something very, very stinky here. In order to really understand this stink . . . again, we know why this would potentially be a valuable thing for these “power elites” to consolidate their power in a world government or what have you.
But the question is: could they do it? If so, how could they do it? These are important questions that we need to address if we want to really approach the subject. And, I guess, if we’re going to address it, we have two different routes we can take. We can go down the unverifiable, unsourceable, unfalsifiable, undocumented route, or we can go down the sourced, verified, falsifiable documented route. Me being me, I’m going to go down the sourced, falsifiable, documented route. But if you want to go down that unsourced, unknowable, unverifiable route, you can go, for example, with something called Project Blue Beam.
Now, Project Blue Beam is something I’m sure most of the listeners out there have heard of at some point—at least in a vague sense—as some sort of plan that was uncovered. There must be documents backing this up—talking about staging an alien invasion with holograms in order to create a world government. Something along those lines.
Well, if you really want to open the Pandora’s Box of Project Blue Beam, it’s much more specific than that and, well, somewhat more outlandish and much less documented than you might expect.
This really all dates back and sources back to one particular French Canadian journalist, Serge Monast, who was talking in the mid-1990s about this Project Blue Beam—this NASA project that he had uncovered and was unveiling to the public. It had a multiple stage process for creating a world religion, world government—world tyranny. This involved the induction of earthquakes in order to expose archaeological finds—manipulated, planted archaeological finds—that would change our view of human history and a staged extraterrestrial invasion and the appearance of a new Messiah to be the head of this world religion and the imposition of UN World Government, etcetera. This is a detailed plan that was talked about, but there is literally no document behind this. There is no NASA secret paper that was ever exposed about this. It really all sources back to this Serge Monast and a couple of interviews that are available online.
There’s a transcript of a speech. There’s a translation of what I guess is some sort of summary of a book he apparently wrote on this subject. He did write a book, apparently in French, on this subject, but it’s never been reprinted, and it’s basically unobtainable. There are a couple of different translations of something that may have sourced from this book, more or less, but that’s basically it. I mean, there are just a few scraps. And from those scraps there’s been a lot of talk, and a lot of people have run with this idea. But I think not a lot of people know where it actually sources from.
I will put some links in the show notes, so you can actually follow them and read about them and come to your own conclusion: “Is this worth following?” and “Why should we believe this particular piece of information?” Call me a doubting Thomas. I’ll believe it when I see something, anything documentable, verifiable in terms of this plan.
If we want to go down the other route and look at actual verifiable, sourced and knowable technologies that we know exist, let alone those technologies that we don’t know exist that are being worked on in the skunkworks of DARPA, down in the bowels of the Pentagon—and for more on DARPA I’ll direct you to a previous Corbett Report radio episode, where we talked about DARPA and its various projects—we can source that in a number of different ways, from a number of different, seemingly disparate threads, but definitely technologies that we now know exist.
One place to start: we can get the clue from the book by previous Corbett Report guest James Perloff, Truth Is A Lonely Warrior, where he talks about an Air Force military publication that was available on the Air Force website. You can still access it on the Wayback Machine. The link will be in the show notes. This is about an airborne holographic projector which, this AF.MIL website notes, is:
” . . . a three-dimensional visual image in the desired location, removed from the display generator. The projector can be used for psychological operations and strategic perception management. It is also useful for optical deception and cloaking, providing a momentary distraction when engaging an unsophisticated adversary.”
SOURCE: Airborne Holographic Projector
You can see the unsophisticated visualization that is accompanying this on the website itself. But, yes, very crudely, it’s a plane projecting an image of another plane elsewhere in the sky. Now that is a very crude implementation of this type of holographic technology that, at the very least, would be required for making the world believe we were under some sort of alien invasion threat or what-have-you, but that is twenty years old now and sources from an Air Force military website.
I’m thinking that the actual technology would be somewhat more advanced. But we don’t have to speculate about that. We can take a look at the very real developments in technology, including such incredible things as beaming sound directly into people’s ears, touchable holograms, and being able to manipulate people’s perceptions and incite fear and panic through brain wave technology.
