Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Fake News Alert: Chinese “Patriots” Don’t Want To Retake Russia’s Far East

By Andrew Korybko | March 25, 2023

President Xi’s trip to Moscow to solidify the Sino-Russo Entente was the trigger event for prompting preplanned propaganda attacks aimed at driving a wedge between these two multipolar Great Powers. The latest one was carried out by Asia Times’ Jeff Pao in his article about how “China eyes Russia’s Far East resources, ‘patriots’ want more”, which reported on ultra-fringe commentary in Chinese online media agitating for their country to retake parts of Russia’s Far East.

The only reason why he and his outlet would amplify those views at this particular point in time is to mislead their targeted audience about China’s grand strategic intentions vis-à-vis Russia after President Xi’s trip to Moscow. By extending false credence to the unrealistic scenario of China retaking parts of Russia’s Far East, Pao is also implying that President Putin is irresponsibly ignoring a latent national security threat of the highest proportions. Neither of his narratives, however, have any factual basis.

Online commentary isn’t a reliable indicator for predicting any country’s future foreign policy, and Pao himself acknowledges in his agitprop piece that “In 1994, then-Chinese president Jiang Zemin and then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin signed an agreement to settle the sovereignty disputes.” Nevertheless, he still hinted that China’s recent directive referring to its former regions in that part of Russia by their traditional names suggests that it might eventually turn this into a territorial issue.

Pao is maliciously misinterpreting that development for information warfare purposes since he’s deliberately ignoring that all countries have the sovereign right to refer to anything however they want, especially if it’s a return to traditional names. While it’s true that in some contexts such a move could precede official claims to foreign territory, that’s not the case in Russian-Chinese relations, which remain rock-solid and have further strengthened as a result of President Xi’s trip to Moscow.

This information warfare agent even mentioned in his article that Russia is encouraging China to scale up its investments in the Far East, even going as far as to set up special economic regions there to facilitate that. He deserves credit for reporting on that fact, but it goes to show that he has ulterior motives in amplifying ultra-fringe commentary demanding that China retake parts of that region. There’s no reason for it to do so either since China already has access to whatever resources it wants there.

Those who speculate that it might countenance this scenario for “living space” are ignoring China’s declining birth rate and the “Heihe–Tengchong Line”, which shows that around 96% of its population resides in the 36% of the country’s eastern territory. Considering that there’s more than enough “living space” already within its own borders, its birth rate is declining, and it has access to whatever resources it wants from Russia, there’s no reason for China to think about retaking parts of the Far East.

These objectively existing and easily verifiable facts expose Pao as the propagandist that he is, who either produced his agitprop under orders from Asia Times’ editors or did so on his own initiative, but in either case he’s someone whose pieces about Russian-Chinese relations can’t be trusted. His agenda is to mislead to people into thinking that China is about to stab Russia in the back while President Putin remains oblivious to this treachery, which isn’t true at all and shouldn’t be taken seriously by anyone.

March 25, 2023 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 1 Comment

Iraq war is epitomy of media duplicity

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | March 23, 2023

The Iraq War was spawned by a deadly combination of political depravity and media complicity. Unfortunately, on the twentieth anniversary of the war, both elements of that conspiracy are being whitewashed. Instead, politicians and their pundit accomplices are prattling as if the Iraq war was a well-intentioned mistake, not a crime against humanity.

In the days after 9/11, when pollsters asked Americans who they thought had carried out the 9/11 attacks, only 3 percent of respondents suggested Iraq or Saddam Hussein as culprits. But President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney worked ceaselessly to convince Americans that Saddam was the 9/11 culprit. Official propaganda trumpeting the Saddam/al-Qaeda link was the linchpin for exploiting 9/11 to justify war. A February 2003 poll found that 72 percent of Americans believed that Saddam was “personally involved in the September 11 attacks.” Shortly before the March 2003 invasion, almost half of all Americans believed that “most” or “some” of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. Only 17 percent of respondents knew that none of the hijackers was Iraqi.

In his official notification of invasion sent to Congress (in lieu of a declaration of war) on March 18, 2003, Bush declared that he was attacking Iraq “to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” Bush tied Saddam to 9/11 even though confidential briefings he received informed him that no evidence of any link had been found. Three years after the war started, Bush publicly admitted that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11.

On March 17, 2003, Bush also justified invading Iraq by invoking UN resolutions purportedly authorizing the U.S. “to use force in ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.” In a speech giving Saddam 48 hours to abdicate power, Bush declared, “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” In the weeks and months after the fall of Baghdad, Bush repeatedly asserted that U.S. forces had discovered WMDs or that Saddam had weapons programs. “We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories,” Bush declared to journalists on May 29, 2003. Five weeks later, he again claimed vindication because “we found a biological lab” in a truck trailer. However, CIA investigators concluded that the trailer had nothing to do with an Iraqi WMD program. False claims by the Bush administration on Saddam seeking uranium in Niger sparked an uproar and leaks seeking to destroy the former ambassador who exposed the sham.

In June 2003, Bush repeatedly denounced “revisionist historians” who kept asking about the missing WMDs. In a November 12, 2003 interview with the BBC’s David Frost, Bush declared that he had sent a team to Iraq “to find the weapons or the intent of weapons.” Bush did not reveal how he defined “the intent of weapons.” The following month, Bush told ABC News that the war was justified because there was “the possibility that [Saddam] could acquire weapons.” In January 2004, David Kay—the man Bush chose to head the search for WMDs in Iraq—testified to Congress that “we were almost all wrong,” as far as Iraq possessing WMDs. Kay’s testimony demolished one of the prime pretexts for the war.

Bush responded by portraying the lack of evidence as proof of his courage. On February 8, 2004, Bush justified invading Iraq because Saddam “had the ability to make weapons at the very minimum.” This is like justifying a violent no-knock raid on someone’s house because they could have purchased gunpowder and tin cans.

In a March 2, 2004 speech to Homeland Security Department employees, Bush offered a new justification for invading Iraq: “America will not allow terrorists and outlaw regimes to threaten our Nation and the world with the world’s most dangerous technologies.” The mere suspicion that a nation might have “dangerous technologies” justified devastating their land.

But what did George W. Bush really think? That mystery was solved a few weeks later at the annual Washington dinner for the Radio and Television Correspondents Association. Bush performed a skit featuring slides showing him crawling around the Oval Office peeking behind curtains. Bush quipped to the poohbah attendees: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere…Nope, no weapons over there… Maybe under here?” The crowd loved it and The Washington Post headlined its report on the evening: “George Bush, Entertainer in Chief.” Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor & Publisher, labeled the performance and the press’s reaction that night as “one of the most shameful episodes in the recent history of the American media and presidency.” By the time of Bush’s performance, hundreds of American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians had already been killed.

