One Western Official Finally Comes Clean About NATO Expansion
By Ted Galen Carpenter | The Libertarian Institute | September 21, 2023
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg likely surprised both factions in the ongoing debate about NATO expansion and its role in triggering the Russia-Ukraine War. He also undermined (perhaps fatally) the official cover story about the reasons for the Ukraine war. Since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, Western officials and their allies in the corporate media have insisted vehemently that the alliance’s addition of Eastern European nations after the Cold War and giving a pledge to Ukraine that it would become a member someday had nothing to do with Vladimir Putin’s decision to attack his neighbor. Indeed, anyone who argued otherwise risked being accused of echoing Russian propaganda and being “Putin’s puppet.”
Both the official explanation and the pervasive narrative regarding the war were unequivocal. Putin was power-hungry and unwilling to tolerate an independent, pro-Western Ukraine on Russia’s border. Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Steven Pifer’s interpretation was typical; “For the Kremlin, a democratic, Western-oriented, economically successful Ukraine poses a nightmare, because that Ukraine would cause Russians to question why they cannot have the same political voice and democratic rights that Ukrainians do.” Even when Pifer published his piece in July 2022, that explanation was extremely weak, given Ukraine’s own corruption and authoritarianism. Volodymyr Zelensky’s subsequent systematic assault on civil liberties makes the notion that Putin felt threatened by Ukraine as an irresistible democratic magnet patently absurd. Ukraine is not a democratic country by any reasonable definition of the term.
Nevertheless, other analysts made arguments similar to Pifer’s thesis. That Russian grievances over NATO helped spark the war “makes no sense,” wrote Rutgers professor Alexander Motyl. “NATO cannot have been the issue,” historian Timothy Snyder insists; Putin “simply wants to conquer Ukraine, and a reference to NATO was one form of rhetorical cover for his colonial venture.” Such comments matched the official positions that the U.S. and other NATO governments adopted. Interventionist opponent Caitlin Johnstone was accurate that “arguably the single most egregious display of war propaganda in the 21st century occurred last year, when the entire western political/media class began uniformly bleating the word ‘unprovoked’ in reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
In a September 6, 2023 speech to the European Union Parliament, Secretary General Stoltenberg contradicted the entrenched official narrative, most likely inadvertently. “President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade (sic) Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.”
Stoltenberg emphasized, “He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.” Consequently, “he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.” [Emphasis added]
Several scholars and former officials had warned for years that NATO’s expansion to Russia’s border would end badly, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine confirmed those predictions. George Kennan, the intellectual father of America’s containment policy during the Cold War, perceptively warned in a May 1998 New York Times interview about what the Senate’s ratification of NATO’s first round of expansion would set in motion. “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” Kennan stated. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake.”
NATO’s attempt to make Ukraine a full-fledged military asset was especially provocative. Kremlin leaders regarded Ukraine as not only being in Moscow’s rightful sphere of influence, but in Russia’s core security zone. Putin made that point clear on numerous occasions at least as far back as his speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Instead of taking those warnings seriously, Western leaders blew through one red light after another. NATO’s leader, the United States, especially worked to forge ever-closer military ties with Ukraine. In essence, the Trump and Biden administrations began to treat Ukraine as a NATO member in all but name.
Extensive arms shipments to Kiev along with U.S. and NATO joint military exercises constituted the centerpiece of that policy. But that was not the extent of Washington’s provocations. Shortly after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the CIA initiated secret paramilitary training programs for Ukrainian special operations personnel in the United States and in Ukraine. Massive arms shipments to Kiev along with joint U.S. and NATO military exercises with Ukrainian forces constituted the centerpiece of that policy. Yahoo national security correspondent Dan Dorfman noted that “U.S. and Ukrainian intelligence have even participated in joint offensive cyber operations against Russian government targets, according to former officials.”
Such actions make a mockery of the argument that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. That assertion is convenient propaganda, but it was always devoid of both facts and logic. Stoltenberg’s comments merely confirm what should have been obvious to both the foreign policy community and the news media from the beginning.
Biden’s ‘age’ is now becoming an issue
Leave it to The Washington Post to come up with a ridiculous euphemism designed to conceal the real story
BY BILL RICE, JR. | SEPTEMBER 19, 2023
The spin-producing talents of our nation’s most prominent mainstream media “journalists” leave me dumbfounded.
The Washington Post would be at the top of the list of “news” organizations that excel in covering up real news and, when its editors feel they have to run an embarrassing story, concocting outlandish euphemisms to conceal the real story.
The Post just published a big story stating that President Biden’s “age” is making many political leaders wonder if he should not run for re-election.
This long story never once mentioned the words “dementia” or “cognitive decline,” proving once again that the press knows which giant elephants it can’t mention in a news article – especially if this elephant is a Democrat donkey.
A few excerpts from the article should give readers a greater appreciation of the talents of the Post’s wordsmiths.
Here’s the lede paragraph:
“A growing number of polls are showing voters concerned about President Biden’s age and energy … Prominent commentators have ruminated on whether he should drop out of the presidential race.”
“… Parts of the Democratic Party (now) fret about whether the man who helped oust Donald Trump from the White House may not have the vitality, at 80, to successfully prevent a return …”
“Supporters and critics alike suggested that Biden’s prospects may hinge on whether he can find a way to overcome a persistent and growing feeling in the electorate that his advanced age is his defining characteristic.”
Deep into the story, we get one sentence where Post editors come as close as they as they can to broaching the real truth:
“When asked what word came to mind when they thought of Biden, more than a quarter of (poll) respondents mentioned age, with another 15 percent using words like “slow” or “confused.”
Readers could also read between the lines with this passage:
“Biden’s gait can be stiff, and his physical and verbal stumbles have at times given his critics material. “
My comment: Biden’s verbal stumbles don’t happen only “at times;” they happen every single day, every time he opens his mouth and tries to read the teleprompter remarks written for him by aides.
While The Post frames this story with the question of whether Biden will step down because of his “age,” increasing numbers of Americans now understand the real story is the growing realization that our national “watchdog” press corp is completely captured.
An army of pack-thinking journalist clones are basically acknowledging their most important job is the daily effort to protect the person who was selected to implement their favorite country-destroying causes.
Clear-thinking adults now know the press corps will always eschew important journalism if said stories embarrass them or might lessen the likelihood key items from their agenda are brought to fruition.
The Washington Post has hundreds of journalists, including a platoon of journalists who cover only the White House and the president. Each of these journalists and editors have multiple sources in the White House and probably shoot the bull with these White House aides over drinks after work.
For four years, they’ve known Biden has textbook dementia, which was obvious three years ago, but has gotten worse every week since.
If they wanted to, these alleged journalists could have “broken” the “Biden has dementia” story years ago, including anecdotes that would make even the most loyal Democrat proclaim, “Good God.”
I’m a freelance journalist in Troy, Alabama and I know from common sense that 50 White House staffers must be working 24-7 to produce the cue cards, teleprompter speeches and recruiting Easter Bunny interns, all of whom are working feverishly to get the leader of the free world through another day without the Mother of All “gaffes” playing out for the world to see.
None of this would matter if this was our retired grandfather battling this affliction, but this happens to be a man who can start World War III and signs “emergency orders” that affect hundreds of millions of citizens.
Needless to say, if Donald Trump had been experiencing the same cognitive decline while he was president, this alarming mental condition would have – correctly – been exposed in one week.
If it was exposed, this would mean all those Biden “critics” referenced in the Post article … had been right all along. It would mean that everyone would know that America’s news-gathering journalists actually exist to conceal important news.
And more people are starting to reach this conclusion as well: If 98 percent of the most-important journalists in the world are concealing obvious truths about the president’s dementia, what else have they been concealing or refusing to investigate?
The answer: Everything important.
The Washington Post could also detonate all the Covid lies and cover-ups … in about two weeks – if its editors wanted to do this and were given permission to do so from their controllers.
They could have easily broken the Hunter Biden/Joe Biden influence peddling scandals … years ago.
The real story is the public is never going to get any real stories from this batch of sycophants and professional propaganda writers.
If some rogue journalists stunned us and decided to practice important investigative journalism, their editors and publishers wouldn’t let them because this would prove this news organization spiked important stories for years.
People might say, “Wow. This expose is great … but why did it take you three years to figure this out or authorize these investigations?”
The fear of publishers is the public would belatedly learn the most important lesson – that all those wacko and dangerous critics were … right all along.
Not only were all the experts wrong – not only were all the key narratives fiction – plenty of journalists must have suspected this; they simply knew they weren’t allowed to prove this.
As we can see from this article, there’s now no denying President Biden has major mental issues (even though the story never mentions “mental issues.”) It’s a coin toss whether “Joe Biden” can make it through the primaries, much less four years of a second term.
Even with mail-in ballots and rigged elections, the Powers That Be are no doubt wondering if Biden’s dementia will cost the Democrats four more years in the White House.
From Climate Change initiatives to central bank digital currency to the WHO treaty to future mRNA vaccines (and to cover-up past crimes against humanity), it’s imperative their guy remain in the White House.
Gavin Newsom, an awful governor of a state that’s coming apart at the seams, seems to be the betting favorite as the best politico Democrats can find to fill in for their current leading man … who will exit stage left not because of dementia … but because of “age.”
Apparently, this is the only story they’ve got and they’re going to stick to it.
For the last four years, disinformation has become a buzz word of our times. Biden himself (reading from his teleprompter) said this, and so has everyone who works for the federal government.
The Washington Post says it too. But most of the world doesn’t understand the key way the most important disinformation is spread. What we have is Disinformation by Omission. Don’t talk about all those giant pachyderms in the room. Don’t tell your readers our Emperor has no Brain.
When “don’t investigate this” might no longer work, society’s elite communicators simply spun another narrative – The poor man is simply getting up there in age and is beginning to lose some of his previous “vitality.”
They even spin the poll questions. This particular story was picked up by msm.com, which included one of its requisite reader polls at the end of the article:
“How concerned are you about the age of President Biden?”
