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Medvedev warns The Times over piece on Russian general’s murder

RT | December 18, 2024

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday slammed Britain’s flagship daily The Times for justifying the assassination of Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov. Medvedev blasted the editors as “lousy jackals” who are part of a hybrid war against Russia.

Kirillov, who headed Russia’s Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Defense Forces, was killed in a blast outside his residence on Tuesday morning. Russian investigators said an improvised explosive device (IED) packed with up to 1kg of TNT was attached to an electric scooter parked near the building’s entrance. Investigators suspect Ukrainian special services of orchestrating the attack, which took place mere hours after the general was accused by Kiev of being linked to the use of chemical agents on the battlefield, a claim Moscow has denied.

In an article on Tuesday, the UK outlet claimed that its sources within Ukraine’s security services admitted responsibility for the assassination. It went on to describe the incident as “a legitimate act of defense by a threatened nation.”

“The assassination is a discriminate strike against an aggressor,” The Times wrote. The paper further characterized Kirillov’s killing as an “eminently defensible” act that should be seen as “a warning and deterrent to other plenipotentiaries of [Russian President] Vladimir Putin.”

“It’s impossible to ignore the editorial published in The Times, where the bastards called the terrorist attack on Igor Kirillov and his assistant a ‘legitimate act of defense’,” Medvedev, who currently serves as deputy head of the Russian Security Council, said in a Telegram post. He stated that according to the logic employed by The Times, its entire management could now be considered “legitimate military targets” for Russia, along with all Western decision-makers.

“All NATO decision-makers from countries that provided military assistance to Bandera Ukraine are participating in a hybrid or conventional war against Russia… All these individuals can and should be considered legitimate military targets for the Russian state,” Medvedev said, adding that the people “who committed crimes against Russia” always have accomplices, including in the media.

“And they, too, are now legitimate military targets. These may include the lousy jackals from The Times, who cowardly hid behind an editorial… So, be careful! After all, a lot can happen in London,” he warned.

Russian authorities have launched a criminal probe into Kirillov’s death and brought charges of murder, terrorism, and illegal weapons trafficking. On Wednesday, the Investigative Committee announced it has detained a 29-year-old citizen of Uzbekistan suspected of carrying out the attack. According to the investigators, the suspect admitted that he had been recruited by the SBU, and agreed to carry out the bombing in exchange for a reward of $100,000 and safe passage to the EU.

December 18, 2024 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Scandal deepens around CNN’s Clarissa Ward staging Syria prison scene

By Wyatt Reed · The Grayzone · December 16, 2024

Footage showing CNN’s regime change-crazed correspondent supposedly freeing a forgotten prisoner from a Syrian jail has been exposed as a scandalous fraud, yet the network continues to re-air it, while defending its correspondent.

“In nearly twenty years as a journalist, this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed.”

That’s how veteran CNN journalist Clarissa Ward described her foray into a Syrian prison on December 12, where she promptly claimed to have rescued a forgotten inmate after three months in jail. But there was just one problem with the “extraordinary moment”: a review of a dramatic story depicted by CNN reveals a number of glaring inconsistencies, the greatest of which is that the man stands accused of being an impostor.

After countless social media users shredded CNN’s story, a fact-checking organization with ties to the US government has exposed the prisoner seemingly liberated in Ward’s theatrical performance turns out to have been a low level Syrian intelligence official jailed for corruption and abuse charges.

CNN finally addressed the deepening scandal on December 15, declaring that it would investigate the subject of Ward’s piece. However, the network continues to protect the correspondent responsible for the journalistic flim-flam, while rebroadcasting the staged report for its viewers day after day.

With Ward still stationed in jihadist-held Damascus, it appears that her bosses are refusing to allow any editorial standards or professional ethics get in the way of a successful Western-backed regime change operation.

“It moved! Is there someone there?”

In CNN’s original Dec. 11 video report, Ward enters a jail she says was previously operated by Syrian Air Force intelligence, which she claims was “one of many secret prisons across [Damascus]” – and was “specifically tasked with surveillance, arrest, and killing of all regime critics.” Ward was apparently searching for signs of Austin Tice, an American journalist who the US government claims was being held by the Assad government prior to its fall.

“We don’t find any hints of Tice,” Ward insists in a voiceover, “but [we] come across something extraordinary.” At this point, “the guard makes us turn the camera off while he shoots the lock off the cell door,” she says. Viewers are not shown their entrance. Afterwards, Ward and her entourage appear in a clean but windowless cell, where a blanket lies heaped on the ground.

“It moved!” Ward exclaims, before asking the blanket, in English: “Is there someone there?”

Upon being prodded by her armed rebel guide, a man crawls out from under the blanket, revealing himself to the CNN crew. Eyes widened, he raises his arms. “‘I’m a civilian,’ he says, ‘I’m a civilian,’” Ward translates. “He tells the fighter he is from the city of Homs and has been in the cell for three months.” Ward is shown pacing in the background, hand clasped dramatically to her chest.

“He clutches my arm tightly with both hands,” she intones, her voice quivering with emotion. She then asks breathlessly: “Does anyone have any water?” Someone off-screen produces a bottle, which the man drinks quickly. As he walks outside, he looks up. “My God, the light,” he says, while staring directly and unflinchingly at the sky. “Left alone for days without food, water or light, the man was unaware Bashar al-Assad’s regime had fallen,” Ward declares gravely.

By her stated estimation, he had been left for dead and deprived of all food and water for at least four days. A 2022 study published in Science determined that “despite adaptations to minimize dehydration, humans can survive for only ~3 days without consuming water.” The Mezzeh Air Force intelligence prison in question was reportedly overtaken by anti-government militants on Dec. 6, a full five days before the report was published.

Yet rather than immediately seeking medical care for the man after his release, a rebel fighter pulls up a chair, and the CNN crew elects to conduct an interview with the supposed former prisoner. At some point, someone hands him a plate of food, and he collapses into Ward’s arms after taking a bite. “He can barely lift it to his mouth. But his body can’t handle it,” Ward declares mournfully.

The segment ends as the man, who Ward identifies as “Adil Gharbal,” is guided into an ambulance by men wearing Red Crescent jackets. “It is the end of a very dark chapter for him and for all of Syria,” Ward concludes.

And perhaps it would be – if it actually happened. But it now appears the man rescued by CNN’s Clarissa Ward was a corrupt Syrian government official, not an innocent political prisoner.

US government aligned site exposes CNN’s Syria prison theater

According to a Western-backed fact-checking organization known as Verify, “Adil Gharbal” is actually Salama Mohammad Salama, who they identified as “a first lieutenant in Syrian Air Force Intelligence,” a figure they claim was “notorious for his activities in Homs.”

Verify, which describes itself as “a verified signatory of the International Fact-Checker Network (IFCN) and a trusted partner of Facebook in the MENA region since 2019,” writes that “residents of the Al-Bayyada neighborhood identified him as frequently stationed at a checkpoint in the area’s western entrance, infamous for its abuses.”

Per Verify, Salama was imprisoned due to his involvement in “theft [and] extortion,” and “his recent incarceration—lasting less than a month—was due to a dispute over profit-sharing” of “extorted funds.”

The IFCN’s parent group, the “Poynter Institute,” has taken huge sums from organizations including George Soros’ Open Society Foundation (OSF) and the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy. In 2017, Poynter took in a whopping $1.3 million from OSF and Omidyar Foundation, the main vessel for spending by Democratic Party-aligned billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Given its US-aligned financial ties, Verify has very little incentive to undercut CNN’s regime change narratives.

Alongside hundreds of social media users, Verify has also pointed out that the timeline described by CNN simply defies belief. As geopolitical analyst Arnaud Bertrand noted, “most humans cannot survive without water for 4-5 days, especially if it’s without food either and in stressful prison conditions. At the very minimum, they would have extremely dry, cracked lips and mouth, severely sunken eyes, a very tight grayish skin and they wouldn’t be able to speak coherently.”

The man CNN claims to have liberated shows no signs of long-term incarceration, however, and instead appears well-fed, neat, and relatively clean-shaven. Another popular post drew attention to “the manicured nails of a man who was in a Syrian dungeon without light for 3 months until CNN rescued him.”

Anti-imperialist commentators weren’t the only ones to push back on CNN’s gratuitous propaganda. One Kurdish activist wrote that the incident “raises some serious serious questions about journalistic integrity” because “the air force intelligence prison was entered by the Syrian rebels and all cells [were already] opened” two days before CNN showed up. “The prison has been liberated for days now; several Syrian reporters were there already – families have come to look for the remains of their family members – prisons were searched by search teams [sent] by the Turkish government; yet somehow all of them ignored this 1 prison cell? – with exactly 1 prisoner inside despite this being a prison cell for multiple prisoners?”

The same activist pointed out that even journalists affiliated with Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, the US-designated terrorist group which largely oversaw the overthrow of the Syrian government, were mocking CNN’s coverage in a post on Telegram: “if it wasn’t a play to achieve a scoop for CNN and laugh at the West’s stupidity, it is more likely that one of the detainees has no place to go and prefers to stay in prison and sleep there.”

Others, who claim to have been jailed by the former Syrian government also questioned the report, with one commenting: “I was detained twice in Syria. I think this is staged. CNN should investigate. Happy to be proven wrong.” Another suggested the video piece did a disservice to those who had actually been jailed: “CNN journalist Clarissa Ward fabricated a scene showing a prisoner inside Syria’s notoriously brutal prisons. This is demeaning and exploitative to Syrian detainees. As a former Syrian detainee, I call for boycotting her and exposing her actions.”

Ward’s history of shameless regime change cheerleading, collaboration with AQ figures

It’s certainly not the first time Ward has been accused of fabricating a story and staging a scene to boost her ratings. While covering Israel’s post-October 7 assault on Gaza, Ward earned widespread mockery when she fell to the ground and took cover from a Hamas rocket attack, when, in fact, no munitions were falling anywhere in her vicinity.

Two weeks later, Ward’s lopsided coverage of the Israeli genocide in Gaza provoked a viral confrontation by Egyptian journalist Rahma Zein, who lambasted the CNN correspondent in a viral video: “Cover this! Say the truth! We understand… You’re just a puppet, you’re just a mouthpiece,” she proclaimed, but in many ways, “you represent your government.”

“We’re watching an occupation” and it’s “the result of your silence,” Zein concluded.

Ward’s presence in Damascus, where jihadist militias have taken control while Israeli forces seize Syrian territory without a fight, represents the culmination of over a decade of propagandizing for regime change.

Back in 2012, Ward claimed to have “sort of slipped off into an alleyway in the [Damascus] old city, put a headscarf on, and went and lived with some activists for a week.” She returned with a de facto commercial for the Free Syrian Army, the Contra-style militia created with CIA arms and support.

CNN’s Clarissa Ward, then of CBS, with the FSA in 2011

In 2017, Ward was granted special entry to Idlib, the Al Qaeda carveout in Northwestern Syria protected by the Turkish military. To gain access to jihadist leaders, Ward hired Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American who joined the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda in 2012 and subsequently served as its top English language propagandist, as her fixer. When Ward won a Peabody Award for her report inside Idlib, Kareem took to Twitter to complain that CNN “barely mentioned my name! I’m telling you, somehow CNN must have forgotten that I was the one that filmed it, I guess they forgot that.”

Ward appeared soon after at the UN Security Council as a guest of the United States delegation. There, she described “the Islamist factions” in the Idlib province as “heroes on the ground” who have “filled the void” in the war to overthrow the Syrian government.

In 2019, when The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal posted a Twitter thread containing non-staged photos and videos documenting his visit to Damascus, including his interviews with Syrians who had been wounded or tortured by Western-backed opposition forces, Ward flew into a petulant frenzy, claiming she was “getting palpitations” that graduated to “spasms of rage,” even wondering if Blumenthal’s critical reporting was driven by drug addiction.

Sober or not, when Ward participated in a clearly staged prisoner rescue – what she called “one of the most extraordinary moments” in her media career – she was clearly drunk on her own entitlement and obsession with advancing the priorities of the US regime change machine. And though her network appears to be protecting her, it seems the morning after has finally arrived.

December 16, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

RFK Jr. and the Samoan Measles Outbreak

By David Marks | Brownstone Institute | December 15, 2024

When the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary comes before the Senate, the specter of the Samoan measles outbreak of 2019 will dramatically be invoked to challenge him. Kennedy’s critics have repeatedly relied on this topic, citing stories that claim he was responsible for an epidemic in 2019 that caused at least 83 children to die due to vaccine hesitancy. In recent articles, reporters quote previous news coverage relying on unsubstantiated and minimal data to justify their analysis.

These stories repeat dubious assertions, fail to discuss any pathological analysis, and dismiss Kennedy’s considered support of healthcare in Samoa. He had assisted the Samoan government in developing a system for health officials to assess the efficacy and safety of medical interventions or drugs, including vaccines.

In November 2019, while the deaths of Samoan children were rapidly increasing, Kennedy wrote a comprehensive letter to the Samoan Prime Minister, presenting some possible causes of the unprecedented, virulent outbreak of measles. His concerns about the epidemic in Samoa highlight striking anomalies that were apparent to a few investigators at the time, although they remain unexplained.

The most convenient and generally accepted explanations of the outbreak claim the epidemic was the result of hesitancy, causing the population to be under-vaccinated. Measles vaccination rates were low due to the previous deaths of two infants given improperly formulated injections, which had nothing to do with Kennedy’s views.

Any considered analysis of the accessible facts soundly contradicts the conjecture that the high death count was related to low vaccination rates.

In most measles epidemics, mortality is on average one in one thousand, and dying children are often malnourished or immunocompromised. From October through December of 2019, over one in a hundred Samoan children with the disease died, ten times more than any previous outbreak in the world. No accounting for this overt statistical deviance has been published.

Despite the presumptions of those who attack Kennedy, there was never any investigation into any aspect of this baffling tragedy. Edwin Tamasese, a health advocate who questioned Samoan government policies during the outbreak, gave Kennedy some insight into what was happening.

Tamasese was concerned about the number of sick and dying Samoan children and began to assist families whose children were severely ill. He and his colleagues encountered conditions that contradicted the government’s narrative.

While the press condemned him as an anti-vaxxer, Tamasese’s interventions and observations are revelatory. In an interview after the outbreak subsided, he said, “We were very careful to take statistics when we were going in to try to identify trends. When we assessed our numbers, 98 percent of those who were getting ill had been vaccinated consistently six to seven days prior to illness. The excuse was that the vaccine did not have time to become effective. However, according to an immunologist on the team, the six to seven-day period was also the length of time it would take an under-attenuated vaccine to make the recipient sick.”

Doctors in hospitals also reported that the very ill and dying children did not have symptoms consistent with normal cases of measles. When the outbreak began, blood from the first thirty-nine cases had been sent to Australia; only seven samples were positive for measles.

The government stopped testing to confirm the cause of these deaths in early November 2019. Without scientific confirmation, illness and mortality were attributed to low immunization rates. Samoan health authorities continued to claim that the only remedy for the deadly epidemic was a drive to increase vaccination; however, the campaign appeared to increase the number of measles cases.

Neighboring Pacific island countries, Tonga and Fiji, which had concurrent outbreaks of the virus — and had a different source of the measles vaccine — did not suffer the same dramatic mortality rates. This should have raised concerns, yet there hasn’t been an inquiry into why the Samoan government switched vaccine sourcing from India to Belgium midway through the crisis.

A renewed effort to vaccinate with this alternate supply began in the first week of December 2019; it was hailed as the reason the outbreak subsided. Measles vaccines take at least 10 days before creating an immune response. There has been no explanation for the data confirming that the onset of cases dropped dramatically two weeks before this vaccination drive could have had any effect.

The government response was not driven by factual analysis; the effort focused on promoting the vaccine and silencing those questioning authority.

With Samoan officials and the press deriding his work and views, Tamasese was arrested and charged with incitement of a government order and treating children without a license. Although this was deemed appropriate justice by the international news media as they echoed the government’s praise of the vaccine, reporters again failed to present the questions raised by the outbreak.

The prosecution’s primary witness against Tamasese was a nurse whose child had measles. He had suggested that administering vitamins A and C could be helpful — and standard medical treatment for measles patients. She had taken his advice and admitted that her child recovered soon afterward.

Tamasese reported that when the nurse left the courtroom, the judge, in throwing out the case, said, “That witness may as well have represented the accused.” There was relative silence from the news media when all charges against him were dismissed.

While worldwide attention on Samoa ignored dramatic inconsistencies, Kennedy was one of the few people who asked detailed and important questions. His views were marginalized; it was easier and politically correct to blame the tragedy on low rates of vaccination.

The relatively few details known about the Samoan measles outbreak indicate that forces intent on presenting vaccines as an infallible, unquestionable remedy will not tolerate scrutiny or admit failures. This continuing devious tactic is applied internationally and is eagerly supported by most governments and the press.

Analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic has only recently vindicated those who were scorned for questioning the response. The parallels to the unfolding of the epidemic in Samoa are not obscure, and support Kennedy’s contention that vaccine development, manufacturing, and application need much more effective evaluation and monitoring to prevent complications and death.

When the US government assures the public that any vaccine or medication is safe and effective, this must come from an independent, thorough, and transparent process, rather than relying only on the words and actions of those with vested interests.

The current criticism of Kennedy is an endeavor to make him look dangerously ignorant and irresponsible to sway members of the Senate. Much to the chagrin of those who vilify him, his efforts to understand and assist in the Samoan measles outbreak exemplify his thoughtfulness and capabilities.

RFK, Jr. is at the forefront of healthcare oversight; his confirmation as HHS Secretary will ensure that Americans benefit from his experience and knowledge.

December 15, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

West shamelessly whitewashes barbarism in Syria

Strategic Culture Foundation | December 13, 2024

One week after the dramatic collapse of the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, it is too early to give a precise prognostication of how the Arab country and the wider region will emerge politically.

But already, there are grim signs of the nation surging in bloody conflict and barbarism. Predictably, the West is covering up its guilt for creating another epic horror, with its news media shamelessly propagandizing and denying the reality of Syria’s new rulers as terrorist factions.

Syria is facing a fate similar to Libya in 2011. The North African country was turned into a killing field by a NATO regime-change aggression under the cynical guise of “liberation.” NATO-backed jihadists brutally murdered Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and the former oil-rich country has been wrecked as a failed state, riven by warlordism ever since without a functioning national government.

Syria’s former president Assad escaped to Moscow and has been granted asylum by his Russian ally. Apart from that difference, Syria’s future looks ominously like Libya’s. Cruelly, that is rather fitting. The overthrow of Libya in 2011 was used by the United States and its Western allies to mount the regime-change war on Syria that also began in 2011, as recounted in our SCF editorial last week.

Thirteen years on, the takeover of Damascus by the terror group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is unleashing murderous reprisals, internecine warlordism, and sectarian hatred. The U.S. and its Western allies are strenuously covering up the huge imperial crime that has befallen Syria, as with Libya before.

In an audacious denial of reality, Washington and its European partners are talking up a “new beginning” for Syria. It’s a charade of optimism aimed at lulling the world into acceptance of heinous Western criminality.

This outpouring of Western optimism is while the Western-backed Israeli regime immediately launched a blitzkrieg on its northern neighbor, viewing the chaotic events in Syria as an opportunity to annex more land. The Israeli military extended its illegal occupation of the Golan Heights and carried out a massive bombing campaign across Syria.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a hurried tour of the region this week, no doubt to ensure an orderly carving up of Syrian territory and resources between Washington and its allies Turkey and Israel – all of whom have worked for years to pursue regime change in Damascus.

While Washington is urging the formation of a non-sectarian government in Syria that “respects religious minorities and women’s rights” – the cringemaking rhetoric of public relations – the reality on the ground told a different story.

The black flags of Wahhabi Islamism supported by HTS and its other al Qaeda-type associates were hoisted in Damascus and other cities. There are palpable fears among Syrian Shia and Alawite Muslims, as well as Christians, that they will be subjected to a reign of terror, as was seen during the years of U.S.-led proxy war from 2011 onwards with beheadings of infidels and apostates, among other atrocities.

Credible videos have shown HTS supporters executing unarmed captives and shouting obscenities about their victims’ perceived religious affiliation. There have been appalling scenes of barbarism where corpses are dragged through streets tied to trucks. Mothers holding the bodies of their slaughtered sons have been abused by jostling crowds in deranged bloodlust.

In an incredible wave of psyops, Western news media organizations have been whitewashing the events in Syria as a kind of “liberation from the tyranny of Assad rule.”

There have been multiple reports of crowds celebrating in the streets of Damascus and Aleppo, tearing down symbols of Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez. However, the Western media have omitted or downplayed any reports that might indicate a descent into barbarism and sectarian killings.

If there was a prize for propaganda, the British state-owned BBC might have won it with this article headlined: “From Syrian jihadist leader to rebel politician. How Abu Mohammed al-Jolani reinvented himself.”

The truth is it is the Western media, like the BBC and CNN, that have “reinvented” al-Jolani.

The years of al-Jolani carrying out mass killings as a commander in Al Qaeda, Islamic State, Al Nusra as well as HTS have suddenly been shoved down the memory hole, and he is now presented as a statesman supposedly leading Syria to a brighter future.

His belated words about respecting religious minorities and pluralism are reported with cloying gullibility by the Western media. Washington and other Western governments are moving to recognize the new Syrian regime by delisting HTS as a terrorist group and indulging al-Jolani’s rhetoric about reconciliation and tolerance as somehow plausible.

Of course, Washington is euphoric about its apparent success in Syria. Damascus has long been a target for regime change, going back to the Eisenhower administration more than 70 years ago when the Arab state was perceived as being too independent.

More recently, as former U.S. Senator Richard Black explained in this 2016 article, Syria became a renewed target for Washington’s regime change in 2007 when then-President GW Bush’s administration decided Bashar al-Assad had to go. To achieve that illegal result, the U.S. and its regional allies deployed murderous proxies, one of which was Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – the new ruler in Damascus.

The covert proxy war continued under Obama, Trump, and Biden. Russia and Iran’s intervention to defend their Syrian ally managed to impede the regime-change objective, but, in the end, they did not succeed for various reasons, as adduced in a SCF commentary this week.

For over a decade, the Western media have systematically and blatantly lied about Syria to cover up for the U.S.-led imperial aggression against that country. They lied about Assad’s alleged despotism when, in reality, Syrians enjoyed religious and social freedoms. They lied about Assad using chemical weapons when it was the Western-backed jihadist terrorists who used them in false-flag provocations, as Seymour Hersh reported.

The overthrow of Assad appears to be a great victory for the Western imperialist agenda and a blow to Russia and Iran. Washington and its allies are in a celebratory mood over the spoils of victory.

But the signs of bloody disintegration are impossible to conceal even for the lying Western media. In the short term, the Western powers and their propaganda media are trying to present the new rulers of Syria as somehow reformed and benign. This is while Israel annexes territory and U.S. and Turkish-backed factions begin fighting over strongholds.

Syria’s descent into untold mayhem has begun, and in the usual Orwellian fashion, the Western culprits are trying to sell the infernal outcome as a liberation. This is typical of the whitewashing deception that comes as a matter of routine following every imperial regime-change operation. It never ends well.

The people of Syria and the region are facing more turmoil, chaos, conflict, and suffering. The criminal Western imperialist axis is emboldened, but lies are never a sound foundation for the future.

December 14, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | Leave a comment

How Does Western Media Try to Defame Calin Georgescu?

Calin Georgescu, running as an independent candidate for president, speaks to media in Bucharest, Romania, Oct. 1, 2024.
By Oleg Burunov – Sputnik – 13.12.2024

Amid uncertainty surrounding Romania’s botched presidential elections, Western media has launched an information campaign against independent candidate Calin Georgescu, who earlier made it to the country’s presidential runoff.

His progress, however, was annulled by the country’s constitutional court, which accused Georgescu of money laundering and being “Moscow’s man” – allegations he denies.

How does Western media paint the 62-year-old politician?

  • The Financial Times : Romania shocked the world by voting for “a pro-Putin TikTok star” and “an outsider with ultranationalist views who was polling poorly just weeks before the election.”
  • The BBC: Georgescu is “a figure from the extreme fringe of Romanian politics.”
  • Sky News: He “has emerged from obscurity to top the polls in Romania’s presidential election. But the Anglophile and Trump supporter is also his country’s most divisive figure for decades.”
  • AP : “A self-professed Donald Trump supporter”, Georgescu remained “a little-known entity until just weeks ago.”
  • France 24: “The pro-Russian outsider candidate”.
  • The Week : The “Putin of Romania” and “the EU and NATO’s worst nightmare.”

Romania held its presidential election on November 24, with Georgescu winning the first round with 22.94% of the votes. The leader of the liberal Save Romania Union, Elena Lasconi, who favors the partnership with NATO and the US, came second with 19.18%.

The second round of elections was scheduled for December 8. However, on December 6, the Constitutional Court ruled to cancel the results of the first round, paving the way for a rerun. The Romanian government must now set the date of a new presidential vote. Both Georgescu and Lasconi criticized the ruling.

Georgescu earlier told Western media that he had spent “zero” on his TikTok campaign and had “zero” ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he praised as “a patriot and a leader”.

The country’s opposition parties and politicians slammed the court’s decision as anti-democratic. Georgescu, for his part, insisted that the ruling “is more than a legal controversy” and that “it is basically a formalized coup d’état.”

December 13, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Iran’s Syria envoy rejects reports on cash theft from embassy

Press TV – December 11, 2024

Iran’s ambassador to Syria has rejected reports that some $42 million worth of cash was stolen from the Iranian embassy in Damascus just after staff left it in anticipation of a change of government in the Arab country.

“There was a single dollar. Why should there be $42 million in an embassy,” said Hossein Akbari on Wednesday during an interview with Tasnim news agency.

Akbari said the ransacking of the Iranian embassy, which took place on Monday, was the work of a group of thugs who were not related to armed militants taking control of Damascus after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad left the country last weekend.

He said that only the embassy’s furniture had been damaged during the ransacking, adding that the staff had evacuated all other important items, including computers and technical equipment.

The ambassador said that Iran’s embassy in Damascus is currently under protection like other foreign missions in Syria upon orders issued by the ruling militants.

“I’m sorry for those media outlets that gave such extensive coverage to this fake news,” he said while referring to the domestic circulation of the story on cash theft from the embassy in Syria which he said had originally been reported by anti-Iran platforms outside of the country.

Akbari said that some 10,000 Iranians are currently working or studying in Syria and need to receive regular consular services.

He added that the ruling militants in Damascus have been urging foreign missions to continue their activities, adding that Iran will resume offering consular services in Syria once the Arab country’s transitional government sets up its foreign ministry.

December 11, 2024 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

NBC Blasts Trump and Kennedy for Wanting to Conduct Vaccine-Autism Studies

NBC claims this issue has been debunked … but has it?

Injecting Freedom by Aaron Siri | December 8, 2024

NBC today blasted DonaldTrump and RobertKennedyJr for wanting to study a possible connection between “autism and childhood vaccines” because NBC claims it has been “debunked” by “hundreds of studies.” But has it? The answer is unmistakably “no!” Here is the proof:

Most parents with autistic children claim vaccines – including DTaP, Hep B, Hib, PCV13, and IPV, each injected 3 times by 6 months of age – are a cause of their child’s autism.* Yet the studies to support that these vaccines do not cause autism have not been conducted.

In 1986, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act in which it ordered federal health authorities (HHS) to study whether pertussis vaccine can cause autism due to parental complaints regarding same.

In 1991, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued its report on this question and could not find a single study on the question of whether pertussis vaccine causes autism. Meaning, the science had not been done.

In 2012, the IOM was again commissioned to study this question, this time by CDC, and also the question of whether tetanus and diphtheria vaccines can cause autism (DTaP), and again the IOM could not find a single study to support the claim that these vaccines do not cause autism. Not one. But it did find one study supporting that DTaP vaccine is correlated with autism but threw it out since it was based on VAERS data.

In 2018, I deposed the world’s leading vaccinologist about the 2012 finding by the IOM and while admitting there are no studies to support that these vaccines do not cause autism, he said he would nonetheless tell parents vaccines do not cause autism even though he has no evidence to support that claim.

In 2019, we sued CDC for the studies it claims support that the vaccines given in the first six months of life do not cause autism. CDC then identified 20 studies: 18 of those studied a different vaccine (MMR) or an ingredient not in these vaccines (thimerosal), and one irrelevant study looked at antigens. Incredibly, the final study CDC identified was the 2012 IOM review that found no studies supporting that DTaP doesn’t cause autism.

In 2020, in a lawsuit specifically about vaccines and autism, one the world’s leading vaccinologists admitted under oath that there were no studies to support that vaccines given in the first six months of life do not cause autism.

This is why actually studying whether vaccines cause autism is important: Video report

While CDC claims that vaccines do not cause autism, despite demanding the studies to support this claim for the vaccines given in the first six months of life, and asking, suing, deposing, etc., for them for years, we still have not received a single such study.

But NBC doesn’t really care about the facts, rather it just repeats the dogmatic claim that “vaccines do not cause autism” like a mantra.

One final thought: given the lack of studies regarding vaccines and autism – the issue CDC and “health” authorities claimed to have most thoroughly studied – imagine the state of the “science” with regard to the 100 other serious harms (often immune or immune-mediated disorders) parents claim are caused by vaccines. (For more meat on that bone watch Episode 388)

December 8, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

France is a perfect example of centrist elites wrecking the West

By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | December 7, 2024

It is almost as if some EU capitals have a tenacious death wish. After Berlin’s amazing and ongoing self-Morgenthauing act of industrial suicide for the greater glory of America’s NATO and Zelensky’s Ukraine, Paris is now self-Waterlooing. As France’s newly-discharged prime minister Michel Barnier almost correctly noted, the “country is going through a profound crisis.”

‘Almost,’ because it’s not ’going through’, but stuck in it.

Meanwhile, the man who set this train to nowhere in motion with a hissy fit of an early-election at the beginning of June, former investment-banker-turned-president Emmanuel Macron, won’t quit, although he’s politically bankrupt. He also keeps blaming everyone but himself, while promising to provide “stability.”

The president’s obstinacy would be funny if it weren’t so tragic for France. As French newspaper Libération has put it, “how can you embody stability when you’re the one who’s produced the chaos?” But then, to be fair to the former Wunderkind of Centrism, for the West’s “elites” and their offspring, too (Hi there, Crack Hunter, lawless son of Genocide Joe!), taking responsibility is just so passé. More importantly, Macron’s personal if humungous failure as a politician and, worse, national leader is not the whole story.

Despite the broad powers of the French presidency and Macron’s narcissistic tendency to over-estimate his own significance, he has been a devastating catalyst, an unwitting tool of history rather than a mover-and-shaker in his own right. This, not to be misunderstood, does not absolve him of guilt. It simply means that focusing on him is much less interesting than he himself believes.

Instead, the deep crisis that has come to a head with parliament’s sacking, on December 4, of Barnier and his short-lived minority government, is the result of two large social forces, and one overarching trend that pervades in the West and deserves the label of historic.

Regarding the social forces, on one side, there are economic stagnation and budgetary stress, and, on the other, a pervasive loss of popular legitimacy for politics-as-usual and, in addition, of basic trust and confidence. Concerning the historic trend, we’ll get to that in a moment.

As for the economics of the mess, just consider a few basic facts and key indicators: The trigger for the government collapse was, as recently in Germany, a crisis of state finances: Barnier’s short-lived minority government fell over its attempt to push through a budget for 2025. The deficit for this year, 2024, is forecast to reach at least 6% of GDP, which is, of course, twice the official EU limit of 3%.

For comparison, the Russian Finance Ministry estimates that country’s 2024 budget deficit to reach just over 1%. Even accounting for potential bias on the side of a government agency, the difference is striking, especially if you consider that Moscow has been the target of unprecedented Western economic warfare and has also had to mobilize to defeat the West in the proxy war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, France’s economic growth is at barely 1%, according The Economist and, according to the European Commission, will slow to 0.8% in 2025. Economists say that’s too optimistic. In other words, there is no “growth,” only stagnation-by-another-name. French business struggles with high energy prices, high interest rates, and waning consumer confidence. Major French firms are cutting jobs by the thousands, bankruptcies “are soaring,” and there is a cost-of-living crisis, again similar to the other Sick Man of the EU, Germany. Long gone seem the days when a Franco-German duo was supposed to be the EU’s beating heart.

To round off the misery, Paris sits on sovereign debt totaling almost €3.3 trillion, equivalent to over 110% of GDP. What the EU allows officially is 60%. That’s a situation The Economist calls “alarming,” with fine English understatement. In reality, “alarming” was yesterday. Paris is now at la-merde-is-hitting-the-proverbial-fan level. Just consult the international ratings agencies: Already at the end of October, Moody’s downgraded France’s credit outlook from “stable” to “negative”; now, the agency has reacted to the budding crisis-on-top-of-a-crisis by highlighting France’s political deadlock and concluding that the probability of consolidating its public finances has been reduced. Some French observers at least are wondering if a full credit rating downgrade is coming. And what about Standard and Poor’s and Fitch, Moody’s competitors? Pardon my French, but just don’t ask.

It’s a dismal picture on the economic front but wait till you see the politics and the national mood!

In the most immediate terms, Macron’s reckless early-election gamble in the summer and his devious and undemocratic maneuvering to keep out the victorious Left after his party’s predictable trouncing, has left France, in effect, ungovernable. Barnier’s predictable failure makes no difference to that fact. Fresh parliamentary elections, once again, would probably not help either. And anyhow, they are ruled out by the constitution before next summer.

Macron will now try out yet another prime minister, number six since he became president. That is a high attrition rate: In 7 years, the would-be embodiment of “institutional stability” has gone through as many heads of government as De Gaulle in 19 years.

It’s also an accelerating attrition rate: Macron’s prime ministers get used up ever faster. The future will show if this trend can be broken. If so, then not because of but despite the president’s baneful influence. As a French commentator noted, he won’t provide a solution, but he can still cause a lot of problems.

There are good reasons for declaring this moment the death of Macronism. Its core project of leaving behind the politics of left and right and replacing them with a combination of Centrism and a “Jupiterian” (Macron’s own, early term) personality cult now lies in tatters.

Specifically, Macronism’s claim to, at the very least, stave off the populist right of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) is a sad joke: No matter what you think about the RN, there is no doubt that its power has never been as great as now, and its chances of capturing the presidency, with or without Marine Le Pen in the lead, have never been better.

Macron has become the Biden of France: in both cases, while building their rule on a promise to keep out right-populist challengers, the two presidents’ incompetence and egotism has facilitated the rise of those challengers.

And how do the French feel in the midst of all of this? Spoiler alert: Not grand. According to French newspaper Le Monde’s summary of comprehensive polling by Ipsos, France is a “country anxious and discontent, hit by a political crisis,” and bereft of trust in its “political personnel and institutions.” In terms of their individual experiences, only 50% are content, 70% believe that the conditions of their life are “less and less favorable,” and 55% say they find it hard to make ends meet.

Regarding their country as a whole, a whopping 87% consider it in decline, which is 18% worse than when Macron was elected for the first time in 2017: National slow claps for “Jupiter.” But the rest of the political elites don’t look much better: Solid, even preponderant majorities consider them “corrupt” (63%), “not representative” (78%), and out for their own, personal good (83%).

In principle, there’s a difference between being miserable and being afraid. But the two states of mind go together really well, too: Almost all of the French (92%) have a bad feeling they are living in a “violent society”, and almost a third think “very violent” is the more precise term. You may say things could hardly get worse. Yet the French firmly believe they can: 89% see violence on the rise, and the majority of those respondents (61%) think it is rising “a lot.”

In sum: A selfish boss from hell (who could fire himself but swears he won’t), no functioning government, a tanking economy, and a mood like there’s no tomorrow. How did that happen to the “Grande Nation”? This is where we get back to the third factor mentioned above: the overarching historic trend. Let’s zoom out from unhappy France and small-minded, selfish Macron, and what we are seeing is an exemplary case of Centrism ruining a country.

True, you would never guess that if you relied on, for instance, The Economist. There, the same old, tired, and dim story is relentlessly told: How a heroic “center” and its stalwart defenders are resisting (or not so much) dastardly attacks from the “populists” and “extremists.” It’s an epic battle of light and darkness, Hobbits and Orcs, almost as if lifted straight from a fantasy novel. It even features glorious last stands: For the New York Times, Britain’s Keir Starmer, “one of the last centrist leaders on the global stage” is “trying to fight populism from the lonely center.” “Remember the Alamo,” I guess.

And yet, look at the real world: Clinton, Biden, Harris, Scholz, Macron, to name only a few – What do they all have in common? They stand for the failed, rejected project of elitist Centrism, dragging down their countries. For a stubborn, snobbish, and manipulative style of politics, complete with lawfare, mass media campaigns of calumny and disinformation, incipient authoritarianism and police-state methods, a dead-end foreign policy of blaming others (Russia and China most of all) for their countries’ problems and decline, and a resolute surrender to the forces of “the market,” which, here, is simply code for globalized capitalist interests.

It is a project that systematically confuses securing the power and privileges of traditional elites with national stability and welfare. Last but not least, its practitioners stand for an aggressive hubris that routinely derides and demonizes all challengers as beyond the pale of propriety. None of this has anything to do with democracy. On the contrary, as Macron’s handling of elections has illustrated, this is a policy of preventing popular participation and empowerment from below. Centrism is in deep crisis. That much, dear Economist, is true. It should be and only has itself to blame.

Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.

December 7, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

Syrian Women Exploited in MI6 Propaganda Ops

By Kit Klarenberg | Global Delinquents | December 5, 2024

The propaganda value of women in conflicts has long-been cynically exploited by Western intelligence services. A leaked CIA memorandum from March 2010 on covert means of increasing flagging support for NATO’s Afghanistan mission noted women “could serve as ideal messengers” in “humanizing” the military occupation. This was due to their “ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory”:

“Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories… could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the mission. Media events that feature testimonials by Afghan women would probably be most effective if broadcast on programs that have large and disproportionately female audiences.”

Throughout the US occupation of course, Afghanistan remained one of the worst countries in the world to be a woman, by some margin. Roughly a year after that CIA memo was authored, Gay Girl in Damascus, a blog purportedly written by Syrian-American lesbian Amina Arraf, garnered significant mainstream attention. Widely hailed for her “fearless” and “inspiring” eyewitness reporting, she was lauded as a symbol of the “progressive” revolution erupting in the country.

In June 2011, Amina’s cousin announced on the blog Amina had been kidnapped by three armed men in the Syrian capital. In response, numerous Facebook pages were set up calling for Amina’s release and ‘liked’ by tens of thousands, #FreeAmina trended widely on Twitter, journalists and rights groups begged Western governments to demand her release, and the US State Department announced it was investigating Amina’s disappearance.

Six days later, it was revealed ‘Amina’ was in fact Tom MacMaster, a middle-aged American man living in Scotland, who had penned extensive lesbian literotica fantasies under that alter ego. While corporate news outlets quickly forgot all about the hoax they’d so comprehensively fallen for, their appetite for dubious human interest stories emanating from the crisis wasn’t diminished.

‘Huge Global Coverage’

In July 2019, an image of two young Syrian girls trapped in rubble in opposition-occupied Idlib attempting to haul their sister to safety as she dangled off the precipice of a dilapidated building, their father looking on in horror above, spread far and wide on social media.

The photo, snapped by a photographer for Syrian news service SY24, went viral the world over. Unbeknownst to viewers though, SY24 was created and funded by Global Strategy Network, a prominent British intelligence cutout founded by Richard Barrett, former MI6 counter-terrorism director. In leaked submissions to the British Foreign Office, Global Strategy boasted of how its propaganda “campaigns” broadcast via SY24 generated “huge global coverage,” having been seen by “many hundreds of millions of people,” and “attracting comment as far as the UN Security Council.”

SY24 content was produced by a network of ‘stringers’ in Syria that Global Strategy trained and provided with equipment, including “cameras and video editing software.” The firm drew particular attention to a team of female journalists it had tutored, “who provide about 40 percent of all SY content,” and were part of “a broad ‘network of networks’” enabling the company “to drive stories into the mainstream.”

Global Strategy also established a dedicated centre for training female journalists to produce content for SY24 in Idlib, “accessing stories that male journalists cannot,” which were then shared on social media. It boasted that almost half of SY24’s followers were women, “a remarkably high ratio for Syria-focused platforms.”

Carefully cultivating an entirely misleading image of an inclusive, credible ‘moderate’ Syrian opposition was of paramount importance to British inelligence. It helped whitewash the barbarous nature of the various ‘rebel’ factions London was backing in the region, while simultaneously engendering support among Western citizens for regime change.

In order to engage the “international community” to this end, Global Strategy, in conjunction with ARK – a shadowy “conflict transformation and stabilization consultancy” headed by veteran MI6 officer Alistair Harris – planned “communication surges” around “key dates” such as International Women’s Day.

In a particularly elaborate example of such a “surge”, the pair collaborated on “Back to School”, a campaign in which young Syrians returned to education. Idlib City Council, opposition commanders, and other elements on the ground concurrently engaged in a “unified” communications blitz, using “shared slogans, hashtags and branding.” Rebel fighters were sent to “clear roads” and “enable children and teachers to get to schools,” all the while filmed by the pair’s voluminous local journalist network, footage of which was then “disseminated online and on broadcast channels.”

Ensuring “female teachers” received sizeable coverage in the Western media was a key objective of the campaign. Furthermore, in many leaked files, ARK boasted of the huge network of journalists it had trained and funded in Syria, who would cover such PR stunts, secretly orchestrated by the organisation. Their reports in turn fed to the firm’s “well-established contacts” at major news outlets including Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, New York Times, and Reuters, “further amplifying their effect.”

‘Thrust by Tragedy’

Other documents make clear ARK well-understood the immense difficulties of promoting the role of women internally and externally during the crisis. One file on “[incorporating] the role of women in the moderate opposition” notes Syrian women in rebel-occupied areas faced “an almost overwhelming variety of problems,” and “the space for women to participate in public life has contracted significantly as the conflict has progressed.”

As a result, ARK was “extremely aware of the risks of promoting women’s participation beyond currently accepted social norms… given the potential to hinder message resonance or result in a backlash against female participation.” It therefore proposed to “subtly reframe the narrative of women… increasing the amount of coverage of their initiatives and opinions as the context allows.”

One means of “subtle reframing” was Moubader (which translates to “person who takes initiative”), a media asset created by ARK in 2015, comprising a “high-quality hard copy monthly magazine with widespread distribution across opposition-held areas of Syria,” with a website and Facebook page boasting almost 200,000 likes. Moubader was established by ARK to achieve “behavioural change” in readers. “Given the importance of broadcast television as a trusted source” in Syria, ARK also sought British intelligence funding to develop a Moubader TV programme, to “leverage stories and values to maximum effect and reach an even wider audience.”

Documents submitted to the Foreign Office by another intelligence cutout, Albany, similarly noted women’s access to education, healthcare, and economic opportunity had “been debilitated” during the crisis, which issues such as early marriage, child military recruitment, and “transactional sex” exacerbated. The UN defines the latter as “non-commercial sexual relationships motivated by an implicit assumption that sex will be exchanged for material support or other benefits.”

Still, Albany considered so many Syrian women having been “thrust by tragedy into head of household and breadwinner positions” over the course of the crisis as a golden opportunity to propagandize them and, in turn, their families, while promoting the ‘inclusive’ nature of the opposition, by creating and partnering with female civil society organizations and journalists.

ARK likewise believed women to be a “critical audience”, given the number of Syrian households with female heads –“up to 70 percent”. So, the organisation sought to ensure they were well-represented in all its domestic and international “broadcast products”, as well as on social media.

‘Female Participation’

Unsurprisingly, the files do not acknowledge the increasingly hostile environment for women in Syria directly resulted from foreign efforts to destabilise and depose its government. ISIS and al-Nusra were and remain rightly notorious for their monstrous treatment of women in the areas they occupied, which included widespread rape, sexual violence and abduction.

However, many armed opposition groups backed by Britain and other foreign powers imposed stringent restrictions on women in the areas they occupied, requiring them to wear hijabs and abayas, doling out extreme punishments for failing to comply, imposing discriminatory measures prohibiting them from moving freely, working, attending school, and more.

There are indications British intelligence was in close quarters with such activities. For instance, in December 2017 BBC documentary Jihadis You Pay For alleged Foreign Office cash distributed on its behalf via contrator Adam Smith International in Syria ended up in the pockets of Free Syrian Police (FSP) officers who not only stood by while women were stoned to death, but closed surrounding roads to facilitate their murder.

Free Syrian Police go unarmed to help their community - BBC News

The ‘Free Syria Police’ at work

FSP, an unarmed shadow civilian police force operating in opposition-controlled areas, was created, funded and trained under the auspices of the British intelligence-funded Access to Justice and Community Security (AJACS) program. In a perverse irony, leaked Adam Smith International files relating to the project indicate it too sought to exploit women for propaganda purposes, applying a gender policy “to encourage female participation in justice and policing.” The company boasted of how, of the 1,868 police officers it trained under the scheme, six – 0.32 percent ­­– were female.

Quite some “revolution”. As Human Rights Watch noted in 2014, prior to the outbreak of civil war, women and girls across Syria were “largely able to participate in public life, including work and school, and exercise freedom of movement, religion, and conscience.” While the country’s penal code and laws governing issues such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance contained some discriminatory provisions, the country’s constitution guaranteed gender equality.

December 6, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Islamophobia, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Why Ukrainian Soldiers Are Deserting

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 4, 2024

A November 29 article in the Los Angeles Times stated that the Ukrainian military is facing a big problem with desertions:

Desertion is starving the Ukrainian army of desperately needed manpower and crippling its battle plans at a crucial time in its war against Russia’s invasion, which could put Ukraine at a clear disadvantage in any future cease-fire talks… Tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops, tired and bereft, have walked away from combat and front-line positions to slide into anonymity, according to soldiers, lawyers and Ukrainian officials. Entire units have abandoned their posts, leaving defensive lines vulnerable and accelerating territorial losses, according to military commanders and soldiers. Some take medical leave and never return, haunted by the traumas of war and demoralized by bleak prospects for victory. Others clash with commanders and refuse to carry out orders, sometimes in the middle of firefights.

The explanation for the desertions turns on what Ukrainian soldiers have been fighting, killing, and dying for ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ever since the start of the war, U.S. officials, the U.S. mainstream press, and Ukrainian officials have steadfastly maintained that the war is about “freedom.” They say that Russia engaged in an “unprovoked” attack on Ukraine with the aim of conquering and subjugating the country and enslaving the Ukrainian people. From there, we’ve been told, Russia’s aim is to head west, conquer Europe, cross the English Channel and take England, cross the Atlantic and conquer South America, Central America, and Mexico, and then, ultimately, invade and conquer the United States.

The scenario is essentially a replay of the old Cold War racket, where Americans were told that there was an international communist conspiracy to take over the world, one that was centered in Moscow, Russia — yes, that Russia — the same one that is now supposedly doing the same thing today except for the communist part.

The big problem is that the official narrative of why Russia invaded Ukraine was a lie from the get-go. The war between Russia and Ukraine has never been about freedom. It was always about NATO, the military alliance that played a central role in the old Cold War racket. Specifically, it was about the Ukrainian government’s wish to join this old Cold War dinosaur at the behest of the U.S. government.

Is joining NATO worth dying for? Not for me — and obviously not for the large number of Ukrainian soldiers who are now deserting.

For a while, the Ukrainian people bought into the lie that was being fed to them by their own government and by U.S. officials. In the early days of the war, Ukrainians were rushing to join the military to fight for their “freedom.” But over time, many Ukrainians have come to the realization that the war never had anything to do with freedom. It was always about the “right” of the Ukrainian government to join NATO, which is something that is very different from freedom.

There is another important aspect to this phenomenon: the central responsibility that the U.S. government has for this massive disaster. It was the U.S. government, especially the Pentagon, that led the way toward the expansion of NATO eastward, with the aim of ultimately absorbing Ukraine, which would enable the Pentagon to install its bases, tanks, troops, and nuclear missiles along Russia’s border. Throughout that move eastward, Russia continued beseeching U.S. officials to stop and instead to comply with their repeated promises to not expand NATO an inch eastward after the ostensible end of the Cold War.

But the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — i.e., the U.S. national-security establishment — insisted on breaking those repeated promises. Ending the Cold War was the last thing they wanted to do. It had been too big a cash cow for them. They were not about to let it go without a fight. They knew that by expanding eastward toward Russia, in violation of their repeated promises they had made to Russia not to do that, they could succeed in provoking Russia into invading Ukraine. It was an ingenious — and diabolical — strategy, one that got them what they wanted — a renewed Cold War plus a hot war in which the U.S. government is using the Ukrainian people as its sacrificial puppets — and getting Russia and the United States ever closer to the prospect of all-out nuclear war.

We also mustn’t ignore the role of the U.S. mainstream press has played in this deadly, destructive, or sordid affair. Whenever critics point out the U.S. scheme that successfully provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, the U.S. mainstream press dutifully describes the criticism as repeating “Russian talking points,” implying that the criticisms cannot possibly be true.

While Ukrainians are now deserting the military, U.S. officials are exhorting their Ukrainian counterparts to crack down on their people. According to that L.A. Times article, “The U.S. urges Ukraine to draft more troops, and allow for conscription of those as young as 18.” Undoubtedly, U.S. officials are advocating the adoption of such coercive measures in the name of “freedom.”

December 4, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

The Pardoning of Hunter Biden’s Crimes in Ukraine

By Professor Glenn Diesen | December 3, 2024

Joe Biden promised not to pardon his son Hunter Biden, and was subsequently celebrated by the media for being principled and standing up for the rule of law. However, in a not-so-surprising move, Joe Biden reversed his position and issued a sweeping pardon with an incredible legal breadth. The pardon protects Hunter Biden from any crimes he may have committed over the past decade, since January 2014. This date is no accident, as it marks the beginning of the Biden family’s seedy and likely criminal activities in Ukraine.

Joe Biden was the Vice President when the West backed a coup in Ukraine in February 2014. The US sought to cement its control over Ukrainian resources for economic interests and as an instrument for political influence. Joe Biden involved his son to personally enrich himself and his family.

Three months after the coup, Hunter Biden and a close family friend of US Secretary of State, John Kerry, became board members of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. The job paid $50.000 a month despite Hunter Biden having no experience or competencies in the gas industry or Ukraine. In 2017, the NATO think tank Atlantic Council and Burisma signed a cooperative agreement, with a focus on “energy security”.

Ukrainian General Prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, opened a corruption case against the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Joe Biden subsequently intervened by having Ukraine’s General Prosecutor fired with the threat of withholding a $1 billion US loan guarantee. Shokin, complained that since 2014, “the most shocking thing is that all the [government] appointments were made in agreement with the United States”. Washington’s behaviour, according to Shokin, indicated that they “believed that Ukraine was their fiefdom”.

Vice President Joe Biden insisted that the decision was not related to Burisma or his son, as he falsely alleged that he has “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealing”. However, Hunter Biden’s business partner in Burisma, Devon Archer, confirmed in July 2023 that Joe Biden was deeply involved in Hunter Biden’s business.

Scandals threatened Joe Biden’s campaign during the 2020 presidential election as the content of Hunter Biden’s communications was leaked. The criminal activities of Hunter Biden, which seemingly could implicate his father, could likely result in Trump winning the election.

The intelligence community intervened in the election as more than 50 former intelligence officials signed a letter, published in Politico, supporting the narrative that the Biden laptop scandal was a Russian disinformation campaign and did not prove the crime of the Biden family. Twitter and Facebook immediately censured the story, while tensions with Russia escalated.

One year later, in September 2021, Politico acknowledged the authenticity of the Hunter Biden emails and that Russia was not involved in any way. Mark Zuckerberg also admitted that Facebook had been pressured to censor Hunter Biden laptop story, which was direct election interference in favour of Joe Biden.

Joe Biden’s pardon of his son’s decade-long involvement in Ukraine implicitly entails pardoning Joe Biden himself. It is very unlikely that anyone will be held accountable for the Biden crimes in Ukraine, and there will be continued loss of trust in both the legal system and the media.

December 4, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

UNESCO’s New Mission: Train Influencers About Combatting Online “Misinformation”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 2, 2024

The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is now incorporating teaching influencers how to “fact check” into its activities.

UNESCO claims that influencers have become “primary sources of news and cultural information” around the world – which prompted it to carry out a survey into how these online personalities verify the “news” they present.

Citizens in UN member-countries may or may not be happy that this is how their taxpayer money funding the world organization is being spent these days. But UNESCO is not only conducting surveys; it is also developing a training course for said influencers (which are also interchangeably referred to as content creators in press releases).

It’s meant to teach them not only to “report misinformation, disinformation and hate speech” but also to collaborate with legacy media and these outlets’ journalists, in order to “amplify fact-based information.”

The survey, “Behind the screens,” was done together with researchers from the US Bowling Green State University. 500 influencers from 45 countries took part, and the key findings, UNESCO said, are that 63 percent of them “lack rigorous and systematic fact-checking protocols” – but also, that 73% said they “want to be trained.”

This UN agency also frames the results as showing that respondents are “struggling” with disinformation and hate speech and are “calling for more training.”

UNESCO is justifying its effort to teach influencers to “rigorously” check facts by referring to its media and information literacy mandate. The report laments that mainstream media has become “only the third most common source (36.9%) for content creators, after their own experience and their own research and interviews.”

It would seem content creators/influencers are driven by common sense, but UNESCO wants them to forge closer ties with journalists (specifically those from legacy, i.e., traditional media – UNESCO appears very eager to stress that multiple times.)

Under the guise of concern, the agency also essentially warns creators/influencers that they should be better aware of regulations and “international standards” that pertain to digital media – in order to avoid “legal uncertainty” that exposes them to “prosecution and conviction in some countries.”

And now, UNESCO and US-based Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas have launched a one-month course which is currently involving 9,000 people from 160 countries. The goal is to train them to “address disinformation and hate speech and provide them with a solid grounding in global human rights standards.”

The initiative looks like an attempt to get “traditional” journalists to influence the influencers, and try to prop up their outlets, that are experiencing an erosion in trust among their audiences.

December 3, 2024 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

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