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The NYT Now Admits the Biden Laptop — Falsely Called “Russian Disinformation” — is Authentic

By Glenn Greenwald | March 17, 2022

One of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks before Americans were set to vote — the nation’s oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President, wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would again if elected president.

The backlash against this reporting was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S. corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies. The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA’s all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

These “former intel officials” did not actually say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo.” Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this “suspicion” based on their experience:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

But a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump’s defeat had no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were “Russian disinformation” — meaning that they were fake and that Russia manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.’s validly despised class of media employees.

Very few even included the crucial caveat that the intelligence officials themselves stressed: namely, that they had no evidence at all to corroborate this claim. Instead, as I noted last September, “virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington PostThe Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.” The Huffington Post even published a must-be-seen-to-be-believed campaign ad for Joe Biden, masquerading as “reporting,” that spread this lie that the emails were “Russian disinformation.”

This disinformation campaign about the Biden emails was then used by Big Tech to justify brute censorship of any reporting on or discussion of this story: easily the most severe case of pre-election censorship in modern American political history. Twitter locked The New York Post‘s Twitter account for close to two weeks due to its refusal to obey Twitter’s orders to delete any reference to its reporting. The social media site also blocked any and all references to the reporting by all users; Twitter users were barred even from linking to the story in private chats with one another. Facebook, through its spokesman, the life-long DNC operative Andy Stone, announced that they would algorithmically suppress discussion of the reporting to ensure it did not spread, pending a “fact check[] by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners” which, needless to say, never came — precisely because the archive was indisputably authentic.

The archive’s authenticity, as I documented in a video report from September, was clear from the start. Indeed, as I described in that report, I staked my career on its authenticity when I demanded that The Intercept publish my analysis of these revelations, and then resigned when its vehemently anti-Trump editors censored any discussion of those emails precisely because it was indisputable that the archive was authentic (The Intercept‘s former New York Times reporter James Risen was given the green light by these same editors to spread and endorse the CIA’s lie, as he insisted that the laptop should be ignored because “a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation.”) I knew the archive was real because all the relevant journalistic metrics that one evaluates to verify large archives of this type — including the Snowden archive and the Brazil archive which I used to report a series of investigative exposés — left no doubt that it was genuine (that includes documented verification from third parties who were included in the email chains and who showed that the emails they had in their possession matched the ones in the archive word-for-word).

Any residual doubts that the Biden archive was genuine — and there should have been none — were shattered when a reporter from Politico, Ben Schreckinger, published a book last September, entitled “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power,” in which his new reporting proved that the key emails on which The New York Post relied were entirely authentic. Among other things, Schreckinger interviewed several people included in the email chains who provided confirmation that the emails in their possession matched the ones in the Post‘s archive word for word. He also obtained documents from the Swedish government that were identical to key documents in the archive. His own outlet, Politico, was one of the few to even acknowledge his book. While ignoring the fact that they were the first to spread the lie that the emails were “Russian disinformation,” Politico editors — under the headline “Double Trouble for Biden”— admitted that the book “finds evidence that some of the purported Hunter Biden laptop material is genuine, including two emails at the center of last October’s controversy.”

The vital revelations in Schreckinger’s book were almost completely ignored by the very same corporate media outlets that published the CIA’s now-debunked lies. They just pretended it never happened. Grappling with it would have forced them to acknowledge a fact quite devastating to whatever remaining credibility they have: namely, that they all ratified and spread a coordinated disinformation campaign in order to elect Joe Biden and defeat Donald Trump. With strength in numbers, and knowing that they speak only to and for liberals who are happy if they lie to help Democrats, they all joined hands in an implicit vow of silence and simply ignored the new proof in Schreckinger’s book that, in the days leading up to the 2020 election, they all endorsed a disinformation campaign.

It will now be much harder to avoid confronting the reality of what they did, though it is highly likely that they will continue to do so. This morning, The New York Times published an article about the broad, ongoing FBI criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s international business and tax activities. Prior to the election, the Times, to their credit, was one of the few to apply skepticism to the CIA’s pre-election lie, noting on October 22 that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation.” Because the activities of Hunter Biden now under FBI investigation directly pertain to the emails first revealed by The Post, the reporters needed to rely upon the laptop’s archive to amplify and inform their reporting. That, in turn, required The New York Times to verify the authenticity of this laptop and its origins — exactly what, according to their reporters, they successfully did:

People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.

That this cache of emails was authentic was clear from the start. Any doubts were obliterated by publication of Schreckinger’s book six months ago. Now the Paper of Record itself explicitly states not only that the emails “were authenticated” but also that the original story from The Post about how they obtained these materials — they “come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop” — “appears” to be true.

What this means is that, in the crucial days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, most of the corporate media spread an absolute lie about The New York Post‘s reporting in order to mislead and manipulate the American electorate. It means that Big Tech monopolies, along with Twitter, censored this story based on a lie from “the intelligence community.” It means that Facebook’s promise from its DNC operative that it would suppress discussion of the reporting in order to conduct a “fact-check” of these documents was a fraud because, if one had been conducted, that no fact-check was even published because, if an honest one had been conducted, it would have proven that Facebook’s censorship decree was based on a lie. It means that millions of Americans were denied the ability to hear about reporting on the candidate leading all polls to become the next president, and instead were subjected to a barrage of lies about the provenance (Russia did it ) and authenticity (disinformation! ) of these documents.

The objections to noting all of this today are drearily predictable. Reporting on Hunter Biden is irrelevant since he was not himself a candidate (what made the reporting relevant was what it revealed about the involvement of Joe Biden in these deals). Given the war in Ukraine, now is not the time to discuss all of this (despite the fact that they are usually ignored, there are always horrific wars being waged even if the victims are not as sympathetic as European Ukrainians and the perpetrators are the film’s Good Guys and not the Bad Guys). The real reason most liberals and their media allies do not want to hear about any of this is because they believe that the means they used (deliberately lying to the public with CIA disinformation) are justified by their noble ends (defeating Trump).

Whatever else is true, both the CIA/media disinformation campaign in the weeks before the 2020 election and the resulting regime of brute censorship imposed by Big Tech are of historic significance. Democrats and their new allies in the establishment wing of the Republican Party may be more excited by war in Ukraine than the subversion of their own election by the unholy trinity of the intelligence community, the corporate press, and Big Tech. But today’s admission by The New York Times that this archive and the emails in them were real all along proves that a gigantic fraud was perpetrated by the country’s most powerful institutions. What matters far more than the interest level of various partisan factions is the core truths about U.S. democracy revealed by this tawdry spectacle.

March 17, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Unreasonable, sinister for NATO to push China to condemn Russia

Global Times | March 16, 2022

The Ukraine crisis was largely triggered by NATO’s aggressive eastward expansion. The bloc is the culprit. Instead of reflecting on itself, NATO piles pressure on other countries to stand with it against Russia. This is unreasonable and quite sinister.

“China should join the rest of the world in condemning strongly the brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday, “The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a blatant violation of international law so we call on [China] to clearly condemn the invasion and of course not support Russia. And we are closely monitoring any signs of support from China to Russia.”

NATO is a puppet of the US, a Cold War military bloc manipulated by the US. The obsolete military organization has launched many ruthless military aggressions and triggered corresponding disasters in which local people underwent great suffering. NATO’s aerial bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 during the Kosovo War is one example.

NATO’s hands are stained with blood and the bloc itself has been a major threat to global and local security. Is NATO qualified to criticize other countries? This organization should have been dismantled long ago.

“NATO is the most serious war machine that violates international law and endangers the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other countries since the end of the Cold War. Since when has the group become a defender of international law? If it is a defender of international law, could you please first apologize for their bombing of Yugoslavia? Could you first compensate for bombing the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia in 1999, which left three journalists dead, and more than 20 people injured? Stoltenberg is not qualified and has no right or moral basis to make such remarks,” Shen Yi, a professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University, told the Global Times.

The West has fallen into extreme insanity, and this is quite sick. This is also a symptom of the growing abnormality of the international community under the coercion of the US and its allies. Stoltenberg’s rhetoric sounds like he attempted to label China as Russia’s “accomplice.” In terms of tensions between Russia and Ukraine, there is no absolute right and wrong, as the geopolitics, history and culture between them are too complicated. Their tensions are a difficult problem to solve. In this context, portraying their military conflict as good versus evil is not rational and detrimental to address it.