Most of the media had embedded themselves for the Iraq war long before that dinner. The Washington Post buried pre-war articles questioning the Bush team’s shams on Iraq; their award-winning Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks complained, “There was an attitude among editors: ‘Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?’” Instead, before the war started, the Post ran 27 editorials in favor of invasion and 140 front-page articles supporting the Bush administration’s case for attacking Saddam. PBS’s Bill Moyers noted that “of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news, from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department.” Jim Lehrer, the host of government-subsidized PBS Newshour, explained his timidity in 2004: “It would have been difficult to have had debates [about invading Iraq]… you’d have had to have gone against the grain.” Lehrer’s admission did not disgrace him since groveling to officialdom is the job description for Washington journalists.

In his 1971 opinion on the Pentagon Papers case, Justice Hugo Black declared that a free press has “the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.” But during the Iraq War, most of the media preferred to trumpet official lies instead of exposing them.

A 2005 American University survey of hundreds of journalists who covered Iraq concluded: “Many media outlets have self-censored their reporting on the conflict in Iraq because of concern about public reaction to graphic images and details about the war.” Individual journalists commented:

“In general, coverage downplayed civilian casualties and promoted a pro-U.S. viewpoint. No U.S. media show abuses by U.S. military carried out on regular basis.”

“Friendly fire incidents were to show only injured Americans, and no reference made to possible mistakes involving civilians.”

“The real damage of the war on the civilian population was uniformly omitted.”

The media sugarcoated the war and almost always refused to publish photos incriminating the U.S. military. The Washington Post received a leak of thousands of pages of confidential records on the 2005 massacre at Haditha, including stunning photos taken immediately after Marines killed 24 civilians (mostly women and children). Though the Post headlined its exclusive story, “Marines’ Photos Provide Graphic Evidence in Haditha Probe,” the article noted that “Post editors decided that most of the images are too graphic to publish.” The Post suppressed the evidence at the same time it continued deferentially reporting official denials that U.S. troops committed atrocities.

In 2007, two Apache helicopters targeted a group of men in Baghdad with 30 mm. cannons and killed kill up to 18 people. Video from the helicopter revealed one helicopter crew “laughing at some of the casualties, all of whom were civilians, including two Reuters journalists.” “Light ’em all up. Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” one guy on the recording declared. Army Corporal Chelsea Manning leaked the video to Wikileaks, which disclosed it in 2010. Wikileaks declared on Twitter: “Washington Post had Collateral Murder video for over a year but DID NOT RELEASE IT to the public.” Wikileaks also disclosed thousands of official documents exposing U.S. war crimes and abuses, tacitly damning American media outlets that chose to ignore or shroud atrocities.

In 2007, Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly declared that at the beginning of the war in Iraq, “everybody in the country [was] behind it, except the kooks.” The “kooks” included UN weapons inspectors, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and many foreign governments. The “kook” label was also attached to Antiwar.com, The American Conservative, Counterpunch, the Future of Freedom Foundation, and an array of individual journalists who often found closed doors to their submissions. Likewise, the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of protestors who took to the streets of American cities to oppose the war were redefined into a laughingstock.

In his rush to war, President Bush showed boundless bad faith—followed by boundless righteousness after his lies were exposed. By the summer of 2008, only 22 percent of Americans approved of Bush and 41 percent said he was the “worst president ever.” But the same media outlets that championed the Iraq War helped resurrect Bush’s public image a decade later. Bush was exalted like the second coming of George Washington for his slams against the Trump administration. By early 2018,  a poll showed that 61 percent of Americans approved of Bush, and his support among Democrats quintupled, from 11 percent in early 2009 to 54 percent now. The key to Bush’s rehabilitation was burying his Iraq War record in the Memory Hole.

The media played the same trick to expunge its own tawdry Iraq record. Four years ago, the Washington Post spent a king’s ransom to produce and run a Super Bowl ad on its “Democracy Dies in the Darkness” motto. At that time, the Post was whipping up RussiaGate hysteria and reaping torrents of new subscribers. The Super Bowl ad, a paean to reporters, declared, “When we go off to war… knowing keeps us free.”

But kowtowing leaves people dead. Twenty years after the start of the Iraq War, President Biden is dragging America deeper into a foreign conflict that could spiral into World War III. Most of the mainstream media is again parroting whatever the U.S. government or its foreign lackeys say about the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Lies are political weapons of mass destruction, obliterating all limits on government power. The Iraq War should have taught Americans not to trust presidents or pundits who seek to unleash mass carnage. But don’t trust the Washington elite to ever learn or admit that lesson.

March 23, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | 1 Comment

Putin and Xi Standing Firm on the Right Side of History

By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 23, 2023

The historic summit this week between the Russian and Chinese leaders provoked paroxysms of angst in the Western media. President Vladimir Putin’s hosting of China’s Xi Jinping in Moscow was presented as the “world’s two most prominent autocrats” purportedly establishing a hostile “anti-West axis”.

The American and European media – slavishly echoing the talking points of their imperialist regimes – were in hyper-bogeyman mode. The meeting of Putin and Xi was distorted in every way to appear as something illegitimately threatening and sinister to the Western “rules-based global order” (euphemism for Western capitalist privileges and predation.)

Bogeyman mode also entails collective amnesia. The summit coincided with the 20th anniversary of the U.S. and British launching their war on Iraq – arguably the biggest crime of the 21st century so far. Yet this vile anniversary has hardly stirred any Western media condemnation or shame, never mind legal accountability.

The wanton cynicism towards the Putin-Xi meeting belies the deep anxiety among the U.S.-dominated clique of Western states that the much-vaunted “rules-based order” is collapsing. A collapse caused by its own inherent corruption and systematic abuse of power and international law over many decades.

Both Putin and Xi emphasized that the Russia-China alliance was not meant to threaten any third party.

“We are always for peace and dialogue,” said China’s President Xi who was in Russia on a three-day state visit.

Putin hailed the highest point in relations between Moscow and Beijing and underscored the long historical friendship. Both leaders said this was not simply an extension of a Cold War-era alliance but rather a harbinger of genuine multipolar global development for all nations based on partnership and cooperation, respecting international law and national sovereignty.

Indeed, the much-anticipated multipolar world order is coming to fruition as the erstwhile dominance of Western elitist unilateralism shrivels. The Russian and Chinese leaders signed multiple trade deals and furthered plans to use national currencies, thereby making the unwarranted privileges of the US dollar obsolete.

There is a palpable sense that the global economy is moving in a tectonic shift towards Eurasian partnership of vitality and dynamic multipolar development, foreshadowing a fateful demise for U.S.-led Western capitalist hegemony. Western nations are haunted by financial bankruptcy, inequality, paralyzing debt, and dead-end militarism.

Of particular note is the plan to build a new gas pipeline from Russia to China dubbed Power of Siberia 2. It will supply an additional 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually to China. Significantly, this new supply route of Russian energy matches the volume that had been earmarked for the European Union with the operation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline – until the Biden administration blew it up.

Out of all the impressive partnership deals signed in Moscow this week, the new gas route to China speaks loudest. Russia has decided to walk away from the ungrateful Europeans and let them suffer the consequences of industrial shutdown by opting for expensive American gas.

Eurasian economic power is the fulcrum of global development. Russia and China are leading the way, not just for the rest of Eurasia, but also for the Global South, Latin America, Africa, and others. The incremental moving away from the U.S. dollar as fiat international currency is the most ominous sign of the rise and fall. Russia and China are hastening that fateful switch.

In a desperate bid to avert the inevitable, the Western imperialist regimes and their media tried to depict the Putin-Xi summit as something sinister for global security, in what amounts to be a reverse projection of their own depredations and crimes.

Western media sneered that “autocrats” Putin and Xi were “posing as peacemakers”, even while both leaders emphasized their vision of multipolar relations was based on mutual cooperation.

China’s proposals for a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine were welcomed by Putin but dismissed by the Americans and Europeans as “diplomatic cover for Russian aggression”. Meanwhile, Washington and Brussels made new commitments to increase weapons supply to Ukraine, thereby prolonging the conflict – the worst in Europe since World War Two.

It is American and European regimes that are ruling out any dialogue or political-historical understanding about the origins of the war in Ukraine. Hence their determination to swipe away any opportunity for resolution. Because if an intelligent, reasonable dialogue was held – as the Russians had proposed before the war erupted more than a year ago – the conclusions would be unacceptable for U.S. and NATO expansionism.

The paradox is Russia and China are portrayed as global villains by Western powers who are still dripping with blood from the fraudulent and illegal Iraq war and who are today fueling a potentially catastrophic nuclear confrontation over Ukraine. The same media lying machine that enabled the destruction of Iraq (and many other nations) is now enabling hostility towards Russia and China.

To augment that twisted narrative, the Western media seek to undermine the Russian and Chinese-led move towards a better, fairer global economy and with that the demise of U.S. hegemony. Of course, “U.S. hegemony” and “Western economy” are just euphemisms for a dictatorship of billionaires and corporations, a dictatorship that the vast majority of the Western public has to suffer under.

So this week, Russia was labelled the “junior partner” of China and denigrated for becoming a “dependency” on Beijing. Western media reporting went into contortions to wantonly mischaracterize the evident warmth between Putin and Xi, and the tremendous significance of their global vision.

Russia was disparaged as becoming nothing more than a “resource colony of China” owing to its burgeoning oil and gas exports. That moniker reminds one of former U.S. Senator John McCain’s insult of Russia being nothing more than a “gas station masquerading as a nation”.

It’s funny how Moscow was up until recently accused of “energy blackmail” and “weaponizing hydrocarbons” when it was the main supplier of Europe. But when Russia’s vast energy is rerouted to China it is now pilloried as a “colony” of Beijing. Western propaganda can’t make up its mind about whether to cast Russia as an energy tyrant or an energy toady. That double-think betrays propaganda construct and demonization.

The world is changing before our eyes. Western imperialist regimes are being exposed for the warmongers they are, their privileges and predatory capitalism are imploding, their neocolonialist blood-sucking days are over, and a new multipolar order of partnership and peace is emerging.

The Western elites and their media are excelling themselves by trying to bad mouth Putin and Xi in every preposterous way. The outlandish distortions are commensurate with the desperation.

Time in short order, however, is telling who really is on the right side of history.

March 23, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , | 2 Comments

‘Blackout’: Sy Hersh Says US, Germany Coordinated NYT ‘False Cover Story’ for Nord Stream Bombing

By Fantine Gardinier – Sputnik – 22.03.2023

On September 26, 2022, a massive explosion ripped through the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines on the Baltic seabed, severing a major natural gas connection and releasing colossal amounts of methane. The US had long objected to the line, which runs from Russia to Germany, urging Europe to buy more expensive US gas instead.

A new report by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh lays blame at the feet of US and German intelligence for a New York Times article claiming it was Ukrainian terrorists, not US Navy divers, who bombed the Nord Stream pipeline last September. Hersh said it was part of a coordinated “blackout” of his expose of Washington’s role in the attack.

“There is no evidence that any reporter assigned there has yet to ask the White House press secretary whether Biden had done what any serious leader would do: formally “task” the American intelligence community to conduct a deep investigation, with all of its assets, and find out just who had done the deed in the Baltic Sea,” Hersh wrote on Wednesday.

“According to a source within the intelligence community, the president has not done so, nor will he,” the journalist asserted. “Why not? Because he knows the answer.”

Hersh pointed to a curious meeting in Washington earlier this month between Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in which both media and aides were almost totally absent.

“There have been no statements or written understandings made public since then by either government, but I was told by someone with access to diplomatic intelligence that there was a discussion of the pipeline exposé and, as a result, certain elements in the Central Intelligence Agency were asked to prepare a cover story in collaboration with German intelligence that would provide the American and German press with an alternative version for the destruction of Nord Stream 2,” Hersh wrote.

“In the words of the intelligence community, the agency was ‘to pulse the system’ in an effort to discount the claim that Biden had ordered the pipelines’ destruction,” he explained.

Indeed, The New York Times, which was one of two newspapers that ran the story, has admitted in the past to letting the CIA proofread certain stories before publishing them.

Along with the NYT, which published an article on March 7 claiming “a pro-Ukrainian group” might have been behind the pipeline explosion, the German weekly Der Zeit published a companion piece that same day claiming German investigative officials had found a luxury yacht chartered by a group of Ukrainians under false pretenses in the area of the explosions just a few weeks before they occurred.

Screengrab of video by Swedish media showing underwater drone footage of damaged Nord Stream pipeline. – Sputnik International, 1920, 17.03.2023

Both reports were largely absent on precise facts, heavy on anonymous sourcing, and admitted that, as the Times put it, “there was much they did not know.” Hersh’s February expose on the pipeline bombing was derided by critics for using anonymous sources, who claimed it undermined the integrity of Hersh’s audacious claims.

In fact, the Der Zeit story even noted the belief among some “in international security services” that the yacht story “was a false flag operation.”
“Indeed it was,” Hersh wrote in reply.

He quoted a source within the American intelligence community as telling him: “It was a total fabrication by American intelligence that was passed along to the Germans, and aimed at discrediting your story.”

To further make his point about just how little the journalists behind the two papers’ exposes really knew about their supposed bombshell reports, Hersh quoted a NYT podcast interview with story co-author Julian Barnes from a few days after its publication in which Barnes admits their primary method for establishing the facts of the article was “asking exactly the right questions” of US intelligence officials.

“All those states that we just went through, did Russia do it? Did the Ukraine state do it? And that was just hitting dead end after dead end. We weren’t finding officials who were telling us that there was credible evidence pointing at a government,” Barnes told the podcast. “So my colleagues Adam Entous, Adam Goldman, and I started asking a different question. Could this have been done by non-state actors?”

“Well, we started asking, who might these saboteurs be? Or if we couldn’t answer that, who might they be aligned with? Could they be pro-Russian saboteurs? Could they be other saboteurs? And the more we talk to officials who had access to intelligence, the more we saw this theory gaining traction.”

Hersh finished his article by faulting the NYT journalists for using their trade to protect Biden from the ugly ramifications of the sabotage order he personally signed.

Hersh has been a journalist for more than 50 years, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his work in exposing the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US troops and its subsequent coverup. He later exposed the US’ secret bombing campaign in Cambodia in the 1970s, US torture of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and the false attribution of a chemical weapons attack in Ghouta, Syria, to the Syrian government instead of to a group of US-backed Islamist rebels.

March 22, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Irreversible Fake News At The Washington Post

Tony Heller | March 17, 2023

March 22, 2023 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Political West doubles down on ‘Russia kidnapping children’ propaganda narrative

By Drago Bosnic | March 21, 2023

With any credible evidence of alleged Russian mass kidnappings of children from former Ukraine sorely lacking, in order to justify this propaganda narrative, as well as give at least some ostensible “credence” to the recent ICC indictment against Russian President Vladimir Putin, the mainstream propaganda machine is mobilizing all of its forces. Supposed “horror stories” of the “ordeal” these kids and their parents “have to go through” are aiming to cause an emotional reaction and present Russia and its leadership as “monstrous” as they could possibly be. One such “horror story” was published by The Guardian on March 19, just two days after the Hague-based “court” issued an arrest warrant for Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights.

According to The Guardian, Yevhen Mezhevyi, a 40-year-old Ukrainian citizen now living in Riga (Latvia), claims his children were “abducted and forcibly transferred” to Russia last year. Mezhevyi’s children were apparently taken while he was serving prison time in the DNR (Donetsk People’s Republic) due to his three-year service in the Kiev regime forces (2016-2019), including in the notorious Yavoriv military base in the west of the country, infamous for the training of various openly Neo-Nazi units. According to his own admission, Yevhen Mezhevyi knew that the Russian military would be apprehending all former and current members of such Nazi-inspired cohorts, so he tried to hide his past and even threw away his uniforms in an attempt to leave no trace of his time in the Kiev regime forces.

However, despite his attempts to hide, Mezhevyi was caught and sent to a prison near the town of Olenovka, approximately 20 km southwest of Donetsk, where he remained for 45 days. He claims that after Russian forces entered the city, Mezhevyi, his son Matvii (13) and daughters Sviatoslava (9) and Oleksandra (7) were “taken” by Russian soldiers and evacuated to Vinogradnoye, a village to the south-east of Mariupol. There, humanitarian volunteers offered assistance to Mezhevyi and his family, so they “stayed there for a while” (Yevhen didn’t specify for how long). “… but then, one day, after we were taken to a checkpoint and searched, a Russian official saw something in my documents,” he lamented, obviously referring to the fact that the official found evidence of Mezhevyi’s time in the Neo-Nazi junta forces.

Despite the fact that he could have easily been sentenced to long-term prison time for this, Mezhevyi was released after 45 days. In the meantime, his children were evacuated to Russia, as the Kiev regime forces, in which he served for three years, never stopped shelling the Donbass republics and other areas. Mezhevyi claims to have tried to get a job, but gave up after his son Matvii called him, allegedly saying that “the camp” he and his sisters were in “was closing in five days” and that “we have to either go to a foster family or an orphanage”. Using the word “camp” for the facilities Mezhevyi’s children were housed in is quite intentional, as the obvious goal is to present Russia in the worst light possible. Apparently, the alternative was to leave the children completely alone in the DNR, where they would’ve been targeted by the Neo-Nazi junta forces, in the case of which Moscow would also be “guilty” for not evacuating them. It seems you can’t win if you’re Russian.

“I understood there was no time to look for a job. I needed to take the risk, travel to Russia and get them out of there, as soon as possible,” Mezhevyi claims, adding: “Thank God, there are volunteers who helped me get to Moscow. It was very hard to cross into Russia from the occupied territories and I was interrogated, again and again, even though I had already spent 45 days in their prison and I just wanted to get my children. But no one cared about that. Eventually, I crossed into Russia and got on a train to Moscow.”

It’s quite interesting how the apparent “Mordor of our time” let Mr. Mezhevyi cross the border and undertake the “risky journey” where the “Evil Empire” even lets “volunteers” help people find their children, “kidnapped” for whatever reason. After he arrived in Moscow, Mezhevyi was contacted by Alexey Gazaryan, an official working at a children’s ombudsman office, managed by Maria Lvova-Belova, for whom the ICC issued an arrest warrant, along with President Putin. Apparently, Gazaryan told Mezhevyi that “he didn’t mind him taking his children back, but that he needed to get a permit” from DNR social services.

The head of DNR social services, Elena Maiboroda, called Gazaryan and agreed, so on 20 June, around 11:00 PM, Mezhevyi arrived at “the camp” on the outskirts of Moscow. He claims he was “interrogated” by at least five people, including Gazaryan, a psychologist, a nurse and the head of “the camp”, who “made him” fill out dozens of papers. Mezhevyi “managed” to cross into Latvia with his children with the help of “volunteers”. The Guardian claims he “still struggles” to understand how, among the documents that the Russians “forced” his son to sign, there was also a certificate asking the child to transfer the custody of himself and his sister back to their father.

The wording is obviously a pitiful attempt to portray Russian officials as supposed “monsters” for following their own legal procedures, which, in fact, are less strict than in most Western countries. The article claims that Mezhevyi’s family has been reunited, “but only after he undertook a risky journey over the border to rescue them”. This implies that they had to be “rescued”, given his “ordeal”, including the “incredibly risky” task of “forced” signing of documents. It seems only in Russia “genocide” is conducted by getting the children safely evacuated from an active warzone to a summer camp and then helping the father, an enemy combatant, to pick them up and go wherever he pleases.

March 21, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 1 Comment

U.N. Is A Climate “Disinformation Threat Actor”

By Michael Shellenberger | March 20, 2023

The United States government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), within the Department of Homeland Security, is raising the alarm about the threat of “foreign influence” that is “leveraging misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.” CISA defines “malinformation” as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” In 2021, CISA, along with the White House and private sector partners, successfully persuaded Facebook and Twitter to censor accurate information about the origins of the SARS-2 coronavirus and covid vaccines.

And yet CISA is failing to do its job when censoring malinformation, misinformation, and disinformation about climate change, including by “threat actors,” often funded or employed by foreign governments. A Google survey of over 2,300 people conducted last year by the nonpartisan research organization Environmental Progress, which I founded and lead, found that 53% of people surveyed in the U.S. agree with the false statement, “Climate change is making hurricanes more frequent,” while 46% agree with the false statement, “Climate change threatens human extinction.”

I strongly oppose efforts by the U.S. government to censor American citizens by ordering social media platforms to remove content, sometimes while threatening to end Section 230, the federal law that makes companies like Facebook and Twitter possible. Such censorship is a violation of the First Amendment. The journalist Matt Taibbi, former State Department official Mike Benz, and I have all pointed to the emergence since 2016 of a censorship-industrial complex operated and funded by the U.S. government. It should be defunded.

But it’s notable that the censorship-industrial complex has shown no interest in censoring climate misinformation that has led people to believe that climate change is making hurricanes more frequent and threatening human extinction. “An example of malinformation is editing a video to remove important context to harm or mislead,” writes CISA. And yet that is precisely what foreign disinformation threat actors like Greta Thunberg, her allies at the German government-funded Potsdam Institute, and even the U.N.’s own Secretary-General Antonio Guterres routinely do when they share videos of people in poor countries suffering from flooding, which is a direct result of lack of flood management infrastructure, not slightly more precipitation from climate change.

Moreover, the censorship-industrial complex has sought to censor accurate information about climate change and energy. Last June, former Biden Administration Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy demanded censorship of those who criticized the failure of weather-dependent renewables during the blackouts in Texas in February 2021, even though such criticisms were factual. “The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation,” said McCarthy.

In her interview, she went on to falsely claim that critics of renewables are funded by “dark money” fossil fuel companies — the same false claim that Democrats made of the world’s most influential scientist studying hurricanes and climate change, Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado. As such, McCarthy spread disinformation in order to undermine the legitimacy of her opponents.

The U.N. continues to wage its disinformation campaign against the people of the world, as today’s headlines about its new report show. “‘The climate time-bomb is ticking,’” reads the CNN headline. “Scientists release ‘survival guide’ to avert climate disaster,” says BBC. “Earth to hit critical warming threshold by early 2030s, climate panel says.” The U.N. most journalists are implying that scientists have determined that a temperature increase beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels would be catastrophic.

The U.N. report is malinformation. The supposed 1.5-degree “threshold” is political, not scientific, as Pielke and others have shown. Global warming causes incrementally greater risk. Temperatures are expected to rise less than most thought as recently as 10 years ago, thanks to abundant natural gas. And humankind’s physical security is assured, given our success at adapting to more extreme weather and producing more food on less land.

All of this raises a question. Why, if the U.N. and U.S. governments are so committed to censoring disinformation, are they themselves spreading it? Why, in other words, do U.N. officials perfectly fit their own definition of “disinformation threat actors,” and often foreign ones at that?

March 20, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | | 1 Comment

Setting the record straight on the teeming media swamp that supported Iraq war

By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos | Responsible Statecraft | March 20, 2023

In his doubling down of support for the war in Iraq, David “Axis of Evil” Frum all but exonerates the architects and promoters of the war (which would include himself, being a speechwriter for President Bush until 2002, then a media cheerleader) as such:

To my mind, the most important lessons regard government decision making, offering a warning against groupthink and self-deception. Crucial decision makers started with an assumption that regime change in Iraq would be cheap, easy, and lightly contested. They then isolated themselves from all contrary information—until it was too late.

Frum, like his contemporary Eli Lake, is an interesting case because each has in the last few weeks attempted to both acknowledge the conventional wisdom after 20 years that the war was a failure, while still arguing best intentions and look, “Iraq really is better off without Saddam Hussein.” On the latter, I will let my colleague Connor Echols’ heartbreaking interviews with actual Iraqis answer that. What I’m keen to explore is Frum’s assertion that: “I don’t believe any leaders of the time intended to be dishonest. They were shocked and dazed by 9/11. They deluded themselves.”

It is highly doubtful that Frum vulcan mind-melded with each of the architects, or saw into their souls a la Bush and Vladimir Putin. We know from highly documented accounts that, contra Frum’s simplistic summation, the Bush administration was influenced by a vanguard of well-placed neoconservatives who had set regime change into motion back in the Clinton administration. This was no 9/11 hangover. As Jim Lobe pointed out in these pages in 2021, the 2001 attacks enabled leaders and operators like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby, Robert Kagan, and Bill Kristol to have the war they wanted long before those planes flew into the Twin Towers.

Frum’s flimsy rationalization conveniently ignores that the mainstream media was totally and willingly co-opted into this “delusion” too, and without it, the invasion and aftermath, which included eight years of occupation and then another two years of military assistance to help the Iraqis roust ISIS (which the U.S. invasion created) wouldn’t have carried on in the manner that it did.

I say that because as the polling showed the American people losing faith in the war by January 2005, the mainstream media backgrounded all of the bad news (like military massacres, civilian deaths, torture, sectarian violence, PTSD) while foregrounding Pentagon talking points that said new counterinsurgency methods and tactical wins meant victory was “right around the corner.” They lied about reconstruction progress, too, as Peter Van Buren points out right here.

An entire ecosystem of information management ensured that the major networks, newspapers and radio, owned by only a handful of conglomerates, were singing the same tune, all of the time.

Frum, Lake, and columnists like Max Boot, who now, conveniently, says he regrets it, were what Spock would call top “lifeforms” in that ecosystem.

We must talk about this because these men and their compradores in the Washington swamp want to dismiss any comparison to how we view Ukraine and how the media is covering U.S. policy in that war. They have not learned any lessons about meddling and the limits of American power writ large, just in failed wars of the past.

March 20, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , | 2 Comments

Sy Hersh Slams ‘Stupid’ NYT Story on ‘Ukrainian’ Trace Behind Nord Stream Blasts

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 18.03.2023

The veteran investigative journalist best known for blowing the lid off major US government lies, from Watergate and the My Lai Massacre to the Syrian gas attacks, penned a series of explosive Substack pieces last month revealing direct US complicity in the Nord Stream pipeline attacks.

Seymour Hersh says he has even more details corroborating the Biden administration’s involvement in the Nord Stream sabotage attacks, but cannot share them for fear of outing his sources.

“Biden authorized the blast. And the people involved know what he did. You know what orders came. I know a lot more about this than I want to say. But I have to protect the people who talk to me,” Hersh said in an interview with Austrian media.

“I know what I wrote is true. I know that it is right. I know the meetings I have described and the details of what happened in Norway. I’ve been involved with the intelligence community for 50 years,” the 85-year-old veteran journalist said, addressing the smear campaign being run against him by the legacy media in the wake of his bombshell Nord Stream-related publications.

Commenting on the story put out by The New York Times and German media earlier this month claiming that a “pro-Ukrainian group” without links to any state blew up the pipelines using a rented commercial yacht, Hersh called this version “stupid,” “unbelievable,” and a “crazy story with no sources.”

The veteran investigative journalist, one of the few in the contemporary US media landscape who still believes in the media’s role as the fourth estate, also took aim at the legacy media for ignoring his story in fealty to power. “If 90 percent of editors were fired, we’d be much better off, because they’re so afraid to write anything critical of Biden, thinking they’re going to put a Republican back in the White House,” he said.

Hersh said the attack on Nord Stream was a “signal” to the Western Europeans from Biden – that if they didn’t “want to go all the way” in the conflict with Russia, the US would cut them off. “He did it. And the price for that will be very high in Europe. Europe will not have the gas it needs and you will have to pay more for it,” he said.

Hersh, a sympathizer of the Democratic Party when it comes to social, environmental, and immigration issues, characterized Biden’s foreign policy as a disaster, with Washington’s badmouthing of China and Russia ultimately helping to “weld the two of them together.” As for the crisis in Ukraine, the journalist expects the NATO proxy conflict to fail. “Russia is going to win this war,” he said.

Seymour Hersh published his first piece on the Nord Stream attacks on February 8, detailing how US Navy divers laid the explosives that blew up the pipelines in June 2022 under the cover of NATO’s BALTOPS drills, with a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance aircraft triggering them to explode three months later. Hersh subsequently wrote several follow-up stories with additional information and historical context.

US and German media rolled out their own stories this month, citing intelligence officials, claiming that a “pro-Ukrainian group” without any ties to Kiev blew up the pipelines independently using a rented yacht. Moscow dismissed these stories as “disinformation” designed to divert attention from the real perpetrators, and repeated long-standing calls for thorough and transparent probes into the acts of terror.

March 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Bill Passed by House and Senate to Declassify COVID Origins Documents May Be Attempt to ‘Frame’ China

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | March 13, 2023

Lawmakers and media misrepresented a bill requiring the declassification of documents related to the origins of COVID-19, according to several experts who warned that contrary to what the public was told, the legislation limits the types of documents the government must declassify — raising questions about the bill’s real intent.

According to the sponsors of the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 — which sailed through the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives and is awaiting President Biden’s signature — the bill requires the government to declassify all documents pertaining to COVID-19.

But experts interviewed by The Defender said the bill requires the declassification only of documents related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China — the epicenter of the “lab leak theory.”

They suggested the limitations may be intended to reduce the culpability of U.S. and private actors in the potential leak of — or development of — COVID-19, by placing full blame on China and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Bill’s backers made ‘false claims’

Independent journalist Sam Husseini said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the Senate’s co-sponsor of the COVID-19 Origin Act, made “claims about the bill which are false.”

Hawley, on March 1, tweeted:

Speaking to Fox News March 2, Hawley made similar claims, saying, “My bill … will declassify all of the information the federal government has on COVID origins.”

Hawley later followed up his statements with a letter addressed to Chinese President Xi Jinping, informing him of the bill’s passage. This prompted a response from the Chinese government, according to The Gateway Pundit.

Another of the bill’s Senate co-sponsors, Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), said in a statement:

“The American people deserve transparency, free from censorship or spin. It’s time to declassify everything we know about COVID’s origins and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, now.”

Braun also tweeted:

Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, told the House:

“The American public deserves answers to every aspect of COVID-19 pandemic including how this virus was created, and specifically whether it was a natural occurrence or was the result of a lab related event.”

Statements like these led media outlets, including The Defender, to report that if passed, the will would trigger the release of all documents — not just those related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Bill ‘dubiously named’

On his blog, Husseini said the COVID-19 Origin Act is “dubiously named” and instructs Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines only to:

“Declassify any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), including (A) activities performed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology with or on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army [of China].”

“This means that information not related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology is not being requested and would almost certainly therefore remain classified,” Husseini wrote.

The bill also states:

“There is reason to believe the COVID-19 pandemic may have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology …

“… the Director of National Intelligence should declassify and make available to the public as much information as possible about the origin of COVID-19 so the United States and like-minded countries can —

“(A) identify the origin of COVID-19 as expeditiously as possible, and

“(B) use that information to take all appropriate measures to prevent a similar pandemic from occurring again.”

The bill requires Haines to turn over the declassified evidence “no later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act” and to submit to Congress an unclassified report containing all the documents requested in the bill, with “only such redactions as the Director determines necessary to protect sources and methods.”

Husseini noted that parts of the bill are unusually specific, focusing “on one strain of alleged evidence” by calling for Haines to turn over classified documents pertaining to “researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in autumn 2019.”

“Now, that could be very important,” Husseini wrote. “But why is this legislation limiting disclosures?”

A ‘classic Nixonian limited hangout’?

Husseini suggested some members of Congress may not have been fully aware that the bill they were voting for does not appear to, in fact, fully declassify all documents related to the origins of COVID-19.

“I have no idea if members of Congress have actually read the legislation and realize how limited it is,” wrote Husseini, who, in another post, called Hawley’s public rhetoric regarding the bill “false and misleading.”

Husseini told The Defender the bill may be acting as a “limited hangout” with the purpose of acknowledging the “lab leak theory” on the one hand, but via legislation that “makes us accept half of the truth.”

Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender, “I’m afraid this [bill] is going to be a classic Nixonian limited hangout” that “does not call for the declassification of all those sources [that] should be declassified and/or released.”

Boyle said any information that is declassified “is going to be helpful,” but that the bill’s provision allowing redactions raises concern.

“Who knows what Avril Haines is going to knock out of this report,” he said.

Husseini noted that the bill also makes no provisions for providing information that several groups, including U.S. Right to Know and some media organizations, have requested — but not yet received — via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) submissions. Husseini said this information “is not classified but is being withheld.”

Husseini cited Gary Ruskin, executive director and co-founder of U.S. Right to Know, who said:

“Much of the federal government’s information related to the origins of Covid-19 is not classified, or likely not classified. We just haven’t been able to access much of it yet via FOIA/FOIA litigation.

“The NIH’s [National Institutes of Health] conduct in stonewalling FOIAs is especially outrageous. It’s time for the Biden administration to tell NIH to comply with the FOIA.”

At a March 9 U.S. Department of State press conference, Ned Price, the agency’s spokesperson, appeared to stonewall Husseini when he asked why the government hasn’t responded to U.S. Right to Know’s FOIA requests related to government funding of bioweapons agents’ discovery research, including the funding of such research in China.

“We can respond in writing on a question that specific,” Price replied. When further pressed by Husseini, Price said, “I would ask that you be respectful of your colleagues.”

An attempt to blame the virus exclusively on China?

There has been a flurry of news reports in recent weeks originating from various branches of the U.S. government indicating broader acceptance of the “lab leak theory.”

The U.S. Department of Energy said it now believes COVID-19 most likely emerged from the Wuhan lab — a position subsequently adopted publicly by FBI Director Christopher Wray.

On March 8, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic heard the testimony of experts who also accepted the “lab leak theory.”

“All this — the recent hearings, the Hawley legislation, the WSJ piece — seem part of a coordinated effort on the part of the ‘intelligence community’ to own the pandemic story and use it for their purposes,” Husseini wrote.

Boyle shared similar concerns with The Defender :

“I am concerned that this [bill] is only going to get a part of the truth. Certainly not the full truth of what really happened here with COVID-19, which we need to get at.

“My concern is that all that’s going to get out of this report … will implicate the Wuhan BSL4 [biosafety level 4 lab] in COVID-19. Well, that’s fine with me. But what about the American involvement here?

“And this was funded by Tony Fauci and Francis Collins at NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] and NIH. Those should be in this legislation too, if we really wanted to get to the bottom of what happened here.”

Boyle and Husseini told The Defender there are numerous government and private entities whose classified documents should be declassified.

Boyle said these include the University of North Carolina, the National Center for Toxicological Research, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School, the U.S. Agency for International Development, EcoHealth Alliance and the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick.

Husseini noted that state governments and private institutions also are likely to possess important information that the COVID-19 Origin Act does not cover. These include Scripps Research, Tulane University and the Wellcome Trust.”

The Wellcome Trust is headed by Jeremy Farrar, now chief scientist for the World Health Organization. “Farrar played a central role in disseminating the propaganda line that COVID could not have lab origins in early 2020,” Husseini said.

U.S. Right to Know sued the University of North Carolina, which is publicly owned, after it failed to respond to the watchdog group’s FOIA requests.

Husseini said the COVID-19 Origin Act “doesn’t even instruct the DNI [Director of National Intelligence] to declassify what it knows about other Chinese government institutions like the Chinese CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].”

Husseini told The Defender :

“Since [Fauci] retired, the system has seemingly skillfully tried to put the deranged stance of the last three years into the rearview mirror hoping people will forget the massive propaganda.”

Boyle told The Defender that “from this legislation, it does appear they’re trying to pin it all on China.”

Husseini, noting that “China may well have major culpability,” said this is not the same as full or exclusive culpability, which is what the U.S. government may now be attempting to establish.

Husseini wrote that “a general anti-China agenda, has taken primacy and is part of a dynamic which ‘ultimately lets’ U.S. institutions and ‘U.S. biowarfare off the hook.’”

He told The Defender :

“There are two pillars of the U.S. establishment here — one wants to polarize at some level with China and the other wants to ensure the U.S. government continues its discovery of bioweapons agents.

“For the establishment to be maintained, both those strains need to be maintained.”

According to Husseini, this may explain why the bill passed both houses with seemingly little debate. It passed the Senate with “unanimous consent,” and subsequently passed the House in a unanimous vote.

Husseini noted that Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a member of the House Rules Committee, even put forth a rule “to ensure passage of Hawley’s bill.”

Husseini said Biden, who hasn’t yet said if he will sign the bill, has a few options he may be considering, telling The Defender :

“I see no sign of actual opposition from the Biden administration and I suspect this is all being done in coordination with the director of National Intelligence, as were the reports in the Wall Street Journal that drove this narrative.

“It’s possible Biden wants to appear reluctant on this and I suppose Biden could veto it and get an override so he could pose as being conciliatory to the Chinese or the like.”

Husseini said that “with the collapse of the completely fictional Daszak narrative in the late Spring and Summer of 2021 … a backup narrative has been put forward, especially through the Wall Street Journal,” whose report on the Department of Energy pivoting toward the “lab leak theory” was co-written by Michael Gordon, “who with Judy Miller perpetrated the Iraq weapons of mass destruction fraud on the U.S. public.”

He also blamed wide swaths of the independent media, particularly left-leaning outlets, for going along with establishment efforts to discredit the theory that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“Much of ‘the Left’ has basically done everything to kill lab origin — and effectively made it a right-wing issue,” Husseini said.

According to Husseini, those who long promoted the Chinese response to COVID-19 and who now are supporting the push to frame China, are pushing for a world “that combines the worst aspects of the U.S. — corrupt corporate capitalism — with the worst aspects of Chinese society: explicit authoritarianism.”

“The pandemic, it can hardly be ignored, helped isolate people from one another, helped restrict borders, was an excuse for massive civil liberties restrictions — all things useful to the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ agenda,” said Husseini. “This is another reason that intentional release should be seriously examined.”

Lab leak or lab origin?

Husseini said he prefers the term “lab origin theory” over “lab leak theory.”

“I see no good reason to make assumptions,” Husseini said. “‘Leak’ assumes a mistake. It could have been a mistake, but why presume it?”

Boyle adopted a similar view, although he noted that the language of the COVID-19 Origin Act does not mention either term.

“It does not refer to a lab leak,” he said. “It doesn’t say ‘leak’ at all. It says ‘originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.’ Obviously, there could be different interpretations of why it originated there. I still believe it was a leak, but this does leave open why it might have originated there.”

Boyle reiterated his longstanding belief that “COVID-19 is an offensive biological warfare weapon with gain-of-function properties” and called for the halting of gain-of-function research.

According to Boyle, who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, Congress’ reluctance to declassify documents that may implicate U.S. government entities in the origins of COVID-19 is reflective of the massive amounts of federal money spent on biological weapons research.

“They’re not doing that because the U.S. government agencies and scientists involved in the development of COVID-19 [have received] massive sums of money,” Boyle said. “We’ve been devoted to developing offensive biological warfare programs since after Sept. 11, 2001 … I’ve been speaking out about this publicly for years.”

Husseini told The Defender :

“Biowarfare is a deniable weapon, which makes disclosure of documents key. Another reason why the Hawley bill limiting disclosure may well signal a massive coverup in plain sight.”

In a pair of tweets Sunday, British Member of Parliament Andrew Bridgen said he received information from U.S. government sources indicating that the U.S. Department of Defense and the Fort Detrick research facility “were responsible for both the virus and the vaccines” and that “criminal proceedings” may follow.

Bridgen did not clarify which sources provided him with this information or who might face such criminal proceedings. At the March 8 Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Dr. Robert Redfield said COVID-19 was “engineered” and blamed gain-of-function research for “the greatest pandemic our world has seen.”

However, Redfield stopped short of explicitly calling for a full ban on such activities, calling instead for a moratorium.

Boyle told The Defender “all this gain-of-function so-called ‘research’ has to be terminated immediately with legislation by Congress … The only way to protect ourselves is to terminate it immediately. No moratorium.”

“There was a moratorium” during the Barack Obama presidency, said Boyle, “and Fauci undermined the moratorium by outsourcing the work through the EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan BSL4 [laboratory]. So, a moratorium is worthless. We have to terminate all gain-of-function research everywhere. It has to be prohibited, to be made criminal.”

The Defender reached out to the offices of Hawley and Braun, Turner and Bridgen for comment, but did not receive a response as of press time.

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.

March 16, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Saudi Arabia sticks to Arab Initiative in drive for ties with Israel

MEMO | March 16, 2023

Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief has said that the Kingdom is sticking to the terms of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative in its drive to normalise relations with Israel.

“The terms are well-known,” Prince Turki Al-Faisal told France 24. “The creation of a sovereign Palestinian state with recognised borders and Jerusalem is its capital, and the return of Palestine refugees.” He pointed out that these were the conditions that Saudi Arabia added to the initiative before it was adopted by the Arab League 21 years ago.

The Arab Peace Initiative has been rejected by every Israeli government since then. Moreover, several Arab states have bypassed it and forged ties with the occupation state.

Replying to a question about the potential normalisation of ties with Israel without fulfilling these conditions, Al-Faisal confirmed: “What I have said was not my opinion, but it was declared by officials. I trust the officials when they say anything, and anything made by media is nonsense.”

According to the New Khalij news website, reports in America claim that Riyadh has proposed to Washington that it will make diplomatic ties with Israel in return for a US pledge to protect the Gulf region, support a peaceful nuclear programme in the Kingdom and approve major arms sales to the Royal Saudi Armed Forces.

March 16, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Germans’ Support for Kiev May Wane Amid ‘Contrived’ Nord Stream Reports, Ex-US Official Says

Sputnik – 15.03.2023

Chancellor Olaf Scholz may fail to maintain public support in Germany for arming Kiev amid hardly credible reports blaming Ukraine for the Nord Stream attack, former Pentagon analyst Karen Kwiatkowski told Sputnik.

In early February, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reported that US navy divers planted explosives on the Nord Stream pipelines. Just a few days after Scholz held talks with President Joe Biden at the White House on March 3, American and German media reports surfaced placing the blame for the attack on a pro-Ukraine group.

In an interview aired earlier on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the version of the involvement of Ukrainian activists in the explosion at Nord Stream “complete nonsense.” Putin told the Rossiya 1 broadcaster that the explosion was carried out by specialists supported by all the might of a state with certain technologies.

Kwiatkowski suggested Germans opposed to continued war aid could use the stories to blame Ukraine for Germany’s economic challenges, or they could use the “contrived” story as another example of US and NATO lies.

“Overall, the ‘story’ is an insult to the intelligence of the average German, and as such it will both weaken German support for [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky, and increasingly show German voters that Scholz himself is a tool of Washington, DC, putting US desires for war on the continent above the needs and the sovereignty of actual Germans,” Kwiatkowski said.

“That support has been declining due to cost, economic turmoil in Germany, and the pressure and stress of hosting and supporting over a million Ukrainians, most of whom intend to stay there.”

The amateur statesmen and spymasters in Washington, Kwiatkowski added, barely conceived of this story in time for Scholz’s visit, she said.

“And it appears they may have needed the German Chancellor’s advice and consent, before providing the unsubstantiated and vague storyline to friendly media,” the former Pentagon analyst said.

If the report itself were more believable, Kwiatkowski explained, or was accompanied by arrests, actual evidence and data, it perhaps would not be as damaging.

Kwiatkowski said it is unlikely that German intelligence has not known the basic facts of the pipeline attacks for many months, but until Hersh’s reporting Scholz and his party could simply remain silent, “as they did.”

The pipeline sabotage was an act of war by the United States, Kwiatkowski argued, as documented by Hersh, but it remains to be seen whether this was an act of war against Russia, against Germany, “or horrifyingly, both.”

“It is most certainly a ploy to shift the focus, because if an act of war were to be committed by the dominant NATO member against the next strongest NATO member, the entire NATO construct would collapse,” she added. “This possibility must not only be denied, it must be suppressed and eliminated.”

Former CIA station chief and analyst Phil Giraldi told Sputnik the new reports do not seem credible versus what Hersh revealed from sources involved in the actual destruction of Nord Stream. He also said the timing of the new narrative is suspicious coming after the “nothing-happened” meeting between Biden and Scholz.

Eurasia Group Vice President Earl Rasmussen said the stories emerging in the wake of Scholz’s visit to Washington are obviously no coincidence and the entire embarrassing affair will diminish Germany’s respect world-wide.

March 15, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , | 1 Comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »