In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Biden rewrote the history of the pandemic. Biden lamented, “Covid had shut down our businesses. Schools were closed. We were robbed of so much.” But it wasn’t Covid that issued the shutdown edicts.
We were robbed by politicians like Biden who disrupted lives in a futile effort to thwart a virus that infected hundreds of millions of Americans anyhow. There was never solid evidence to justify shutting businesses or schools but that did not deter politicians from promising to save humanity by destroying freedom.
After Pfizer and Moderna, Biden was perhaps the biggest Covid profiteer in America. In 2020, Biden ran one of the most fear-based presidential campaigns in modern history. Biden talked as if every American family had lost a member or two from this pestilence. He routinely exaggerated Covid death tolls by a hundred- or a thousand-fold, publicly asserting that millions of Americans had been killed by Covid-19. Biden was helped mightily by fear-mongering media coverage.
A Brookings Institute analysis noted, “Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to overestimate [Covid] harm. Forty-one percent of Democrats… answered that half or more of those infected by COVID-19 need to be hospitalized.” At that time, the rate of hospitalization was between 1 percent and 5 percent – so those Democratic voters overestimated the risk of hospitalization by up to 20-fold.
In the final debate between the presidential candidates in October 2020, Biden blamed Trump for every Covid fatality: “220,000 Americans dead…. Anyone who’s responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States.” Biden promised, “I will take care of this. I will end this. I’m going to shut down the virus, not the country.” In a speech on the day before Election Day, he declared, “We’re going to beat this virus. We’re going to get it under control, I promise you.” Biden won the presidency as a result of only 43,000 votes in three swing states. The disruption and damage caused by lockdowns were invoked as proof of Trump’s negligence, rather than seen as evidence of an unprecedented political panic-mongering and repression.
After taking office, Biden issued a flurry of edicts, including mandating masks for anyone on federal property. In September 2021, he mandated that more than 100 million be injected with Covid vaccines, despite proliferating evidence that the vaccines were failing to prevent transmission or infections. In an October 2021 CNN Town Hall, Biden vilified vaccine skeptics as murderers who only wanted “the freedom to kill you” with Covid.
On Tuesday night, Biden announced, “Covid no longer controls our lives.” But Biden extended the official Covid emergency at least until May 11, entitling him to sweeping additional power. Biden still claims that Covid miraculously entitles him to “forgive” half a trillion dollars in federal student debt. And the Biden administration is fighting to perpetuate vaccine mandates on foreign visitors to America and to preserve the president’s prerogative to impose mask mandates.
The carnage from Covid crackdowns is still being tabulated. A 2022 Johns Hopkins University analysis of 24 studies on the impact of lockdowns in the United States and Europe found “no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality.” The pointless shutdowns did far more damage than Biden will ever admit:
A National Bureau of Economic Research analysis estimated that young Americans suffered “171,000 excess non-Covid deaths during 2020 and 2021… a historic, yet largely unacknowledged, health emergency.” Many of those fatalities were “collateral damage” from shutdowns and other Covid policies.
Millions of jobs were lost thanks to lockdowns, a major reason why life expectancy in the United States had its sharpest plunge since World War Two.
Forced isolation was a Grim Reaper. Deaths from drug overdoses set an all-time record of 108,000 in 2021 and alcohol-related deaths jumped 25% in the first year of the pandemic.
The Biden administration suppressed free speech on Twitter and other social media based on a single theme: “Be very afraid of Covid and do exactly what we say to stay safe,” as journalist David Zweig summarized in the TwitterFiles. Official fear-mongering helped boost the percentage of Americans reporting struggling with depression or anxiety by more than 300 percent.
If Biden can shift blame for disastrous Covid policies, politicians will be more likely to pointlessly lock down the nation in the future. Americans deserve to see all the federal records and all the state government records to expose the recklessness and deceit that permeated Covid policies. America will not recover from the pandemic until all the COVID lies and abuses by officialdom have been exposed.
James Bovard, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is author and lecturer whose commentary targets examples of waste, failures, corruption, cronyism and abuses of power in government. He is a USA Today columnist and is a frequent contributor to The Hill. He is the author of ten books.
National Security Adviser to President Biden Jake Sullivan played a prominent role in plotting the September 26, 2022, sabotage against the Russo-European Nord Stream pipelines, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh has revealed. So, who is Jake Sullivan: “the cat’s meow,” “once-in-a-generation intellect,” or a reckless hawk?
“I have great respect for Hersh and his reporting and believe that Sullivan could certainly have been instrumental in pushing for and carrying out this deceitful campaign that likely has inflicted monumental damage on citizens worldwide while also sapping America’s remaining national prestige,” Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel told Sputnik.
In December 2021, Jake Sullivan, acting with Joe Biden’s blessing, convened men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments to come up with a plan on how to destruct Nord Stream 1 and 2 designed to pump Russian natural gas to Europe, according to Seymour Hersh’s recent bombshell.
In early 2022, the CIA told Sullivan that they knew how to blow up the pipelines. The group decided to keep the risky plot on a hush. The US Congress wasn’t informed. The US military and intelligence operatives did their best to conceal Washington’s role in the sabotage. As per the investigative journalist, the team had concerns about the legality of the plot and was well aware that it could quickly morph into a foreign policy nightmare.
After the pipelines had been destroyed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and, later, Undersecretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland openly praised the development.
“When any crime is committed, the immediate question to ask when seeking suspects is ‘to whose benefit?’ Not only did it benefit the US, US officials made comments before and after the pipeline’s destruction virtually confirming their role and the benefits derived,” Brian Berletic, geopolitical analyst and former US marine, told Sputnik.
For his part, Jake Sullivan stated laconically on September 27, 2022, that the US was supporting efforts to investigate the “apparent sabotage” and “will continue [it’s] work to safeguard Europe’s energy security.”
“Hersh’s reporting on the Nord Stream bombing is completely convincing and I know for a fact that he has reliable sources, mostly in the intelligence community, but I would rather regard Sullivan as the implementer of the attack on the pipeline by virtue of his position rather than the driving force behind it,” Philip Giraldi, former CIA station chief, now an executive director of the Council for the National Interest, told Sputnik. “To be sure, Joe Biden would have had to promote and endorse the project.”
Clinton’s Golden Boy
Jake Sullivan, 46, has long been praised as a “golden boy” by the US mainstream media. Having graduated from Yale in 1998 Sullivan became an advisor to then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2008 and later, after Hillary dropped out from the race, he advised Barack Obama during his general election campaign.
Sullivan was just 32 when he was sworn in as Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff for policy at the US State Department. When Clinton left the State Department in early 2013, Obama promoted Sullivan to the position of national security adviser to then-Vice President Joe Biden.
In 2015, Sullivan married Margaret Goodlander, onetime advisor to well-known hawks Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain, who used to previously work for the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for a New American Security. (Goodlander is currently Counsel to Attorney General Merrick Garland).
Sullivan is known for being a quiet but prominent member of the Clinton-Obama team. According to the press, he was part of the “exclusive” team working on resuming relations with Cuba and striking the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. He is also said to be Hillary’s close confidante in the Libya plan, which was developed months before the 2011 NATO invasion of the North African state and brutal killing of its leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Sullivan and his boss, Clinton, adhered to the concept of “smart power,” which encompasses the use of military threat, force, and sanctions and the soft-power levers favored by foreign policy doves, which includes humanitarian aid and negotiations.
The aide was reportedly called “the cat’s meow” and a “potential future president” by Hillary, while Biden lauded him as a “once-in-a-generation intellect.”
In 2015, the sandy-haired Minnesotan joined Hillary on her 2015/2016 election cycle as a foreign policy adviser and eventually returned to the US administration as Joe Biden’s national security adviser in 2021.
Sullivan Lacks True Sense of Right Versus Wrong
However, there’s another side to Sullivan’s stellar career. “Sullivan is clearly drunk on power and lacking a true sense of right versus wrong,” according to Ortel.
“Sullivan is a fiercely partisan globalist who achieved numerous high honors in academic life so he is supremely self-confident and, sadly, often grievously wrong,” Ortel told Sputnik. “One way to get a sense of the way he operates is to look through the State Department and Podesta WikiLeaks files and the FBI Vault files on Hillary Clinton where Sullivan is frequently involved. Like the Clintons, Sullivan thrust himself into contact with powerful Democrats and operated well above his experience level early on. But unlike the Clintons, Obama, and Biden, Sullivan has yet to hold elected office.”
One might wonder why Sullivan rose to prominence so fast even though he had relatively little experience in government affairs. Hillary herself admitted that Jake wasn’t the most experienced diplomat when it came to foreign policy.
“Jake was not the most experienced diplomat at the State Department I could have chosen, but he was discreet and had my absolute confidence,” Clinton wrote in her memoir Hard Choices while describing her decision to tap Sullivan to kick off negotiations with Iran in 2012. “His presence would send a powerful message that I was personally invested in this process.”
According to US media observers, Sullivan’s primary secret is that he mastered himself in delivering on his boss’s wants and needs even when it went contrary to rules and ethics. The US press quoted a senior Obama aide as saying that Sullivan was ready to do “everything” for then-Secretary Clinton.
Unsurprisingly, Sullivan had no scruples about Hillary’s unsecured email server use for classified and top secret government correspondence. He was bullish on Washington’s Libyan and Syrian interventions which spiraled out of control, completely ruining the North Africa state and leaving the Syrian Arab Republic in tatters.
“Under Obama and Biden, Sullivan is connected to train wreck after train wreck, from the Arab “spring”, to Benghazi, ISIS, the Iran ‘deal’ and more. He seems to be a huge fan of secret negotiations that are never subject to oversight,” Ortel noted.
Sullivan got mired in Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi scandal revolving around the former secretary of state’s failure to prevent a brutal slaughter of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other US nationals in Libya on September 11, 2012. During the investigation into the matter, the House committee stumbled upon Sullivan’s letter in which the official emphasized that “we need to live in a world of risks,” while touting Washington’s decision to oust Gaddafi which opened the door to chaos in Libya.
Trump-Russia “Collusion” Hoax
“In the 2016 campaign, he had every motive to hide the misdeeds of the Clintons, including corruption and tax fraud involving The Clinton Foundation and many other charities,” said Ortel, who has been conducting a private investigation into the Clinton Foundation’s alleged fraud for several years. “Here it will prove interesting to see what [Special Councel] John Durham has to say about Sullivan, including his likely role pushing the Russian Hoax, for Trump’s impeachment and for electing Joe Biden.”
Sullivan appeared to have no scruples about actively spreading the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and keeping the myth alive even after the allegations about Trump were proven null and void. Later, Durham’s investigation shed light on Clinton campaign operatives’ role in peddling a fake Trump-Alfa Bank story and uncorroborated “dirty dossier” by ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele.
However, when testifying under oath before the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in December 2017, the Clinton confidante denied any knowledge of the plot or people involved in it.
US investigative journalist Paul Sperry alleged that Sullivan was well-aware that the Trump-Alfa Bank story was “cooked-up” and personally spearheaded a “confidential project” to link Trump to the Kremlin.
Sullivan was also the one who personally promoted the Trump-Russia collusion story prior to the 2016 elections. Thus, during the July 2016 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Philadelphia, Sullivan met with a number of mainstream media producers and anchors to tell a story “that Trump was conspiring with Putin to steal the election.”
Around that time, the CIA intercepted Russian intelligence’s “chatter” about a Clinton “foreign policy adviser” who allegedly proposed a plan to vilify Donald Trump by linking him to the Kremlin in order to distract public opinion from Hillary’s emailgate scandal. Some US observers believe that the foreign policy adviser in question was Jake Sullivan.
According to Ortel, Sullivan could well be aware of many other “dirty” secrets of the US Democratic establishment, including the Clinton’s alleged pay-to-play schemes, Joe and Hunter Biden influence peddling and Team Obama’s efforts to undermine then-sitting President Donald Trump through a string of dodgy investigations and leaks.
“Simply put, Sullivan has no choice but to cover up the disasters connected to Biden, Obama and Clinton and likely cannot accept the grave errors (and high crimes) that seem to have been committed. In this effort, he will believe he is secure because his wife is a close advisor and friend of Attorney General Merrick Garland,” the Wall Street analyst remarked.
Nord Stream Reporting Not Done
When it comes to the Nord Stream sabotage, “in a just process, Sullivan and his co-conspirators would swiftly be charged, convicted and incarcerated if it is proven that he orchestrated an undeclared war against Russia,” argued Ortel.
According to Ortel, by fanning the flames of proxy war against Russia, Team Biden both pursues vested interests and seeks to cover up and obscure political misdeeds involving Biden, Clinton and Obama in Ukraine and other nations from 2009 to date.
Still, it appears that one could soon hear more about the Biden administration’s secretive and risky plot. Hersh indicated to Sputnik that more investigative pieces about the Nord Stream explosion were forthcoming, but declined to provide further details.
Speaker of the Russian parliament Vyacheslav Volodin has branded US President Joe Biden a “terrorist” after a report by iconic American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh blamed Washington for sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines last year.
Volodin said on Thursday that Biden’s State of the Union address, in which he claimed that the US was “a nation that stands as a beacon to the world,” reminded him of “statements by the leaders of the Third Reich.”
The ramifications of this “ideology of exceptionalism” were uncovered in the investigation by Hersh, the Russian MP wrote in a post on Telegram.
The State Duma speaker was referring to a report published by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist on Wednesday, in which he claimed that the US was behind the explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines last September. According to an informed source who talked to Hersh, explosives were planted at the key pipelines in the Baltic Sea back in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of a NATO exercise. They were later detonated remotely.
Nord Stream 1 and 2 had been important routes for the delivery of Russian gas to Europe through Germany.
“If [Harry S.] Truman became a criminal, who used nuclear weapons against civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then Biden became a terrorist, who ordered the destruction of the energy infrastructure of his strategic partners: Germany, France, the Netherlands,” Volodin said.
The sabotage of the pipelines by the Americans was “an act of intimidation of its vassals, who decided to develop their economy in the interests of their own citizens,” he wrote.
The revelations by Hersh should be grounds for an international investigation to “bring Biden and his accomplices to justice,” and to make sure that the nations affected by this “terrorist attack” are paid compensation, Volodin added.
The Biden administration has denied the report by Hersh, with the National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson calling it “utterly false and complete fiction.”
The Russian authorities have for months been pointing to the fact that the only side that benefited from Nord Stream being rendered inoperable was the US, which saw its supplies of liquified natural gas to Europe increase massively following the sabotage.
Ever heard of Monkey Werx? He hosts a You Tube channel that focuses on tracking U.S. civilian and military flights. Sounds pretty innocuous and boring. No more. Turns out that Monkey Werx provided a video report last September (September 30th to be precise) that confirms part of Sy Hersh’s account of the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.
And here is the Monkey Werx report from September 30th (relevant info starts at the 2 minute mark) tracking that P8 Poseidon:
There still are some people in the intelligence community who are patriots and are alarmed by Biden’s lawless behavior. I imagine that the Biden Administration will launch a witch hunt for the intelligence officers who alerted Sy Hersh to this story. According to the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war on another country. Joe Biden has usurped that authority and carried out an act of war against a NATO ally (Germany). The potential ramifications of this act include the heightened risk of the U.S. starting a shooting war with Russia.
Former Twitter executives looked at times uncomfortable, but betrayed their staunch anti-free speech biases during a House Oversight Committee heading on Wednesday.
The hearing was called to investigate the role government played, specifically the FBI, with regards to censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop report by the New York Post.
Former Twitter Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, Former Deputy General Counsel James Baker, and Former Global Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth were grilled by Representatives, with Congressman Clay Higgins telling them they could be arrested for interfering with the 2020 presidential election.
“The bottom line is that the FBI had the Biden Crime Family laptop for a year. They knew it was leaking. They knew it would hurt the Biden family. So the FBI used its relationship with Twitter to suppress criminal evidence from being revealed about Joe Biden one month before the 2020 election,” Higgins asserted.
“You, ladies and gentlemen interfered with the United States of America 2020 presidential election! Knowingly and willingly!” he continued, adding “That’s the bad news! It’s gonna get worse! Because this is the investigation part! Later comes the arrest part, your attorneys are familiar with that.”
“I’d like to spend five hours with these ladies and gentlemen doing depositions surely yet to come,” the Congressman added.
Elsewhere during the hearing, Rep. Nancy Mace blasted the former executives for also, as highlighted by the Elon Musk’s release of The Twitter Files, working to suppress information regarding COVID.
“I along with many Americans have long term effects from COVID. Not only was I a long-hauler, but I have effects from the vaccine,” Mae declared.
She continued, “It wasn’t the first shot but it was the second shot. I have now developed asthma that has never gone away since I had the second shot. I have tremors in my left hand. And I have the occasional heart pains that no doctor can explain. And I’ve had a battery of tests.”
“I find it extremely alarming Twitter’s suppression spread into medical fields,” Mace told the former execs.
“You’re not a doctor, right?” Mace directly asked Gadde, adding “What makes you think you or anyone else at Twitter have the medical expertise to censor actual, accurate CDC data?”
Gadded pathetically claimed she was not familiar with these particular situations.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you’re not,” Mace shot back.
Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan told them they “got played by the FBI” over the Hunter Biden laptop, forcing Roth to admit that the New York Post report didn’t violate any Twitter policies in his opinion, but was censored anyway.
“This to me is the real takeaway,” Jordan said, going on to state “51 former intelligence officials, five days after you guys take down the Hunter Biden story and block the New York Post’s account, five days later, 51 former intel officials send a letter and they say, ‘the Hunter Biden story has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’ The information operation was run on you guys, and then by extension then run on the American people. And that’s the concern.”
Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert asked the former Twitter executives “Who the hell do you think you are?” for shadow banning people they disagree with on the platform.
Boebert also asked the execs if they had shadow banned her own account.
“I can reach out to Elon and to his staff, and I can see what’s happened ,and I can sit here today and hold you all in account,” Boebert concluded, adding “I am angry for the millions of Americans who were silenced because of your decisions, because of your actions, because of your collusion with the federal government. They can’t reach out to Elon. They can’t sit here today and hold you in account.”
The chair of the Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky highlighted Tweets made by Roth in the past calling Republicans ‘Nazis’.
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia told Roth “You permanently banned my Twitter account but you allowed child porn all over Twitter.”
The former execs mostly either claimed ignorance and denied any wrong doing.
James Baker said he can’t recall speaking with the FBI while working at Twitter, and denied that he acted unlawfully.
Meanwhile, Roth attempted to argue that censorship on Twitter under his watch helped to create more freedom of speech.
Roth also admitted that he finds it “regrettable” that the conservative account LibsOfTikTok is still allowed to be active on Twitter… More videos
‘Just an ear infection, here’s some antibiotics,’ was my hospital diagnosis after a five-minute assessment; strange, as I couldn’t understand how an ear infection could make my eye swell and deliver an excruciating head pain akin to being hit with a hammer four days earlier.
I had an Oxford University/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine on March 28, 2021. I was 54. The government said it would enable people to get back to some kind of normality, both family and work (I was in the clothing industry). It was implied that it was our duty to protect those around us by being vaccinated. Thirdly, I was the carer for my frail 87-year-old father, living alone since my mother’s death in 2006.
The ‘ear infection’ pain got worse, the symptoms debilitating, I thought at one point I was going to die. I’m not a moaner but I just wasn’t comfortable with what I was told, and so began my road-blocked journey to VITT (vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis) diagnosis.
Once a diagnosis is given, it is nigh on impossible to get it changed, and for three months after I was told I had an ear infection I went back and forth to my GP, writing letters explaining my symptoms, asking for neurological referral, all to no avail.
I was eventually granted eye and blood tests. The eye test result recommended neurological assessment, but the killer was being handed my blood test results without explanation, just some notations stating ‘Abnormal see Doctor’.
Now very worried, I decided to see a private neurologist. I hadn’t even sat down before the neurologist, sizing me up in an instant, said ‘Something’s not right’ and suddenly I was an NHS emergency.
NHS MRI/CT scans and blood tests followed and then silence. All the adrenaline ebbs away and one gets back to life . . . until that moment when the phone rings, you see the word HOSPITAL on the display, and your pulse starts racing. It’s that call, and the calm voice you are hearing is telling you there’s a blood clot in your brain.
I didn’t take it in, I started shaking. I asked the neurologist (who is wonderful) to slow down as I couldn’t understand any of it.
A few days later I’m talking to a haematologist, again a wonderful person, and with pills and blood tests under way I had gathered myself and was able to ask questions.
I later wrote to my hospital and GP telling them of my diagnosis. I’ve got the ‘Sorry about that’ letters, the ‘we learned a lot/the MHRA didn’t tell us’ etc reasons. And I still have the blood clot I first told them I thought I had as a consequence of my vaccine.
Today, I feel if I’d been admitted on first presentation I’d have recovered. Instead, my NHS-diagnosed VITT blood clot and head pain are a constant reminder, my walking stick an embarrassment, and all the rest: my drooping eye, the vision fluctuation, the increased cranium pressure and broken teeth from my falls, the loss of my driving licence, PTSD, the lumbar puncture, blood thinners and the other procedures/appointments I now have after taking a ‘safe and effective’ vaccine – I can’t even work any more.
The impact has been just as bad for my father. I was pretty much his only link with the outside world, but because of my injury and all that goes with it (not being able to drive, for example) I can’t provide care for him. His health and well-being have suffered greatly. Now he has full-time live-in care, which he has to pay for, and has been in and out of hospitals since.
It’s all dreadfully sad. I have apologised to him and my family for my taking the vaccine. I wish I could turn the clock back and be a normal husband, dad and son again, but all that’s been ripped away from me. Everyone in a family suffers when it’s a vaccine injury, not just the vaccinated.
If you are vaccine injured, or know someone who is, you can contact or read about the the Covid-19 vaccine injury support group, UK CV Family, here.
The Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed last September by the US in a covert operation, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has claimed. The legendary reporter made the bombshell revelation in an article posted to his newly launched blog on Substack on Wednesday.
The explosives were planted at the pipelines back in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise, Hersh reported, citing a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
The journalist noted he had reached the White House and the CIA for comment, with both firmly rejecting the claim as“utterly false.”
The bombs were detonated three months later on September 26 with a remote signal sent by a sonar buoy. The buoy was dropped near the Nord Stream pipelines by a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane, according to the report.
The operation came to fruition following months of back-and-forth between the White House, the CIA and the military, with the officials focusing on how to leave no trace of the US involvement in the attack. The planning process began back in December 2021, when a special task force was created with the direct participation of US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
“The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes,” the report read.
The source told Hersh that everybody involved understood the operation was not some “kiddie stuff” and was actually an “an act of war.” Throughout “all of this scheming” certain officials urged the White House to drop the idea entirely. “Some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out,’” according to the source.
Originally, the explosives were to have a 48-hour-timer and were set to be planted by the end of BALTOPS22, Hersh reported citing the same source. The two-day window, however, was ultimately deemed to be too close to the end of the exercise by the White House, which ordered the task force to come up with an on-demand method of detonating them. The latter ultimately turned out to be the sonar buoy idea.
The Joe Biden’s administration has been “focused” on jeopardizing the Nord Stream pipelines – initially through sanctions, and, ultimately, with direct sabotage – seeing it as a key to swaying Europe under its cause amid then-looming conflict in Ukraine, Hersh noted.
“As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia,” he wrote.
Moscow has provided a similar take on the incident shortly after the blasts, branding them a “terrorist attack” and stating that the US was the nation that benefited most from it, by speeding up Europe’s attempts to wean itself off the Russian gas.
Twenty years ago, former Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his now-infamous address before the United Nations Security Council, making the case for war against Iraq.
The presentation would later be revealed as lies. Sadly, it would also turn out that no one seemed to care.On February 5, 2003, I watched it all with a sense of boiling anger. The day before, I had made the following prediction to Japanese media:
“He’s [Powell] going to present circumstantial evidence that packaged together and presented will make a compelling case that [UN weapons] inspections don’t work, inspections can’t work, that Iraq is actively conspiring against inspections, thereby, denigrating the efficacy of inspections, while the world waits for inspectors to do their job. The purpose of Colin Powell’s presentation tomorrow is to destroy international trust and confidence in weapons inspections and that is a darn shame.”
I was 100% correct in my assessment.
I was in Japan at the invitation of Japanese activists to generate political opposition to America’s looming war on Iraq. I addressed the Japanese parliament and spoke with several major Japanese media outlets. Shortly after Powell finished speaking, I gave an interview with Kyodo News, where I dismissed Powell’s assertions that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction as “unsubstantiated.”
“There’s nothing here that’s conclusive proof that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction,” I told Kyodo News. “Everything in here is circumstantial, everything in here mirrors the kind of allegations the US has made in the past in regard to Iraq’s weapons program,” I said. “He just hits you, hits you, hits you with circumstantial evidence, and he confuses people – and he lied, he lied to people, he misled people.”
Powell’s iconic moment was when he raised a vial of white powder – a proxy intended to simulate dry powder anthrax, a potent biological weapons agent, in an effort to link Iraq with the terrorist attacks in the US in October 2001 where dry powder anthrax was sent through the US postal system in envelopes. Ironically, the anthrax in question was actually produced by the US. Iraq is only known to have produced liquid bulk anthrax, which has a shelf life of only three years, and the last known batch of liquid bulk anthrax was produced in 1991 at a state-owned factory which was destroyed in 1996.
“Colin Powell holds up a vial of dry powder anthrax and he makes allusions to the attack in the United States through the letters. That was US government anthrax! It had nothing to do with Iraq,” I said. Powell, I explained, was engaging in “classic bait-and-switch” in his presentation. “Iraq, anthrax, vial, dry powder – what connection do they have? None!”
During my February 4 media event in Japan, I made the following prediction about the consequences of Powell’s UN presentation:
“The United States will seek to compel the Security Council into passing a new resolution, if the Security Council fails to do so the United States will go it alone with its narrow coalition and I see a massive aerial bombardment beginning by the end of February, I see ground troops in significant numbers crossing over into Iraq by early March, and I don’t see this war finishing anytime soon. While we may occupy Baghdad sometime in June, we’ll be occupying Iraq for months, if not years. It will be an occupation that will be carried out with the violent opposition of the Iraqi people, and I see an increase in the acts of anti-American terror abroad. I think an American invasion of Iraq is the best recruitment poster that Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda will ever have.”
I challenged Powell’s assertions until I was blue in the face, including at a public forum held at the University of Tokyo the day after Powell spoke, February 6.
It was to no avail.
“There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more,” Powell told the Security Council, “and he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction.”
All lies. But the US mainstream media repeated his words as gospel, and the American people ate it up as if it were Manna from heaven. My country went to war based upon a foundation of lies told by someone who, up until that moment, was seen as one of the most credible individuals in American public service ever.
The Powell presentation set a precedent of public lies which haunts the US and the world to this day. The United States, it seems, is incapable of telling the truth about anything, especially when it deals with national security and foreign policy.
The current manifestation of this precedent is playing out before the world when it comes to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. As was the case with Iraq and Anthrax, the US leads a coalition of compliant partners in spreading similar lies about Russia, whether to ignore history when labeling the Russian decision to intervene an “unprovoked act of aggression”, backing the Ukrainian version of the Bucha massacre, or misleading the Ukrainians and the world about the ability of US-led injections of military equipment to change the tide of battle against Russia – it won’t.
It is virtually impossible for Russia to even begin to contemplate negotiations when the party sitting at the other side of the table, the United States, incorporates lies into every aspect of its argument. The Powell Precedent is pure poison, and the world, especially Russia, would be foolish to accept any drink from a chalice offered by the United States.
Colin Powell may no longer be with us, but his legacy lives on in the bodyguard of lies he helped build around everything the US has said and done since that fateful day 20 years ago.
Updated boosters and annual Covid shots mirroring session flu shots are the orders coming out of the recent FDA VRBPAC meeting. What data is supporting these ideas? Was this the plan all along? The HighWire gives their analysis.
One dose of Pfizer, just one! Within 30 minutes, while I was still driving home, I had a sudden feeling of the worst flu. My throat, eyes, lips and neck swelled to double their size and I couldn’t breathe. Within an hour welts appeared on my legs, arms, chest and even in my hair. I was taken by ambulance to A&E and given an epi-pen. Twenty-four months on and I have a formal diagnosis of chronic angioedema and urticaria. I’m no better, every day my lips and face swell. I have drooping eyelids, blurred vision, tremors, uninvestigated and untreated spikes in heart rate for no reason, and protruding veins all over my body. Then there is the horrendous tinnitus and 60 per cent loss in hearing. Sinus problems (lesions in the nasal cavity), pain at the back of the head, stomach pain and an intolerance to more than 200 foods. I can’t go out in sunshine because it literally burns the scalp and skin. This is now my life.
The doctors’ advice is to have the second jab! I don’t think so. It was 18 months and 21 visits to A&E before my GP surgery finally got to see me face to face, and then declared that I was too much of a specialist case for them to treat.
I am no anti-vaxxer. I had the jab in good faith thinking that it would mean life returning to normal, to see my children and grandchildren. The lack of medical care and investigation on any symptoms other than the urticaria and angioedema is both criminal and despicable along with their constant texts and letters telling me to get a second dose.
It’s an emotional journey and a very visual one. I have lost all confidence in socialising; the constant swelling has meant my skin has aged ten years in 24 months. I can no longer see well enough to drive, and that is a loss of independence.
The UK CV Family group https://www.ukcvfamily.org/ is a lifeline for me. I can’t thank the creators of the group enough for giving me the simple realisation I am not alone. Daily we see new members. I welcome them with the same message: welcome and so sorry you have to be here.
The Cochrane mask review I wrote about last week has hit Team Mask very hard, in fact much harder than I thought it would. They’ve been frantically coping for days now – combing through the fine print, seizing upon every moment of expressed uncertainty or caution in the paper to claim that population-wide masking might still be justified, somehow, because reasons.
The dim and eternally concerned Twitter epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo (who would be a disgrace to her field, if the field of public health weren’t already a disgrace) posted a hilarious nineteen-tweet thread that gathers all the typical excuses and cries to the heavens for more studies, because the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Intriguingly, as others have noted, Nuzzo used to think totally differently about the utility of masking. In 2006, our epidemiological luminary co-authored a paper on Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza, which flatly admits that “the ordinary surgical mask does little to prevent inhalation of small droplets” and that no data support using N95 or FFP2 respirators outside of healthcare settings. Like all pandemic authorities, Nuzzo had sensible ideas right up until the moment her ideas became important.
Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane review, has added to the pain and embarrassment of Team Mask by granting this interview to Maryanne Demasi, in which he reiterates bluntly that “there’s no evidence that masks are effective during a pandemic,” no evidence that respirators do anything even in healthcare settings, blames misguided mask mandates on bad governmental advisers, and criticises the masking “craziness” that took root in 2020, in which “strident campaigners” – “activists, not scientists” – like “academics and politicians started jumping up and down about masks.” He also makes an observation that is often aired at the plague chronicle, namely that the failure of masks to do very much indicates that virus transmission itself is poorly understood, and far more complicated than we tend to assume. You should read the whole thing for yourself.
Here, I want to highlight one crucial point. Jefferson explains that he and his co-authors were ready to publish a review on the evidence for masking and other physical interventions in April 2020, but that Cochrane held up its appearance by “inexplicably” demanding a further peer reviewer. This effectively delayed publication by months, in precisely the period that novel mask mandates were emerging all across the world. When the review was finally cleared for publication in November – long after its chance to influence mask policies had passed – the authors were directed to insert all manner of language softening their conclusions, and Cochrane included an accompanying editorial on why “Policy makers must act on incomplete evidence in responding to COVID-19.”
Plainly, the conviction that mask mandates were necessary came first; The Science followed. All the while, though, the evidence didn’t go away. It was just suspended slightly out of view, diluted with weak excuses and deprived of influence over policy, until the ideological fervour dissipated and the plain truth could be spoken again. The lesson is that regime authorities, particularly when they enjoy the collaboration of the press and academia, can tell almost any lie, but suppressing the truth requires active effort, and sooner or later their myths come crashing down. The mask mythology was among the first to take shape, and it has been the first to fall.
In the coming months other pandemic fantasies will also begin unravel.
Other than a few dead-end doom addicts on social media, most people agree that the COVID-19 pandemic is over. SARS-CoV-2 has entered a stage of endemicity, similar to that of common cold coronaviruses, where there will be sporadic, seasonal outbreaks of cold and flu-like illness as immunity wanes in recovered and vaccinated individuals.
The pandemic was a worldwide disaster, claiming the lives of millions of people. It wasn’t a war against an enemy, as the virus didn’t surrender or sign any peace agreements. SARS-CoV-2 was contained by population immunity, just as similar pandemic viruses have been in the past.
The origin of the virus is still in dispute. Some virologists have tried to shut down any debate while pushing a zoonotic origin as the only possibility. However, a lab leak is no longer a wild theory, it’s a plausible explanation based on evidence from a variety of independentsources.
Yet there was another parallel disaster that was certainly man-made, and that was the US pandemic response. Panicked health officials and politicians failed to implement measures that would protect those most vulnerable to severe COVID-19, including elderly in assisted living facilities, which comprised one-third of all COVID deaths. Instead, leaders insisted on harmful and unfocused measures such as shutdowns, school closures, and universal masking, with little evidence of their benefit.
Attention to other medical issues, such as cancer screenings and diagnosis and treatment of other diseases, as well as childhood vaccinations, all disappeared in a wave of COVID monomania. The consequences of this ill-advised singular focus will be with us for many years. It is of paramount importance that the mistakes that led to this man-made disaster are not repeated.
The governments of European countries have begun to conduct public inquiries into their COVID responses, including Norway, Sweden,The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Denmark. It is past time for the United States to join this list, and critical given the worldwide influence of the CDC, FDA, and NIH/NIAID.
Members of the US Congress are conducting such an inquiry, and their efforts require the help of physicians, scientists and public health policy experts to identify key policy decisions and provide a rationale for investigating those policies and the officials and government agencies that devised and implemented them, with the ultimate goal of meaningful reform.
With help from Brownstone Institute, the Norfolk Group was organized in May, 2022, with the goal of providing a blueprint containing key questions for a congressional inquiry into the public health aspects of the US response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The group consists of eight scientists, physicians and policy experts, and seven of us met in person in Norfolk, Connecticut over Memorial Day weekend. All eight members continued to meet virtually over the summer, fall, and winter as the document was written and continuously revised.
Because the group was comprised of individuals from diverse backgrounds, without oversight from any public or private institutions (including Brownstone), we chose to name ourselves The Norfolk Group, and publish our document independently on the website www.NorfolkGroup.org.
The eight members of the Norfolk Group are:
Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD; epidemiologist, health economist, and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine; founding fellow of the Academy of Science and Freedom.
Leslie Bienen, MFA, DVM; veterinarian, zoonotic disease researcher, and faculty member at Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health (through December 31st 2022). She left in January 2023 to work in healthcare policy.
Ram Duriseti, MD, PhD; emergency room physician and computational engineer for medical decision making; associate professor at Stanford School of Medicine.
Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, PhD; physician and PhD epidemiologist in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of California-San Francisco, clinical researcher in healthcare policy and practicing Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation physician.
Martin Kulldorff, PhD, FDhc; epidemiologist and biostatistician; professor of medicine at Harvard University (on leave); founding fellow of the Academy of Science and Freedom.
Marty Makary, MD, MPH; surgeon and healthcare policy scientist; professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Margery Smelkinson, PhD; infectious disease scientist and microscopist whose research predominantly focuses on host/pathogen interactions.
Steven Templeton, PhD; immunologist; associate professor at Indiana University School of Medicine.
The document provides questions and supporting information regarding ten areas of the US pandemic response, including:
Protecting High Risk Americans
Infection Acquired Immunity
School Closures
Collateral Lockdown Harms
Public Health Data and Risk Communication
Epidemiologic Modeling
Therapeutics and Clinical Interventions
Vaccines
Testing and Contact Tracing
Masks
In preparing this document, we did not conduct any interviews or unearth any previously unseen documents. All the information contained in the document was and is publicly available, and we have provided links to each source throughout.
We have detailed evidence that was available at each time point during the pandemic, and have documented instances where the US health agencies, officials, and politicians ignored or suppressed discussion of that evidence. We ask questions that attempt to discover why key individuals failed to consider all aspects of public health instead of engaging in a damaging singular focus on community-wide suppression of an age-stratified and comorbidity-amplified infectious disease. Why was the uncertainty of evidence supporting the effectiveness of mitigation measures not acknowledged? How was pressure from pharmaceutical companies, teachers’ unions, and other special interests related to the abandonment of evidence-based policies? These questions broadly apply to all of the ten areas covered in our document, and together with specific questions and supporting data, resulted in eighty pages. This was no small effort, and I’m proud to have been a part of it.
Our document focuses solely on the public health-related aspects of the US pandemic response. Although the origin of SARS-CoV-2 may be in dispute, our document does not ask questions related to this active area of investigation. Separate committees have been and will be organized to address that issue. We have also avoided the topics of economic mismanagement and the role of media in creating or exacerbating pandemic response crises. A media-focused document was released in July, 2022, and an economics-related document was released in December.
Critics will no doubt reflexively label our document as a partisan effort funded with a secret pile of Koch money. Other than the initial efforts of Brownstone Institute to bring us together, there was no outside influence. Our website is self-funded. Understandably, many of our questions and supporting evidence could and likely will be used for partisan purposes, as one party will lead any COVID-19 response commission while the other may be reluctant to cooperate. It is our hope that despite this messy and partisan process, the truth will emerge, individuals will be held accountable, and an opportunity will emerge for serious reform of dysfunctional government agencies.
An inquiry into the US COVID-19 pandemic response cannot be avoided, and we are trailing other countries in efforts to identify mistakes, demand accountability, and propose solutions. It might be an ugly process, but it is a necessary one. We hope our document will move US leaders and policymakers toward the goal of ensuring that the mistakes of our pandemic response are never repeated.
Steve Templeton is a Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is an Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine – Terre Haute. His research focuses on the immune response to the human opportunistic pathogens. He is currently writing a book on infectious diseases and pandemics.
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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Jake Sullivan, 46, has long been praised as a “golden boy” by the US mainstream media. Having graduated from Yale in 1998 Sullivan became an advisor to then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2008 and later, after Hillary dropped out from the race, he advised Barack Obama during his general election campaign.
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