I don’t answer narrative-manipulating poll questions and I’m not really concerned about Biden’s “age.” For that matter, I’m no longer worked up about his dementia, which I detected four years ago. Plus, I’ve known for years that “Joe Biden” isn’t making the big decisions.
The question that should have been asked is this:
How concerned are you that our nation’s leading “news” organizations are completely captured?
My answer: Pretty damn concerned.
Emails Show Decade of Hunter Biden Spinning Journalists on Foreign Business Deals
The Hunter Biden laptop archive shows years of careful efforts to manipulate media outlets, a rare window into the DC spin cycle.
BY LEE FANG | SEPTEMBER 19, 2023
Speaker Kevin McCarthy, announcing that the House of Representatives will pursue an impeachment inquiry, suggested that the probe will hinge in part on deceiving the American public about Hunter Biden’s foreign business ventures.
“President Biden did lie to the American people about his own knowledge of his family’s foreign business deals,” McCarthy said at a press conference. GOP lawmakers, he added, have “uncovered credible allegations into President Biden’s conduct.”
Such an investigation will likely force an examination of the public narrative regarding Hunter Biden’s consulting deals that go back at least a decade. During President Obama’s second term, then-Vice President Joe Biden was the administration’s point man on the nation’s policy toward Ukraine, a perch he used to urge the country to adopt sweeping ethics reforms to resist “the cancer of corruption” and enact sweeping ethics reforms.
At the time, some American journalists began to question whether the vice president’s stern message was undermined by his son Hunter Biden’s employment at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, which was owned by a notorious local oligarch.
Emails on Hunter’s laptop reveal that the inquiries sparked an internal debate within his team of consultants and public relations agents. Ultimately, they devised a series of responses about Hunter’s work with Burisma that were, at best, misleading and, at worst, outright falsehoods.
The Biden team has constructed a careful image of Hunter Biden’s business ventures, sometimes employing a sophisticated myth-making operation aided by allies in the media who rarely challenged or investigated their false claims. The laptop emails show that the team closely monitored critical reporting and pushed to shape coverage with reporters from the New York Times, Time magazine, Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press.
Their spin informed much of the ensuing coverage in the mainstream press, defusing the issue, even as President Trump and other Republicans insisted that Ukraine was a hotbed of Biden family corruption. Although he had no background in the energy field and little experience in corporate governance, Hunter Biden, who had a law degree, was appointed to the board of Burisma in May 2014.
It was revealed later that he was paid about $1 million per year – as was his business partner Devon Archer. In a press release announcing his appointment, Hunter Biden is quoted as saying, “I believe that my assistance in consulting the Company on matters of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities will contribute to the economy and benefit the people of Ukraine.”
That same month, journalist Michael Scherer reached out with questions about the arrangement.
Several consultants employed by Burisma, including Ryan Toohey of FTI Consulting and Heather King, a partner at the law firm Boies, Schiller, & Flexner, where Hunter worked as counsel, strategized over how to respond to Scherer, a reporter then with Time magazine who has since joined the Washington Post.
For the Scherer inquiry, laptop emails show, Hunter’s business associates settled on a strategy to deflect the most direct questions and obfuscate the true intent of Burisma’s attempts to sway U.S. government officials.
One of Hunter’s associates noted that they planned to respond to Scherer’s attempts to reach David Leiter, a former aide to then-Secretary of State John Kerry, hired to work for Burisma. The plan was to use an assistant to make Leiter “unavailable to comment, as opposed to some sort of statement that made it seem like we were unwilling or refusing to engage with the reporter.” Leiter, the emails show, was in fact available, but the public relations team wanted to keep him out of reach.
Scherer wanted to know why Burisma was on a hiring spree of well-connected American lobbyists, including Leiter and others. In response, Toohey planned to tell Scherer that the hired guns were simply working on issues related to energy independence, economic growth, as well as “transparency and good governance.”
In response to other questions posed by Scherer, Toohey prepared a statement claiming that Hunter Biden will “not be engaged with the U.S. government” on anything related to Burisma.
The response belied a detailed lobbying agenda spelled out in other emails.
Burisma had made clear that the company had hired Leiter, Hunter Biden, and other political operatives as part of a focused plan to obtain Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky a U.S. visa as well as to persuade American officials to intervene with Ukrainian government officials to drop an investigation of his business interests.
In a May 2014 email, Vadim Pozharskyi, a close adviser to Zlochevsky, explained to Hunter that he needed his “advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message/signal, etc. to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions,” a reference to an ongoing investigation of Zlochevsky by Ukrainian prosecutors.
That month, Pozharskyi again wrote to Hunter, spelling out the “working plan for both FTI and David,” reiterating that he wanted the lobbyists to intervene against the “politically motivated proceedings initiated against us in Ukraine” and to overcome the “US entry ban” for the Burisma owner.
“The immediate plan is to reach out to the Energy and Ukraine desks, respectively, at State Dept,” wrote Heather King, the attorney working closely with Hunter Biden at the time. “That will include outreach to Carlos Pascual, he is the top US energy diplomat,” she added.
Scherer printed the denials, but to his credit, reported on the odd circumstances surrounding Biden’s hiring, at a time when Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point person for Ukraine, with a special focus on energy policy in the region.
In many cases, Hunter Biden’s associates cast him as simply an auditor with a special focus on renewable energy sourced from geothermal vents. That was the strategy in response to an inquiry from Stephen Braun, a reporter for the Associated Press. “Mr. Biden will not lobby on behalf of Burisma. His role is to advise the company’s legal and compliance unit, including guidance on corporate governance standards.”
Behind the scenes, Hunter Biden’s team knew otherwise. In emails conferring over how to deal with Braun’s questions, Pozharskyi reiterated the plan to provide Braun with “minimum information.”
Like many other articles from this time, the AP story focused on the conflict of interest issues, noting the denials around any lobbying with a degree of skepticism:
A former Washington lobbyist, the vice president’s son is effectively exempt from most rules that would require him to describe publicly the legal work he does on behalf of Burisma.
Hunter Biden will not lobby for the company, said Lawrence Pacheco, an official with FTI Consulting, a Washington government affairs company recently hired by Burisma.
Pacheco did not say whether Biden might oversee or advise on any future Burisma lobbying strategy in the U.S. Pacheco said the company “does not take positions on political matters.”
Braun could not be reached for comment. Scherer declined an opportunity to comment on the Hunter Biden emails. Biden, Toohey, and King did not respond to a request for comment.
However, the emails clearly indicate that substantial resources were allocated to managing both Burisma and Hunter’s personal image. Pozharskyi pointed out that Burisma had retained American consultants to reach out to “the most reputable European and American journalists/newspapers, magazines, websites, blogs,” while assistance was required to handle Wikipedia, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other online platforms. Burisma, wrote Pozharskyi, sought a “detailed algorithm on how the Company should act in case of bad publicity.” The effort included scrubbing negative details from Hunter Biden’s Wikipedia, while bolstering the online credentials of Burisma, emails show.
A highly focused effort to monitor and shape news media coverage helped maintain the public profile. Even with relatively low visibility, independent media were closely watched. Hunter and his team monitored Vice News as well as the gadfly website ZeroHedge. In response to critical reporting from Vice, one colleague noted approvingly that the article was not being “reposted or republished” in Ukrainian media.
In July 2014, Toohey circulated an investigative piece I wrote for Salon about Hunter Biden’s hiring at Burisma, which noted that the vice president’s son had been retained amid a string of nepotistic hires likely aimed at influencing natural gas and energy policy.
In the article, I noted that Joe Biden had traveled to Ukraine to “announce a $50 million aid package that included technical support for increasing the country’s natural gas production – an investment that could bolster profits at Burisma Holdings, where his son is a director.” What was not known at the time, however, was that Hunter Biden was already working with a team of public affairs consultants to channel U.S. government technical assistance to his client.
The laptop emails show that even this relatively brief mention of Hunter Biden and a potential conflict of interest with his father raised concerns.
“All, please see below a piece that mentions Hunter’s appointment as part of a broader trend, mostly within the context of relatives of eleceds [sic] engaged to lobby for the energy industry,” wrote Toohey, attaching a copy of the text of my piece. But, he added, “This was a freelanced piece picked up in a number of web-based outlets including Salon, but nothing with significant reach.”
Pozharskyi replied that he had seen the piece earlier and “wanted to have a discussion in this regard.”
In some cases, the team celebrated media coverage that elevated its desired narrative. Politico reported Hunter’s hiring at Burisma and simply printed quotes from the company’s official statements:
“The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals,” Alan Apter, Burisma Holdings’ chairman of the board of directors, said in a statement, which was reported by The Moscow Times on Tuesday.
Biden, joining the board, will be in charge of the legal unit, the company said. He will also provide support for Burisma Holdings “among international organizations.”
Biden said the company will help strengthen Ukraine’s economy.
Pozharskyi circulated a link to the Politico article to Hunter and his associates, noting the “positive coverage.”
Hunter’s membership on the Burisma board received renewed attention in late 2015, as then-Vice President Biden was set to visit Ukraine where he planned to address the parliament on the need to adopt new reforms against a culture of corruption in the country. James Risen of the Times, among others, renewed inquiries directed toward Hunter and his associates about the rationale behind his appointment to the company, Burisma, and why the company appeared to be buying access to high levels of government.
In one email found on Hunter’s laptop, Risen asked, “What lobbying activities is the company engaged in the US?” among other questions to Hunter Biden. In response, a Burisma spokesperson straightforwardly claimed that “no one is lobbying on their behalf.”
The company’s lobbying efforts were not covered in the story ultimately published by the New York Times, which featured Risen’s piece on Dec. 8, 2015. The article included a statement from the Hunter Biden team, crafted by the strategy firm FTI Consulting, asserting that the company’s focus was on “corporate governance and transparency.”
Risen’s article did not address whether Hunter’s business career demonstrated such expertise or his lack of experience in the energy field. Although Risen identified Hunter as “a former Washington lobbyist,” he accepted the denial that no lobbying was involved.
In reality, just a month prior to the email exchange with the Times, Burisma, following Hunter Biden’s advice, had hired Blue Star Strategies, a Democratic lobbying firm, to influence the Obama administration. A copy of the agreement, belatedly filed with the Justice Department, reveals that the firm, which aided in lobbying State Department officials on Ukrainian energy policy, received a monthly retainer of $30,000.
Blue Star Strategies was even copied on the emails with the Hunter Biden team on its response plan to Risen.
Risen also allowed a Burisma spokesman to decline to state Hunter’s compensation while claiming it was “not out of the ordinary” for such board positions. It was later disclosed that he was paid about $1 million per year, which is far higher than the typical compensation. As a point of comparison, median annual compensation of board members at Fortune 500 companies is around $110,000.
Risen, now with The Intercept, did not respond to a request for comment.
Political operatives of all ideological backgrounds frequently manipulate public perception – often employing specialized “crisis communication” firms to suppress negative coverage and shape desired narratives. What is remarkable about the Hunter Biden episode is how successful it was, and how uncritically most media organizations treated this unorthodox relationship between a president’s son and a controversial foreign corporation.
In response to the Wall Street Journal, Toohey worked closely with Blue Star Strategies’ Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano to craft a message defusing questions around a conflicting message between Hunter and his father. They settled on a strategy of presenting the Ukrainian gig as perfectly “aligned” with an anti-corruption agenda, laptop emails show. The lobbyists suggested that they release a statement to the Journal claiming that Hunter’s work for the Ukrainian energy giant, to supposedly strengthen corporate governance, are “also goals the United States.”
The Journal printed the statement, attributing it to a spokesperson.
Such coverage – which suggested Hunter Biden had engaged in questionable but ultimately harmless behavior that did not involve, much less implicate, his father – set the narrative for most coverage in mainstream outlets. When President Trump told Ukraine’s president in 2018 that “there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son” and asked him to look into Joe Biden’s demand that the prosecutor looking into Burisma be fired, Democrats moved to impeach him.
The Biden spin continued even after the New York Post published the first articles based on material from Hunter’s laptop in October 2020. The Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, sought to discredit the New York Post’s reporting that Hunter Biden had arranged a dinner meeting between his Ukrainian associates at Burisma and his father when he served as vice president. At the time, the Biden presidential campaign claimed that it “reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time, and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.” Kessler reiterated this denial as though it were an established fact.
It turned out to be false. The July testimony by former Hunter Biden associate Devon Archer confirmed that Hunter Biden had arranged a secret dinner with his Ukrainian business partner and his father, as the New York Post had originally reported. The ongoing saga over the Washington Post’s role in covering up the Biden revelations was detailed last month by RealClearInvestigation’s Paul Sperry.
Last month, Kessler “updated” his article to acknowledge this.
Also last month, Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, who has dismissed any hint of scandal regarding Biden business dealings, appeared on Live at the Table, a podcast hosted by Noam Dworman, the owner of New York City’s Comedy Cellar. The show went viral as Dworman challenged Bump’s claims that there was “no evidence” of wrongdoing by Joe Biden.
In a heated exchange, Bump conceded that Hunter Biden’s text messages that claim, “unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary,” was one form of “evidence.” Moments later, Bump ended the interview and walked off the set.
The interaction provided a rare moment of visible accountability for the establishment press, which has largely followed the Biden spin for an entire decade on this issue.
Yet the White House is still hoping it can still instruct journalists on how to cover the story. Shortly after McCarthy’s impeachment inquiry announcement, President Biden’s White House staff circulated a memo, instructing media outlets on how to cover the news. In bold type, the memo claimed that the entire Hunter Biden conflict of interest scandal had been “refuted” and “debunked” – language that was adopted in media reports about the inquiry in Vox, NBC News and CNN.
Hyping Ukraine Counteroffensive, US Press Chose Propaganda Over Journalism
By Bryce Greene | FAIR | September 15, 2023
It has been clear for some time that US corporate news media have explicitly taken a side on the Ukraine War. This role includes suppressing relevant history of the lead-up to the war (FAIR.org, 3/4/22), attacking people who bring up that history as “conspiracy theorists” (FAIR.org, 5/18/22), accepting official government pronouncements at face value (FAIR.org, 12/2/22) and promoting an overly rosy picture of the conflict in order to boost morale.
For most of the war, most of the US coverage has been as pro-Ukrainian as Ukraine’s own media, now consolidated under the Zelenskyy government (FAIR.org, 5/9/23).
Dire predictions sporadically appeared, but were drowned out by drumbeat coverage portraying a Ukrainian army on the cusp of victory, and the Russian army as incompetent and on the verge of collapse.
Triumphalist rhetoric soared in early 2023, as optimistic talk of a game-changing “spring offensive” dominated Ukraine coverage. Apparently delayed, the Ukrainian counteroffensive launched in June. While even US officials did not believe that it would amount to much, US media papered over these doubts in the runup to the campaign.
Over the last three months, it has become clear that the Ukrainian military operation will not be the game-changer it was sold as; namely, it will not significantly roll back the Russian occupation and obviate the need for a negotiated settlement. Only after this became undeniable did media report on the true costs of war to the Ukrainian people.
Overwhelming optimism
In the runup to the counteroffensive, US media were full of excited conversation about how it would reshape the nature of the conflict. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told Radio Free Europe (4/21/23) he was “confident Ukraine will be successful.” Sen. Lindsey Graham assured Politico (5/30/23), “In the coming days, you’re going to see a pretty impressive display of power by the Ukrainians.” Asked for his predictions about Ukraine’s plans, retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges told NPR (5/12/23), “I actually expect… they will be quite successful.”
Former CIA Director David Patraeus, author of the overhyped “surge” strategy in Iraq, told CNN (5/23/23):
I personally think that this is going to be really quite successful…. And [the Russians] are going to have to withdraw under pressure of this Ukrainian offensive, the most difficult possible tactical maneuver, and I don’t think they’re going to do well at that.
The Washington Post’s David Ignatius (4/15/23) acknowledged that “hope is not a strategy,” but still insisted that “Ukraine’s will to win—its determination to expel Russian invaders from its territory at whatever cost—might be the X-factor in the decisive season of conflict ahead.”
The New York Times (6/2/23) ran a story praising recruits who signed up for the Ukrainian pushback, even though it “promises to be deadly.” Times columnist Paul Krugman (6/5/23) declared we were witnessing “the moral equivalent of D-Day.” CNN (5/30/23) reported that Ukrainians were “unfazed” as they “gear up for a counteroffensive.”
Cable news was replete with buzz about how the counteroffensive, couched with modifiers like “long-awaited” or “highly anticipated,” could turn the tide in the war. Nightly news shows (e.g., NBC, 6/15/23, 6/16/23) presented audiences with optimistic statements from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other figures talking about the imminent success.
Downplaying reality
The Washington Post (4/10/23) noted that pessimistic leaked assessments were “a marked departure from the Biden administration’s public statements about the vitality of Ukraine’s military.”
Despite the soaring rhetoric presented to audiences, Western officials understood that the counteroffensive was all but doomed to fail. This had been known long before the above comments were reported, but media failed to include that fact as prominently as the predictions for success.
On April 10, as part of the Discord leaks story, the Washington Post (4/10/23) reported that top secret documents showed that Ukraine’s drive would fall “well short” of its objectives, due to equipment, ammunition and conscription problems. The document predicted “sustainment shortfalls” and only “modest territorial gains.”
The Post additionally cited anonymous officials who claimed that the documents’ conclusions were corroborated by a classified National Intelligence Council assessment, shown only to a select few in Congress. The Post spoke to a Ukrainian official who “did not dispute the revelations,” and acknowledged that it was “partially true.”
While the Post has yet to publish the documents in full, the leaks and the other sources clearly painted a picture of a potentially disastrous counteroffensive. Fear was so palpable that the Biden administration privately worried about how he could keep up support for the war when the widely hyped offensive sputtered. In the midst of this, Blinken continued to dismiss the idea of a ceasefire, opting instead to pursue further escalating the conflict.
Despite the importance of these facts, they were hardly reported on by the rest of corporate media, and dropped from subsequent war coverage. When the Post (6/14/23) published a long article citing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s cautious optimism about the campaign, it neglected to mention its earlier reporting about the government’s privately gloomier assessments. The documents only started appearing again in the press after thousands were dead, and the campaign’s failure undeniable.
In an honest press, excited comments from politicians and commentators would be published alongside reports about how even our highest-level officials did not believe that the counteroffensive would amount to much. Instead, anticipation was allowed to build while doubts were set to the side.
Too ‘casualty-averse’?
By July, Ukrainian casualties were mounting, and it became clearer and clearer that the counteroffensive would fail to recapture significant amounts of Ukrainian territory. Reporting grew more realistic, and we were given insights into conditions on the ground in Ukraine, as well as what was in the minds of US officials.
According to the Washington Post (8/17/23), US and Ukrainian militaries had conducted war games and had anticipated that an advance would be accompanied by heavy losses. But when the real-world fatalities mounted, the Post reported, “Ukraine chose to stem the losses on the battlefield.”
This caused a rift between the Ukrainians and their Western backers, who were frustrated at Ukrainians’ desire to keep their people alive. A mid-July New York Times article (7/14/23) reported that US officials were privately frustrated that Ukraine had become too afraid of dying to fight effectively. The officials worried that Ukrainian commanders “fear[ed] casualties among their ranks,” and had “reverted to old habits” rather than “pressing harder.”
After noting estimates that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died and as many as 120,000 wounded, the New York Times (8/18/23) reported that “American officials say they fear that Ukraine has become casualty averse.”
Acknowledging failure
After it became undeniable that Ukraine’s military action was going nowhere, a Wall Street Journal report (7/23/23) raised some of the doubts that had been invisible in the press on the offensive’s eve. The report’s opening lines say it all:
When Ukraine launched its big counteroffensive this spring, Western military officials knew Kyiv didn’t have all the training or weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge Russian forces.
The Journal acknowledged that Western officials simply “hoped Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness would carry the day.”
One Post column (7/26/23) asked, “Was Gen. Mark Milley Right Last Year About the War in Ukraine?” Columnist Jason Willick acknowledged that “Milley’s skepticism about Ukraine’s ability to achieve total victory appears to have been widespread within the Biden administration before the counteroffensive began.”
And when one official told Politico (8/18/23), “Milley had a point,” acknowledging the former military head’s November suggestion for negotiations. The quote was so telling that Politico made it the headline of the article.
Even Rep. Andy Harris (D-Md.), co-chair of the congressional Ukraine Caucus, publicly questioned whether or not the war was “winnable” (Politico, 8/17/23). Speaking on the counteroffensive’s status, he said, “I’ll be blunt, it’s failed.”
Newsweek (8/16/23) reported on a Ukrainian leadership divided over how to handle the “underwhelming” counteroffensive. The Washington Post (8/17/23) reported that the US intelligence community assessed that the offensive would fail to fulfill its key objective of severing the land bridge between Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
As the triumphalism ebbed, outlets began reporting on scenes that were almost certainly common before the spring push but had gone unpublished. One piece from the Post (8/10/23) outlined a “darken[ed] mood in Ukraine,” in which the nation was “worn out.” The piece acknowledged that “Ukrainian officials and their Western partners hyped up a coming counteroffensive,” but there was “little visible progress.”
The Wall Street Journal (8/1/23) published a devastating piece about the massive number of amputees returning home from the mine-laden battlefield. They reported that between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians had lost one or more limbs as a result of the war—numbers that are comparable to those seen during World War I.
Rather than dwelling on the stalled campaign, the New York Times and other outlets focused on the drone war against Russia, even while acknowledging that the remote strikes were largely an exercise in public relations. The Times (8/25/23) declared that the strikes had “little significant damage to Russia’s overall military might” and were primarily “a message for [Ukraine’s] own people,” citing US officials who noted that they “intended to demonstrate to the Ukrainian public that Kyiv can still strike back.” Looking at the quantity of Times coverage (8/30/23, 8/30/23, 8/23/23, 8/22/23, 8/22/23, 8/21/23, 8/18/23), the drone strikes were apparently aimed at an increasingly war-weary US public as well.
War as desirable outcome
The Army War College’s John Deni (Wall Street Journal, 12/22/21) urged the US to take “a hard-line stance in diplomatic discussions,” because “if Mr. Putin’s forces invade, Russia is likely to suffer long-term, serious and even debilitating strategic costs.”
The fact that US officials pushed for a Ukrainian counteroffensive that all but expected would fail raises an important question: Why would they do this? Sending thousands of young people to be maimed and killed does nothing to advance Ukrainian territorial integrity, and actively hinders the war effort.
The answer has been clear since before the war. Despite the high-minded rhetoric about support for democracy, this has never been the goal of pushing for war in Ukraine. Though it often goes unacknowledged in the US press, policymakers saw a war in Ukraine as a desirable outcome. One 2019 study from the RAND Corporation—a think tank with close ties to the Pentagon—suggested that an effective way to overextend and unbalance Russia would be to increase military support for Ukraine, arguing that this could lead to a Russian invasion.
In December 2021, as Russian President Vladimir Putin began to mass troops at Ukraine’s border while demanding negotiations, John Deni of the Atlantic Council published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (12/22/21) headlined “The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine,” which laid out the US logic explicitly: Provoking a war would allow the US to impose sanctions and fight a proxy war that would grind Russia down. Additionally, the anti-Russian sentiment that resulted from a war would strengthen NATO’s resolve.
All of this came to pass as Washington’s stance of non-negotiation successfully provoked a Russian invasion. Even as Ukraine and Russia sat at the negotiation table early in the war, the US made it clear that it wanted the war to continue and escalate. The US’s objective was, in the words of Raytheon boardmember–turned–Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, “to see Russia weakened.” Despite stated commitments to Ukrainian democracy, US policies have instead severely damaged it.
NATO’s ‘strategic windfall’
In the wake of the stalled counteroffensive, the US interest in sacrificing Ukraine to bleed Russia was put on display again. In July, the Post‘s Ignatius declared that the West shouldn’t be so “gloomy” about Ukraine, since the war had been a “strategic windfall” for NATO and its allies. Echoing two of Deni’s objectives, Ignatius asserted that “the West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked,” and “NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland.”
In the starkest demonstration of the lack of concern for Ukraine or its people, he also wrote that these strategic successes came “at relatively low cost,” adding, in a parenthetical aside, “(other than for the Ukrainians).”
Ignatius is far from alone. Hawkish Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) explained why US funding for the proxy war was “about the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done”: “We’re losing no lives in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians, they’re fighting heroically against Russia.”
The consensus among policymakers in Washington is to push for endless conflict, no matter how many Ukrainians die in the process. As long as Russia loses men and material, the effect on Ukraine is irrelevant. Ukrainian victory was never the goal.
‘Fears of peace talks’
Polls show that support for increased US involvement in Ukraine is rapidly declining. The recent Republican presidential debate demonstrated clear fractures within the right wing of the US power structure. Politico (8/18/23) reported that some US officials are regretting potential lost opportunities for negotiations. Unfortunately, this minority dissent has yet to affect the dominant consensus.
The failure of the counteroffensive has not caused Washington to rethink its strategy of attempting to bleed Russia. The flow of US military hardware to Ukraine is likely to continue so long as this remains the goal. The Hill (9/5/23) gave the game away about NATO’s commitment to escalation with a piece titled “Fears of Peace Talks With Putin Rise Amid US Squabbling.”
But even within the Biden administration, the Pentagon appears to be at odds with the State Department and National Security Council over the Ukraine conflict. Contrary to what may be expected, the civilian officials like Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland and Antony Blinken are taking a harder line on perpetuating this conflict than the professional soldiers in the Pentagon. The media’s sharp change of tone may both signify and fuel the doubts gaining traction within the US political class.
Why Has Konstantinovka Suddenly Vanished From the Radar Screen?
By Stephen Karganovic | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 17, 2023
Slightly over a week ago, all major collective West news outlets carried the story of a rocket attack on a crowded market in Konstantinovka, a town which is under Kiev regime control. It was announced that as a result of the blast 17 people were killed, including a child, and 32 were injured. Within minutes of the occurrence the accusation was hurled that the missiles that hit the market were Russian and that the Russian side in the conflict was therefore responsible for the mayhem.
The attack, which occurred as Secretary Blinken was visiting Kiev, was denounced immediately and from various quarters. Zelensky claimed that it was an example of “Russian evil” that “must be defeated as soon as possible.” Along the same lines, “Denise Brown, the UN’s humanitarian envoy for Ukraine, denounced the attack as ‘despicable,’ and the European Union condemned it as ‘heinous and barbaric.’”
At the time when these statements were being made, which was literally within minutes of the occurrence to which they referred, there was no evidence whatsoever, firm or circumstantial, to corroborate them. Quite the contrary, the circumstantial evidence pointed in the opposite direction. Amateur videos from the scene posted on social networks portrayed shoppers who heard the sound of incoming projectiles turning their heads to look in the direction away from where the missiles would have come from, if they had been Russian. That strongly suggested that the missiles were launched from territory under the control of the Ukrainian military.
So far, almost ten days after the widely publicised event, no forensic investigation with verifiable data is reported to have been performed, under anybody’s auspices, Ukrainian or international. As a result, each and every statement made about the blast by Ukrainian or Western officials is unsupported by evidence and is purely conjectural.
Even more suspicious than that is the fact that initially lively and unabashedly accusatory media coverage of the Konstantinovka market blast, which vividly recalled a similar false flag market incident contrived in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, suddenly went silent. That happened literally from one day to the next. The day of the blast, September 6, and before any reliable information could have been available, a Wikipedia article accusing Russia for the incident in Konstantinovka was hastily posted. (Ludicrously, in deference to Kiev regime’s linguistic edicts Wikipedia refers to the town as “Kostiantynivka,” to stress its non-Russian character.) By Googling “Konstantinovka attack” one gets a long series of videos and articles all contending unanimously, as in the Reuters report, that “Russian attack kills 17 in east Ukraine as Blinken visits Kyiv, officials say”. But every single one of these reports is dated September 6 or 7, 2023, and from then on, as if by magic, all references to the crime cease. Hard as one may look, after September 7 there is no mention of the event that just the day before provoked such enormous indignation and, in the opinion of the highest officials, merited the use of dramatic expressions such as “evil,” “heinous,” and “barbaric.”
Why was there no follow-up? Why was such an initially promising false flag operation, which cost the lives of more than a few innocent individuals, suddenly dropped?
One can only speculate about the reasons. As we explained in our original piece on this subject, historically there is a very strong correlation between false flag operations and specific political events that are meant to be exploited by the falsely directed emotions that the event was provoked to generate. In this case, that is obviously Secretary Blinken’s visit, into which the Kiev regime had invested enormous hopes in terms of additional material assistance and support. However, based on everything we now know about the results of that visit, the regime received very disappointing news about its Western sponsors’ readiness to maintain their support at the expected level. In light of these realities, the regime may have concluded that further fanfare about the Konstantinovka market blasts would be unproductive. Western sponsors, on the other hand, may have decided to cut off media coverage which would have enhanced the victim image of their proxies that they are slowly preparing to ditch, generating moral pressure to continue to back them with the same intensity. Without the logistical support of the Western propaganda machine no other outcome was conceivable and the Konstantinovka story could only die a natural death. That is exactly what happened.
We must remember, however, that besides the propaganda story there are sixteen or seventeen, by various counts, innocent people who are also dead.
Their violent death was cynically arranged by the Kiev Nazi regime to try to improve its political position as its fortunes deteriorate on every front. The victims of this outrage in Konstantinovka, as well as the victims of similar false flags in Bucha and Kramatorsk, deserve justice. The perpetrators must be punished.
As we have repeatedly argued, it is necessary to consider without delay the issue of putting in place serious and effective legal mechanisms to identify and punish perpetrators of crimes against humanity such as we have just witnessed in Konstantinovka. The criminals may be beyond the reach of justice at the present moment, but that is bound to change soon. When that happens, justice must be ready to spring into action.
The Konstantinovka incident demonstrates once again the need for Russia to declare universal jurisdiction over all crimes against humanity committed in the context of the conflict which began in 2014, reserving the right to prosecute related crimes which may have been committed anywhere on the territory of rump Ukraine, the Russian Federation, or in any other location. Since Konstantinovka happens to be in the Ukrainian-occupied portion of Donetsk Region, a territory which has been legally incorporated into the Russian Federation, no special jurisdiction is required to prosecute parties suspected to be guilty of this market massacre, on the basis of individual, command, or joint criminal enterprise modes of criminal liability. But elsewhere the situation may not be as simple. Bucha is an example that comes to mind immediately of a similar crime where additional jurisdictional powers would be required to prosecute.
Let us hope that the Konstantinovka false flag murder operation will be a clarion call to action to close off every remaining avenue of impunity that could be used to shield the perpetrators of such disgusting acts.
Another Magical JFK Assassination Pseudo-Debate and Limited Hangout
By Edward J. Curtin, Jr. | Behind The Curtain | September 14, 2023
Much has been made of the September 9, 2023 simultaneous reports in The New York Times and Vanity Fair of the claims of a former Secret Service agent, Paul Landis, who was part of the security detail in Dallas, Texas when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Like so many reports by such media that have covered up the truth of the assassination for sixty years, this one about “the magic bullet” is also a red herring.
It encourages pseudo-debates and confusion and is a rather dumb “limited hangout,” which is a strategy used by intelligence agencies to dangle some truth in order to divert attention from core facts of a case they are desperate to conceal. With these particular articles, they are willing to suggest that maybe the Warren Commission’s magic bullet claim is possibly incorrect. This is because so many people have long come to realize that that part of the propaganda story is absurd, so the coverup artists are willing to suggest it might be wrong in order to continue debating meaningless matters based on false premises in order to solidify their core lies.
Despite responses to these two stories about Landis that credit them for “finally” showing that the “magic bullet” claim of the Warren Commission is now dead, it would be more accurate to say they have revived debate about it in order to sneakily hide the fundamental fact about the assassination: that the CIA assassinated JFK.
We can expect many more such red herrings in the next two months leading up to the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination.
They are what one of the earliest critics of The Warren Commission, Vincent Salandria, a brilliant Philadelphia lawyer, called “a false mystery.” He said:
After more than a half century, the historical truth of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has been finally established beyond rational dispute. The Kennedy assassination is a false mystery. It was conceived by the conspirators to be a false mystery which was designed to cause interminable debate. The purpose of the protracted debate was to obscure what was quite clearly and plainly a coup d’état. Simply stated, President Kennedy was assassinated by our U.S. national security state in order to abort his efforts to bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion.
That the corporate mainstream should trumpet these reports as important is to be expected, but that they are also so greeted by some people who should know better is sad. For there is no mystery about the assassination of President Kennedy; he was assassinated by the CIA and the evidence for this fact has long been available. And the Warren Commission’s claim that Lee Harvey Oswald fired the so-called “magic bullet” – Commission Exhibit 399 – that entered JFK’s back and exited his neck and then went into the back of Gov. John Connally, who was sitting in the front seat, zigzagging in multiple directions, causing him five wounds and then emerging in pristine condition, has always been risible. Only fools or those ignorant of the details have ever believed it, but desperate conspirators led by the late Arlen Specter, the future Senator, did desperate things for The Warren Commission in order to pin the rap on the patsy Oswald and cover-up for the killers.
I could spend many words explaining the details of the government conspiracy to assassinate JFK, why they did it, and have been covering it up ever since. But I have done this elsewhere. If you wish to learn the truth from credible sources, I would highly recommend that you watch the long version of Oliver Stone’s documentary JFK Revisited; Through the Looking Glass and then closely read the transcripts and interviews in James DiEugenio’s crucial compendium of transcripts and interviews for the film. You will immediately realize that these recent revelations are a continuation of the coverup.
This should be immediately intuited by the titles of the two pieces. The New York Times’ article, written by its chief White House correspondent Peter Baker, who previously worked for the Washington Post for twenty years, including four years as its Moscow bureau chief, is entitled JFK Assassination Witness Breaks His Silence and Raises New Questions. (The Times and Washington Post have long been the CIA’s mouthpieces.) The Vanity Fair article is written by James Robenalt, a colleague of John Dean of Watergate infamy, and is entitled A New JFK Assassination Revelation Could Upend the Long-Held “Lone Gunman” Theory.
For anyone with a soupçon of linguistic analytical skill and a rudimentary knowledge of the JFK assassination, those titles immediately induce skepticism. “New questions”? Don’t we already have the answers we need. “Could Upend the Long-Held ‘Lone Gunman’ Theory”? So we must keep debating and researching the obvious. Why? To protect the CIA.
Both articles go on to expound on how the sympathetically described poor conscience-stricken old guy Landis’s claim that he found the so-called pristine magic bullet on the top back of the car seat where JFK was sitting and placed it on Kennedy’s stretcher in Parkland Hospital without telling anyone for all these decades is an earth shattering revelation. And as they do so, they make sure to slip in a series of falsehoods to reinforce the essence of the government’s case.
If anyone is interested in the facts concerning the physical evidence, all one need do is read Vincent Salandria’s analysis here. Once you have, you will realize the hullabaloo about Landis is a pseudo-debate.
These articles about Landis reinforce what Dr. Martin Schotz describes in his book History Will Not Absolve Us, and what he said in a talk twenty-five years ago. He made a distinction between the waters of knowledge and the waters of uncertainty. In the case of the JFK assassination, the public is allowed to think anything they want, but they are not allowed to know the truth, although since the Warren Commission was released it was evident that “no honest person could ever accept the single bullet theory.” And he then added this about pseudo-debates:
The lie that was destined to cover the truth of the assassination was the lie that the assassination is a mystery, that we are not sure what happened, but being free citizens of a great democracy we can discuss and debate what has occurred. We can petition our government and join with it in seeking the solution to this mystery. This is the essence of the cover-up.
The lie is that there is a mystery to debate. And so we have pseudo-debates. Debates about meaningless disputes, based on assumptions which are obviously false. This is the form that Orwell’s crimestop has taken in the matter of the President’s murder. I am talking about the pseudo-debate over whether the Warren Report is true when it is obviously and undebatably false. . . . Perhaps many people think that engaging in pseudo-debate is a benign activity. That it simply means that people are debating something that is irrelevant. This is not the case. I say this because every debate rests on a premise to which the debaters must agree, or there is no debate. In the case of pseudo-debate the premise is a lie. So in the pseudo-debate we have the parties to the debate agreeing to purvey a lie to the public. And it is all the more malignant because it is subtle. The unsuspecting person who is witness to the pseudo-debate does not understand that he is being passed a lie. He is not even aware that he is being passed a premise. It is so subtle that the premise just passes into the person as if it were reality. This premise—that there is uncertainty to be resolved—seems so benign. It is as easy as drinking a glass of treated water.
But the fact remains that there is no mystery except in the minds of those who are willing to drink this premise. The premise is a lie, and a society which agrees to drink such a lie ceases to perceive reality. This is what we mean by mass denial.
That the entire establishment has been willing to join in this process of cover-up by confusion creates an extreme form of problem for anyone who would seek to utter the truth. For these civilian institutions—the media, the universities and the government—once they begin engaging in denial of knowledge of the identity of the assassins, once they are drawn into the cover-up, a secondary motivation develops for them. Now they are not only protecting the state, they are now protecting themselves, because to expose the obviousness of the assassination and the false debate would be to reveal the corrupt role of all these institutions. And there is no question that these institutions are masters in self-protection. Thus anyone who would attempt to confront the true cover-up must be prepared to confront virtually the entire society. And in doing this, one is inevitably going to be marginalized.
And to mention just one false premise of the Landis saga (beside the one that there is uncertainty to be resolved; and there are many others, but one will suffice, since I don’t want to enter into a pseudo-debate), it is that the so-called magic bullet in evidence – CE 399 – the one discussed in these articles, is not even the one said to be found somewhere in Parkland Hospital, and the chain of custody for that bullet – or some bullet – is broken in many places (see James DiEugenio, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass ).
Phantom bullets and plenty of magic go into the creation and destruction of this tall tale told to camouflage the CIA’s guilt in its killing of President Kennedy. If you believe in magic and mystery, The New York Times’ Peter Baker has these words for you, if you can understand them:
Mr. Landis’s account, included in a forthcoming memoir, would rewrite the narrative of one of modern American history’s most earth-shattering days in an important way. It may not mean any more than that. But it could also encourage those who have long suspected that there was more than one gunman in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, adding new grist to one of the nation’s enduring mysteries.
Yes, those four English lads said it in 1967: “The magical mystery tour is hoping to take you away” into an enduring mystery, even though the case was solved long ago.
Putin-Kim Summit: Western Hysteria Can’t Conceal Historic Failing Of Western Imperialism and Criminality
Strategic Culture Foundation | September 15, 2023
Western news media have become a parody of misreporting, misinformation and outright imperialist propaganda. Nobody of sound mind can take their claims seriously anymore. This week such media “excelled” in their deceptions and distortions with hysterical coverage of the meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
It is, however, instructive to analyze what motivates the Western hysteria and false narratives.
The tone of Western reporting and commentary was akin to reading reviews of a new James Bond movie. In their telling, the summit was portrayed as a tete-a-tete between the world’s most dastardly villains. The Washington Post perhaps took the laurels for hyperbole, describing the summit as having “nefarious glamor” and went on to mention Kim arriving in a bulletproof train (as if that is somehow weird) and how the two leaders met at a “remote space port” (cue the James Bond music) and dined on “duck salad and crab dumplings” (oh, how very evil!). All that was missing, it seemed, was a shark tank.
The contrived menacing tone projected by the gamut of Western media speculated on Russia cutting a deal with North Korea to supply artillery munitions for the 18-month-old conflict in Ukraine. There were also heavy inferences that Russia would help bolster its East Asian neighbor’s nuclear arsenal thereby allegedly posing a greater threat to the United States.
It was widely claimed that the summit demonstrated that Russia was isolated internationally over the Ukraine war and that President Putin was “desperate” by reaching out to “pariah state” North Korea.
As we noted above, Western media have long ago forfeited any credibility. Their narratives have become embarrassingly discredited. Anything that American or European news media pronounce on should be taken with a risible pinch of salt, if not with utter contempt.
One topical example suffices. This week saw an appalling human disaster in Libya from storm floods. Up to 20,000 people are feared dead from torrential flooding. Not one Western media outlet even remotely made the connection that this horror was made wholly possible because the North African country was destroyed and turned into a failed state by the criminal military attack on the nation in 2011 by the U.S.-led NATO alliance.
Given this total denial by Western media of the underlying cause of Libya’s ruination, one can reasonably dismiss their credibility and moral presumption to discuss any other world events. Their function is to mislead, not inform.
The summit this week between the Russian and North Korean leaders was indeed a significant marker. Their meeting occurred while the 8th Eastern Economic Forum was proceeding in Russia’s Far East city of Vladivostok. The forum brought together political and business leaders from scores of nations with a focus on investment and partnership in the Asia-Pacific. President Putin delivered a keynote address to delegates before hosting Kim Jung Un at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Arum region, about 1,500 kilometers from Vladivostok.
The meeting between the Russian and North Korean leaders was a cordial event involving lengthy discussions (up to six hours, according to some reports) and a lavish state dinner attended by senior dignitaries. The details of the one-on-one talks were not elaborated on in public but the general topic areas included partnership in developing space technology and military matters.
Russia and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have a long and honorable history, as both leaders warmly acknowledged. Putin noted how Soviet soldiers fought alongside Korean revolutionaries to defeat Japanese imperialism to help establish the DPRK in 1948. The partition of the Korean Peninsula into North and South was largely instrumented by the United States as a Cold War measure to contain the Soviet Union and China.
There is nothing sinister about the Far East Asian neighbors reaching out to each other to further develop fraternal relations for the benefit of both nations. The spirit by which Putin and Kim embraced is fully consistent with the historic emergence of a new multipolar world order.
In this new global reality, the notion of hegemonic dominance by the United States and its Western partners is rapidly becoming redundant and indeed repugnant. The arrogant and brutal imposition of unilateral sanctions by Western powers are increasingly seen for what they are – criminal vestiges of a by-gone era of Western neocolonialist self-ordained privileges.
The truly sinister aspect about the Putin-Kim summit is the glaring absence of any Western media acknowledgement that the DPRK has for decades been subjected to Western economic warfare as well as unrelenting military aggression by the United States from annual “war games” that rehearse “decapitation strikes” and an invasion of North Korea. The U.S. continues to refuse to make a formal peace settlement with the DPRK even after 70 years from the end of the Korean War in 1953. During that war, the U.S. inflicted genocidal mass aerial bombing killing up to three million civilians.
Instead of admitting historical truth and realities about the nefarious nature of American-led Western imperialism, the pathetic Western media would rather focus on “nefarious duck salad” supposedly eaten by Putin and Kim.
While the Western media go into hysterics about North Korea allegedly supplying weapons to Russia for the conflict in Ukraine, the same media are vacant in any questioning about the supply of $100 billion in weaponry by Washington and its NATO accomplices to prop up a Nazi regime in Kiev. That’s because they promote the absurd propaganda lie that the Western powers are “defending democracy” in Ukraine, in spite of the well-documented facts about the Kiev regime’s rampant corruption, repression, forced conscriptions and Nazi associations.
On the particular scare-and-smear story by Western media that Russia is desperately seeking arms supply from North Korea, it seemed to go un-noticed that the New York Times completely undermined this speculation with a separate report this week claiming that Russia is more than self-sufficient in artillery and arms production.
Anyway, even if the DPRK and Russia enter into a military supply deal, so what?
Russia has every legal right to confront the years-long aggression that NATO has embarked on in Ukraine. The United States is this week considering supplying long-range (300 km) ATACMS missiles to the Nazi regime and, according to its criminally insane Secretary of State Antony Blinken, has given the go-ahead for attacks on Russian territory.
This is the shocking and deplorable reality of Western-induced escalation of war between nuclear superpowers. And yet, according to the Western media, the sinister thing the Western public should be concerned about is a neighborly summit between Putin and Kim.
As Russia’s President Putin noted in his plenary address and in public dialogue during the Eastern Economic Forum, the Western arrogant powers have destroyed their own privileged financial system from decades of abusing the rest of the world and using their neocolonialist prerogatives to parasite off others. The West is desperately trying to conceal the reality of the historic global shift towards a multipolar world and away from self-ordained Western hegemony. Part of this denial and cover-up entails the West resorting to the old and weary game of trying to create bogeymen stories to corral the Western public behind otherwise bankrupt leaders.
The bogeymen narratives don’t work anymore. That’s because Western media are seen to be bankrupt in credibility, having been exposed over and over again as liars and con artists as seen from their apologetics for endless criminal wars – Libya is a stark case in point this week. Another reason for narrative impotency is due to the visible moral bankruptcy of Western political leaders. How can anyone take these elite charlatans seriously? Biden, Sunak, Scholz, Rutte, Macron, Trudeau, Von Der Leyen, Borrell, to name a few.
Another reason why Western bogeymen tales don’t cut it is because the harsh economic and social reality hitting most citizens in Western states is actually much scarier than any fictitious claims about foreign villains. The latter begins to seem even more absurd and disdainfully divorced from reality.
What should be – and no doubt is already – deeply troubling to Western elites and their media is that the public is realizing that their real and only enemy is within, in the form of elite rulers and their elite-serving economic system. That was always the case historically, but in former times, that reality could be diverted from with bogeymen stories about foreign enemies, “Commies and Reds”, and so on. Now, however, no amount of Western media spinning and fantasizing can conceal the dawning and dreadful reality of Western inherent corruption and failure, and the long overdue need for justice and accountability for the multiple capital crimes of Western imperialism.
US offers to pay Polish media for Ukraine coverage
RT | September 13, 2023
The US Consulate General in Krakow is soliciting Polish outlets to write about Ukrainian refugees “returning and rebuilding,” it emerged on Wednesday. Washington is offering $50,000 for the year-long project.
The project “to promote coverage in Poland by local and regional media representatives of stories in Ukraine” was first spotted by a Telegram channel based in Belarus. It can be found at the website of the US embassy in Poland, under the designation WAW-NOFO-FY23-05.
It was unclear when the solicitation was originally posted. However, the deadline for submissions is end of the day Friday, September 15.
According to the post, the goal is to “promote in-depth reporting by local and regional Polish media of the return of Ukrainian families from Poland to Ukraine and their social and physical rebuilding efforts, particularly those built on partnerships between Poles and Ukrainians.”
The articles should fuel “public understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced by Ukrainians” as well as interest in Ukrainian “efforts to return and rebuild” and the “enduring impact of support provided by Polish society to Ukrainian refugees.”
The solicitation suggests the project would actually be given to a Polish NGO, with US embassy staff having “substantial involvement in the grant implementation, including reviewing and approving selection of participants, trainers, and award decisions within the project.”
The NGO would get a grant of $50,000 (about 215,500 zloty at the current exchange rate) and then have Polish journalists compete for portions of the money. The embassy would evaluate their success by the “quality and reach of reports generated.”
The project also includes at least one workshop teaching the reporters “culturally sensitive and trauma-informed manner and how to create compelling human-interest stories in this context,” taught by “experts in the intersection between mental health and journalism in war zones” and others with the relevant experience.
The entire project is slated to run for a single year, though Washington reserves the right to extend that if it’s judged to be “in the best interest of the US Department of State.”
There are approximately one million Ukrainian refugees in Poland at the moment. Multiple surveys of those who settled in EU countries show that more than 40% do not intend to return even if the conflict with Russia ends. Warsaw has reportedly already started sending men of military age back, even as other EU members have refused to do so on human rights grounds.
White House tells media how to cover Biden impeachment
RT | September 13, 2023
White House lawyers have reportedly written a letter directing CNN, the New York Times and other US media outlets to scrutinize Republican lawmakers more aggressively as they try to impeach US President Joe Biden.
CNN and other recipients of the letter acknowledged getting the missive on Wednesday. “It’s time for the media to ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies,” Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office, wrote in the letter. He added that the impeachment efforts should “set off alarm bells for news organizations.”
US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) launched the impeachment effort on Tuesday, directing committees of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to open a formal inquiry. He said allegations of influence-peddling and solicitation of bribes by the Biden family “paint a picture of a culture of corruption.”
Even before receiving any guidance from the White House, some US media outlets already appeared to be trying to protect the president. CNN and Associated Press, for instance, suggested that Republicans were trying to prosecute Biden without having evidence to justify their investigation.
Those outlets apparently ignored such evidence as the sworn testimony of IRS whistleblowers and the records of bank transfers that lawmakers have already revealed. By launching impeachment proceedings, congressional committees will gain more power to subpoena documents that could help prove or debunk the allegations.
Veteran US journalist Matthew Keys, who has worked for such outlets as Reuters and Fox News, said the White House directive on impeachment coverage was “not OK.” He added, “The White House should not be encouraging, influencing or interfering in the editorial strategies of America’s newsrooms, including CNN and the New York Times.” The letter could backfire, Keys said, because “any time the media does try to hold Republicans to account, those lawmakers can simply counter by questioning whether it’s actual journalism or something encouraged by the Biden administration.”
Legal scholar Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University, said the directive “has an uncomfortable feeling of marching orders to the media.” By trying to influence coverage of the impeachment inquiry, he argued, the administration “removes any pretense of separation between the Biden personal legal team and the White House Counsel’s Office.”
Sams, who also serves as a senior adviser to Biden, claimed that Republicans had failed in nearly nine months of investigation to “turn up any evidence of the president doing anything wrong.” He added that impeachment is “grave, rare and historic,” and the press must treat the claims of Republicans with “appropriate scrutiny.” The White House official attached a 14-page appendix to his memo providing talking points to address Republican “lies.”
Democrats previously controlled the House and twice impeached then-President Donald Trump.
BBC ‘disinformation’ correspondent busted spreading disinfo on her own bio
BY KIT KLARENBERG · THE GRAYZONE · SEPTEMBER 9, 2023
The BBC’s Marianna Spring specializes in branding average citizens as conspiracy theorists and potential terrorists for questioning official claims. When caught lying about her own professional record to advance her ambitions, she says she thought her deceit “wouldn’t be a big deal.”
On September 6th, The New European reported that BBC’s “specialist disinformation correspondent” Marianna Spring lied on her résumé in a failed attempt to bag work with Coda Story back in 2018.
While posing as an independent outlet, Coda Story is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, the US government’s regime change arm, as well as the European Union.
Spring had submitted an application to Coda Story editor-in-chief Natalia Antelava containing a CV in which she claimed to have worked alongside BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford on the British state broadcaster’s reporting on that year’s World Cup in Russia.
An entry read: “June 2018: Reported on International News during the World Cup, specifically the perception of Russia, with BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford.”
This claim was the textbook definition of “disinformation.” In truth, Spring had met Rainsford in a handful of social settings, and they never worked together. Antelava easily ascertained Spring was lying, and admonished her for the fabrication. The future BBC apparatchik responded with a grovelling apology, expressing contrition for her “awful misjudgment”, while somewhat amazingly still professing to be a “brilliant reporter”:
“I’ve only bumped into Sarah whilst she’s working and chatted to her at various points, but nothing more. Everything else on my CV is entirely true. There’s absolutely no excuse at all, and I’m really sorry again. The only explanation at all is my desperation to report out in Moscow, and thinking that it wouldn’t be a big deal, which was totally naive and stupid of me. I’m really sorry again for this awful misjudgment on my part.”
Antelava did not respond well, rejecting Spring’s application outright, and remarking, “telling me you are a brilliant reporter who exercises integrity and honesty when you have literally demonstrated the opposite was a terrible idea.”
Spring’s fabrication may have also been illegal. In Britain, her country of birth, lying on one’s résumé is a serious criminal offense under the 2006 Fraud Act. If an individual exaggerates their qualifications with the intention of gaining employment, they can face hefty fines, and a possible jail sentence of up to 10 years.
Why it took so long for Spring’s deceit to be publicly exposed is unclear. In the years since she attempted to lie her way into a flashy reporting job, her career has soared meteorically, placing her in the spotlight of mainstream British media.
Not long after her CV falsification, Spring joined the flagship BBC political program Newsnight, and was then promoted as the broadcaster’s “specialist disinformation correspondent” in March 2020. Coincidentally, the British government had just passed its Coronavirus Act, placing the country’s population under lockdown, and psychologically bludgeoning it into compliance with pandemic restrictions.
As The Grayzone has documented, Spring was at the forefront of an aggressive effort to frame critics of lockdowns, pandemic restrictions, mask and vaccine mandates, and vaccine passports as a vast, fascistic, potentially violent fifth column infesting both on and offline spaces – and who deserved to be crushed with a repressive state response. She frequently relied on the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a NATO state-funded information warfare operation, to reinforce her dubious reporting.
Spring’s connection to a constellation of state-backed propaganda outfits wound her up on the invite list for a secret May 2022 summit aimed at destroying The Grayzone. A Foreign Office-funded intelligence operative named Amil Khan suggested she be invited to the gathering.
The disclosures about Spring come mere days after The Guardian published a fawning profile of Spring and her crusading work “battling cranks, extremists – and Elon Musk,” while campaigning for integrity and honesty on social networks and in alternative media. While for the most part an unctuous hagiography, it ended on a surprisingly critical note, asking its subject why she was solely focused on purported “disinformation” spread by citizens and independent journalists, rather than governments or powerful organizations.
This query led Spring to reportedly lose her patience, in a quintessentially British way. She admonished her interviewer:
“I constantly get, ‘Marianna, why have you not BBC-verified this?’ Every single thing. It’s like, I’ve become the complaints person. I think they think I’m Superwoman. I can’t do everything. We all have to think about how ecosystems work – I deal with the extreme stuff.”
It is certainly true Spring “can’t do everything.” When applying for a job, she could not even tell the truth about her own record. Instead, Spring may have committed a criminal offense by lying on her CV in an admittedly “desperate” bid to climb the NATO-state sponsored media ladder.
Dr. Pierre Kory: New York Times Guide to Fall Vaccine Shots Is ‘Disinformation’
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 6, 2023
The New York Times on Sept. 1 published a “guide to fall vaccine shots,” which included recommending the general public get COVID-19, flu and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) vaccines, and infants 6 months and older receive COVID-19 shots this fall.
Written by Times senior writer David Leonhardt, the guide warns about rising COVID-19 cases and the approaching flu season, before offering, “The good news is that there are vaccines and treatments that reduce risks from all major viruses likely to circulate this season.”
According to the Times, “This year, we should take a broader approach,” rather than “obsess over COVID.”
Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D., dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine — described by the Times as a “vaccine expert” — echoed that appeal. “It’s not only COVID you have to think about,” he said.
Hotez, Nirav Shah, M.D., J.D., principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and other public health officials and experts quoted by the Times recommended Americans prepare for the upcoming fall and winter by getting the trio of COVID-19, flu and RSV vaccines.
None of these experts, however, addressed any of the potential safety risks posed by these vaccines.
Medical and public health experts who spoke with The Defender took a different view and questioned the Times’ guide, citing concerns about the safety and efficacy of vaccines for respiratory illnesses.
“Vaccines against respiratory illnesses have failed miserably,” said cardiologist Peter McCullough M.D., MPH. “America is wary of vaccines at this point, wanting to get on with life free of menacing vaccines, and are willing to seek early treatment, which is always the best way to handle infections, vaccinated or not.”
Pediatrician Dr. Liz Mumper, president and CEO of the Rimland Center for Integrative Medicine, told The Defender, “There have been no studies examining the effects of giving RSV vaccine, flu vaccine and COVID vaccine at the same time.”
“If you follow the advice in The New York Times article,” Mumper said, “be aware that your child will be part of post-marketing experimentation.”
Times still pushing vaccine propaganda
According to the Times, “The best defenses against COVID haven’t changed: vaccines and post-infection treatments,” which are “especially important for vulnerable people, like the elderly and immunocompromised.”
The federal government is “on track” to approve updated COVID-19 shots, designed to combat recent variants, in mid-September, the Times reported. Once they are available, “all adults should consider getting a booster shot.”
“COVID can still be nasty even if it doesn’t put you in the hospital,” the Times states. “A booster shot will reduce its potency.”
Hotez resurrected a claim heard often during 2021 and 2022, telling the Times, “Overwhelmingly, those who are being hospitalized are unvaccinated or undervaccinated.”
Experts who spoke with The Defender disagreed.
Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., professor emeritus and senior research scientist in epidemiology (chronic diseases) at the Yale School of Public Health, citing data from U.K. Public Health, said, “All-cause deaths ages 18+ are disproportionately among vaccinated people, whether one, two or three doses, compared to unvaccinated people.”
“The statistic quoted by Dr. Hotez is false,” Risch said.
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., senior director of science and research for Children’s Health Defense (CHD) said, “The new booster simply hasn’t been tested to affirm any assertion of protection. The original trials on children were laughable as they looked at antibody titers rather than actual disease prevention.”
McCullough told The Defender, “The COVID-19 vaccines have been a safety debacle with record cases of myocarditis, blood clots, stroke, and all-cause mortality.”
Despite the injury and mortality reports and the Times’ admission that the risk of COVID-19 to young children is “very low,” Shah nonetheless recommended children as young as 6 months of age get the COVID-19 booster shots this fall.
“Do you want to see your grandpa … [and] grandma?” Shah asked in the Times. “Are you really sure you’re not going to give COVID to them?”
Experts who spoke with The Defender refuted Shah’s advice.
Dr. Pierre Kory, president and chief medical officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), said “There is no medical justification for a healthy 6-month-old or older child to be vaccinated for COVID-19,” adding:
“There is so little data available on the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine in children that to give blanket recommendations like Shah is doing creates an unnecessary risk to children’s health.
“We simply do not know enough about the COVID-19 vaccines to make such broad recommendations. Additionally, COVID-19 is highly treatable in children and poses very little risk to a healthy child.”
Mumper told The Defender, “Any official who advocates that children take a vaccine to protect grandparents has not read the medical literature carefully.” She said, “After doing a deep dive on the risks and benefits of COVID vaccines in children, I remain steadfastly opposed to their use in healthy children,” adding:
“Any immunity from COVID shots is short-lived and follows a period of immune suppression. Very worrisome adverse events like inflammation of the heart, triggering autoimmunity, interfering with autonomic functions and reproductive toxicity are well described in the medical literature.”
Not all countries following suit
Some countries began limiting COVID-19 vaccination for children last year. In April 2022, Denmark ended its blanket COVID-19 vaccination recommendation, including for children.
Now, Denmark recommends “booster-vaccination” only for people “aged 50 years and above and selected target groups.”
Earlier in 2022, public health authorities in Sweden and Norway opted not to recommend COVID-19 vaccines for children between the ages of 5 and 11.
Sweden now recommends COVID-19 vaccination only for those 50 and above (18 and above for high-risk groups), while Norway is still only recommending COVID-19 vaccines for those 65 and older (and as young as 5 for high-risk groups).
In March of this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) said healthy children and adolescents ages 6 months to 17 years have a “low disease burden” and are therefore low priority for vaccination.
In June, Australian public health officials said Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine is “no longer available” for children under 12, and in January, U.K. public health authorities ended their booster program for those under 50.
COVID vaccine recommendations ‘not science, not medicine, not public health’
Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist and member of CHD’s scientific advisory committee, told The Defender that while public health authorities and the media continue to recommend COVID-19 vaccines, none of them have been fully licensed in the U.S., as all such vaccines are available under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) only.
In May 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said that COVID-19 vaccines for kids under 6 would not have to meet the agency’s 50% efficacy threshold required to obtain an EUA.
CDC data released in September 2022 showed that more than 55% of children between 6 months and 2 years old had a “systemic reaction” after their first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.
“The CDC, criminally, claims the (authorized) vaccines are ‘safe and effective,’” Nass said, adding:
“That is a term of art that is only allowed to be used for licensed vaccines and drugs. No licensed COVID-19 vaccine is available in the U.S. Public health is supposed to balance benefit and risk.
“This is not science. Not medicine. Not public health.”
Flu vaccines have demonstrated ‘declining efficacy’
According to the Times, “The most immediate step worth considering involves R.S.V.” On Sept. 5, the CDC issued a health advisory warning of rising RSV cases in parts of the U.S., particularly among children and babies.
Last month, the CDC signed off on the first-ever monoclonal antibody vaccine Beyfortus for the prevention of RSV, for babies up to 8 months old.
Also last month, the FDA approved an RSV vaccine for pregnant women, despite concerns raised by some medical experts about premature births identified during clinical trials. In May, the FDA approved Pfizer’s Abrysvo and GlaxoSmithKline’s Arexvy RSV vaccines for people 60 and older.
The Times quoted Ashish Jha, M.D., MPH, former White House COVID-19 adviser and now dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, who said, “If you’re 60 or over, you don’t want to get into November without having an RSV vaccine.”
And though there is no RSV vaccine approved for administration to children, the Times said that “parents may want to ask their pediatrician” about monoclonal antibody treatment for children under 8 months of age.
According to Hooker, “the RSV vaccine given to pregnant women could not even make a 20% threshold for protection (as specified by the FDA) against lower respiratory RSV infection.”
Supporting the push for the flu vaccine, the Times and experts such as Jha said, “The flu officially kills about 35,000 Americans in a typical year,” but “the flu’s toll would be lower if more people got a vaccine shot,” noting that “In recent years, less than half of Americans have done so.”
Jha added, “We underestimate the impact that respiratory viruses have on our population. The flu can knock people out for weeks, even younger people.” Jha pointed out that flu can make heart attacks and strokes more common as well.
Kory, however, told The Defender that the COVID-19 vaccines have made people more susceptible to other respiratory illnesses, like the flu and RSV:
“In my practice, we treat many vaccine-injured patients who are now more susceptible to the flu, RSV and many other viruses. The COVID vaccines cause many to present as if they have an autoimmune disease and now respond with more severe symptoms to common viruses like the flu.”
Risch, meanwhile, said, “Traditional flu vaccines are considered to be safe for most people” and may be a “reasonable” option for them, but “this should be discussed with one’s healthcare provider.”
“The flu vaccines seem to have had declining benefit over the last 10-15 years, to the point now that they may confer only a 30% benefit,” Risch added.
And according to Hooker, “The flu shot is also notoriously bad at protection against the flu and there are very few data regarding this season’s flu shot efficacy.”
‘Ludicrous’ public health messaging
Shah’s recommendation that children as young as 6 months get a COVID-19 shot this fall follows in a long line of questionable advice and claims disseminated by public health officials, some of which were later contradicted.
In a May 2021 MSNBC interview, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), said:
“Although you don’t like to see breakthroughs, the fact is, this is one of the encouraging aspects about the efficacy of the vaccine. It protect you completely against infection. If you do get infected, the chances are that you’re going to be without symptoms, and the chances are very likely that you’ll not be able to transmit it to other people.”
Fauci’s statements, however, failed to account for the many examples of breakthrough infections with severe symptoms and hospitalization.
After years of official “safe and effective” claims, in YouTube’s new “medical misinformation” policy introduced Aug. 15, “Claims that any vaccine is a guaranteed prevention method for COVID-19” are prohibited. Fauci’s videos from 2021, notably, are still up on YouTube.
In April 2020, Fauci said that remdesivir will become the “standard of care” for treating COVID-19. But numerous victims of COVID-19 hospital protocols prescribed by the CDC have come forward in recent months claiming that remdesivir was administered without permission of the patients or their families and contributed to further injury or death.
Similarly, former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in March 2021 “Our data from the CDC today suggests … that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick … can’t transmit it to others.” She doubled down on these statements during a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing in June, asserting that her statement “was generally accurate.”
Hooker said these statements were “obviously patently false, as the vaccines distributed in the U.S. at that time [in 2021] were not tested for transmission and there was evidence of ‘breakthrough’ infections even in the clinical trials.”
“This obviates any protection to ‘Grandma and Grandpa’ through children getting vaccinated against COVID-19,” Hooker added.
Also in 2021, Walensky recommended wearing pantyhose over a mask to ensure a tight fit.
Nass called such public health messaging “ludicrous,” noting that Walensky’s pantyhose recommendation “quickly disappeared” because it “had connotations the CDC was not willing to deal with.”
Kory criticized the Times’ fall vaccine guide, characterizing it as an example of “disinformation.”
“The New York Times is carrying the disinformation that continues to come from the CDC and other government health agencies,” he said. “This is one of the reasons that the public continues to lose trust in the media and our government.”
As a result, public health officials “create a mockery of how medical and scientific evidence is used to inform patient care decisions and public health policy,” Kory said.
Other experts who spoke with The Defender suggested taking vitamins to boost one’s immune system, rather than a series of vaccinations.
“For the immune system to defend against respiratory viruses, all people should take daily vitamin D to achieve blood levels of 50 or greater,” Risch said. “This is typically 5,000 units per day for a 150-lb person, but can be adjusted up or down according to body weight.”
“Serious RSV infections generally occur only in the youngest young and the oldest old. People in these categories should discuss this with their doctors,” he added.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
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.
Geologist Dr. Ian Plimer counters USA Today’s ‘fact-check’ on CO2 levels
Media’s ‘fact-checking resorted to lies & omissions’
By Dr. Ian Plimer | Climate Depot | September 4, 2023
The article claims, “Neither Plimer nor the social media user responded when USA TODAY asked which “six great ice ages” they were referencing.”
That is a lie. USA TODAY did not contact me despite the fact that I am easily contactable.
USA TODAY’s fact checks state that “Human greenhouse gas emissions, not El Niño, drive climate change”. Nowhere have I claimed El Niño drives climate change, and it has never been shown that human emissions drive global warming. If it could be shown, then it would also have to be shown that the modern warming is completely different from previous warming. This has not been done.
USA TODAY’s fact checks state that “Greenhouse gases, not Milankovitch cycles, drives modern global warming”. This is contrary to data on the Earth’s orbit, solar activity and plate tectonics. Furthermore, it has never been shown that greenhouse gases drive climate change.
USA TODAY’s fact checks state that “Humans are responsible for a significant amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.” If one molecule of plant food in 83,333 molecules in the atmosphere is a significant amount, then I’m a monkey’s uncle. It would also have to be shown that the molecules of plant food of natural origin do not drive global warming.
USA TODAY’s rating of a talk I gave was “Partly false” regarding six major ice ages, and then played semantic games as to whether an ice age or a glaciation within an ice age could be considered an ice age.
The key points of my talk were not addressed. These were:
(a) Ice ages and glaciations were initiated when the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was far higher than today (e.g. Huronian, Cryogenian, Permo-Carboniferous) hence, atmospheric carbon dioxide could not drive global warming.
(b) Increases in atmospheric temperature are followed by an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is the opposite of the climate activist mantra that suggests an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide drives global warming.
(c) For decades, I have asked climate activists to give me half a dozen scientific papers that show unequivocally that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. This has not been done.
It appears that fact-checking resorted to lies and omissions of pertinent information. Ideologically-blessed activist fact checkers with no scientific training give little confidence.
Emeritus Professor Ian Plimer,
The University of Melbourne,
Australia
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Guaido’s true colors: “President” to fix Venezuelan relations with Israel
By Jim Carey | Geopolitics Alert | February 13, 2019
Caracas – In an interview over the weekend, “interim President” of Venezuela Juan Guaido promised he would work on restoring relations with Israel.
Despite not actually having a government or being in any type of official position of power within Venezuela Juan Guaido is still somehow making big promises. Last week it was the promise to sell oil he doesn’t control to the US and this week he is setting foreign policy for a state, a military, and a diplomatic core that he doesn’t have.
Regardless of Juan Guaido’s material position, Israel has been more than willing to indulge in the US fantasy in Venezuela and was one of the early states to recognize the fraud as “interim President.” Now it seems Guaido is more than willing to repay the favor should he ever actually hold office.
Guaido made this promise in a recent interview with the Israel Hayom newspaper where he told the interviewer that he was “very happy to announce that the process of stabilizing relations with Israel is in full swing.” While what exactly that means when you’re a President with no power is rather ambiguous, for some reason Guaido has said restoring relations “is very important for us.”
Regardless of all these factors, there are still several reasons the new President has made this a high priority. Even without any actual diplomatic staff recognized by the state, Guaidó has still been in contact with Israel and has even discussed opening a new Venezuelan embassy in Israel, saying it “is one of the subjects we are talking about.”
Another reason Guaidó claims he wants to restore relations with the Zionists is due to the fact that there “are many Venezuelans in Israel and many Jews in Venezuela.”
According to Guaidó, this Venezuelan Jewish community “is very active and prosperous”… continue
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