The Chinese ambassador to US Qin Gang said in an opinion piece in The Washington Post that rumors like “Russia was seeking military assistance from China” are “purely disinformation.” All this is information war initiated by the US. NATO is trying to use this kind of information war to intimidate China, and to coordinate Washington, in an attempt to occupy the moral high ground over the Ukraine crisis.

“By making such statements, NATO is trying to distort the focus of the international community from criticizing its eastward expansion to China’s so-called coordination with Russia,” Zhang Tengjun, Deputy Director of the Department for Asia-Pacific Studies at the China Institute of International Studies, said. “NATO is deliberately circumventing its role and responsibility. It is trying to shift the blame and confuse the public. This is very sinister.”

March 17, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Oligarchs: Russia, Israel, and Media Omissions

BY ALISON WEIR | IF AMERICANS KNEW | FEBRUARY 17, 2005

As is often the case with AP’s coverage of news having to do with Israel, there’s a serious omission in its reporting on the Russia-Israel connection even when it involves oil and the United States.

The day after the State of the Union Address, two Interpol fugitives attended the “National Prayer Breakfast” held in Washington DC. The day before that, these fugitives from the law were the guests of honor at an hour-long meeting of the International Relations Committee on Capitol Hill, invited by ranking Democrat Tom Lantos (Calif.)

You would think it would be hot news when wanted men being hunted by European police suddenly pop up in the US particularly on Capitol Hill and at events attended by the US president.

Yet, there was not a single AP story in the US on any of this. 1 Not a single national network television or radio news program even mentioned these facts. In fact, Google and LexisNexis searches four days after these events took place turned up only three newspaper articles on them anywhere in the entire country. 2

Who are these fugitives from the law, wanted by Interpol, who are meeting at the highest levels of the US government? And why didn’t we learn of them?

Therein lies the story. These two men, it turns out, are just the tips of a colossal iceberg. And this iceberg doesn’t just have 90 percent of its mass hidden under water; this iceberg is almost entirely submerged.

They are Mikhail Brudno and Vladimir Dubov, Israeli-Russian partners in the giant Russian oil company Yukos. They, along with a number of their cronies, are wanted by Interpol for allegedly bilking Russian citizens out of billions of dollars. To elude Russian prosecution, these men have taken up residence in Israel. 3

As the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz explains: “In recent years Russian authorities began investigating [Yukos], its managers and major stockholders, many of whom are of Jewish origin. The probes caused several of the managers to flee to Israel, and resulted in Khodorkovski’s [Yukos CEO] arrest and a Kremlin attack on Yukos.”

The fact is that Israel is an important factor in the ongoing, nation-shaking power struggle now going on in Russia. Yet AP virtually never reports this connection. For example, a few months ago in a typical AP story on this power struggle, “Report: Russia again charges Berezovsky,” 4 Moscow AP Bureau Chief Judith Ingram makes no mention anywhere that Berezovsky is an Israeli citizen, or of his many connections to Israel.

Such omissions by AP and large swaths of the American media leave Americans seriously disadvantaged in deciphering what is going on in Russia, and its profound significance for the world.

In order to make sense of this Russian power struggle, and to understand its importance to the rest of us, it is necessary to understand the usually omitted Israeli subtext. When this is understood, the friendship of such pro-Israel Congressional leaders as Rep. Lantos to fugitive Russian oil tycoons begins to make sense.

To explore this background it is often useful to turn to the Israeli press. In July a major Israeli publication, the Jerusalem Post, carried an article headlined: “Boris Berezovsky: Putin’s Russia dangerous for Israel.” Before describing what this contained, let us first go into a little of the background.

The Oligarchs

Boris Berezovsky is one of seven “oligarchs,” as they are known both inside and outside Russia: massively rich, powerful manipulators who through violence, theft and corruption acquired a mammoth percentage (reports range from 70 to 85 percent) of Russia’s resources, from its oil to the auto industry to mass media outlets.

At the same time, the group steadily gained control over much of the country’s political apparatus. Using extraordinary financial resources and insider dealing, the oligarchs handpicked prime ministers and governmental leaders and barely even bothered to do this behind the scenes.

In 1997 Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of the group and Russia’s sometimes richest man (several of the oligarchs trade the top spot back and forth) told an interviewer before he was arrested and imprisoned by Putin last year:

“If we rank all the fields of man’s activity by profitability, politics will be the most lucrative business. When we see a critical situation in the government, we draw lots in order to pick out a person from our milieu for work in power.” 5

Almost all of these oligarchs, it turns out, have significant ties to Israel. In fact, Berezovsky himself has Israeli citizenship a fact that caused a scandal of Watergate proportions in Russia in 1996 when it was exposed by a Russian newspaper. 6

Do Berezovsky’s dual loyalties really matter? Yes. In the realm of global dominance, Israel’s interests and Russia’s are considerably divergent. It is in Israel’s interests to bring to power a regime in Russia friendly to Israel, rather than the current one under Putin, which Israeli leaders feel is supportive of its enemies. Not long ago, for example, Putin met with Syrian leaders an action highly disturbing to Israel.

Having an Israeli citizen at the highest levels of the Russian government is ideal, from Israel’s point of view. In Berezovsky they had such a man. The Jerusalem Post article mentioned above is revealing. It describes Berezovsky as “the Godfather of the Oligarchs’ and Kingmaker of Russia’s Politics’” and reports Berezovsky’s statement that “Putin’s Russia is dangerous for Israel.” Berezovsky goes on to assert that Putin “supports terror” in the Middle East through Russia’s previous relations with Iraq and current relations with Iran. 7

While Israelis may have been delighted at Berezovsky’s position in Russia, It is not surprising that Russian citizens were somewhat less so. Finding that a powerful leader and member of the Russian Security Council was an Israeli citizen was disconcerting, at best.

As a result of the media uproar over Berezovsky’s Israeli citizenship and other events, the Oligarchs’ connections to Israel are widely known in Russia and elsewhere. In Israel they are covered frequently, often with adulation, including a recent hit Israeli TV series called “The Oligarchs.”

“Some of its episodes,” according to Israeli writer Uri Avnery, “are simply unbelievable or would have been, if they had not come straight from the horses’ mouths: the heroes of the story, who gleefully boast about their despicable exploits. The series was produced by Israeli immigrants from Russia.”

Avnery writes that the oligarchs used “cheating, bribery and murder,” as they “exploited the disintegration of the Soviet system to loot the treasures of the state and to amass plunder amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. In order to safeguard the perpetuation of their business, they took control of the state. Six out of the seven are Jews.” 8

According to a Washington Post story by David Hoffman, the group bought and controlled Russian governmental officials at the highest levels. After financing Yeltsin’s election in 1996, Hoffman writes: “The tycoons met and decided to insert one of their own into government. They debated who and chose [Vladimir] Potanin, who became deputy prime minister. One reason they chose Potanin was that he is not Jewish, and most of the rest of them are, and feared a backlash against the Jewish bankers.” 9

In Russia, the oligarchs are deeply loathed, considered villains who worked to bleed the country dry; during their reign many Russian citizens saw their life savings disappear overnight. A new term was coined for their dominance, “semibankirshchina” (the rule of the seven bankers), and they were widely known to have wielded small, murderous armies. There are rumors that Berezovsky, subject of the respectful AP article, was even responsible for the gunning down of an American journalist, Forbes Moscow editor Paul Klebnikov.

While no one has been charged with the murder of Klebnikov, who had written a book on Berezovsky, many suspect a Berezovsky connection. As a friend of Klebnikov wrote: “Experienced expatriates in Russia shared an essential rule: Don’t cross these brutal billionaires, ever, or you’re likely to go home in a box.” 10

The Chechnya Connection

There is evidence that Berezovsky’s responsibility for death and tragedy may be vastly greater.

“Berezovsky boasts that he caused the war in Chechnya,” Avnery reports, “in which tens of thousands have been killed and a whole country devastated. He was interested in the mineral resources and a prospective pipeline there. In order to achieve this he put an end to the peace agreement that gave the country some kind of independence. The oligarchs dismissed and destroyed Alexander Lebed, the popular general who engineered the agreement, and the war has been going on since then.

“In the end,” Avnery writes, “there was a reaction: Vladimir Putin, the taciturn and tough ex-KGB operative, assumed power, took control of the media, put one of the oligarchs (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) in prison, caused the others to flee (Berezovsky is in England, Vladimir Gusinsky is in Israel, another, Mikhail Chernoy, is assumed to be hiding here.)”

Yet, apart from the Washington Post, American media report on almost none of this. Instead, US coverage largely portrays Berezovsky and his crowd as American-style entrepreneurs who are being hounded by a Russian government whose actions are, to repeat the media’s commonly used phrase, “politically motivated.”

US news stories, even when they occasionally do hint at questionable practices, tend to use such phrases as “brash young capitalists” to describe the oligarchs. 11 For example, a long series co-produced by FRONTLINE and the New York Times referred to these men as “shrewd businessmen,” and asked “what it’s like to be young, Russian and newly affluent?” 12 Massive violence, dual loyalties, and control of resources are rarely, if ever, part of the picture.

When AP Moscow bureau chief Ingram was asked for this article about Berezovsky’s Israeli citizenship, she claimed to know nothing about it, a curious contention for someone who has been an AP news editor in Moscow since 1999. When Ingram was queried further, she hung up the phone.

An examination of Ingram’s reporting on the Berezovsky story cited above raises serious questions. Though she is located in Moscow, Ingram interviewed only two people for her news story: Berezovsky, who is in London, and Berezovsky associate Alex Goldfarb, in New York. One wonders why she interviewed none of the Russians residing around her.

Similarly, one wonders why not a single AP story has identified Berezovsky’s considerable connection to Israel.

Further, nowhere does Ingram’s article convey the ruthlessness of the oligarchs’ actions, or the significance of their holdings, including control of its media. Unnoted in Ingram’s report is the fact that her subject and fellow oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky have been two of Russia’s most powerful media tycoons.

Before Putin’s crackdown, according to the Washington Post, oligarchs had succeeded in seizing “the reins of Russia’s print and broadcast media, vital to the evolution of the country’s fledgling democracy and growth of its nascent civil society.” Berezovsky crony Gusinsky, who is close friends with Rupert Murdoch and was about the launch a satellite network, fled to Israel when it appeared he would be arrested.“ 13

Somehow, AP’s bureau chief seems to have missed all this.

Does this matter to Americans?

AP is the major news source for the thousands of news outlets around the country who cannot afford to have their own foreign correspondents. When AP chooses not to cover something, its omission is felt throughout the nation. When national news networks and others leave out the same facts, the cover-up is almost total.

Russia, despite its current turmoil, contains enormous power. Its natural resources are gargantuan: it possesses the world’s largest natural gas reserves, the second largest coal reserves, and the eighth largest oil reserves. It is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, the second largest oil exporter, and the third largest energy consumer.14 Russia’s significance on the world stage now, as in the past, is immense.

Similarly, the United States is currently the most powerful nation on earth. It is therefore essential that its citizens be accurately informed on issues of significance. Israeli citizens, Russian citizens, and citizens of nations throughout the world know the information detailed above. It is critical that American citizens be no less well informed.

For years, the neocons’ push for war against Iraq was largely not covered by the US media. For even longer, the neocons’ close connections to Israel have gone largely unmentioned in mainstream American news reports. As a result, very few Americans know to what degree many of those responsible for the tragic US invasion and occupation of Iraq have been motivated by Israeli concerns.

The omission in coverage of Iraq has been profoundly disastrous, both for the Middle East and for Americans. In fact, it is quite likely that only history will show the true extent of this disaster. It is deeply troubling to see the same kind of omission occurring on Russia.

End Notes

  1. Interestingly, an AP report sent out only on its Worldstream wire (i.e. to Europe; Britain; Scandinavia; Middle East; Africa; India; Asia; England, but not to US papers) contained information on this at the end of the report.
  2. Washington Post: “Prayer Breakfast Includes Russian Fugitives” (overall, the Post has been an exception to the general blackout on this subject); the Seattle Times, which ran the Post story, and the New York Times, in a short story on page 12 on Sunday, three days after the event. Interestingly, the NY Times story was filed from Moscow (not Washington) and quotes a “spokesman” for the two men, Charles Krause, who has worked as a correspondent in Israel for the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. In the Times story Russian attempts to prosecute these men are described as “politically motivated.”
  3. This is a wise move, since Israel is known for often failing to Jewish extradite citizens, no matter what their crime. Even requests for such cooperation by the US, which gives Israel over $10 million per day, sometimes go unheeded by the Israeli government. Private citizens wanted for committing murder in the US, for example, have sometimes not returned for trial.
  4. Associated Press, Sept. 22, 2004
  5. “Tycoons Take the Reins in Russia,” By David Hoffman, Washington Post Foreign Service, Friday, August 28, 1998; Page A01
  6. “Media and Politics in Transition: Three Models,” Post-Soviet Media Law & Policy Newsletter, Issue 35, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Feb. 27, 1997
  7. “Boris Berezovsky: Putin’s Russia dangerous for Israel.’, Bret Stephens, The Jerusalem Post, July 5, 2005
  8. The Oligarchs”, Uri Avnery, CounterPunch, Aug. 3, 2004
  9. “Tycoons Take the Reins in Russia,” By David Hoffman, Washington Post Foreign Service, Friday, August 28, 1998; Page A01,
  10. “Same Old Ruthless Russia,” by Michael R. Caputo, Washingtonpost.com
  11. Washington Post, Aug 28, 1998
  12. October 2003, Sabrina Tavernise,
  13. “Powerful Few Rule Russian Mass Media,” David Hoffman, Washington Post, March 31, 1997; Page A01
  14. Russia Country Analysis Brief

March 17, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Russia Promises More Disclosures on Ukraine Biolabs

Al-Manar | March 17, 2022

The Russian Defense Ministry said on Thursday it will soon release additional documents pertaining to the operation of Pentagon-funded biolabs in Ukraine. Moscow believes they have been involved in bioweapons research.

Russian military specialists in weapons of mass destruction are analyzing documents obtained from staff members of the Ukrainian labs, ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a daily briefing. He claimed they detailed “implementation by the US in Ukraine of a secret project to study the ways humans can be infected from bats,” which was done in Kharkov.

The official said the same Institute of Experimental and Clinical Veterinary Medicine in the Ukrainian city worked for years to study under which conditions wild birds carrying flu could cause an epidemic in humans and to assess the damage that would result.

Konashenkov didn’t explain why such research should be considered military in nature, as assessed by the defense ministry.

The spokesman further said more Ukrainian documents will soon be released on the transfer of human samples from Ukraine to the UK and other European nations. The materials will be accompanied by Russian military assessments of the work they detail, he said.

The Pentagon sponsors dozens of labs around the world under the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The work they do, the US government claims, is benign and is meant to monitor emergence of new dangerous infections. Countries like Russia and China believe they may be more sinister in nature.

US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland said under oath that labs in Ukraine have been destroying research materials to prevent Russia from seizing them. It was not clear why Washington saw the scenario as dangerous. US officials claimed that the pathogens in question were remnants of Soviet bioweapons programs, which Moscow would presumably already have access to.

Some American public figures, such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, were attacked for asking questions about the Ukrainian labs, which supposedly amounts to repeating “Russian propaganda.”

Utah Senator Mitt Romney accused Gabbard of spreading “treasonous lies” with her concerns about the safety of pathogen samples in Ukraine. The hosts of The View television show suggested people asking such questions should be arrested and investigated as possible Russian agents.

March 17, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Presearch Search Engine – #SolutionsWatch

Corbett • 03/16/2022

Now that DuckDuckGo has officially DuckDuckGone in the direction of censorship, what’s a free speech-loving, liberty-minded conspiracy realist to do? Never fear, #SolutionsWatch is here. In the first of a series of explorations of Alt Tech, James talks to Colin Pape of Presearch, a decentralized search engine that is seeking to offer an alternative to the Big Tech monopolization of search.

Watch on Archive / BitChute / Minds / Odysee or Download the mp4

SHOW NOTES:
We Need to Talk About Search

The Library of Babel (FLNWO #27)

DuckDuckGo Bows to Authoritarians, Begins Censoring Search Engine Results to “Fight Disinformation”

Searx

Brave Search

#Presearch Weekly #News & Updates w Colin Pape #58

Presearch.io (information)

Presearch.org (search engine)

March 17, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

‘Diplomatic Viruses’ (2018)

https://www.bitchute.com/video/XlueDNPZlPcm/

21st Century Wire

This investigative documentary begins its journey in the US Embassy located in Tbilisi, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where reports are circulating about the trafficking of frozen human blood and pathogens under the guise of diplomatic cargo for a secret Pentagon-funded military program.

Internal documents, leaked to Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva by Georgian insiders, implicate US scientists in a highly opaque operation involving dangerous pathogens – carried out under the cover diplomatic immunity.

According to documents, the Pentagon has been funding a chain of bio labs across the former Soviet bloc, with one of the largest programs happening at the Lugar Center in Tbilisi. The military facility is just one of the many Pentagon bio laboratories located in 25 countries across the world. Watch:

Run time: 27 min
Writer and Director: Dilyana Gaytandzhieva
Narration: Patrick Henningsen
Broadcast on Al Mayadeen TV (2018)

March 16, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

CIA prisoner was used as torture prop to teach recruits – declassified documents

The US flag at the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba on August 7, 2013 © AFP / Chantal Valery
Samizdat | March 15, 2022

The US Central Intelligence Agency used a detainee in Afghanistan as a ‘prop’ to teach interrogators how to torture prisoners, leaving the man with brain damage, newly declassified documents have revealed.

According to the 2008 report by the CIA’s inspector general, published by The Guardian, 44-year-old Ammar al-Baluchi was used to teach interrogators how to perform a torture technique called ‘walling’. As explained by the CIA, walling is where an interrogator “pulls the detainee towards him and then quickly slams the detainee against [a] false wall.”

The document states that Baluchi was subjected to walling for up to two hours at a time, and a former trainee claimed that “all the interrogation students lined up to ‘wall’ Ammar” so their instructor “could certify them on their ability to use the technique.”

“In the case of ‘walling’ in particular the [Office of the Inspector General] had difficulty determining whether the session was designed to elicit information from Ammar or to ensure that all interrogator trainees received their certification,” the declassified report said, noting that it appeared “certification was key” during the torture sessions.

Baluchi – who was captured by the CIA in 2003 before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006 – reportedly suffered from brain damage as a result of his detainment by the US intelligence agency.

The Kuwaiti-born man was detained for allegedly having a role in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and serving as a courier for Osama Bin Laden.

Baluchi remains in US custody at Guantanamo Bay, despite calls from the United Nations and human rights activists for his release.

A Saudi Arabian man was released from Guantanamo Bay to receive mental health treatment this month after nearly 20 years in custody. Mohammad Mani Ahmad al-Qahtani, 46, was freed after US officials deemed his imprisonment “no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the national security of the United States.”

Qahtani was reportedly diagnosed with schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder after he was subjected to beatings, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, and other forms of torture at Guantanamo Bay.

There are 38 detainees left in the military prison.

March 15, 2022 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Medical Establishment Excess Death Analysis Omits Vaccine Deaths

At least 10 million people worldwide have died from pandemic, but not COVID infection

By Joel S Hirschhorn | March 14, 2022

The subject of excess deaths during the pandemic, meaning deaths more than prior years, has received much attention. Now comes an analysis by medical establishment researchers, funded by Bill Gates and published in the premier establishment medical journal – The Lancet. An establishment publication commented positively on the article.

Before explaining what was intentionally omitted, here are the key findings.

The study covered the initial two years of the COVID pandemic, 2020 and 2021. It estimated excess mortality from the COVID-19 pandemic in 191 countries and territories, and 252 subnational units for selected countries.  Global deaths directly attributed to COVID-19 reached 5.9 million, yet estimates put excess deaths during this period at a staggering 18.2 million. In other words, about 12 million people probably died from causes other than COVID infection. Something that the public health establishment should be held accountable for.

At the country level, the highest numbers of cumulative excess deaths due to the pandemic were estimated in India 4·07 million, the USA 1·13 million, Russia 1·07 million, Mexico 798 000, Brazil 792 000, Indonesia 736 000, and Pakistan 664 000. Note that the figure for the USA was about 300,000 greater than the CDC official number of deaths related to COVID infection through 2021.

Among countries, the excess mortality rate was highest in Russia 374·6 deaths per 100 000 and Mexico 325·1 per 100 000, and was similar in Brazil 186·9 per 100 000 and the USA 179·3 per 100 000. The highest estimated excess mortality rate from COVID infection was in Bolivia at 734.9 deaths per 100,000, followed by Bulgaria, Eswatini, North Macedonia, and Lesotho.  Iceland had the lowest excess mortality rate 47.8 per 100,000. Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, and Taiwan had negative excess mortality rates, meaning fewer people died than in pre-pandemic years.

The study noted: “Our estimates of COVID-19 excess mortality suggest the mortality impact from the COVID-19 pandemic has been more devastating than the situation documented by official statistics. Official statistics on reported COVID-19 deaths provide only a partial picture of the true burden of mortality.” In other words, something other than the virus is to blame for millions of deaths.

An interesting finding was that studies from several countries including Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands, suggest COVID-19 infection was the direct cause of most excess deaths, most likely because these nations maintained a more open society than other countries.

The study did recognize that there was likely underreporting in some places of direct deaths due to COVID infection.

The key goal in excess death studies is explaining deaths not resulting from COVID infection, and this usually means collateral or indirect deaths from how the pandemic was managed or, more correctly, mismanaged. So many people died from the many impacts of economic lockdowns, inability to get regular medical care, suicides and illegal drug use, for example.

Most interesting in this very detailed study was absolutely no consideration of deaths associated with COVID vaccines. Data from the US, UK and European Union indicate at least several hundred thousand deaths. Many more in other global locations could easily bring the total to several million, especially recognizing that millions of adverse health impacts from vaccines likely will keep explaining deaths for quite some time.

But the study had a very positive view of the benefits of COVID vaccines: “the development and deployment of SARS-COV-2 vaccines have considerably lowered mortality rates among people who contract the virus and among the general population. As a result, we expect trends in excess mortality due to COVID-19 to change over time as the coverage of vaccination increases among populations and as new variants emerge.” This, obviously, is an establishment view of the COVID vaccines despite a large medical literature with an opposite view.

Also interesting was the detailed analysis for states in India that totally ignored what is now widely known. Namely, that a number of states, especially Uttar Pradesh, used ivermectin to successfully wipe out the pandemic.

Death numbers in a number of other nations were also surely reduced by wide use of ivermectin. But this study had no interest in examining this.

US excess deaths

There are reasons to think that the excess death data for the US was an undercount. Various insurance industry officials have spoken about very high death rates not due to COVID infection in working age people.  CDC data shows the Millennial generation suffered a “Vietnam War event,” with more than 61,000 excess deaths in that age group in the second half of 2021, according to an analysis by Edward Dowd a former Wall Street executive who made a career of crunching numbers to make big-dollar investment decisions. The Millennials, about ages 25 to 40, experienced an 84% increase in excess mortality in the fall, he said, describing it as the “worst-ever excess mortality, I think, in history.”

Along this same line is this: According to the CEO of OneAmerica, a national life insurance corporation headquartered in Indiana, deaths are up 40% in the third quarter of 2021. These deaths are primarily non-COVID deaths among workers aged 18 through 64. “We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said. The data is consistent across every player in that business. What the data is showing to us is that the deaths that are being reported as COVID deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.”

Conclusions

The massive number of all pandemic deaths shows how totally ineffective all actions by governments and public health groups, as well as the medical establishment, have been. It has all been one gigantic pandemic blunder.

Even if there was some undercounting of COVID infection deaths, there probably was at least 10 million pandemic deaths in the two years covered in this study that can and should be blamed on a number of ineffective and unnecessary public health actions. Where is the accountability for these non-infection deaths?

Considering the enormous number of COVID vaccine shots given globally there also should be no praise for them saving lives. In some countries like the US with high rates of vaccination there were still high COVID deaths. What must always be emphasized is that the use of ivermectin and various non-vaccine protocols could have prevented nearly all COVID infection deaths.

March 15, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

New Spanish Study Finds That Masking in Schools Does Nothing

By Noah Carl | The Daily Sceptic | March 14, 2022

Before ‘The Science’ flipped in the spring of 2020, the consensus among Western epidemiologists was that community masking doesn’t affect the spread of respiratory pathogens like influenza. As Jonathan Van Tam said on April 3rd 2020, “there is no evidence” to support the general wearing of face masks.

Although masks might block large droplets in close-contact settings like hospitals, and thereby slightly lower the risk of transmission, they can’t block airborne particles – which simply go through/around them, and then remain aloft for minutes or even hours.

As a result, large indoor setting like supermarkets, transit stations or classrooms soon fill up with airborne particles – even if everyone’s wearing a mask.

A new Spanish study strongly supports the pre-Covid conventional wisdom that masks don’t stop transmission of respiratory pathogens. The study uses quite a powerful design, which makes its results all the more convincing.

