Another €100,000 (£88,000, $107,000) has been gifted to a climate journalist via the foundation of Spain’s second largest bank, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA (BBVA). The money is an annual presentation and was recently given to the New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert. The bank said it gave her the cash “for her extraordinary ability to communicate in a rigorous, attractive manner the fundamental environmental challenges of our time”. BBVA is deeply involved in funding subsidy-heavy renewable technologies. It recently declared record profits for 2022 of €6.42 billion, and noted that it had channelled €50 billion into “sustainable business”. Past cash recipients include Matt McGrath of the BBC, the Guardian newspaper and Marlowe Hood of Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The foundation was particularly impressed with Kolbert’s 2016 seminal book, The Sixth Mass Extinction, which was awarded a ‘non-fiction’ Pulitzer Prize. This was said to have documented the dramatic loss of species that the planet is suffering. “One third of all reef building corals, a third of all freshwater molluscs, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of reptiles and a sixth of all birds are heading towards oblivion,” she said. For good measure, she claimed that around a half of all living species on the Earth could disappear by the end of the century.
Kolbert is a Climate Catastrophist straight from central casting. She fervently believes that humans can control the climate by adjusting levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a proposition that is disputed by many scientists. She compares climate ‘deniers’ to flat-earthers. What ‘deniers’ think of climate science, or rather her take on said science, is “completely irrelevant“. Like most people in her world, she says, “I have low tolerance for people who deny facts and disregard truths”.
The sixth mass extinction scare is becoming very popular in climate Armageddon circles, and is heavily promoted by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). But it suffers from a major flaw – a lack of proof. Most of the claims are produced by models and are just opinions. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists 823 animals and plant species (mostly animals) that have gone extinct since 1500. If you are in the Pulitzer prize winning territory of a sixth mass extinction, you might expect to be able to show more than 823 extinct species in 522 years.
The WWF has been responsible for much extinction alarmism since its Living Planet Index has estimated at least a 50% vertebrate decline since 1970. But a group of Canadian biologists recently cast considerable doubt on this claim, suggesting that it was a cherry pick. They showed that the estimate was produced from less than 3% of vertebrate populations. “If these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase,” they point out. “More informative indices are needed,” they conclude. The finding is perhaps not surprising since the small increases in CO2 over the last 40 years has produced 14% more vegetation across the globe.
Five years ago, the eminent Smithsonian palaeontologist Doug Erwin dismissed sixth mass extinction talk as “junk science“. He went on to state that “many of those making facile comparisons between the current situation and past mass extinctions don’t have a clue about the difference in the nature of the data, much less how truly awful the mass extinctions recorded in the marine fossil record actually were”.
As regular readers are aware, MIT Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen believes the entire climate narrative is “absurd”. However, he acknowledges it has near-universal acceptance, despite the fact that in a normal world the counterarguments would be compelling. “Perhaps it is the trillions of dollars being diverted into every green project under the sun, and the relentless propaganda from grant-dependent academics and agenda-driven journalists, along with the political control offered to elite groups in society by Net Zero, that currently says it is not absurd,” he suggests.
Neil Winton spent 34 years working for the international news agency Reuters, including four years as science and technology correspondent reporting on global warming. He wrote a recent article noting that anyone who abused people by calling them a climate denier “betrays the fact they know little about climate science, or are too lazy to do their own research”. They are more interested in forcing their views on the public and silencing debate, he added. The idea that the science is settled, he says, won’t last long if the reporter can be bothered to use a search engine revealing “scores if not hundreds of highly qualified scientists who beg to differ”.
In his new book on Net Zero, Winton notes, the author Ross Clark accuses Reuters of joining an organisation “which is dedicated to presenting a partisan view of climate change, and silences those who dare to disagree by activating the obnoxious ‘denier’ assertion”.
This organisation is called Covering Climate Now (CC Now), and it specialises in ready-to-publish climate scare stories. The Daily Sceptic wrote about it in December under the heading ‘How billionaires fill the Media with climate fear and panic’. CC Now feeds over 500 media operations and its ‘partners’ include some of the biggest names in news publishing such as Reuters, Bloomberg, AFP, CBS News,ABC News and MSNBC News.
Winston notes that CC Now issues the advice: “For God’s sake do not platform climate denialists.” Op-eds that detract from the scientific consensus or ridicule climate activism “don’t belong in a serious news outlet”, it says. Since when did Reuters require an outside organisation to advise it on how to report on controversial issues, asks Winton.
He adds: “If you dig deeper though you’ll find it uses weasel words only too familiar to those like me who’ve striven to provide real honesty and balance to the argument. It reveals itself as just another arrogant, warmist outfit dedicated to shutting down those with whom it disagrees. Not a thing Reuters should be associated with, surely?”
If you believe what the media tell you, you would think so. But you would be wrong. As the chart below for 1980 to 2022 shows, there is no obvious trend in the frequency of major hurricanes worldwide during the satellite era.
The IPCC, the UN climate panel, can also find no evidence either, stating in their latest climate assessment: ‘There is low confidence in most reported long-term (multi-decadal to centennial) trends in Tropical Cyclone frequency- or intensity-based metrics due to changes in the technology used to collect the best-track data.’
The US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration says the same about Atlantic hurricanes: ‘There is no strong evidence of century-scale increasing trends in US landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes. Similarly for Atlantic basin-wide hurricane frequency (after adjusting for observing capabilities), there is not strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity.’
But facts don’t matter to the climate warriors at the BBC, who published a ‘Reality Check‘ following Hurricane Ian last summer, which claimed that there was evidence that hurricanes were getting more powerful.
I fired off a complaint to the BBC at the time, which their Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) have now rejected. They presented no real data to counter any of the evidence I have outlined above. Instead they relied almost entirely on computer modelled projections of what might happen in future.
Their dismissal of my complaint sums it up better than I can: ‘The evidence would therefore appear to indicate climate scientists who have studied hurricanes and the effect of human-induced climate change agree the proportion of tropical cyclones which develop into hurricanes or major hurricanes is expected to increase, and those hurricanes are expected to have higher peak wind speeds ‘
Of course, it was not what could happen in the future which I was complaining about. It was their claim that such changes are already happening. In short, they created a straw man and knocked it down, while ignoring the actual complaint!
The real problem, of course, is that the ECU is part of the BBC, and will always back them up even when the evidence against them is overwhelming. The BBC will never be properly held to account until a truly independent complaints unit is set up.
Amid tens of thousands of lawsuits that are pending in state courts all across the U.S., a new report based on evidence discovered in these court cases reveals Big Pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) had, for decades, concealed evidence showing that Zantac could cause cancer.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, GSK — then known as Glaxo — had been aware of cancer-causing risks with ranitidine, the drug which was marketed as Zantac, even before it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1983. These warnings came from independent researchers but also from Glaxo scientists.
Within five years, Zantac, used to treat or relieve heartburn, acid indigestion and gastric ulcers, became the world’s best-selling medicine and was one of the first to surpass $1 billion in annual sales, according to Reuters. GSK later sold the drug to Pfizer — and Zantac was then sold to Boehringer Ingelheim and finally Sanofi.
This decision was made based on “research showing the amount of NDMA in the products increases the longer the drug is stored and could potentially become unsafe,” Reuters reported, with Fierce Pharma adding that this problem was identified “even under normal storage conditions.”
According to the Bloomberg Businessweek report, the storage issues came in addition to the known risk that “under certain conditions in the stomach, ranitidine could form a potentially dangerous compound” that could cause cancer.
All four aforementioned pharmaceutical companies are now facing tens of thousands of lawsuits in state courts throughout the U.S. “Plaintiffs said the companies knew, or should have known, that ranitidine posed a cancer risk and that they failed to warn consumers,” reports Reuters.
According to Reuters, “While NDMA is found in low levels in food and water, it is known to cause cancer in larger amounts.” Zantac, accordingly, has been linked “to at least 10 types of cancer” in lawsuits that have been filed, including bladder, esophageal, liver, pancreatic and stomach cancers.
GSK continues to claim that there is “no consistent or reliable evidence” that Zantac caused cancer.
What is NDMA?
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, “NDMA, which is short for N-Nitrosodimethylamine, is a yellow liquid that dissolves in water. It doesn’t have an odor or much of a taste.” It is most toxic to the liver, and “was first linked to cancer in 1956.”
It adds that “The carcinogen, called NDMA, was once added to rocket fuel and is now used only to induce cancer in lab rats.”
The same report notes that NDMA is “one of a group of chemicals called nitrosamines, which by the 1970s were considered the most potent carcinogens yet discovered. They caused cancer in every species of animal tested. A single dose of less than a milligram of NDMA can mutate mice cells and stimulate tumors, and 2 grams can kill a person in days.”
According to USA Today, drawing on FDA data, “Nitrosamines are found in water, cured and grilled meats, dairy products and vegetables” and studies have found that they lead to “increased cancer risk if people are exposed to large amounts over long periods of time.”
Stephen Hecht, Ph.D., a professor of cancer prevention at the University of Minnesota, told USA Today that food safety experts have made efforts to reduce nitrosamine levels in foods such as cured meats to far below the levels of the 1970s and 1980s.
Bloomberg Businessweek states that “Every public-health agency, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the FDA to the World Health Organization, says NDMA likely causes cancer in humans.”
The FDA has placed limits on six types of nitrosamines, reports USA Today, equaling “up to one case of cancer per 100,000 people exposed to the contaminant.”
However, the drugs that were recalled and ultimately pulled from the market far exceeded these limits, with estimates of a risk of one cancer case for every 3,000 to 8,000 patients, according to USA Today.
The withdrawal of Zantac and its generic versions resulted in tens of thousands of lawsuits that are still pending — and a process of discovery that has unearthed significant evidence revealing that Glaxo and regulatory bodies were long aware of the presence of NDMA in these medications.
Discovery reveals that Glaxo, regulators continuously ignored NDMA cancer risk
Bloomberg Businessweek reviewed “thousands of pages” of documents, including those arising from the discovery process in the ongoing lawsuits against GSK and other drugmakers, as well as scientific studies, to develop its story, discovering that GSK supported “flawed research” that skewed the narrative away from Zantac’s risks.
As stated in the Bloomberg Businessweek report: “Proving that a particular person’s cancerous cells were mutated by a company’s drug is complicated. Glaxo’s decisions suggest it never wanted to consider that possibility. The clues were there. The documents show that Glaxo preferred not to find them.”
The report continued:
“From ranitidine’s beginning to its end, Glaxo had been warned by its own scientists and independent researchers about the potential danger. An account of those four decades emerges in hundreds of documents, thousands of pages, many of which have never been made public.
“Bloomberg Businessweek reviewed court filings, many still under seal, as well as studies, FDA transcripts and new drug applications obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests. They show that the FDA considered the cancer risks when approving ranitidine. But Glaxo didn’t share a critical study.
“Over the years, the company also backed flawed research designed to minimize concerns and chose not to routinely transport and store the medication in ways that could have eased the problem. Glaxo sold a drug that might harm people, tried to discount evidence of that and never gave anyone the slightest warning.”
The report presents evidence indicating that Glaxo — and later GSK — were aware that NDMA could be present in Zantac, both as a result of how it was metabolized in the human stomach and also by naturally occurring even under ordinary storage conditions.
According to the report, ranitidine was first developed by Glaxo scientists in the 1970s, and a U.S. patent for it was granted in 1978. As stated by the report, the process of developing ranitidine and getting it approved was swift.
“They developed ranitidine quickly, and the US Food and Drug Administration reviewed it quickly. Glaxo gave it the brand name Zantac,” said Bloomberg Businessweek. It was soon marketed as being “better and safer” than the leading heartburn drug at the time, Tagamet.
However, the warning signs were already there. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, a U.S. government cancer researcher and biochemist, William Lijinsky, had found in 1969 that nitrosamines could form in the stomach, exacerbated by the presence of nitrites, “a common chemical found in cured and grilled meat and in beer and coffee and vegetables” found to be “common causes of heartburn and acid reflux.”
Lijinsky’s solution to this, presented in published studies and in Congressional testimony in the 1970s, was to limit sodium nitrite levels in food. Already, by the late 1970s, Lijinsky identified roadblocks that were not allowing his warnings to be fully heeded.
“It seems to me that the regulatory agencies have been less than eager to act in the matter of nitrites and nitrosamines,” he testified before Congress in 1977. “There has been ample information available, if they had sought it. There is, of course, immense opposition by the manufacturing companies to any change.”
According to Lijinsky’s wife, Rosalie Lijinsky, herself a genetic toxicologist who recently retired from the FDA, William lost federal funding for his research due to pressure from both the food and pharmaceutical industries.
Nevertheless, the warning signs continued to build up. A 1980 report titled “Glaxo, Ranitidine—Cause for Concern,” found that ranitidine could potentially form a potentially dangerous, and cancerous, compound in the stomach.
Glaxo, which was seeking FDA approval for Zantac, prepared for “defensive action” to protect itself from the report’s findings. The Bloomberg Businessweek story noted that Glaxo’s board never tested ranitidine to see if it might form a nitrosamine compound.
In a 1981 trial in Britain, 11 healthy men who were administered a daily two-dose regimen of ranitidine for four weeks developed more nitrite in their digestive system — meaning that conditions were favorable for the formation of nitrosamines.
These results were deemed inconclusive by Glaxo scientists, who said that “Ranitidine is recommended only for short-term use” — even though most Zantac users took the drug “for months, sometimes years, even decades,” according to Bloomberg Businessweek.
Another 1981 study, published in The Lancet by Italian scientist Silvio De Flora, Ph.D., found that when ranitidine was mixed with nitrite, it led to “toxic and mutagenic effects.” De Flora later suggested that the consumption of Zantac occur long before or after a meal. However, says Bloomberg Businessweek, “instructions for taking Zantac to prevent heartburn would recommend using it close to mealtime.”
De Flora, who told Bloomberg Businessweek that “Pharmaceutical companies do not like this kind of study,” said he was quickly approached by Glaxo executives, who then published a follow-up letter in The Lancet attempting to downplay De Flora’s findings.
A 1982 study, which infamously became known as the “Tanner study,” also found danger. Specifically, this study, conducted by scientist Richard Tanner of rival drugmaker Smith, Kline & French, found that ranitidine when combined with different concentrations of nitrite, formed a cancerous poison that was soon named NDMA.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, “back in 1982, court documents show, Glaxo kept the study secret. The associate director of clinical research in the U.S. was never told about the Tanner report. The senior medical adviser for gastrointestinal research was unaware of it. So was the FDA.”
At the same time, reports Bloomberg Businessweek, “Glaxo also knew of another potentially serious problem with ranitidine. It wasn’t always stable. The drug was sensitive to heat and humidity, and when exposed to too much of either could degrade … That creates conditions for NDMA to form in the drug itself.”
However, later in 1982, Glaxo officials did not reveal this knowledge to a panel of FDA officials and independent researchers. “The Glaxo scientists disputed the idea that ranitidine could form a nitrosamine under any normal human conditions,” according to Bloomberg Businessweek.
By May 1983, the FDA had approved Zantac in a rapid process — and by 1989, it “was worth $2 billion. It accounted for half of Glaxo’s sales and 53% of the market for prescription ulcer remedies.”
However, problems persisted. In the early 1990s, it was found that the pills were not stable and were changing color while in storage. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, “Discoloration is often a sign that tablets are degrading. In some cases, degradation can cause dangerous impurities to form.”
However, Glaxo’s solution was to change the color of the pills. At this time, the company was seeking FDA approval for a less potent over-the-counter version of Zantac. This approval came in the spring of 1996.
Nevertheless, issues with discoloration persisted into the last decade. In 2010, Zantac was “tested for impurities that were known to cause … yellow discoloration.” Although, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, “NDMA used in labs is yellow,” no tests were conducted for this particular substance.
Similarly, when a manufacturing site in China identified problems with “discolored and degraded Zantac tablets” in 2015, GSK sought to downplay the issue, while no testing for NDMA was conducted. Instead, “inappropriate storage” was blamed.
During this period, GSK was fined by regulators in the U.S. and China, but not over Zantac specifically. In 2012, GSK pled guilty and was fined $3 billion “for marketing drugs for inappropriate uses, disregarding safety data and cheating Medicaid,” according to the Bloomberg Businessweek report.
And in 2014, “China fined GSK $500 million and deported a top executive for bribing doctors to prescribe its drugs.”
Issues with Zantac did not come to a head until September 2019, when the FDA received a document from Valisure, an independent laboratory, which, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, “had found extremely high levels of NDMA in Zantac and several generic versions of ranitidine.”
Valisure conducted these tests after NDMA had been found in batches of the blood pressure medication valsartan the previous year. Bloomberg Businessweek reports that Valisure “found NDMA in every version of ranitidine it tested and concluded the problem was inherent to the molecule itself.”
Although the FDA issued an alert, it also questioned Valisure’s testing methods and conducted its own tests. “Within a month,” says Bloomberg Businessweek, “at least two dozen countries pulled ranitidine from stores or halted its distribution.” GSK stopped distributing the drug, as did Sanofi.
Ultimately, in April 2020, ranitidine was banned by the FDA. The agency found that “NDMA levels increase in ranitidine even under normal storage conditions … And NDMA has been found to increase significantly in samples stored at higher temperatures, including temperatures the product may be exposed to during distribution and handling by consumers.”
However, says Bloomberg Businessweek, the FDA has not shared specifics in any published paper about what its tests detected. Instead, these findings were revealed “during a monthly lecture series called FDA Grand Rounds,” in October 2021: one tablet of ranitidine contained “almost four times the FDA’s limit in any drug” when initially tested.
Nevertheless, in June 2021, the FDA said there were “no consistent signals” that Zantac increases cancer risk and that such links that were found in outside research papers were not conclusive. Bloomberg Businessweek says this “is now a regular part of Glaxo’s public-relations and, presumably, legal defense.”
A statement provided by GSK to Fierce Pharma in response to the Bloomberg Businessweek article says it “presents an incomplete and biased presentation of the facts surrounding the Zantac (ranitidine) litigation.”
“Patient safety is the highest priority for GSK, and the company categorically refutes any allegation of having covered up data regarding the safety of ranitidine,” the statement adds. “The safety of ranitidine has been thoroughly evaluated over the past 40 years.”
Thousands of Zantac-related lawsuits pending despite setbacks
The Bloomberg Businessweek report states that “More than 70,000 people who took Zantac or generic versions of it are suing the company in U.S. state courts for selling a potentially contaminated and dangerous drug,” with the first of these trials set to begin later this month in the Superior Court of California, County of Alameda.
Other companies that sold Zantac, including Pfizer, Sanofi and generic manufacturers, are also facing lawsuits.
There have been some setbacks for plaintiffs, however. According to the Bloomberg Businessweek report, a December 2022 ruling, by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, “dismissed thousands of federal lawsuits that had been consolidated in her courtroom for pretrial proceedings.”
U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenberg found there is “no widespread acceptance in the scientific community of an observable, statistically significant association between ranitidine and cancer.” Lawyers for the plaintiffs plan to appeal.
GSK is hanging its hat on this ruling, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. In a statement, Kathleen Quinn, a spokesperson for the company, said, “The court’s view is consistent with the position that GSK and other co-defendants have taken throughout this litigation.”
And in a statement following the Florida federal court ruling, GSK said it was glad that “unreliable and litigation-driven science did not enter the federal courtroom.”
Fierce Pharma reports that following this ruling, not just GSK but “Pfizer, GSK, Sanofi and Boehringer Ingelheim are now able to wash their hands of thousands of Zantac-related lawsuits,” as about 50,000 claims were taken “off the drugmakers’ plates.”
And according to Law360, on Feb. 7, the same Florida judge issued a new ruling which will not allow tens of thousands of Zantac lawsuits to be combined.
This ruling was made on the basis that the lawsuits in question had signed up for “court-created registry of claims in the multidistrict legislation” that was “abandoned” following the December 2022 decision.
In this new ruling, Judge Rosenberg also provided some insights into the appeals that were filed against the December 2022 decision, stating that “claimants in the registry are still now required to file their cases individually in federal court in order for their claims to be considered timely,” according to Law360.
However, as reported by Bloomberg Businessweek, “GSK does still have to fight the tens of thousands of cases waiting in state courts, where judges aren’t bound by the federal court’s ruling,” adding that “GSK could face years of lawsuits in California, Delaware and other states, with the possibility of billions in damages.”
Law360 reported Jan. 26 that despite the December 2022 Florida ruling, “New York’s Litigation Coordinating Panel on Thursday consolidated more than 40” Zantac lawsuits. Attorneys from Napoli Shkolnik PLLC, one of the firms representing plaintiffs in the lawsuits, described this as “a welcome alternative” to the Florida multidistrict litigation.
In the forthcoming Alameda County court case, GSK “is expected to urge” the court “to limit what expert testimony jurors can hear,” reports Reuters.
The plaintiff in that case, James Goetz, says he developed bladder cancer from taking Zantac over a period of many years. According to Bloomberg Businessweek :
“Goetz was 60 in 2017 when he was diagnosed with bladder cancer. That in and of itself wasn’t too unusual; 60 is about the age this particular cancer is often diagnosed in men. Smokers get bladder cancer, but Goetz hadn’t smoked since he was 22. His job hadn’t exposed him to any potentially harmful chemicals. It was perplexing, but he had no reason to think his getting cancer was anything other than random.
“When Zantac was recalled, he kept four bottles he’d already purchased. They’re in the freezer in the office of one of his attorneys, Brent Wisner, as are leftover pills from Russell. Tests showed that one of Goetz’s pills is contaminated with 3,000ng of NDMA, Wisner says; one of Russell’s has more than twice as much. Wisner says he’s invited GSK to test the tablets, but the company hasn’t done so.”
Goetz’s cancer has returned in aggressive form, necessitating surgery and dialysis. His bladder and prostate were removed, along with 20 feet of his intestines. He later suffered sepsis, kidney stones and kidney failure. His lawsuits against Boehringer Ingelheim, Pfizer and Sanofi were settled in December 2022, but his GSK case continues.
Depositions taken during the discovery process, brought to the public eye by Bloomberg Businessweek, have been revealing. A former senior medical adviser to Glaxo, when asked during a June 2021 deposition whether Glaxo had ever tested for the presence of NDMA in Zantac, answered, “Not to my knowledge.”
In a May 2022 deposition, Andrew Whitehead, who had been director of second-generation research and development for the company, testified that “it would have been known in the ‘80s as part of the development” of Zantac that ranitidine would degrade in high temperature conditions.
And a May 2021 deposition, Fred Eshelman, formerly Glaxo’s associate director of clinical research when Zantac was developed, agreed with a lawyer for the plaintiffs that “it is completely unheard of in the industry to go that fast” — referring to the clinical development of ranitidine.
More drugs under scrutiny for potential presence of nitrosamines
As the lawsuits against the former manufacturers of Zantac continue, increased scrutiny of medications for the potential presence of nitrosamines has followed.
USA Today reports that the FDA “has asked drugmakers to evaluate all products for any risk they might contain nitrosamines,” adding that “Companies that identify any such risk must conduct follow-up testing, report changes and take action” by Oct. 1.
“We continue to closely evaluate this type of impurity and will continue to investigate and monitor the marketplace and manufacturing efforts to help ensure the availability of safe, quality products for U.S. consumers,” stated FDA spokesman Jeremy Kahn.
According to USA Today, in recent years, several drugs have been recalled due to the presence of nitrosamines, including diabetes medication metformin, anti-smoking medication Chantix, and blood pressure, heart and kidney medications losartan, quinapril (sold as Accupril) and valsartan.
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.”
In his excellent exposé of the recent decision by the Knight-Cronkite News Lab (KCNL) to advocate journalism that goes beyond objectivity, and in light of the report from the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) confirming that RussiaGate was fabricated nonsense, genuinely independent researcher, writer and filmmaker James Corbett made a number of very salient points.
As Corbett points out:
As a moment’s sober reflection will immediately reveal, the mouthpiece mockingbirds of the controlled establishment media have never been objective and they have no credibility to damage.
But there is far more to this particular psyop than merely covering up the inconvenient history of media. The new narrative, sold to us in this instance by both KCNL and the CJR, is laying the foundations for a transformation of the media landscape.
The establishment wants us to believe that our “trust” in journalism is a vital component of our democracy—and, moreover, that the state can determine which news media organisation is deserving of our “trust.”
In truth, if democratic principles really matter to us, it is essential that we never trust any “news reports” from any journalist or news provider. Democracy places a duty upon us to be fierce critical thinkers. We should never unquestioningly accept anything we are told.
Journalism Is Story Telling
Every mainstream media (MSM) and “alternative media” outlet presents narratives. They are in the business of telling stories, not simply presenting “objective” facts.
Good journalism expresses an opinion and then cites the evidence that informs it. Well written journalism does this within the engaging and intriguing narratives it weaves. But no journalism is free from the journalist’s own conformation bias, and the tenor of the story is often directed by the editorial policy and allegiances of the publisher.
Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh’s recent investigation, in which he exposes the likelihood that the US government was behind the destruction of the Nord Stream II pipeline, is only available via independent outlets and on his own Substack. Despite this apparently being a story of enormous magnitude, the MSM seems extremely reluctant to bring it to wider attention. You can read about it only in the so-called “alternative media.”
While some MSM outlets report the official denial of Hersh’s piece, none have lent it much credibility, and many have been quick to cast aspersions on Hersh himself. Yes, the old game of attacking the messenger while avoiding the content of the message.
It is fair to say, based on the Hersh article alone, that no one can really verify his revelations in specific regard to Nord Stream II. He presents no evidence other than anecdotal accounts from unnamed sources. But nowhere in the MSM does there appear to be any interest in pursuing the needed investigation that Hersh’s piece demands.
Thus, it remains a piece of fantastic journalism, most notably because the very specific references it makes to orders given and operations undertaken during the BALTOPS22 exercise can be investigated. Detailed questions can be asked of officials. The blanket denials of Hersh’s story and his precise allegations are nowhere near enough to discredit it.
Given all the circumstantial evidence that also points towards US and NATO aligned culpability, his journalism—a great story—adds real fuel to the fire. This is real investigative journalism. That the story he presents in part reflects his own perspective is irrelevant.
The MSM Was Never Objective
One of the MSM’s main criticisms of the so-called “alternative media” is that it can often be described as activist journalism. This allegation implies that the perspective of the alternative news journalist biases their reporting. But such a criticism is itself a deception, because all journalism reports from a perspective.
There are basic commercial reasons why objectivity doesn’t suit journalism. Consumers of “news” don’t want to simply know what the facts are. They also want a steer on the broader implications of those facts. If that reaffirms their existing world view, all the better for sales. We all want to believe we are right and not be constantly reminded that we are probably wrong.
This is why very few Guardian readers also read the Daily Telegraph or Sun readers the Mirror, even when the presented “facts” are essentially the same. We pay for the perspective we agree with, not simply an objective reporting of the facts.
It is science, not journalism, that strives to achieve absolute objectivity in its pursuit of empirical facts. But the problem with scientific objectivity, beyond its corruption, is that it tends to introduce immense complexity and can be extremely boring to read. It doesn’t lend itself well to stirring up emotions or selling media content.
Other than a few obsessive researchers and the scientists themselves, few of us actually want to read highly technical and sterile scientific papers. We rely upon the journals and the MSM to tell us what the science says, wrongly assuming that their reporting of it is “objective.”
Our faith in the MSM places us in a vulnerable position, especially when it comes to the reporting of hard facts, such as those supposedly revealed by science. If those same alleged “facts” then become the basis for justifying government policy and/or our own decisions, then we had better be damn sure that our belief in the veracity of the story is well-placed.
The evidence that the MSM doesn’t even report the facts accurately is overwhelming. The CJR has exposed RussiaGate as the politically motivated nonsense it was. But this rubbish was relentlessly spewed out on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a year—alongside the equally baseless Skripal yarn—by a majority of MSM outlets. The obvious propaganda was designed to illegitimately demonise the Russian government.
The CJR report demonstrates that today’s Western MSM is a mass purveyor of mis- and disinformation. We are presently regaled with highly spurious Ukraine war propaganda. This is the culmination of the Russophobic Western MSM agenda that has been building for many years.
The scene has seemingly been set, and we have all been psychologically prepared for the current conflict. This makes it easier for us to imagine that the Russians are our enemy.
State propaganda partnerships with the MSM are nothing new. Three examples quickly come to mind:
— British military intelligence were feeding senior broadsheet correspondents “stories” for decades, long before the MSM made up tales about WMD in Iraq to convince the public to accept a fake casus belli for the Iraq War.
— The Church Committee formally exposed the “Operation Mockingbird” network in the US in 1975. The CIA had been manipulating the reporting of the US MSM for many years, feeding selected operative journalists intel that they then reported as “objective journalism.”
While proven MSM disinformation operations and campaigns, such as these, have purportedly been assigned to the annals of history, disinfo activity is manifestly ongoing. If anything, state control of the MSM narrative for propaganda purposes has reached heights that even Bernays couldn’t have imagined.
State propaganda has been privatised. Governments channel taxpayers’ money to their global corporate partners, which in turn pay the MSM to produce the desired disinformation. During the pseudopandemic we saw whole teams of behavioural scientists at the World Health Organisation global governance level and in various nations states “use” the MSM to unethically deploy applied psychology and disinformation to tackle what the establishment and its MSM hypocritically called “the infodemic.”
When Spi-B—the team of behavioural change experts within the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE)—recommended that the UK government should “use the media” to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” to convince British people that they were living through a pandemic, contrary to the evidence of their own eyes, the MSM dutifully obliged. They launched numerous corporate backed terror campaigns upon an unsuspecting public.
We are constantly told by the political class that “press freedom” is an essential part of our democracy. If the MSM really were a pluralistic and free media, it wouldn’t be possible to “use” it for propaganda. There would be too many dissenting articles by investigative MSM journalists to maintain a single, uniform narrative across all outlets simultaneously. But it isn’t a pluralistic and free media and never was, so it is entirely possible for the MSM to be co-opted. What does this say about our alleged democracy?
The so-called “infodemic,” identified by the World Health Organisation as being “just as dangerous” as an alleged global pandemic, included any and all information that questioned the diktats of our “democratic” policymakers. The MSM attacked all dissent—literally without question—on the behalf of governments and intergovernmental authorities and their corporate partners.
The infodemic, according to the establishment, was prompted by the public’s questions about government policy, about “science” as reported by the MSM, and about data that revealed statistical manipulation. The infodemic was also prompted by the MSM looking askance at sceptical scientific papers shared by people who dared question the reported “science” as well as at the millions of people who raised their voices in mass protests. These protests were either ignored by the MSM or the protestors views were distorted and their peaceful demonstrations labelled “extremist.”
There was nothing remotely “objective” about any of this mainstream “news coverage.” Rather, in total obedience to the state, the Western MSM attacked informed opinion, ridiculed all questions and demonised individuals who did not comply. Not because there was any justification for doing so, but because that is the role of the MSM. Objectivity is nowhere in sight, nor has it ever been.
The MSM Has Never Questioned Power
The Knight-Cronkite News Lab (KCNL) objective is to create a “set of standards for trustworthy news.” Indeed, maintaining the public’s “trust” is the overwhelming fixation of the MSM and its government partners. We are urged to place our faith in those who evidently lie to us and suppress facts all the time.
At one point the KCNL noted:
As early as the turbulent 1960s, some younger journalists, especially investigative reporters, began to question what objectivity really meant if it did not challenge power, privilege and inequality.
Similarly, the CJR report on RussiaGate states that “primary missions” of journalism include “informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable.”
We are told that “holding power to account,” or watchdog journalism, is the core principle of journalism. Yet nowhere in the International Federation of Journalists Charter of Ethics or in the UK National Union of Journalists Code of Conduct is there any mention of this alleged principle.
The American Press Association’s (APA) Principles of Journalism does say that journalism must serve as an independent monitor of power. But this “principle” speaks more about defending journalists’ alleged “rights” than it does about exposing any wrongdoing:
Journalism has an unusual capacity to serve as watchdog over those whose power and position most affect citizens. The Founders recognized this to be a rampart against despotism when they ensured an independent press; courts have affirmed it; citizens rely on it. As journalists, we have an obligation to protect this watchdog freedom by not demeaning it in frivolous use or exploiting it for commercial gain.
The APA’s watchdog principle is supposedly protected by the government and its courts. Yet it is not a “right,” but rather a permit bestowed upon American journalists by the establishment. This permit can be rescinded. The extent to which journalists in the US can question “power” is based solely on the protection that legacy journalism receives from the institutions it allegedly questions.
Demeaning something as frivolous is precisely what the MSM does when it labels people as conspiracy theorists, as science deniers or as COVID deniers. These attacks are rarely, if ever, based upon any exploration of the evidence. In fact, the labelling system itself is used to omit, obscure or “deny” the evidence.
All the APA’s principles mean is that certain subjects and certain kinds of evidence, characterised as “frivolous,” must not be reported by its members. What is or is not considered “frivolous” is entirely subjective. Given journalism’s legislative “protections,” it seems pretty clear what will be considered “frivolous.” A high degree of subjectivity, not objectivity, is the full extent of the APA members’ ethical commitment to “watchdog” journalism.
We only need look at the history we’ve discussed to understand that the news media barely and rarely holds power to account. Instead, the MSM is more frequently an extension of state and corporate power and is used to control the people through disinformation, omission and misdirection rather than to inform them and question power on their behalf.
This is not to say that good MSM journalism doesn’t exist. But, on those few occasions when MSM journalists do expose state crimes, they pay a terrible price for doing so. Julian Assange is among the small band of journalists who have dared to question power. He currently languishes in a British high-security prison precisely because he did so.
The MSM doesn’t question power when it deceives the public about chemical weapon attacks on behalf of the state. It isn’t holding power to account with its refusal to investigate, or even report, evidence of malfeasance in office. Its ignoring of state crimes can in no way be considered “watchdog freedom.” And it certainly does not act as any kind of watchdog when it simply reports whatever it is ordered to report by a centrally controlled global propaganda network.
We Are the Problem and the Solution
Social media has been lambasted for corralling its users into self-affirming information silos. While this is somewhat concerning, it isn’t anything new. The technological capability of social media to control opinion is an added dimension, to be sure, but the MSM has been doing exactly the same thing for more than a century.
Unfortunately, the MSM is able to propagandise us with relative ease. It does this partly by exploiting our own misconceptions. While we all seem to agree that the Russian and Chinese MSM are state propaganda, we Westerners, for some unknown reason, apparently imagine that our own mainstream media isn’t.
There is, however, a caveat with regard to this apparent gullibility. Research statistics show that there is a remarkable lack of trust in the MSM in the West. Notably, in the US “trust” in the news is as low as 26%. The UK fares little better, at just 34%. “Trust” in the news is higher in Scandinavian countries.
We only need have brief conversations with friends and family to realise that the propaganda does, in fact, work. But what explains this disconnect between our lack of trust in the MSM with our continuing willingness to believe what it tells us?
The answer lies in the greatest achievement of the Western MSM and the parasite class it serves: They have convinced us that our media is free and is pluralistic—this despite it never being true.
Consequently, it seems that while we are wary of spin and propaganda, we refuse to contemplate the likelihood that the MSM is out-and-out lying to us. Perhaps that is because we perceive the MSM as basically serving the public interest—even if we admit to ourselves that it bends the truth a little. In other words, our scepticism does not extend as far as disbelief.
We therefore remain unable to reconcile our credulous acceptance of MSM claims about itself with the reality that we are being misled en masse by that same institution. Cognitive dissonance—the uncomfortable psychological sensation we experience when we hold two or more contradictory thoughts at the same time—may account for our irreconcilable beliefs.
In other words, we are caught between not “trusting” the MSM, on the one hand, and, on the other, our inability to accept the fact that virtually nothing the MSM tells us is true. The implications of this dichotomy are beyond anything we want to contemplate. As a result, we still believe that “the news” is our window on the world.
If you think about it, the idea that all the important global events of the day can be condensed into a single “newspaper” or a 30-minute “evening news” broadcast is quite ridiculous. Even if it were composed of honest, unbiased reports, which it seldom is, “the news” cannot provide us with anything approaching a reasonable understanding of what is actually going on.
Therefore, if we genuinely want to know what’s happening, we have to actively seek information and critically evaluate it ourselves. As James Corbett wrote:
Granted, the realization that all media is constructed for us by someone with an interest in making us believe something is not a happy one for most people. Instead, it is a deeply unpopular realization, because it means we can’t just switch on the evening news, switch off our brain, and expect some totally neutral journalistic saviour to come along and hand us “the news” from on high.
Like it or not, it is our responsibility to think critically about all information, no matter who relays it. This responsibility applies equally to the stories we are fed by the “alternative media.” This article should be read critically! It is, after all, just information that’s being passed along to you.
The Knight-Cronkite News Lab suggests that journalists should give their “readers, viewers, listeners and users valuable information that helps them make better decisions and lead better lives.”
Here, the new breed of MSM journalists, no more nor less objective than their predecessors, has been given the task of reporting “the news” from a value-driven perspective. The aim is to change us by making us “better” people. So what are the values the new breed of journalists are being taught to advocate?
KCNL tell us:
There is broad consensus today about the reality of climate change and the threats that it poses. That may well inform how many resources a newsroom devotes to reporting on the issue as well as any point of view its stories reflect. The same might go for opposition to systemic racism, say, or support for LGBTQ rights. [. . .] One value we believe is worth stating out loud is support for democratic institutions, which are under attack on multiple fronts. Trustworthy news is essential to sustaining a healthy democracy.
Herein lies the problem. Every one of these “values” serves global political agendas and dovetails neatly with government policy and, perhaps most notably, with global governance policy. That is to say, the MSM’s new values are exactly the same as their old values. Their “new” objective, just like the old objective, is to advocate for power, not question it.
Contrary to the KCNL’s claims, democracy is not founded upon our acceptance of whatever we are told by government “institutions.” Rather, it is predicated upon our ability not just to question the state but to limit it. Thus, KCNL’s contention that a “healthy democracy” is one where “democratic institutions” assert sovereignty over us is entirely false.
To point out that these institutions have no authority over us whatsoever is not to attack “democracy.” On the contrary, doing so defends “democracy.” But you will never hear that from the MSM. The MSM’s continuing mission is to maintain the lies that ensure we never realise this “truth.”
It is ironic that the MSM attacks their alternative counterparts for advocacy journalism and yet the MSM’s own apparent solution to the trust issue that preoccupies it is to itself emulate advocacy journalism. The difference? The alternative media is far more likely to advocate the questioning of power, while the MSM looks set to continue advocating for power.
Seeing as how the concept of “news” is, in and of itself, absurd, the suggestion that news should be “trusted” simply adds another layer of misdirection to this new MSM advocacy journalism. So, if our “faith” in the stories we are told is part of the problem, a solution is self-evident. We should abandon any notion of “trust.” We should invest our efforts in being “better” critical thinkers.
The “alternative” media outlet UK Columnsums up this point nicely. It asks:
Why should I trust the UK Column ? Put simply, you shouldn’t. The question of whether or not to trust a news organisation is a false choice. Making such a choice is promoted by government, the old media, and two new organisation types: the fact checker and the trust provider.
It disenfranchises readers, viewers and listeners. It is based on the principle that if you trust the media organisation you are visiting, there is no need for you to check the information they present. So we ask you not to trust us. Instead, view everything published here with a critical eye. Where possible, primary source material is made available for everything we publish: check it; make up your own mind.
In his previously referenced article, James Corbett provides a list of questions we should all ask ourselves whenever we encounter information offered by any source. We don’t need government or any other “democratic institution” to control information for us, nor we do need to be told what to think about it. We just need to think critically and answer these simple questions to our own satisfaction:
Why is this media outlet showing us this report?
What interest do they have in making us think a particular way about the issue presented?
Can the information in the report be independently confirmed or triangulated from other sources?
Whose viewpoint is being shown, and how is that viewpoint portrayed? Whose viewpoint is being excluded? Why?
What language is being used to frame the issue?
What does the report make us believe about the world?
Are we in agreement with the report? Why or why not?
Ultimately, as ever, the choice is yours. You can gather information from any source you wish. If you want to know what the state wants you to believe and what behaviour it expects of you, then go to the MSM. If you want to explore broader criticism of government and its policies, then the more independent “alternative media” provides richer pickings.
Treat these two impostors just the same. There is honest, high-quality journalism in both. There is also propaganda to be found in both. Fortunately, if you answer James Corbett’s suggested questions, you’ll be able to spot the difference more often than not.
North Korea’s portrayal in the mainstream media is unflattering, to say the least. However, underestimating Pyongyang’s growing capabilities is wholly limited to the infowar arena, as the Pentagon is deeply alarmed by the DPRK’s latest show of force during the recent military parade commemorating the 75th anniversary of the founding of the KPA (Korean People’s Army). The country has shown an unprecedentedly diverse array of new weapons, including its rapidly growing arsenal of ICBMs (intercontinental range ballistic missiles). The “star of the show” was what appears to be a solid-fuel ICBM similar to the older Soviet/Russian “Topol”.
However, despite well over a million casualties caused by intentional US targeting of civilians, the truly terrifying possibility was the nearly initiated American plan to drop hundreds of nuclear weapons on the East Asian country. US Army General Douglas MacArthur, the overall commander of Western forces during the Korean War, planned using nuclear weapons to inflict a decisive defeat on North Korea. Luckily, this deranged idea was dropped due to fears of how the Soviet Union would react. Pyongyang soon became aware of the plan and decided to ensure it is never implemented by developing capabilities to retaliate.
And while the USSR provided a direct strategic umbrella, preventing further attacks on North Korea, the superpower’s unfortunate demise in the 1990s left Pyongyang’s security severely undermined. Over the next three decades, North Korea developed capabilities far exceeding the size of its population, economy and territory, effectively becoming what Alexander Mercouris of the Duran appropriately dubbed “the pocket superpower”. Developing such capabilities is certainly no easy feat even for global powers, while being virtually impossible for relatively small countries such as North Korea. And yet, DPRK is rather unique in this regard, being the only small country (besides Israel) with such weapons.
North Korea’s urgent need for deterrence has been repeatedly reinforced, including just several years ago, when the US came close to once again attacking the country on multiple occasions under both the Obama and Trump administrations in 2016 and 2017. The Pentagon’s war plans once more included the use of thermonuclear weapons, just like approximately 70 years earlier, but never materialized, thankfully. Pyongyang’s ability to “return the favor” forced the belligerent thalassocracy to take the military option “off the table”. The successful deployment of several ICBM types, as well as the adoption of MIRV (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) warheads presents an insurmountable obstacle for aggressive US strategists.
Washington DC’s inability to intercept North Korean missiles has pushed it to consider “preventive attacks”. As Pyongyang’s entire strategic arsenal was thought of being composed exclusively of older-style liquid-fuel missiles (which take time to launch), the US believed it would have enough time to target all North Korean launch sites before the ICBMs are fired. However, Pyongyang has now demonstrated it has solid-fuel missiles (much shorter launch cycles, as there’s no need to fuel the missiles before launch), nullifying the possibility of such strikes. What’s more, numerous North Korean test launches of new depressed-trajectory missiles have proven impossible for America’s “Aegis” ABM system to even detect, let alone shoot down.
Title says it all. And this liar is apparently gonna replace Fauci in NIH!
Isn’t elemental evil so obvious – I mean WOW!
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In an unprecedented step, Youtube has severely restricted as “inappropriate or offensive” Seymour Hersh’s blockbuster Nord Stream Pipelines interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!
Hersh won his Pulitzer Prize more than a half-century ago in 1970 as the fiercely independent reporter who uncovered America’s My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War. During his following decades at the New York Times and the New Yorker he broke some of the biggest stories in journalistic history, including the domestic spying activities of the CIA, the Abu Ghraib prison abuses of the Iraq War, and the killing of Osama bin Laden, while being honored with two National Magazine Awards, five George Polk Awards, and numerous other accolades.
Hersh’s long career arguably ranks him as the most renowned living American journalist, and indeed Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University described him as such in a recent interview.
Then late last week, Hersh dropped a bombshell as big as anything in his career, revealing on his Substack platform the exact details of how the Biden Administration had secretly destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines, an attack on $30 billion of vital European energy infrastructure that constituted an act of war against Germany, one of our closest NATO allies.
How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
Seymour Hersh • Substack• February 8, 2023 • 5,200 Words
As I discussed in my own column, despite Hersh’s stellar career and the massive implications of his remarkable story, almost all our mainstream media outlets boycotted it, ensuring that it received minimal attention.
Hersh said he wanted his story to stand on its own, and was only willing to do a very limited number of interviews, with the first of these being with a small radio podcaster:
He soon followed this up with a half-hour appearance on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, a leading left-liberal news program broadcast on more than 1,400 radio and television stations worldwide, many of them PBS and NPR affiliates.
During that interview, Hersh responded to criticisms and explained that Ukraine’s war with Russia was going far worse than reported by the American media. According to Hersh and some of his government sources, the American attack on the pipelines may have been a disastrous mistake that could result in the collapse of NATO once most Europeans became aware of what had happened.
Democracy Now! has 1.3 million subscribers on its large Youtube channel, and immediately released Hersh’s important interview on that platform. Within hours the segment was approaching 250,000 views on its way to a likely total of many millions, becoming one of the channel’s most popular videos. I naturally linked it in several comments on our website.
But the same day it was released, Youtube suddenly censored Hersh’s Democracy Now! appearance, claiming that it represented “a violation of community standards” and was “offensive”:
As a result, Hersh’s Democracy Now! segment can no longer be viewed anywhere except on the Youtube site itself, and then only after clicking through two layers of warnings. The obvious intent was to drastically reduce Hersh’s potential audience and this will surely succeed. I assume that these restrictions have been combined with the most severe sort of shadow-banning. So a segment that would have probably been seen by many millions will only get a small fraction of that total.
Such Youtube censorship of a top mainstream journalist on a leading mainstream channel seems completely unprecedented, a massive escalation of the previous measures directed against the political fringe. The move was probably driven by concerns of how Youtube had earlier allowed the views of other important public figures to circumvent the blockade of media gatekeepers:
Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, one of our most distinguished political scientists, had spent many years making exactly these same points and blaming America and NATO for the simmering Ukraine crisis, but his warnings had been totally ignored by our political leadership and media. His hour-long lecture explaining these unpleasant realities had quietly sat on Youtube for six years, attracting relatively little attention, but then suddenly exploded in popularity…as the conflict unfolded
Mearsheimer’s lengthy explanation of the origins of the Ukraine war has now accumulated 28 million views, quite possibly more than any academic lecture in the history of the Internet.
Mearsheimer’s other Ukraine interviews and lectures accumulated many millions of additional views, and as a direct consequence of his suddenly enormous Internet presence, the once-boycotted academic was invited to contribute lengthy expositions of his views to such extremely establishmentarian outlets as the Economist and Foreign Affairs, and selected to participate in prestigious public forums such as Canada’s Munk debate and Europe’s Holberg Debate. As a result, probably tens of millions worldwide became exposed to a perspective previously excluded from the Western mainstream media.
In another example, Jeffrey Sachs has expressed very similar concerns about the Ukraine war and over the last few months a couple of his interviews on Democracy Now! have accumulated well over 4 million views, while a different interview with geopolitical scholar Alfred McCoy had reached nearly 2 million more:
When Sachs suggested on Bloomberg TV that the American government had probably been responsible for the pipeline attacks, he was quickly yanked off the air, but his clip went super-viral on Twitter, accumulating several million views.
Meanwhile, the clips of President Biden and other top American national security officials promising to eliminate the Nord Stream pipelines and then crowing about the mysterious explosions that destroyed them have also became ubiquitious on the Internet.
Hersh’s work and record were widely promoted on Twitter.
Tucker Carlson had covered the pipeline attacks from the very beginning and immediately discussed Hersh’s remarkable reporting.
Similarly, Max Blumenthal and Aron Mate did the same on the Grayzone:
But the audiences of both these shows are already overwhelmingly hostile to the Biden Administration, so these segments would be far less threatening than Hersh’s own lengthy interview with Amy Goodman on a program often watched by Biden supporters. Other than that practical consideration, I see no reason why Hersh’s interview would have been censored.
The problem faced by our political establishment is that their current position on the Ukraine war has drawn increasing opposition from individuals with the highest public stature and credibility, not only top journalists and academics like Hersh, Mearsheimer, and Sachs, but also top national security experts such as Col. Douglas Macgregor and Ray McGovern.
Our failed current Ukraine war policy against Russia has only been maintained by one of the tightest information blockades in modern American history, with 99% of the mainstream media and a large majority of the alternative media tolerating no dissenting voices. But the disastrous potential flaws in our strategy become immediately become apparent once they are mentioned and a critical mass of leading figures has now begun to do so, with their views increasingly reaching the public. So a regime of unprecedented censorship may now be imposed to prevent the American people from hearing both sides of the story.
Hence a factual interview of one of our most renowned journalists by a leading media outlet has been stamped “offensive” and heavily suppressed.
Such restrictions are hardly unknown to me. Just days after I published my first April 2020 article pointing to strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the global Covid epidemic was result of a botched American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), our entire website was banned by Facebook with all our pages deranked by Google.
The bombing of the Russian Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines supplying Germany has directly benefitted business interests in the two countries now accused of the terrorist act: the US and Norway have both increased natural gas sales to Europe.
Western media suppressed the revelation that the White House ordered the bombing of two Russian gas pipelines, a former CIA expert has alleged.
Award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published his bombshell exposé on his personal blog last week detailing how last September’s attack on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 submarine pipelines to Germany was organized.
Russia has requested a meeting of the UN Security Council on February 22 to discuss Hersh’s revelations, while China has called on the UN to investigate.
Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, told Sputnik the security council presidency, currently held by Malta, could block that request.
“It’s hard for the Russians to depend on the UN now since it has been pretty much co-opted by the US, but they still play by that rule,” McGovern said. “They prefer the old way to what the US calls the ‘rules-based international order’.”
He said the most interesting aspect of Hersh’s exposé was “the fact that US media, German media have been silent on all these things.”
“How long can the major media keep this quiet?” McGovern asked, pointing to the continued longevity of the ‘Russiagate’ hoax years after it was debunked. “It’s been over five years since the US government knew that there was no Russian hacking of the DNC. Five years plus. Does the American people know that?”
The intelligence expert said the American people had been “inculcated with a deep hatred of Russia and Putin personally” to drum up support for the proxy conflict in Ukraine. But now the wheels were coming off the Pentagon-orchestrated military campaign, the media narrative was crumbling.
“Things are coming to a head in the next month or two and how the US reacts to what is likely to be the abject defeat of Ukrainian forces,” McGovern said. “The people running our policy are naive. They’re arrogant. They think the US is exceptional. And Putin himself has said, you know, they think they can be completely immune to the consequences of their activities. That is no longer the case.”
Another who has been critical is former US marine and UN chemical weapons inspector Scott Ritter.
“There are lots of people that know how stupid and how unconstitutional this act of war was,” McGovern said. “So what we have is not only a lack of courage.”
The former CIA insider said government surveillance was now “so pervasive” that few sources would take the risk of tipping off reporters like Hersh.
“I imagine Sy Hersh, every stroke of his pen is recorded and they can trace back as they try to trace back to who the, quote, culprit, end quote, and reality, who the patriot was,” McGovern said.
He compared Hersh to persecuted whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Wikileaks founder Jullian Assange.
“They’ll double down on stupid for as long as they can,” McGovern said. “Next thing you can expect is to find out that Sy Hersh slept with some Swedish women.”
The meeting of the defence ministers of the Pentagon’s Ukraine Defence Contact Group in the “Ramstein” format in Brussels on January 14 failed to make any major announcement on the supply of offensive weapons to Kiev.
But the US President Joe Biden is expected in Poland early next week and may have another face-to-face meeting with Ukraine President Vladimir Zelensky. Biden probably intends to make a splash before declaring his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election.
The Biden Administration hopes to push Germany to the war front in Ukraine but the meeting in Brussels ended up inconclusively. Later, the press conference by the US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin had an air of vacuity, of empty-headedness, devoid of content.
Against this murky backdrop, all that the NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg would say was that the supply of military aircraft to Ukraine is being discussed, but this is not an urgent problem. According to him, the current conflict is a “struggle of logistics” and ammunition, so the alliance needs not so much to provide Ukraine with new weapons, as to make sure that everything that has already been delivered works. Stoltenberg stressed the need to deliver on the promises regarding German Marder infantry fighting vehicles, American Bradley, as well as Germany’s Leopard 2 tanks.
The single biggest announcement by Austin on Tuesday was about a decision by the Norwegian government that it will provide 7.5 billion euros in military and civilian assistance to Ukraine over the coming five years. He called it “a very significant commitment.”
Austin pretended it never occurred to him why Norway is making such a grand gesture, which is in reality a pathetic act of atonement for destroying the Nord Stream gas pipelines. Therein hangs a tale.
Of course, the Ramstein meeting did not discuss the bombshell report by Seymour Hersh, an investigative journalist with a track record of breaking major stories, on how the US reduced Germany’s Nord Stream gas pipelines to “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea” — to borrow the immortal words of Victoria Nuland, US Undersecretary of State — as the conflict in Ukraine was raging.
According to Hersh’s source, the decision to sabotage the pipeline came directly from President Biden and the subsequent top secret debate within the US administration lasting some 9 months was on how to achieve the goal without getting caught.
Hersh’s report on February 8 disclosed that it was the Norwegian navy which finally found the optimal location for blowing up the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines. Thus, on September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane dropped a sonar buoy in a seemingly routine flight, triggering high-powered C4 explosives that had been planted on the pipelines.
Hersh has since explained to the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung that Norway was particularly interested in successfully pulling off the plot against the Nord Stream pipelines.
In his words, “Norway was interested in income growth, and hence in increasing the volume of its energy supplies to the EU, to the same Germany. And what do we see after the mission? Norway has made it. It’s (energy) exports grew against the backdrop of significant hostility towards Russia.”
Norway was attracted to Biden’s sabotage project like a fly to the honeypot, since it stood to gain fabulously in financial terms if it helped the US military to destroy Nord Stream pipelines near Danish waters, and replace Russia as Germany’s principal source of piped natural gas.
To be sure, Norway has made a kill. The loot is estimated to be worth over $100 billion so far! Norway supplied 33 percent of Germany’s gas needs in 2022, making it the country’s largest supplier.
Experts estimate that “Norway’s position as a key provider of energy to Germany is set to further increase in the years to come, including from new Arctic fields coming on line and new discoveries above the Arctic Circle… Expanded production above the Arctic Circle, arriving from the Irpa field 340 km west of Bodø scheduled to come online in 2026, as well as new discoveries in the Barents Sea including one made in 2022 adjacent to Goliat, will be key to maintaining peak production.
“With Germany largely disconnected from Russian pipeline gas, the door for Norway to further expand its market share and establish itself as the country’s primary gas supplier remains open.”
Ironically, at a joint press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in August 2022, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre claimed that “Norway delivers as much gas as possible to Germany.” Of course, what he didn’t tell Scholz was that Norway was about to execute a project to transform Germany, Europe’s largest consumer of natural gas, as a captive market for it very soon. Actually, Norway blew up the Nord Stream pipelines only a month later on September 22.
Norway is now burnishing its image as a rich country capable of the milk of human kindness, which is generously sharing a whopping 7.5 billion euros (out of the windfall profit of $100 billion from the German loot) with Ukraine. And Austin announces it as a grand gesture to thwart Russian “aggression”!
This sordid pantomime provokes an incredulous gasp. One cannot but take pity on the German nation which is saddled in these tumultuous times with a mediocre government of inexperienced, dubious politicians who dare not defend their country’s core interests against American bullying.
The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was spot on when he spoke at length for the first time about the Nord Stream pipelines and Seymour Hersh’s article at a working meeting on February 15 with heads of foreign media bureaus accredited in Russia:
“The main goal was to prevent Germany from feeling comfortable in the energy sphere and from receiving gas via these two pipelines, which were financed by companies in Russia, Germany, Austria and Italy… Germany has not simply been humiliated; it has been put in its place as a satellite of the United States…”
Norway is not squeamish about giving away a tiny portion of its loot from Germany, a NATO partner. Maybe, it is indulging in an act of atonement over a fiendish crime perpetrated on a neighbour and ally. Maybe, the Biden team urged Norway to burnish its credentials as a Good Samaritan. And Austin hailed it as a solid outcome of the Ramstein meeting at Brussels.
On February 17, 2008, a group of US-backed “democratic leaders” headed by a former Western-sponsored terrorist declared the independence of Serbia’s breakaway province of Kosovo and Metohija (its full legal name under Serbia’s constitution).
It seemed oh so simple and straightforward at the zenith of the “unipolar moment,” and Kosovo Albanians were “confidently awaiting Western recognition for their state despite the anger its secession provoked in Serbia and Russia’s warnings of fresh Balkan unrest,” as a Reuters report drily noted.
Their confidence was more than justified, as 22 of 27 EU and 26 of 30 NATO member states eventually recognized this unilateral act of secession, pulling along many other smaller, mostly Western-dependent countries to follow suit. UN Security Council Resolution 1244, according to which the province is to remain an autonomous province of Serbia pending a mutually agreed final settlement, was ignored, just as the UN and international law were ignored in the spring of 1999, when NATO unilaterally engaged in a 78-day bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, under the familiar pretext of protecting “democracy, human rights and the rule of law.” This resulted in NATO’s military occupation of the province that lasts to this day.
The case of “independent Kosovo” is in many ways the perfect embodiment of the post-Cold War West’s “rules-based order.” In contrast to international law, which derives from the UN Charter and numerous universally accepted post-WWII treaties and agreements, the “rules-based order” is pretty much anything its propagators deem it to be in accordance with their political interests du jour. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it, these “rules” are “created from scratch for each particular case. They are written within a narrow circle of Western countries and palmed off as the ultimate truth.”
In the case of Kosovo and Metohija, the “rules” were to be tailored to the ambitions of the unipolar hegemon and its vassals. This formed the base of the collective West’s failed attempt to declare this instance sui generis, i.e., unique and incomparable to any other case, in order to prevent others from referring to it as a precedent – South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Crimea, the Donbass, and the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, among others, begged to differ. And, no, the original goal of this unique “rule-setting” was not to protect “democracy, human rights and the rule of law” in Serbia’s historic province, which hosts not only the site of the legendary Battle of Kosovo of 1389, the only battle in which an Ottoman sultan was killed, but also hundreds of Serbian Orthodox medieval churches and monasteries. The true US interest was much bigger and less benevolent. And it was revealed in a document memory-holed by Western mainstream media, a May 2000 letter to then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder by Willy Wimmer, a member of the German Bundestag and vice president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE.
Wimmer’s letter contains a description of a security conference that he had attended in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava that was co-organized by the US State Department and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington-based think tank. A list of participants and the agenda could at one time be found on the AEI website but are no longer available at the time of writing. Almost all of the information available nowadays about it comes from Wimmer’s account. According to him, the conference not only exposed the true causes of NATO’s brutal attack on Yugoslavia and subsequent occupation of Kosovo and Metohija, but also the purpose behind NATO’s further enlargement toward the borders of Russia, and, most importantly from the aspect of global security, the US aim of undermining the international legal order as part of its drive for global domination. In essence, Wimmer’s report revealed the criminal plan that has brought the world to the brink of global, possibly nuclear, conflict.
According to senior US officials at the conference as cited by Wimmer, Yugoslavia was bombed “in order to rectify General Eisenhower’s erroneous decision during World War II,” when he failed to station US troops there. Naturally, as Wimmer recorded, no one at the conference disputed the claim that, having engaged in the bombing of a sovereign country, “NATO violated all international rules, and especially all the relevant provisions of international law.” Furthermore, NATO’s unilateral intervention outside its legal domain represented a deliberate “precedent, to be invoked by anyone at any time,” and “many others” in the future.
The ultimate imperial goals were clearly stated: “To restore the territorial situation in the area between the Baltic Sea and Anatolia such as existed during the Roman Empire, at the time of its greatest power and greatest territorial expansion. For this reason, Poland must be flanked to the north and to the south with democratic neighbor states, while Romania and Bulgaria are to secure a land connection with Turkey. Serbia (probably for the purposes of securing an unhindered US military presence) must be permanently excluded from European development. North of Poland, total control over St. Petersburg’s access to the Baltic Sea must be established. In all processes, peoples’ rights to self-determination should be favored over all other provisions or rules of international law.”
In short, the tragedy that is unfolding in Ukraine today can be clearly traced back to NATO’s trampling of international law in the case of Kosovo and the “victorious” West’s building of a new (“rules-based”) order by expanding its military alliance all the way to Russia’s borders. If we were to apply the Nuremberg Principles of International Law formulated under UN General Assembly Resolution 177 on the basis of the post-WW II Nazi war crimes trials, NATO’s decision-makers would stand a very good chance of being found guilty of crimes against peace: “(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances,” and “(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).”
In other words, international law is inconvenient for today’s collective West not just for practical but for legal and moral reasons. Not to speak of the obvious historical parallels with a previous militaristic attempt at forming a “new order” that ended in a Berlin bunker after tens of millions of lives were extinguished. Wimmer’s (almost) forgotten correspondence is an indictment far deeper than the collective West’s current marriage of convenience with Kiev’s neo-Nazi element.
However, even as the Ukraine crisis continues to escalate, the new Battle of Kosovo is far from over. Because, 15 years on, the collective West still hasn’t been able to find a political accomplice in Belgrade ready to grant it retroactive amnesty by recognizing “independent Kosovo” and/or agreeing to its UN membership. That is why, even as they stubbornly press on with the latest Drang nach Osten on the military field, Western powers are also doubling down on their diplomatic pressure on Serbia, which not only refuses to formally recognize its own dismemberment but also to join the illegal sanctions against Russia. The latest ploy, informally called the Franco-German plan, is to try to force Serbia to recognize its province’s statehood in all but name, in return for foggy promises of financial aid and (distant) future EU membership. As a result, the current onslaught of Western diplomats on Belgrade is only slightly less intense than the parallel inflow of Western mercenaries to Kiev.
The problem for the collective West is that, despite its intense, decades-long pressure, substantial investment in the Serbian media and NGO sector, and threats of renewed international isolation, Serbian popular opinion remains stubbornly independent-minded. According to a recent report by the uber hawkish, London-based Henry Jackson Society, 53.3% of Serbian citizens wish their country to remain neutral in the Ukraine conflict (with a further 35.8% supporting an overtly pro-Russian stance), while 78.7% oppose sanctions against Russia and 54.1% think that Serbia should rely on Russia first when it comes to foreign policy (as opposed to 22.6% opting for reliance on the EU). Furthermore, the EU has definitely lost its luster, with 44.3% saying they would “definitely” or “probably” vote against EU membership (as opposed to 38.1% ready to vote for) if a referendum were to be held tomorrow. Finally, according to a recently released independent Serbian poll, 79.2% oppose EU membership as a “reward” for recognizing independence for Kosovo.
It can thus be argued that, much as Hitler’s march into the Rhineland broke the post-WW I world order, NATO’s unprovoked attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 was a deliberate move to destroy the post-Cold War order, while the Western-inspired declaration of Kosovo’s independence 15 years ago was an attempt to legitimize a new, “rules-based” order, which is now reaching its ugly culmination in Ukraine. And, taking the parallels a bit further, just as the attempted new order may meet its military Stalingrad in Ukraine, it might meet its diplomatic Stalingrad in Kosovo, well before the 20th anniversary of that occupied territory’s purported independence.
As the 13th anniversary of the crimes of September, 2001 approaches, the neoconservatives are shrieking from the rooftops – and effectively confessing that they were the real perpetrators of the 9/11-Anthrax false flag operation. (The neocons, you may recall, openly called for a “new Pearl Harbor” in September, 2000 – and got one exactly one year later.)
Every year at this time, the neocons orchestrate and hype a series of public relations stunts designed to magnify fears of “radical Islam” and reinforce their crumbling 9/11-Anthrax cover story. But this year’s propaganda campaign is so extreme that it represents a tacit confession: The neocons know that the truth about the 9/11-Anthrax operation is slowly closing in on them; so they are over-reacting by desperately trying to stoke the dying embers of the so-called War on Terror, in order to maintain the myth that Muslims (rather than neoconservative Zionists) attacked America in the autumn of 2001.
When a hysterical person exhibits guilty demeanor by trying too hard to blame a crime on someone else, that person is almost certainly the real perpetrator. As the neocons try much too hard to blame Islam for 9/11 and “terrorism” in general, their hysteria inadvertently reveals their own culpability. Like Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth, the neoconservative movement has blood on its hands and “doth protest too much.” … continue
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