PRESENTER: “The ultimate weapon in the infowar would be so secret, so invisible, so undetectable, you would never know your mind was under attack. At Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada, a young student is about to undergo one of the strangest experiences of her life. They’re hooking Denise’s brain up to an electroencephalograph, or EEG machine. For thirty to forty minutes, this will monitor her brain waves while these electric coils attached on either side of her head will immerse her brain in an electromagnetic field. Her brain actually completes the circuit between the two coils. The field pulsing through her brain is less powerful than one given off by a digital clock radio. But, acutely controlled and focused on specific parts of the brain, it will open Denise’s mind to outside suggestion by this man. Dr. Michael Persinger is a professor of psychology and neuroscience. He is designing ways to put the power of mind control to good use. Dr. Persinger’s research focuses on brain trauma, and he uses carefully controlled doses of electromagnetic radiation to induce relaxation and alleviate pain.
DR. PERSINGER: So what Sandra did was to initiate an opiate-releasing pattern. That’s a burst-firing field that is stimulated once every four seconds and that produces relaxation and a very pleasant sensation. Similarly, using the appropriate field we can induce fear and apprehension, but clearly that would be unethical in that setting.
PRESENTER: Dr. Persinger’s tests suggest that carefully programmed electromagnetic frequencies can tap into individual brains and influence people’s emotions.
DR. PERSINGER: The cognitive processes of the human brain are really quite simple. And, if you understand how they work, you can make entire populations think and decide in the manner which you wish.
PRESENTER: Many experts are skeptical of such an Orwellian scenario, but Persinger thinks the implications are chillingly real.
DR. PERSINGER: Suppose you generate a field that produces fear—fundamental fear—in large numbers of people, and then over the television or in traditional ways you say, “The reason we’re having this fear is because of this particular group.” Now you start to move the population, believing in a direction that you wish.
PRESENTER: To influence 250 million people, the equivalent of the entire population of the United States, may not be difficult. According to Dr. Persinger, we already have the technology—satellites and television and radio transmitters. Mind control may already be happening. We know the mysterious psyops plane can beam persuasive sounds and pictures into people’s television sets. Will it someday beam disturbing frequencies directly into the mind?”
PRESENTER: First, your voice is transformed into high-frequency ultrasound—a sound so high no one can hear it. Ultrasound is highly directional, so, like a torch, it can be pointed at someone standing a long way away. Although they cannot hear the ultrasound, it causes secondary vibrations in the air around them, and it’s that sound the person hears.
DR. JOSEPH POMPEI: So, if you imagine you’re in a room and I shine a flashlight at you, it’s very bright for you but it’s very dark for everybody else. Much the same way, the audio spotlight creates a very narrow beam of sound that can shine at a listener. They hear it very clearly, and it doesn’t create noise that might bother other people in the same space.
SOURCE: Voice to Skull Time
PRESENTER: Researchers at Tokyo University have come up with the technology that is a first and significant step away from the mouse and keyboard: touchable holograms.
HIROYUKI SHINODA (translated): Up until now, holography has been for the eyes only. If you tried to touch it, your hand would go right through. But now we have the technology that also adds the sensation of touch to holograms.”
Now, look, I’m not necessarily saying that there’s going to be a staged alien invasion tomorrow and that we should all be concentrating on this, nor am I saying that there is no such thing as alien life in the universe. I would be shocked, flabbergasted, if there was not. Whether or not it’s visiting Earth well, what do I know? How do I know? I mean, I haven’t seen it myself, but does that mean it doesn’t exist? Well, of course not.
I’ll let you guys . . . you’re grown-up boys and girls out there. I’m sure you can decide for yourself on things like that. But we should know that there is a coordinated plan, or an agenda in place, to capitalize on such things as fake alien invasions that is being funded and promoted by the financial power elite at the top of the pyramid and is being promoted and pushed out into the cultural sphere by the politicians and economists and the Vatican and the UN, and then, underneath them, the culture-creators in the entertainment industry, to prepare the public for such a possibility. And we should be on guard against such manipulations.
These technologies that are now coming together . . . the ones that we know about, let alone the ones that are secretly in development that we don’t have access to . . . are clearly along the path towards making such an event possible.
You can look at something like the Norway spiral and believe the official response—that this was a Russian ICBM test that went awry. If you believe that, I have a bridge on the moon to sell you.
But all of these are just different pieces of the puzzle. I think they add up to something very interesting and something that is potentially coming sometime in the future.
Even if this particular instantiation—this fake alien invasion or what have you—doesn’t come together, still, the concept of psychological manipulation through manipulated events in manipulated reality is an important one—obviously one that we have to continue to keep in mind. Now that the technology for making these events possible is more and more a documentable reality, I think we should have our mental guards up for such eventualities.
So, that’s, I think, where we’re going to leave things today.
This is an open-source investigation. I invite and encourage and applaud the input of all of you out there. So, if you are a Corbett Report member, please do leave your comments on the website with any relevant links or information. Any comments, questions, complaints, criticisms, concerns or otherwise—all invited at corbettreport.com.
Once again, I’m your host James Corbett of corbettreport.com thanking you for joining me for this edition of The Corbett Report podcast and inviting you to join me again next week.
Sednaya: Investigating Syria’s most notorious prison
The Cradle | December 24, 2024
When militants from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by former Al-Qaeda leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani – who now goes by his real name Ahmad al-Sharaa – finally toppled Bashar al-Assad’s government on 8 December 2024, they quickly released the prisoners in Sednaya.
A flood of new media reports about the horrors of the prison quickly emerged.
But which reports about the crimes of Assad’s government are true, and which are fabricated as part of a new propaganda campaign to legitimize Julani’s rule and whitewash the opposition’s similar past atrocities?
Vast underground prison complex?
On 9 December, one day after Assad’s fall, The Guardian journalist William Christou was among the first journalists to reach Sednaya.
Christou claimed that a day after Julani’s forces had taken control of the prison, a door had been found leading to a “vast underground complex, five stories deep, containing the last prisoners of the Assad regime, who were gasping for air.”
He reported rumors that there “were 1,500 prisoners trapped underground that needed rescuing; perhaps your loved ones are among them.”
As a result, hundreds of panicked Syrians rushed to the prison, located 30 kilometers outside Damascus, to search for loved ones missing from the war. Due to the crowds, “Cars were ditched by the roadside and people began to walk,” Christou wrote.
In subsequent days, numerous fake videos professing to show prisoners in the underground complex went viral, while CNN journalist Clarissa Ward faked the discovery of a prisoner in a detention facility in Damascus.
“We came to see the prisons under the ground,” one woman wandering the halls of Sednaya told The Cradle during its visit to the prison.
She said her brother had been missing since 2018. She first went to the Mezzeh military prison in Damascus, and now she was looking for any sign of him at Sednaya.
However, despite efforts by the White Helmets and Turkish rescue organizations, no secret underground complex holding thousands of prisoners has been found.
During its visit to Sednaya, The Cradle was able to walk freely through the facility and verified that there is just one underground basement level containing small individual isolation cells and an adjoining toilet.
Human slaughterhouse?
In the days after Assad’s fall, more and more western journalists visited Sednaya and filed reports. Virtually all begin by citing a 2017 investigation by Amnesty International, which called the prison a “human slaughterhouse.” The investigation claimed up to 13,000 civilians were executed in mass hangings over a four-year period.
The US State Department tried to reinforce the findings of the Amnesty report by claiming the bodies of the executed were burned in a “crematorium” located in a building adjacent to the main prison.
However, the State Department gave zero proof of the crematorium, and no one has claimed to find it since the prison was opened.
Further, Amnesty’s report acknowledges the number killed was just an “estimate” (between 5,000 and 13,000) based on testimony from alleged former guards and prisoners taken by the rights group in Turkiye. The report said the mass execution process was “secret” but then somehow claimed to reveal its intimate details.
The report also ignores that the Syrian government was detaining people during this period in the context of facing an Al-Qaeda-led insurgency, including from the Nusra Front and ISIS.
When The Cradle asked a Syrian who is supportive of the opposition about his view of the Sednaya issue, he noted that the prison is Syria’s “Guantanamo.” In other words, the prison is reserved for high-security prisoners from Islamist armed groups detained on terrorism charges.
This is evident by the famous Sednaya prison uprising in 2008, in which primarily Islamist prisoners revolted against their guards.
But Amnesty claims that the prisoners were held in Sednaya and mass executed “as part of an attack against the civilian population.”
Iraqi and US forces have also long held large numbers of Al-Qaeda militants in prisons in Iraq, such as at Abu Ghraib. However, the fact that the Syrian government was holding Al-Qaeda militants in its prisons is somehow ignored by Amnesty and others.
Psychological operations
Another question is whether the testimony of the former alleged prisoners and guards given to Amnesty in 2017 and to western media outlets after the prison was opened in 2024 is reliable.
A Spanish journalist who visited Sednaya in the days after Assad’s fall told The Cradle that he was suspicious of the testimony given to him by alleged former prisoners. Fixers associated with Julani’s new government had arranged the interviews, he said, and some of the details of their testimony seemed too fantastic to be true. “But there was no way to verify if they were true or not,” the journalist said.
As a case in point, recent western media reports almost all include interviews with Omar al-Shogre, an alleged former Sednaya prisoner who was the star witness of the 2017 Amnesty report.
However, a close review of Shogre’s testimony shows it was clearly fabricated.
For example, he told Amnesty the guards would regularly force the prisoners to rape each other while being escorted from their cells to the bathroom.
“As we walked to the bathroom, [the guards] would select one of the boys, someone petite or young or fair. … They would then ask a bigger prisoner to rape him … No one will admit this happened to them, but it happened so often,” Shogre claimed.
However, during its visit to Sednaya, The Cradle observed that each cell has its own toilet and sink. In one cell, The Cradle observed items of clothing hanging on lines above the sink to dry after washing. There was no possibility that the guards were escorting prisoners out of their cells to go to the bathroom, as Shogre’s scenario claims.
Over the years, Shogre has made many wild and completely implausible claims, which further undermine his credibility.
The Nation wrote that according to Shogre, “Guards would deliberately execute a prisoner right before serving inmates their only meal of the day, often placing the corpse’s head over the platter of food, so that it would bleed into the daily mound of bread and potatoes.”
The former prisoner’s fabrications have long been part of a broader propaganda campaign to impose crushing sanctions on Syria.
Shogre works for the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a group established and funded by the US government to facilitate the overthrow of the Syrian government. SETF provided alleged non-lethal aid to US-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups that fought the Syrian army starting in 2011.
While working for the SETF, Shogre advocated for the US Congress to impose the Caesar sanctions on Syria, which helped strangle his home nation’s economy and resembled the US sanctions on Iraq, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in the 1990s.
The Caesar sanctions were themselves named after a psychological operation claiming that a Syrian military photographer had smuggled 55,000 photographs out of the country, documenting the torture and killing of some 11,000 detainees by the Syrian government.
But as journalist Rick Sterling observed, Human Rights Watch (HRW) acknowledged that almost half of the photos do not show people tortured to death by the Syrian government. Instead, they show dead Syrian soldiers and victims of car bombs and other violence from the opposition groups. Such deaths are normal for any government to document in a time of war.
Syria’s missing
Despite the propaganda surrounding Sednaya, there are many indications that the Syrian government detained large numbers of Syrians during the war who were either tortured to death or shot and killed.
While in a restaurant in Damascus shortly after Assad’s fall, The Cradle witnessed two employees, a father and his son, emerge from the back room in tears. They told the owner and fellow staff that they had just received word that the names of their three uncles, taken by the government and missing since 2014, had been found in the records at Tishreen military hospital, confirming their deaths.
One reason that many Syrians may have been detained and disappeared is because Syrian intelligence operated in many ways like a mafia. The feared ‘mukhabarat’ often abused their power to extract bribes from Syrians in many aspects of everyday life.
One Syrian from Damascus told The Cradle that there was little rule of law in Syria. Instead, Syrians lived by the “rule of the phone numbers.” Your privileges and ability to protect yourself depended on whether you had the phone number of someone powerful to call if the local security agents tried to extort you, or worse.
Those with money or political connections were often released, including those detained on terrorism charges, while others continued to rot in prison. As a result, many were tortured and killed.
Writing for Al-Akhbar in 2013, journalist Qassem Qassem stated it is an “undeniable fact” that the Palestinian filmmaker from the Yarmouk Palestinian camp in Damascus, Hassan Hassan, was “killed in the regime prisons.” He said that Hassan was not a terrorist or “takfiri,” and “never carried a gun nor blew himself up with an explosive vest,” but was killed anyway.
The “Repentance” prison
But in addition to those who disappeared or were tortured by the government, the armed opposition groups also tortured and disappeared huge numbers of people.
When asked about the issue of those gone missing in Assad’s prison, one Syrian from Aleppo told The Cradle that the militant groups fighting the former president ran mafia-style kidnapping rings of their own.
“The opposition, since the start of the war, has killed tens of thousands of Syrians, and the ones they didn’t bury in mass graves, they sent, in parts, to several families when the ransoms weren’t paid. Try also asking them where the missing are.”
While walking through Sednaya prison, The Cradle spoke with a man who was looking for his missing son – a commander in a militant opposition group called Burkan al-Sham in the eastern Ghouta area of Damascus.
The man said he and his son were accused of being Syrian government agents by another armed opposition group, the Saudi-backed Jaish al-Islam.
Led by Zahran Alloush, the son of a prominent Salafist preacher in Ghouta, the group was described by the UK foreign office as part of the “moderate armed opposition.”
The man told The Cradle that he and his son were both held at Jaish al-Islam’s “Tawba,” or “repentance,” prison in the town of Duma, in the Ghouta region. He said they were tortured in ways “worse than in Sednaya.”
The father said he was later released, but his son remains missing. He later heard rumors his son had ended up in a government prison in Mezzeh. After looking there and finding nothing, he came to Sednaya to search.
Pro-opposition Enab Baladi reported in 2017 that while there is a large network of activists in Duma, there are no accurate statistics on the number of detainees in Tawba.
Abu Khaled, a 31-year-old media activist from Duma, told the outlet he was surprised by the absence of such reports.
“Random arrests take place all around Eastern Ghouta,” he stated. These prisons, especially Tawba, “are as bad as those of the Syrian regime, and, according to former prisoners, many detainees stay in prisons for months without trial.”
“A man’s body was recently returned to his family three days after his arrest,” pro-opposition Syria Direct reported in 2017. “Jaish al-Islam directly threatened them, telling them that if they spoke to the media or published pictures of the body, they would all be killed.”
Julani’s prisons
Abu Mohammad al-Julani’s Nusra Front also imprisoned and tortured many Syrians. We know this from the testimony of Theo Padnos. A freelance journalist from the US, Padnos was kidnapped by the FSA in 2012 and handed over to Nusra. He remained a hostage for two years before Qatar paid a large ransom to release him.
While imprisoned at the Eye Hospital, the Nusra guards beat and shocked the journalist with an electric cattle prod. Other prisoners were hung by their wrists from ceiling pipes. Their feet mimicked the riding of a bicycle in the air.
When Julani’s Nusra conquered Idlib province in 2015 and formed a National Salvation government, the group established new prisons where torture was also common.
An opposition media activist, Jawdat Malas, was imprisoned by the group in a dark and dirty cell, Enab Baladi reported.
For hours every day, he would be tortured until his body was heavily bruised. “I reached a point where I was constipated. My whole body was dark blue,” he said. “Other detainees were taking care of me. I had no idea what I did wrong. I was terrified.”
In April 2020, Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ) issued a report stating that women were detained and killed in Idlib, including for “insulting deity,” “espionage” for the benefit of the Syrian army, and “adultery.”
Conclusion
No one in Syria now knows what the future holds. But what is sure is that Syrians have suffered from more than a decade of horrific war and economic sanctions. Violence has been inflicted on Syrian civilians by the former government under Bashar al-Assad, but also by the foreign-backed extremist groups who functioned as tools of the US and its allies to topple Assad. Most crucial to recall is that the vast majority of this violence occurred after 2011, when the US launched its covert war on Syria on Israel’s behalf.
Fact-checking Fortune: Has Polio Vaccine Saved 20 Million Children From Paralysis?
The Defender | December 23, 2024
A Dec. 13 article in Fortune called the polio vaccine used in the U.S. today “not only safe but also effective.”
The article also claimed that because 3 billion children have been vaccinated against polio since 1988, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, that means “20 million people who would’ve otherwise been paralyzed by polio are walking today.”
How accurate is the 20 million figure?
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) website, in 1988, there were 350,000 reported polio cases worldwide in a global population of 5.1 billion people. If, as the WHO website states, “One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis,” that would amount to 1,750 cases of irreversible paralysis linked to polio in 1988.
Using that figure — 1,750 cases in 1988 — and factoring in 1.2% annual population growth, the estimated number of cases of irreversible paralysis between 1988 and 2024 would total approximately 80,910 — not 20 million, as Fortune reported.
Here are four other facts about polio vaccines the Fortune article doesn’t address.
1. Polio vaccines used in U.S. don’t prevent infection or transmission.
According to Fortune, the polio vaccine is “safe and effective.” Here’s why that statement oversimplifies the issue of polio vaccines and leads to misleading conclusions.
There are two kinds of polio vaccines used in the world today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They are the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) and the oral polio vaccine (OPV).
The OPV is used for mass vaccination campaigns of children outside the U.S., as was recently done in Gaza. However, the U.S. exclusively uses IPV polio vaccines, according to the CDC.
The IPV products, which are injected, contain an inactivated — or dead — poliovirus. According to the CDC, the IPV protects against “severe disease caused by poliovirus” but “does not stop transmission.”
According to the Polio Global Eradication Initiative, the IPV also doesn’t prevent infection.
Two stand-alone IPV products are licensed in the U.S. by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Both are manufactured by Sanofi. The other five are combination vaccines that target polio plus other illnesses, including diptheria, pertussis and tetanus.
One of the two stand-alone IPV products, Poliovax, was discontinued. The FDA page on licensed polio vaccines doesn’t explain why.
That leaves IPOL as the sole stand-alone polio vaccine licensed in the U.S.
2. Global polio vaccine campaigns can lead to ‘vaccine-derived’ polio outbreaks.
As its name suggests, the “oral polio” vaccine, or OPV — used only outside the U.S. — is delivered orally. The OPV contains a weakened vaccine-virus that activates an immune response in the body, according to the WHO.
Unlike the IPV products used in the U.S., the OPV prevents transmission, according to the CDC and the WHO. However, the weakened vaccine-virus used in the OPV can cause polio variant outbreaks.
The CDC states that the U.S. stopped using OPV “to eliminate the risk of polio variants that can occur with OPV.”
According to the WHO, the continued use of the OPV “poses a risk to wiping out the disease” because the weakened vaccine-virus originally contained in the OPV can begin to circulate among people who didn’t get the vaccine.
“When this happens,” the WHO said, “if it is allowed to circulate for sufficiently long enough time, it may genetically revert to a ‘strong’ virus, able to cause paralysis, resulting in what is known as circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses.”
Vaccine-derived polioviruses were responsible for the recently reported cases of polio in Gaza and the 2022 case reported in New York.
In March 2023, seven children were paralyzed by vaccine-derived polio linked to the novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) developed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, according to health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
In other words, the viral infections in these cases resulted from exposure to the vaccine-virus used in the OPV — not from exposure to a naturally occurring, or “wild,” strain of the poliovirus.
The last wild poliovirus case reported in the U.S. was in 1979, according to the CDC.
3. Risk of paralysis from poliovirus infection is roughly 0.001%.
Approximately 90-95% of poliovirus infections are asymptomatic, according to the FDA package insert for IPOL, the only stand-alone IPV product used in the U.S. The package insert also provides general information on polio, including this:
“Nonspecific illness with low-grade fever and sore throat (minor illness) occurs in 4% to 8% of infections. Aseptic meningitis occurs in 1% to 5% of patients a few days after the minor illness has resolved.
“Rapid onset of asymmetric acute flaccid paralysis occurs in 0.1% to 2% of infections, and residual paralytic disease involving motor neurons (paralytic poliomyelitis) occurs in approximately 1 per 1,000 infections.”
In other words, according to the FDA, the risk of becoming paralyzed as a result of a poliovirus infection is roughly 0.001%.
4. All polio vaccines used today are genetically modified.
Unlike the original polio vaccines developed in the early 1950s by Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Albert Sabin, the IPV and OPV being administered today are genetically modified.
In 2020, the WHO authorized a new genetically modified OPV for emergency use in polio outbreaks. According to a 2023 article in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, nOPV2 was developed through a global partnership between public health, governmental, philanthropic and nonprofit organizations, including the Gates Foundation.
IPOL, the only stand-alone polio vaccine used in the U.S., uses technology that involves growing the poliovirus on monkey kidney cells whose chromones were modified to cause them to multiply forever.
In 2022, attorney Aaron Siri, on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, petitioned the FDA to “withdraw or suspend the approval for IPOL for infants, toddlers, and children until a properly controlled and properly powered double-blind trial of sufficient duration is conducted to assess the safety of this product.”
The petition stated that modified monkey kidney cells “are susceptible to infection by dozens of viruses, including HPV, measles, rubella, reovirus, SV40 virus, and SV-5.”
According to the petition, Sanofi’s IPOL vaccine hasn’t been adequately proven safe because the clinical trials relied on for licensing the product did not include a control group and declared the vaccine safe after following the trial participants for up to only three days after injection.
The FDA has not withdrawn or suspended its approval of IPOL as requested by Siri, and the agency continues to rely on the existing clinical trials and the agency’s own safety assessment lasting only up to three days.
The CDC recommends children receive four doses of IPOL, starting at age 2 months. The second dose is given at 4 months. The third is given at 6-18 months, and the fourth is given anytime between 4 and 6 years.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
This article is part of a series of articles by The Defender responding to the latest media coverage of vaccines, triggered by the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
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How Europe’s New Political Class Began Rejecting Reality
By Glenn Diesen | October 26, 2024
Russia considers NATO’s incursion into Ukraine to be an existential threat, and NATO has openly stated its intention to make Ukraine a member state after the war. Without a political settlement that restores Ukraine’s neutrality, Russia will therefore likely annex the strategic territories it cannot accept ending up under NATO control and then turn what remains of Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state. As the war is being lost, the rational policy for the Europeans would therefore be to offer an agreement based on ending NATO’s eastward expansion to save Ukrainian lives, territory and the nation itself. Yet, no European leader has been able to even suggest such a solution publicly. Why? … continue
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- Philosopher Schopenhauer: Climate Science Certainty Stems From Stupidity, Ignorance
- New Study: Species Extinction Rates Declining Since 1980 – ‘Climate Change Is Not An Important Threat’
- Denmark Places Climate Protection Above Animal Welfare, Poisoning And Culling Cows
- New Study: Greenland Was 3-7°C Warmer And Far Less Glaciated Than Today 6000-8000 Years Ago
- German Media Report That Current Frigid Weather Can Be Explained By Arctic Warming!
- Berlin Blackout Shows Germany’s $5 Trillion Green Scheme Is “Left-Green Ideological Pipe Dream”
- Modeling Error In Estimating How Clouds Affect Climate Is 8700% Larger Than Alleged CO2 Forcing
- Berlin’s Terror-Blackout Enters 4th Day As Tens Of Thousands Suffer In Cold Without Heat!
- Expect Soon Another PIK Paper Claiming Warming Leads To Cold Snaps Over Europe
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