Ermengol Coma and colleagues analysed data on a large cohort of Spanish children aged three to eleven, whom they followed for the first term of the school year from September to December of 2021. During this period, there was a mask mandate in place for children in primary school (aged six and up) but not for those in pre-school (aged three to five).

Hence the researchers compared outcomes between children aged five (who were not subject to the mandate) and those aged six (who were subject to the mandate).

This constitutes a relatively well-controlled comparison, given that the two groups differ by only one year in age. In other words, since six-year olds are only one year older than five-year olds, you wouldn’t expect the rate of transmission to differ much between them for reasons other than the mask mandate.

The researchers estimated the incidence of Covid, the secondary attack rate and the R number separately for the two groups. If mask mandates work, you’d expect all these quantities to be higher among the five-year olds. However, the researchers found no statistically significant differences between the two groups.

What’s more, they found a strong positive association between measures of transmission and age across all the age-groups in their sample. In other words, transmission was higher among older age-groups, despite the fact that these groups were subject to the mask mandate, whereas the younger ones weren’t.

Ermengol Coma and colleagues’ findings suggest that mask mandates do essentially nothing to reduce the spread of Covid. And given that masks plausibly impede both learning and social interaction, on top of being uncomfortable, there’s no good reason for children to wear them. Indeed, the fact that they were ever made to is a scandal.

March 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

A Pandemic is Not a War

By Steve Templeton | March 11, 2022

A number of people have said it, but — and I feel it, actually: I’m a wartime president. This is a war. This is a war. A different kind of war than we’ve ever had.

-Donald Trump, Former President of the United States

We are at war. All the action of the government and of Parliament must now be turned toward the fight against the epidemic, day and night. Nothing can divert us.

-Emmanuel Macron, President of France

This war – because it is a real war – has been going on for a month, it started after European neighbors, and for this reason, it could take longer to reach the peak of its expression.

-Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, President of Portugal

We are at war with a virus – and not winning it.

-Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General

We must act like any wartime government and do whatever it takes to support our economy.

-Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The president said this is a war. I agree with that. This is a war. Then let’s act that way, and let’s act that way now.

-Andrew Cuomo, Former Governor of New York

You get the picture. Leaders at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic really wanted us to think of ourselves as combatants possessing a civic duty to fight an insidious, unseen enemy. They wanted us to think that victory was possible. They wanted us to understand that there would be casualties, and collateral damage, and to steel ourselves for the inevitable enactment of broad and unfocused policies that would keep us safe, no matter the cost.

This isn’t all that surprising in hindsight. Politicians love to use war as a metaphor for just about every collective enterprise: the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on cancer. They understand that war provides an incomparable motivation for people to make sacrifices for the greater good of their countries, and when they want to harness some of that motivation, they pull out all the metaphorical stops.

Leaders have been searching for a “moral equivalent of war” for a very long time. The idea was introduced by psychologist and philosopher William James in a speech at Stanford in 1906 that has been credited for inspiring the creation of national projects such as the Peace Corps and Americorps, both organizations aspiring to “enlist” young people into meaningful, non-military service to their country:

I spoke of the “moral equivalent” of war. So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skillful propagandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.

People are willing to do things during a war that they wouldn’t be willing to do during peacetime. During World War II, it was impossible that German bombers would reach the middle of the United States, yet citizens in the U.S. Midwest practiced blackouts to demonstrate their commitment to defeating an enemy they had in common with people far away. People that actually had to sit in the dark at night to be safe.

This was what leaders using war metaphors were asking from their citizens at the start of the pandemic:

The war metaphor also shows the need for everyone to mobilize and do their part on the home front. For many Americans, that means taking social distancing orders and hand washing recommendations seriously. For businesses, that means shifting resources toward stopping the outbreak, whether in terms of supplies or manpower.

However, it wasn’t just social distancing and handwashing—leaders were asking for cooperation for a complete lockdown, a complete suspension of normal life for a short, yet vague and undefined period of time. There was no thought to how this would actually stop a highly contagious virus, or how people would be expected to return to normal life when the virus hadn’t completely disappeared. There wasn’t a desire to mobilize the engines of democracy for war. Instead, there was a mandate to shut them down. Economic production wasn’t maximized, it was minimized.

I was skeptical of the ability of shutdowns to do much good from the beginning, and was very much afraid that panic and overreaction would have serious consequences. I didn’t use war metaphors because it never occurred to me that they would be in any way helpful. Yet when I advocated trying to minimize collateral damage by allowing people who were less vulnerable to severe disease to resume their lives, others criticized that I was for “surrendering to the virus”. The use of war metaphors wasn’t just limited to leaders, but had quickly spread to the broader population.

Some international leaders tried to resist the temptation to use war metaphors, but ultimately failed. After telling the Canadian House of Commons that the pandemic wasn’t a war, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau couldn’t resist: “The front line is everywhere. In our homes, in our hospitals and care centers, in our grocery stores and pharmacies, at our truck stops & gas stations. And the people who work in these places are our modern-day heroes.” Trudeau later also couldn’t resist using extreme measures normally reserved for wartime to quell a protest led by the very truck stop heroes he had once glorified.

War metaphors have their uses, as explained by sociologist Eunice Castro Seixas:

Indeed, the findings of this study show how, within the context of Covid-19, war metaphors were important in: preparing the population for hard times; showing compassion, concern and empathy; persuading the citizens to change their behavior, ensuring their acceptance of extraordinary rules, sacrifices; boosting national sentiments and resilience, and also in constructing enemies and shifting responsibility.

“Constructing enemies and shifting responsibility” would play an important role later on in the pandemic, when extreme and damaging measures didn’t work and politicians resorted to blaming their own citizens for failing to cooperate with damaging and unsustainable measures.

Some academics, like anthropologist Saiba Varma, warned that:

Analogising (sic) the pandemic to a war also creates consent for extraordinary security measures, because they are done for public health. Globally, coronavirus curfews are being used to mete out violence against marginalised (sic) people. From the history of emergencies, we know that exceptional violence can become permanent.

It was obvious that working class and poor individuals would be disproportionally harmed by draconian COVID measures, and that the wealthy, or Zoom class might actually benefit:

We have, for example, already witnessed how people in already quite privileged positions are the ones who have the ability to work from home, which means that they also have more potential to act according to health recommendations, while others run the risk of being dismissed from their work or of their businesses going bankrupt. Then, there are those in positions identified as socially important functions that cannot choose to avoid risks, particularly in the care sector, where the risk of infection is the largest and shortages of protective equipment exist. Last, not everyone has the resources that are required to participate in pandemic self-governance (knowledge of how and when to shop, having people who can help you, the hospital closest to you having enough respirators, etc.).

The authors to the above article, Katarina Nygren and Anna Olofsson, also commented on the criticism of “lax” pandemic response measures in Sweden, noting how the pandemic response in Sweden was vastly different from that of most other countries in Europe because it emphasized personal responsibility rather than relying on government coercion:

Thus, the Swedish strategy to manage Covid-19 has been largely based on the responsibility of the citizens who receive daily information and instructions for individually targeted self-protection techniques by the Public Health Agency of Sweden’s website and press conferences held by state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, and other representatives of the government. They continue to underline the importance of all citizens playing their part to stop the virus from spreading and avoiding the enhancement of law enforcement’s restrictions on citizens’ rights as long as possible.

With recommendations rather than prohibitions, the individual becomes the unit of decision making towards whom claims of liability are directed if he or she does not manage to act ethically according to social expectations. This kind of governing of conduct, which has been characteristic of the Swedish risk management strategy during the pandemic thus far, targets the self-regulating individual in terms of not only trust but also solidarity. This type of governing was explicitly made by the prime minister in his speech to the nation on the 22nd of March (speeches that are extremely rare in Sweden) in which he particularly emphasized individual responsibility not only for the sake of personal safety but for the sake of others.

The Swedish Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven, used precisely zero wartime metaphors in his March 22, 2020 speech to the nation about the COVID pandemic and the response of the Swedish government. Within the next few months, the Swedish response was, rather predictably, viciously attacked by other leaders and media outlets for its failure to conform to the rest of the reflexive lockdown-mandating world. Yet the Swedish strategy has overall not resulted in much higher deaths, currently 57th in COVID deaths per million inhabitants, well below many of its critics.

There were only a few other notable exceptions in the metaphorical blitzkrieg of war imagery by world leaders in their early pandemic speeches. Another was German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who said of the pandemic, “It is not a war. It is a test of our humanity!” The reluctance of a German leader to use a war metaphor for something that is clearly not a war is both understandable and admirable.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was contemptuous of lockdowns and refused to use war imagery in his speeches, making it quite clear that pandemic deaths had no easy collective solution, only hard choices: “Stop whining. How long are you going to keep crying about it? How much longer will you stay at home and close everything? No one can stand it anymore. We regret the deaths, again, but we need a solution.” Not surprisingly, he was widely condemned for these comments.

Interestingly, much of the analysis and criticism of the use of war metaphors for the early pandemic response came from left-leaning outlets, like VoxCNN, and The Guardian, where journalist Marina Hyde wrote:

As the news gets more horrifyingly real each day – and somehow, at the same time, more unmanageably unreal – I’m not sure who this register of battle and victory and defeat truly aids. We don’t really require a metaphor to throw the horror of viral death into sharper relief: you have to think it’s bad enough already. Plague is a standalone horseman of the apocalypse – he doesn’t need to catch a ride with war. Equally, it’s probably unnecessary to rank something we keep being informed is virtually a war with things in the past that were literally wars.

An article in Vox warned of the consequences of too much power in the wrong hands:

A war metaphor can also have dark consequences. “If we look at history, during times of war, it’s often been the case that war is accompanied by abuses of medicine and the suspension of widespread ethical norms,” Keranen said, citing Nazi use of medicine or other public health trials that have been conducted on prisoners and war resistors over the years. “Especially now, we need to be on guard for this with the clinical trials and other product development that we’re undergoing, so that in our haste to ‘fight’ the disease with a military metaphor, we’re not giving away our fundamental ethical concepts and principles.”

“Giving away our fundamental ethical concepts and principles” is arguably exactly what happened in many western nations, yet hard-hitting and often accurate criticism from left-leaning media outlets speaking out against the pandemic as a war view had all but gone silent sometime after November 3rd, 2020. Coincidently, the conflation of a pandemic public health response with a military one has all but been erased by an actual war when Russia invaded Ukraine. An actual war tends to bring perspective back to places where it has been lost rather quickly.

With two full years of hindsight, it’s clear that lockdowns were a disaster and that mandated measures caused more harm than benefit, yet this has not prevented leaders from declaring victory, crediting their own brave and resolute leadership for saving millions of lives and routing the viral enemy. However, SARS-CoV-2 isn’t a real enemy—it doesn’t have an intention other than to exist and spread, and it won’t agree to an armistice. Instead, we will have to live with the virus forever in an endemic state, and skip the victory parades.

There’s no evidence that calling the pandemic what it truly was—a global natural disaster, admitting our limitations for “defeating” it, and calling on people to stay calm and avoid acting in irrational fear, would’ve resulted in a worse outcome. It’s more likely that the collateral damage of broad and unfocused responses would have been avoided in a pandemic-as-disaster scenario. There would be no need to view leaders as military commanders or experts as heroes or high priests of absolute truth. Rather, the humble and rational response that Sweden’s leaders enacted and the proponents of the Great Barrington Declaration proposed will be remembered as the least damaging among many others that resulted in failure and defeat on the metaphorical battlefields of public health.

Steve Templeton, PhD. is an Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine – Terre Haute.

March 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

UK and US Jointly Develop Biological Weapons

By Vladimir Platov – New Eastern Outlook – 14.03.2022 

Documentary evidence of Washington’s aggressive plans for developing and manufacturing biological weapons in secret US biological laboratories in Ukraine, banned by international conventions, has been uncovered during the Russian special operation to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine, and it is frankly horrifying! Although suspicions of such US activities have already been repeatedly published by many media outlets and their verification and official confirmation of such criminal anti-human plans by Washington was one of the goals of Moscow’s special operation to demilitarize Ukraine.

In this regard, the former weak position in bringing clarity to the exposure and suppression of such forthcoming US crimes is highly surprising. First of all, the international community and international institutions should have long ago initiated an independent inspection of some 400 such secret Pentagon biological laboratories scattered around the world, whose location in specific countries is clearly linked to the theatres of future US military action against “adversaries.”

The unconditional involvement of Britain, which has long collaborated with the US in the development of chemical and biological weapons, has also surprisingly been ignored in relation to such criminal plans.

Thus, the US Federal Contractor Registry shows that the Pentagon has spent more than $70 billion in recent years alone on experiments with deadly viruses and nerve agents at the Porton Down military biological laboratory, which is located near Salisbury in Great Britain. The US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), led by the US Department of Defense, has funded a number of defense projects at this so-called “Defense Science and Technology Laboratory” (DSTL) at Porton Down. These include experimental infection of primates with anthrax, Ebola, Marburg, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, western and eastern equine encephalitis viruses, and poisoning of animals with mustard gas and phosgene. It is well known that experiments with LSD have been “incapacitating” British troops during exercises. The testing of chemicals on humans, however, was not out of the ordinary for Porton Down. According to El Pais, in 1963 Porton Down staff decided to test the vulnerability of public infrastructure to chemical and biological attacks by spreading a bacterium on the London Underground, which was initially thought to be harmless but turned out to be quite capable of causing septicemia.

The DTRA has full access to all scientific and technical developments at the Porton Down “laboratory.” Such experiments involving animals are considered secret in Great Britain and it is a criminal offence under Chapter 24 of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act to reveal information about such experiments.

According to information received by the media, military experiments with chemical and biological weapons have increased at Porton Down in recent years. Thus, between 2005 and 2016, 122,000 animals were infected with deadly viruses or poisoned with chemicals. The “laboratory” uses mice, guinea pigs, rats, piglets, ferrets, sheep and monkeys in its research.

It is also known that British military “scientists” received funding from the DTRA to develop a chemical testing system from 2012 to 2017, with experiments on the effects of VX and VM poisoning agents being conducted at Porton Down in 2015.

In 2013, scientists from Porton Down sprayed gas on the London Underground, which the British government tried to keep quiet about and not tell its citizens. At the time, thousands of persons were gassed without their knowledge, and no one asked for their consent to take part in such barbaric “research” against their own people. Nevertheless, data about this is recorded in a British Home Office document, telling also about other programs conducted jointly by the United States and Britain.

Information about the UK’s Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) testing of the chemical poison VX on guinea pigs was posted on the US National Center for Biotechnology Information website on August 9, 2018. And on September 1, 2018, a report emerged on behalf of 10 more researchers at the DSTL about testing Bioscavenger, which is an effective delayed therapeutic intervention for VX chemical weapons poisoning. The DSTL itself officially admitted in mid-2016 that they were producing the poisonous substance and testing it on animals. The DTRA is a major foreign client of the UK’s DSTL. Between 2012 and 2017, British military scientists received $39.7 million for the Pentagon’s chemical system testing program, and judging by the US Federal Procurement System, the DSTL and DTRA collaboration continues.

The Porton Down secret laboratory has repeatedly been at the center of scandals involving human experimentation. Up to 20,000 people participated in litigation with the DSTL from 1949 to 1989. And in 2008, the UK Ministry of Defense paid 360 veterans £3 million without admitting responsibility.

According to The Guardian, in the late 2000s, the US and Britain experimented with biological weapons in Afghanistan, using a specially bred fungus called fusarium oxysporum and pleospora papaveracae to kill poppy crops. In 2000, the international NGO Sunshine Project published a report on the danger of this fungus infecting and killing not only coca, poppy and cannabis, but also other plants in environmentally sensitive areas of Asia and the New World. An indication of the dangers of such fungi is the fact that their use is banned in the US. According to the Sunshine Project report, genetically modified strains of the fungus have been bred in the US, which means that the deliverables can be classified as biological weapon.

Given this information alone, the extent of Britain’s involvement in the possible development with the US of biological weapons already needs to be investigated in detail.

March 14, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

The Most Objective Evidence Shows No Indication That Covid Vaccines Save More Lives Than They Take

By James D. Agresti | Just Facts Daily | March 2, 2022

Overview

Medical journals and textbooks are clear that the only way to accurately determine the life-or-death impacts of medical treatments is by measuring “all-cause mortality” in “randomized controlled trials.” Clinical lingo aside, this is simply the number of deaths in studies where people are randomly assigned to receive or not receive a certain treatment.

Though widely ignored in media coverage of Covid-19 vaccines, medical journals describe all-cause mortality in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as:

Beyond the fact that death is the most severe and clearest health outcome, the reason why this measure is more vital than any other is because RCTs control for every possible confounding factor, including those that are not obvious. Thus, a clinical research methods guide states that RCTs are the “gold standard” for research because they provide “a rigorous tool to examine cause–effect,” which “is not possible with any other study design.”

Combined with the use of a placebo so that people don’t alter their mindsets or behaviors as a result of knowing they received the treatment, quality RCTs ensure that any significant difference in the total number of deaths among the people who receive and don’t receive a treatment is, in fact, caused by the treatment. This eliminates subjective judgments about the root causes of death, which is a major point of contention with C-19 vaccines.

Unlike other data which can be easily manipulated through statistical tampering, all-cause mortality in RCTs is straightforward and solid. If an RCT is large enough and properly conducted, a simple tally of all deaths among people who receive and don’t receive a treatment proves whether the treatment saves more lives than it takes.

Underscoring all of the above facts, medical textbooks and journals explain that:

  • RCTs are “the pinnacle in clinical design.”
  • RCTs are “the best way to study the safety and efficacy of new treatments.”
  • “the act of randomisation in a large” RCT “balances participant characteristics (both observed and unobserved) between the groups, allowing attribution of any differences in outcome to the intervention.”

In this case, the “intervention” is FDA-approved Covid vaccines, and the “outcome” is death. That vital data was gathered in RCTs involving 72,663 adults and older children for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. However, the FDA presented these results in a place and manner likely to be overlooked, and no major media outlet has covered them.

The results reveal that 70 people died during the Moderna and Pfizer trials, including 37 who received Covid vaccines and 33 who did not. Combined with the fact that half of the study participants were given vaccinations and the other half were given placebos, these crucial results provide no indication that the vaccines save more lives than they take.

Accounting for sampling margins of error—as is common for medical journals and uncommon for the media—the results demonstrate with 95% confidence that:

  • neither of the vaccines decreased or increased the absolute risk of death by any more than 0.08% over the course of the trials.
  • the vaccines could prevent up to two deaths or cause up to three deaths per year among every 1,000 people.

Importantly, those results:

  • apply to adults and older children averaged as a group, and the vaccines’ benefits and risks can vary considerably for each individual.
  • don’t apply beyond the timeframes of the studies, which were limited to several months.
  • don’t apply to people who were excluded from the studies, including those who are severely ill, previously had Covid-19, or have an immune disorder like HIV.
  • don’t apply to the currently dominant SARS-CoV-2 variant (Omicron).

Just Facts asked four Ph.D. scholars with contrasting views about Covid vaccines and who specialize in the disciplines addressed in this research to critically review it. Among those who did so, they assessed it as follows:

  • Jessica Rose, Ph.D. in Computational Biology, Postdoctorate in Molecular Biology, Postdoctorate in Biochemistry: “I rarely have nothing to say when I read something with regard to corrections, but this is accurate and well written.”
  • Rodney Sturdivant, Ph.D. in Biostatistics, Director of the Statistical Consulting Center at Baylor University: “The facts, so well laid out in this article, are a call for a very careful review and more study before future shots are recommended. All statisticians and scientists should be demanding better from the FDA.”

The FDA’s Diversion

Despite the import of all-cause mortality, the FDA completely ignored this measure in its press releases announcing approvals of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Moreover, the FDA presented the all-cause mortality figures 20+ pages into technical documents alongside the following statements that distract from their implications:

  • Pfizer: “From Dose 1 through the March 13, 2021 data cutoff date, there were a total of 38 deaths, 21 in the Comirnaty [vaccine] group and 17 in the placebo group. None of the deaths were considered related to vaccination.” (Emphasis added.)
  • Moderna: “There were 32 deaths during the blinded phase of the study: 16 deaths in the vaccine group, and 16 in the placebo group. None of the unsolicited AEs [adverse events] leading to death were considered vaccine-related.” (Emphasis added.)

Those statements are highly subjective and divert naive readers from the fact that only the total number of deaths in each group can determine whether the vaccines save more lives than they take. This is precisely why medical journals call all-cause mortality the most “objective,” “relevant,” “significant,” and “important” outcome—not deaths considered related to the treatment.

Again, RCTs eliminate the need for subjective judgments like the FDA made in those statements. This is especially important for vaccines since there are untold ways in which they can alter the risk of death beyond direct effects like preventing Covid-19 or causing cardiac eventsembolismsfevers, and seizures.

For example, many fatal car accidents are triggered by fatigue, and the Pfizer and Moderna RCTs found that 70–72% of subjects under the age of 55 reported “fatigue” after receiving the vaccine. There is no objective way to account for all such risks and benefits except by measuring all-cause mortality in RCTs.

Even with direct connections, determining whether a vaccine contributed to a death is often inconclusive. As explained in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, “when diseases and deaths occur shortly after vaccination with an mRNA vaccine, it can never be definitively determined, even with a full investigation, that the vaccine reaction was not a proximal cause.”

Likewise, the British Medical Journal reported in January 2021 that the Norwegian Medicines Agency investigated the deaths of 13 “very frail elderly patients” which occurred “shortly after receiving” the Pfizer C-19 vaccine and “concluded that common adverse reactions of mRNA vaccines, such as fever, nausea, and diarrhea, may have contributed to fatal outcomes in some of the frail patients.” Yet, the medical director of the agency stated, “There is no certain connection between these deaths and the vaccine.”

Measuring all-cause mortality in RCTs removes that uncertainty, which makes the FDA’s diversion and the media’s failure to report these results all-the-more troublesome.

Inferior Studies

While downplaying and ignoring the most objective data, media outlets, government agencies, and large corporations have touted studies that are rife with assumptions and plagued by fatal flaws. For a prime example, more than 100 such entities publicized the results of a study from the Commonwealth Fund which estimated that C-19 vaccinations prevented about 279,000 deaths and 1.25 million hospitalizations in the U.S. by the end of June 2021.

Those figures were calculated by comparing “observed” Covid-19 trends to a “model,” a type of study design that “rests upon a host of simplifying assumptions” and “cannot be fully” representative of the real world, as admitted by a medical journal that published a similar study.

Another class of subpar study results uncritically parroted by the media comes from “observational studies.” These are studies which observe the outcomes of people “in the wild” who have not been randomly assigned a certain treatment. As a medical journal explains, such studies can “rarely” determine the effects of a treatment because a host of other factors are at play.

For instance, observing the death rates of people who are vaccinated and unvaccinated against C-19 cannot prove whether the vaccines are more helpful than harmful because the odds of death are impacted by numerous factors like these:

  • People who are deathly ill or even temporarily ill tend not to get vaccinated, a phenomenon described in medical journals as “healthy vaccinee bias.”
  • Older people—who are more likely to die than younger people—have much higher C-19 vaccination rates than younger people.
  • Immunocompromised people—who have conditions like cancer and HIV that increase their risk of death—are “plausibly more likely to be offered and seek vaccination” because they are very vulnerable to C-19.

Researchers commonly use statistical techniques to “control” for such variables, but these methods cannot rule out the possibility that other factors are at play. Also, the techniques used to perform such analyses are prone to pitfalls.

The root weakness of observational studies is that they can only measure associations, and association does not prove causation. Although commonly taught in high school math, this vital fact of medical and social science is routinely ignored by commentatorsjournalistsPh.D.’s, and government agencies like the CDC.

Highlighting the necessity of measuring all-cause mortality and the fact that observational studies cannot match the reliability of RCTs:

  • a 2013 article in JAMA Internal Medicine documents that 80% of “traditional RCTs” measure “mortality, a hard and important end point.”
  • a 2018 paper in the European Heart Journal compares RCT and non-RCT studies on drugs to prevent heart failure and finds that:
    • the observational studies routinely conflict with the RCTs.
    • “it is not possible to make reliable therapeutic inferences from observational associations.”
    • RCTs “clearly remain the best guide to the treatment of patients.”
  • a 2005 paper in JAMA Internal Medicine presents a “systematic review of randomized controlled trials” on treatments for people hospitalized with uncommon types of pneumonia and reports, “Although mortality is the most significant outcome in a potentially lethal infection, all studies chose clinical failure as their primary outcome. This end point is subjective and should be studied with care. Our review clearly demonstrates its potential for bias.”
  • the medical book Principles and Practice of Clinical Research documents that:
    • “while consistency in the findings of a large number of observational studies can lead to the belief that the associations are causal, this belief is a fallacy.”
    • “a well-designed” RCT “overcomes the major weaknesses of all other types of study designs….”
  • a commentary published by the British Medical Journal in October 2020 explains:
    • “Sixty years after influenza vaccination became routinely recommended for people aged 65 or older in the US, we still don’t know if vaccination lowers mortality” because “randomised trials with this outcome have never been done.”
    • “Observational studies with results in both directions can be cited, and without definitive randomised evidence the debate will go on.”
    • “Unless we act now, we risk repeating this sorry state of affairs with Covid-19 vaccines.”

None of this means that models and observational studies are clinically useless. They can illuminate paths for additional research, and in rare cases where their results are mathematically and logically overwhelming, they can estimate the effects of a treatment. However, their results should be taken with a grain of salt, especially if there are RCTs to the contrary.

Underpowered?

Some may argue that the Moderna and Pfizer RCTs were “underpowered,” a medical term for clinical trials that don’t enroll enough participants to detect an effect. However, Moderna enrolled more than 30,000 people in its RCT, Pfizer enrolled more than 40,000, and an additional 10 deaths in the Pfizer vaccine group—or only 0.05% of the vaccinees—would have shown with 95% confidence that the vaccine costs lives on net.

Moderna and Pfizer could have made their RCTs larger, leaving little doubt as to whether the vaccines save more lives than they take, but the companies chose not to do this. In September 2020 after months of people “campaigning for greater openness,” Covid vaccine manufacturers released important information about the designs of their RCTs. Summarizing these plans, the British Medical Journal reported that the studies were not designed to “determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus” or “detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths.”

Explaining why Moderna chose to construct a study that couldn’t determine if its vaccine saves lives, Tal Zaks, the company’s chief medical officer claimed that “too many would die waiting for the results before we ever knew” if the vaccine “prevents mortality.” He also declared that it would cost $5–10 billion dollars to conduct a trial big enough to measure the impact on death and said:

I think the public purse and operational capabilities and capacities we have are rightly spent not betting the farm on one vaccine, but, as Operation Warp is trying to do, making sure that we’re funding several vaccines in parallel.

The first of those excuses is transparently false, as Moderna could have included more participants in the study at the same time. It is also self-contradicting, as Zaks can’t know if “too many would die waiting” if he doesn’t know that the vaccine “prevents mortality.” Furthermore, C-19 vaccine study results are reviewed on a rolling basis, allowing people to act on the available data without waiting for the final results.

Zak’s second excuse is belied by the fact that the U.S. government has enacted six “Covid relief” laws with a total cost of about $5.3 trillion, or 530 times Zaks’ upper-end estimate. Including the money spent by other nations, a handful of $10 billion studies is a relative drop in the bucket.

Larger studies would have narrowed the sampling margins of error and provided more resolution about whether the vaccines save more lives than they cost, but even the current studies are large enough to show with 95% confidence that the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines did not decrease or increase the absolute risk of death by any more than 0.08% over the course of the trials.

Longer-Term Effects

All studies have their limitations, and a major one of the Moderna and Pfizer RCTs is that most of the participants were enrolled for only several months after their second dose of the vaccine. For Moderna, this period was a median of four months, and for Pfizer, it was an average of 3.3 months.

Here again, this weakness of the studies is a direct result of choices made by the vaccine manufacturers. That’s because Pfizer and Moderna began removing people from their RCTs through a process called “unblinding” as they became eligible to receive the vaccines under “local recommendations.”

Those decisions were made in defiance of guidance issued by a global association of 24 healthcare regulatory agencies called the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities. This group includes the FDA and its counterparts in Canada, Australia, China, France, Germany, Mexico, Japan, Nigeria, India, and other nations.

In a statement released in November 2020, this international coalition of government agencies made the following points (and others) about why longer-term RCTs are necessary for C-19 vaccines:

  • “To determine that the benefit of a vaccine outweighs its potential risk, regulators need robust and convincing evidence of the safety and efficacy that is obtained from well-designed randomised and controlled trials.”
  • “Thus, continued evaluation of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated” participants “for as long as feasible will provide invaluable information.”
  • Such information includes but is not limited to “additional and more precise information on longer-term safety,” “potential risks of vaccine-induced enhanced disease,” and “whether protection against Covid-19 disease wanes over time.”
  • “Therefore, unless maintaining participants in their randomised treatment groups (vaccinated or control) after a vaccine is approved is clearly infeasible, we recommend that clinical trials should proceed as initially planned with a follow-up of at least one year or more from completion of assigned doses.”

Pfizer and Moderna flouted that guidance, and the journal BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine reported in July 2021 that “placebo controlled follow-up, originally planned for 2 years in many trials, was eliminated after a few months, when manufacturers began offering vaccine to placebo recipients within weeks of receiving emergency use authorisations.”

Decisions to hastily end the RCTs also:

  • hindered their ability to detect any effects of herd immunity as the broader society became vaccinated.
  • prevent everyone from knowing with certainty how the vaccines protect against recent SARS-CoV-2 variants because the trials ended before Delta became common and before Omicron emerged.

Since all of those are observational studies, they don’t have the surety of RCTs and are therefore tentative. This is precisely why Dr. Doran Fink, Deputy Director of the FDA’s Division of Vaccines and Related Products Applications, warned at an FDA committee meeting in October 2020:

Once a decision is made to unblind an ongoing placebo-controlled trial, that decision cannot be walked back. And that controlled follow up is lost forever.

Medical ethics require that RCTs be barred or ended if they would undoubtedly harm people. Thus, some allege that the RCTs should have been shortened based on their findings that the vaccines have large and statistically significant effects on reducing the risk of severe Covid-19. The Pfizer RCT, for example, found that the vaccine decreases the incidence of severe Covid-19 among people aged 16 and older by 70.9% to 100.0% (with 95% confidence).

However, those results don’t account for any side effects of the vaccines or whether their benefits wane over time. Moreover, the all-cause mortality data provided no indication that the vaccines were saving more lives than they cost.

What the RCTs Can’t Reveal

One of the most dangerous errors in medicine is interpreting the results of studies more broadly than the evidence warrants. This is called “overgeneralizing,” and academic works on applied statistics warn that “researchers in the behavioral and social sciences almost always want to make inferences beyond their samples,” but this practice “is always risky,” especially when the study subjects are “drastically different” from the people to whom the results are applied.

Media outlets often foster such deadly misinterpretations by failing to report the limits and caveats of studies. A prime example is the main Pfizer and Moderna RCTs that yielded the all-cause mortality data and the widely trumpeted results that the vaccines are more than 90% effective in preventing Covid-19. Beyond the fact that the RCTs were limited to several months, both of them excluded people:

  • who are very vulnerable to C-19, like those who are severely ill or have certain immune disorders.
  • who are highly resistant to Covid-19 because they previously had the disease and now have natural acquired immunity to it.

Thus, it is extremely important to realize that even though the Covid vaccines did not decrease or increase the absolute risk of death by any more than 0.08% over the course of the RCTs, this only applies to the pre-Omicron era and generally healthy adults who don’t yet have naturally acquired immunity.

Moreover, that result is merely an average, and the benefits and risks of the vaccines could vary widely depending upon factors like weight, age, sex, and a host of other variables. For instance, the risk of being harmed by Covid-19 greatly declines at younger ages, while the major known risks of the vaccine increase.

Summary

On February 5, 2022, President Biden tweeted, “Here’s the deal: Unvaccinated individuals are 97 times more likely to die compared to those who are boosted.” This claim—which Biden did not support but seems to be a gross distortion of a bogus statistic from CDC director Rochelle Walensky—clashes with the most objective, relevant, and important evidence on this matter.

That evidence consists of two large RCTs for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which were the FDA’s main basis for approving them. These studies involved 72,663 generally healthy adults and older children in the pre-Delta/Omicron era who didn’t yet have naturally acquired immunity to C-19. After half of the subjects were randomly given a vaccine and the other half a placebo, 37 people died who received a vaccine, and 33 died who received a placebo.

On a superficial basis, these figures suggest that the vaccines increased the relative risk of death by 13%. However, the death rate in both groups was so small (0.1%) that the difference between them is statistically insignificant. More specifically, the results demonstrate with 95% confidence that:

  • neither of the vaccines decreased or increased the absolute risk of death by any more than 0.08%.
  • the vaccines could prevent up to two deaths or cause up to three deaths per year among every 1,000 people.

In short, the strongest available evidence shows no indication that the mRNA Covid vaccines save more lives than they take. However, the benefits and risks of the vaccines can vary greatly for each individual.

March 14, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment