Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Calls for France to reveal location of nuclear waste dumped in Algeria

MEMO | October 5, 2020

France should take initiative to solve the problem of the nuclear waste buried in the Algerian Sahara in the early 1960s, as no one knows its exact location, which is a classified military secret, the head of the Paris-based Observatory for Armament said.

In an interview with Radio France Internationale yesterday, Patrice Bouvre said: “When France suspended its nuclear tests in 1966, it simply buried the waste of the 17 experiments it conducted over the years.”

He added that Paris classified the location or locations of the buried nuclear waste and the documents related to the affair as “a military secret”, which remains to date.

As a result, there is no information available about the exact location of the nuclear waste buried in the Algerian desert, Bouvre explained.

He called on the French authorities to reveal the truth about this file and to cooperate with Algeria to clean up the areas contaminated by the nuclear waste that still exposes these regions to serious environmental damages.

France conducted 17 nuclear tests between 1960 and 1966 in the Algerian Sahara, and the waste from these experiments is buried in an unknown location in the area, hindering attempts to remove the radioactive materials and protect the population and the environment.

October 5, 2020 Posted by | Environmentalism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

PCR Inventor: “It doesn’t tell you that you are sick”

The MSM have been going all out trying to pretend this never happened, turns out it did

By David James | OffGuardian | October 5, 2020

There has been a great deal of controversy over claims that Kary Mullis, the creator of the PCR technology that is being widely used to test for so-called ‘cases’ of COVID-19, did not believe the technology was suitable for detecting a meaningful presence of a virus.

Those making these assertions were attacked and ‘fact checked’ (deemed inappropriate by propagandists) by news outlets claiming that Mullis’ comments had been taken out of context.

So when a video surfaces with Mullis talking about the efficacy of the technology it is worth paying close attention to what he is saying. He died last year, so it is the best ‘fact check’ available. In the video, Mullis is discussing AIDS. He first deals with a criticism from the audience that the PCR technology is being misused [timestamp – 48:40].

“I don’t think you can misuse PCR. [It is] the results; the interpretation of it. If they can find this virus in you at all – and with PCR, if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody.”

Mullis does not explicitly say that the PCR technology is unsuitable for detecting a meaningful presence of COVID-19. How could he, given that he died before it came to light? But such a conclusion can safely be inferred:

“It starts making you believe in the sort of Buddhist notion that everything is contained in everything else. If you can amplify one single molecule up to something you can really measure, which PCR can do, then there is just very few molecules that you don’t have at least one single one of in your body.”

Mullis then addresses the question of what should be considered meaningful, which is the central issue with the use of the PCR tests. Do the ‘case’ numbers being used around the world by governments to impose police states and egregious lockdowns of the population, especially in my home state of Victoria, actually mean anything? The answer seems to be ‘no’:

“That could be thought of as a misuse: to claim that it [a PCR test] is meaningful. It tells you something about nature and what is there. To test for that one thing and say it has a special meaning is, I think, the problem. The measurement for it is not exact; it is not as good as the measurement for apples. The tests are based on things that are invisible and the results are inferred in a sense. It allows you to take a miniscule amount of anything and make it measureable and then talk about it.”

Mullis also addresses, by implication, another question about the incidence of ‘cases’. If you test positive – and Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration has admitted that they do not know if this means you are infected or not – are you actually sick? In the past that is what the word ‘cases’ has meant: someone unwell from a disease. Mullis’ position is clear [emphasis added – timecode 51:49]:

“PCR is just a process that allows you to make a whole lot of something out of something. It doesn’t tell you that you are sick, or that the thing that you ended up with was going to hurt you or anything like that.”

Mullis’ comments are unsurprising for anyone who has been paying attention to the behaviour of the authorities during the COVID-19 catastrophe. The technology relies on amplifying results many times over. If they are amplified less than about 35 times, no-one will test positive. If they are amplified 60 times, everyone will test positive. The flawed thinking is obvious enough.

Why is there such a concerted effort to quell anyone exposing problems with the use of the technology? There is no doubt that these attacks are designed to deceive (including predictable use of that shoddy ad hominem phrase ‘conspiracy theory’, a rhetorical trick to insult people rather than address their arguments).

Look closely at the ‘fact checking’. The Reuters article uses a mixture of a straw man argument and a red herring. It asserts it was wrong to claim that Mullis said that: “PCR tests cannot detect free infectious viruses at all”. This is obviously a deliberate misrepresentation intended to wrongly characterise the opponents’ argument and then ‘expose’ it as false.

Then we get the red herring. The Reuters article claims that: “The quote is actually from an article written by John Lauritsen in December 1996 about HIV and AIDS, not COVID-19 (here).” Neat trick. Assert that your opponents got their sources wrong, and then dismiss them because of their poor research.

It is transparently untruthful, but why are these news outlets pushing such propaganda?

In one way, it could be said to be just business as usual. For those of us who have worked in newsrooms, especially in the finance and business sections, being subjected to propaganda is as routine as the daily cups of coffee.

The techniques are endless: outright lying, misleading but true facts, half truths, quarter truths, lack of context, lack of corporate memory, deceptive jargon, false statistics, lobbying by astro-turf organisations, threats of legal action, threats to complain to the editor or proprietor, threats of removal of access to important sources, promises of getting first access to important stories, subtle requests from former colleagues for assistance, and, of course, my favourites – free lunches at expensive restaurants and travel junkets.

The situation, always bad, has worsened with the destruction of the media’s business model by Facebook and Google, who have taken half the world’s advertising revenue. It has forced the hollowed out newsrooms to rely more on outside news feeds. And, as Matt Taibbi has noted, mainstream media organisations are, for commercial reasons, no longer interested in “selling a vision of reality they perceive to be acceptable to a broad mean”.

Instead, they deliberately sow division and only appeal to niches. Forget facts; inciting prejudice comes first.

But none of that explains why there is such intense propaganda about COVID-19.

The endless spin inflicted on media organisations is transparently related to satisfying greed or enhancing power, but what is the motive here? True, the US health system is one of the biggest profiteering exercises in the world, corrupting health everywhere. Health accounts for 16 per cent of US GDP, which is about twice the level of, say, Australia or the UK (countries that have universal care).

That extra eight per cent equates with $1.6 trillion in profiteering, or about two per cent of the global economy – an eye-watering scam conducted by pharmaceutical companies, hospital conglomerates, insurance companies, lawyers, consultants and so on. Those vultures will be trying to control the media to profit from a vaccine and who knows what else.

But they will only be one group of players and probably not the main ones. The most important question is who is funding the ‘fake news’ that COVID-19 is an existential threat and what is their agenda? Most countries have been greatly harmed. It has resulted in a medical dictatorship that has shut down Victoria; health bureaucrats may, absurdly, be given police powers.

There is a very sinister international agenda here, but the outline of it is, so far, only blurry.

October 5, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Israel and the World Refugee Crisis

If Americans Knew | October 4, 2020

There are 26 million people worldwide who have fled to other countries as refugees, more than half of whom are under the age of 18. Israel plays a role in over 80% of the world’s refugees. This 3 minute video explains how. For a short video with basic information on Israel by author Alison Weir see:

https://youtu.be/IPpFIKC0Fo0

For information on the $38 billion to Israel see:

https://israelpalestinenews.org/congr…

https://israelpalestinenews.org/senat…

https://ifamericansknew.org/stat/cost…

SOURCES: Israel’s Arms Sales and Clients

https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/f…

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/israel…

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion…

https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/01/18/p…

https://www.972mag.com/israeli-weapon…

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/i…

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/1…

https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-isra…

https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-6-80…

https://www.finalcall.com/artman/publ…

https://theconversation.com/kashmiris…

October 4, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , , | Leave a comment

History as Warfare: The ‘1619 Project’ and the Plot to Destroy the Republic

By Matthew Ehret | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 4, 2020

“Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend, will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof shuts out the sky.”

– Marquis St. Evrémonde (from Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities)

A major cultural fight has broken out between Donald Trump’s recently announced 1776 Commission and the NY Times’ 1619 Project.

While Trump’s commission designed to “promote patriotic history” naively paints over some glaring hypocrisies of American history by placing figures like Hamilton, Jackson, Jefferson and Lincoln in the same boat (thus keeping a bit too much bathwater along with the baby), it does represent an important major cultural battle over the soul of America which is now sitting precariously upon a new civil war, military coup threat and total disintegration.

In his recent Sept. 17 speech attacking the 1619 Project and announcing his 1776 Commission, Trump said quite rightfully:

“Whether it is the mob on the street, or the “cancel culture” in the boardroom, the goal is the same: to silence dissent, to scare you out of speaking the truth, and to bully Americans into abandoning their values, their heritage, and their way of life.

“We are here today to declare that we will never submit to tyranny. We will reclaim our history and our country for citizens of every race, color, religion, and creed.

“The radicals burning American flags want to burn down the principles in our founding documents, including the bedrock principle of equal justice under law. In order to radically transform America, they must first cause Americans to lose confidence in who we are, where we come from, and what we believe…. The left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.”

Attacking the underpinnings of Critical Race theory which attempts to assert that belief in rational thought, hard work and the nuclear family were the result of “whiteness”, Trump invoked Martin Luther King saying:

“where children are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Critical Race Theory, the 1619 project, and the crusade against American history, are toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.”

What is the 1619 Project?

The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which was unveiled in June 2019 by Nikole Hannah-Jones, attempts to smear the entirety of American history as simply a slave-promoting fraud from the moment the first slave arrived in Jonestown in 1619.

During its short existence, this “project” has quickly won over thousands of academics, and in spite of its proven fallacies (which it had to secretly cover up in Orwellian fashion), Jones was still awarded the Pulitzer Prize legitimizing the fraud in the minds of countless school administrators, policy-makers and academics.

If one truly accepts the claims of the 1619 Project which have become turned into a Pulitzer curriculum and already embedded in 4500 U.S. schools, then America’s dissolution would be no great loss to the world. In fact, one would have to conclude that since the republic was always built upon the defense of slavery (going so far as to paint the British Empire as an anti-slavery bastion which the founding fathers broke away from only due to their fear of having their slaves removed), then America was always… evil.

The First Paradox

If it were true that the creation of the American republic was just driven by a desire to protect the institution of slavery from the abolition-loving British then it should be asked: why did every American state shut down the African slave trade by 1793??”

Don’t believe me? Let the facts speak for themselves.

By 1784, six states in the new nation had voted to totally abolish slavery (Rhode Island in 1774, Vermont in 1777, Pennsylvania in 1780, Massachusetts in 1781, New Hampshire in 1783 and Connecticut in 1784), while the importation of all new slaves was banned by every other state by 1793. The important Northwest Ordinances passed in the 1787 Continental Congress ensured that no slavery would be permitted in the immense North West Territories (giving rise to the later addition of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin as free states). This agreement was established during the 1774 Continental Congress where a non-importation act was signed by all colonies stating: “That we will neither import, nor purchase any slave imported, after the first day of December next; after which time, we will wholly discontinue the slave trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it.”

Another Paradox

If Britain was threatening to end the slave trade as the 1619 Project authors teach, then why did the Empire override dozens of petitions from the colonies between 1650-1765 demanding an end to slavery? Rather than oppose slavery, the British Royal Africa Company, under the direction of the Privy Council, and Board of Trade enforced the mass important of 8 million African slaves into the Americas during the 18th century alone! These same organizations constantly strove to destroy all efforts to establish manufacturing within the colonies from 1630-1765 which everyone knew was the only effective pathway to liberating a society from reliance on slave labor.

Additionally, IF it were true that the 1776 revolution were driven by the intent to protect the slave economy from the freedom-loving British Empire, then why did England only ban slavery in 1807 and why did they wait until 1833 to begin extending this ban across their colonies?? Did the founding fathers have a crystal ball and act on events that would occur only 65 years in the future? If the British truly hated slavery so much, then why did the empire maintain a global system of subjugation, famine and exploitation across Asia, Ireland and beyond for so many generations?

So what happened? Was the British Empire seriously pushing an anti-slavery agenda? Why did America’s anti-slave trajectory fall apart so soon after the revolution and why did the rot spread to the point of necessitating a Civil War by 1861?

How to proceed with a serious investigation?

The Matter of Money

Since one of the most effective keys to understanding history starts with the question of “who controls the money”, economics is a good place to start.

Approaching the matter this way will cause the inquiring mind to confront the battle between two opposing paradigms of statecraft which defined the world in which the American revolution arose as part of an international phenomenon involving leaders from Russia, France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, India and Morocco.

The battle over what sort of system of economics would govern America after political independence was achieved in 1783 will here become a very valuable question.

Where certain players of that age believed that “value” should be locked into rules of money-worship and profit (which all people desired since money bought pleasure and helped us avoid pain), others disagreed and believed value should be looked for elsewhere. These others believed that value transcended matters of pleasure/pain and touched upon something less transient and more universal… but what?

Introducing Ben Franklin

During the 18th century, these latter forces centered themselves around the figure of America’s “father of founding fathers” Benjamin Franklin who drafted some of the most important policies that led to the sovereign control over currency from his 1729 On the Necessity for a Paper Currency, onwards. Franklin used his powerful printing presses to spread both sovereign banking and anti-slavery pamphlets, books and treatises for decades before the revolution itself was declared in 1775. One of the most powerful anti-slavery books printed by Franklin was the influential 1737 ‘All Slave Keepers Who Keep the Innocent in Bondage’ by Benjamin Lay which argued that any Christian keeping slaves was an offense against God.

Lay wrote: “No greater sin Hell can invent than to prophane and blaspheme the pure and Holy Truth, which is God all in all, and remove God’s creatures made after his own image, from all the comforts of life and their country… and bring them into all the miseries that dragons, serpents, devils and hypocrites can procure and think of”.

In the mind of Franklin and his co-thinkers these issues (economics and slavery) represented two sides of the same fight.

Franklin argued in his many writings that “value” originated in what you create that satisfies the needs of humanity, and not what “things” you possess or wish to consume. Since a society of creators/producers requires sovereign manufacturing to generate real wealth and constant internal improvements of infrastructure to coordinate the development of all parts of a nation under a unified intention, Franklin recognized clearly that the production generated by “slave labor” is a chimera and actually represented a form of “anti-value”. Like heroine consumption today, anti-value simply means any form of “momentary profits” that might even be measurable as GDP and generate money flows, but actually represents a destruction of that society’s ability to sustain its own existence over time. (1)

The reason for this is simple.

Slavery destroys the creative powers of mentation in both the laboring slave who is valued only for their animal labor, and also the decadent slave master who’s potential for creativity becomes narrowly defined by ways to keep the slave under control.

It is thus no coincidence that Franklin also created the anti-slavery alliance in the 1760s and later founded the 1785 Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves” alongside several of his devoted proteges. These proteges included the figures of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Gouvernor Morris who all happened to become the creators and leaders of the “American System of political economy” premised on the use of a national bank, productive credit, protective tariffs, and large scale manufacturing to promote the economic sovereignty of the new nation. I introduced some of this in my recent essay How to Save a Dying Republic: Hamilton’s Genius.

When Jefferson took control of the Presidency from 1801-1809, a major victory was won for the pro-slavery oligarchs of America who saw immense profits to be gained by spreading their peculiar form of society under a perverse form of Manifest Destiny.

Admittedly, these oligarchs would have been much happier with the victory of Aaron Burr to the presidency in 1801 since an immediate dissolution of the union would have occurred between slave and free states as early as 1804 (to be discussed in a future essay). Unlike Burr, Jefferson was at least against breaking up the Union into northern and southern confederacies (with the free states merging with Canada and the slave states becoming their own nation), and that is why Hamilton (Jefferson’s political nemesis) ironically organized aggressively for his victory winning the fatal ire of Burr.

Sadly, Jefferson’s devout belief in agrarianism, hate for manufacturing, love of slavery, and British enlightenment thinking still made him an instrument for the slave power’s cancerous growth during his terms in office.

The British Empire’s Global Game

By destroying Indian textiles and subduing the “Chinese dragon” with a program of mass opium consumption that would stain the 19th century, the City of London quickly took control of world textile manufactures which created a primary export market for southern slave plantation cotton and a new set of addictions began: the addiction to the easy money derived from cheap slave labor. This proto globalization established a global closed system of controls onto all nations through cash cropping, free trade, speculation and drugs.

By 1840 over 20% of the British population was employed in textiles under such anti-human conditions that Charles Dickens described in his Tale of Two Cities and other writings.

The Best of Times and Worst of Times

With the 1804 murder of Hamilton, and undermining of America’s national credit system between 1804-1836, British free trade grew as protective tariffs were taken down, and credit towards infrastructure projects like the Erie Canal, roads, rail, etc shriveled up. Speculation ran rampant whenever this monetarist system was unleashed driven by booms and busts and the rise of “state-rights” programs that superseded all national initiatives. This process was taken directly from classic divide to conquer tactics which I outlined in my last essay Lincoln and the Greenbacks.

An astute Whig economist looking upon this bipolar process in America (while comparing it to the depressingly stagnant Canadian economic situation of 1791-1850) stated in 1853:

“Though the ratio of the increase of the population has been greater in Canada than in the United States, yet their increase of wealth has barely kept pace with the population, and they are as poor as they were half a century since. They have enjoyed the blessings of Free Trade with England all the time, we have only a part of the time. Whenever we have attempted to supply ourselves by our own industry, with the comforts and necessaries of life, we have improved our condition as a people; and during the intervals of Free Trade and large importations of foreign goods, we have relapsed again into a condition bordering on bankruptcy; while the Canadians have been constantly exhausted, and kept so poor by Free Trade, as to be unable to get sufficient credit to have even the ups and downs of prosperity and bankruptcy in succession.”  (2)

The Slave Power Spreads

By 1836, the 2nd National Bank was officially killed after a mass propaganda campaign convinced a duped mob that it was an instrument of tyranny in America, and over the coming 6 decades, the only five presidents who would make any serious effort towards reviving America’s nationalist system would end up dead while in office (Harrison in 1841, Taylor in 1850, Lincoln in 1865, Garfield in 1880, and McKinley in 1901). The man who is today celebrated for having “killed the bank” and “paying Americas debts” was in reality a force of pure destruction. Jackson “paid the debt” by cutting all infrastructure projects and unleashing mass speculation which resulted in a devastating 1837 bank panic that drove the nation into discord and depression. An unrepentant racist, Jackson also gave enormous assistance to the slavocracy by emptying the southern lands of Cherokee in the genocidal “Trail of Tears” and giving the land over to cotton planting oligarchs loyal only to their profits, “way of life” and the British Empire.

This story is told in all of its ugly detail in historian Michael Kirsch’s groundbreaking 2012 study “How Andrew Jackson Destroyed the United States”.

Between 1801 to 1840, southern cotton exports exploded from 100,000 bales/year to 1 million bales/year with 80% of the exports going to Britain. The City of London-Wall Street-New Orleans triangle dominated the world system with New Orleans representing over 12% of all U.S. banking capital. The southern slave states grew to represent the world’s fourth biggest economy through the support of the British Empire both financially and also in the logistical support needed to import mass slavery into the Americas. This degeneration proceeded slowly until the presidencies of Jackson and his handler Martin van Buren, but after this, cotton exports increased to 4 million bales/year by 1860 and the slave power grew immensely under the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 that ensured the spread of slavery west of Mississippi.

While many radical abolitionists in the USA and British Canada then advocated the dissolution of the union as an alternative to civil war, stronger souls like Frederick Douglass recognized the higher historic fight at hand. As a lesson to modern anarchists who believe in the 1619 Project and feel no sorrow at the burning of America under a new civil war today, Douglass took the time to research history, and broke with William Lloyd Garrison (the leader of the abolitionist movement) defending the Constitution in 1852:

“I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. It is a slander upon their memory… In that instrument [the U.S. Constitution] I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but interpreted, as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a Glorious Liberty Document. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slaveholding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it”.

This higher understanding of history and the principles of the Constitution caused Douglass to ally himself with Lincoln where he worked with all his might to recruit 200,000 black soldiers to the cause. Later in life, Douglass attacked British free trade and “cheap labor” in defense of the Nationalist system writing in 1871:

“Cheap Labor, is a phrase that has no cheering music for the masses. Those who demand it, and seek to acquire it, have but little sympathy with common humanity. It is the cry of the few against the many. When we inquire who are the men that are continually vociferating for cheap labor, we find not the poor, the simple, and the lowly; not the class who dig and toil for their daily bread; not the landless, feeble, and defenseless portion of society, but the rich and powerful, the crafty and scheming, those who live by the sweat of other men’s faces.”

The British Hand Behind the Civil War

During the entirety of the Civil War, the British Empire’s guiding hand could always be felt, from supplying the south with battle ships, weapons and finances to providing logistic and diplomatic support internationally. Even British Canada was given over to the Confederacy’s intelligence headquarters which deployed spying, money laundering, and terrorist operations against the Union during the entire war.

Speaking to the British Parliament, Lord Robert Cecil (Marquis of Salisbury) expressed Britain’s logic succinctly when he said in 1861:

“The Northern States of America never can be our sure friends because we are rivals, rivals politically, rivals commercially…. With the Southern States, the case is entirely reversed. The population are an agricultural people. They furnish the raw material of our industry, and they consume the products which we manufacture from it. With them, every interest must lead us to cultivate friendly relations, and when the war began they at once recurred to England as their natural ally.”

A future installment will tackle the role of British operations in Canada that organized the murder of Lincoln, sabotaged the industrial reconstruction of the South, and undid the internationalization of Lincoln’s system around the world during the 19-20th centuries. This sabotage of potential created the foundations for the creature embedded within America now organizing a new Civil War and dissolution of the republic once and for all.


The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

(1) In the minds of those dirigistes like Franklin (including the Colbertist school of France, and its international leaders like Jonathon Swift, Daniel Dafoe, and Cotton Mathers in America who all wrote pamphlets supporting manufacturing over slave labor), a machine produced by the creative mind of man can accomplish the work of 100 laborers- thus liberating those laborers from the demands of the material forces of nature and freeing them to develop their powers of mind.

(2) Ezra Champion Seaman, Essays on the Progress of Nations (1853), p. 599

October 4, 2020 Posted by | Economics, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Daniel Korski: The Intelligence-Linked Mastermind Behind the UK’s Orwellian Healthtech Advisory Board

By Johnny Vedmore | Unlimited Hangout | October 1, 2020

As a futuristic, hi-tech dystopia increasingly takes shape around us, the concept of the Panopticon is more relevant than ever as it functions as the underpinning of the ever-growing mass surveillance grid.

For those who are not so familiar with 18th century social philosophy, a Panopticon was originally the design of a prison building by an English philosopher named Jeremy Bentham. The Panopticon prison’s architecture would allow one guard in a central guard tower to observe every inmate without those prisoners knowing that they were being observed, and so those incarcerated were left to assume that they were actually being observed all of the time. This prison would, in theory, allow that singular guard to maintain order over every inmate.

Much later, in the 20th century, the famous French philosopher, Michel Foucault, would use the concept of Bentham’s original Panopticon as a way to describe and explore “disciplinary power”. According to Foucault’s work, disciplinary power had been successful due to its utilisation of three technologies; hierarchical observation; normalising judgment; and examinations. Hierarchical observation refers to the fact that the observer in a Panopticon can be of any hierarchical position within the observing body, meaning that a prison guard, supervisor, or a governor could be the person viewing the inmates. Foucault would also insist that the normalisation of judgement is imperative for disciplinary power to exist. The final principle, the examination, is used to combine the first two principles of the observations and the resulting judgements to help decide on whether further actions should be taken or punitive measures be applied.

Among the most notable of Foucault’s analyses of the utility of the Panopticon is the following quote from his book Discipline and Punish: “The major effect of the panopticon is to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” In other words, the uncertainty of whether or not an individual is being constantly watched induces obedience in that individual, allowing only a few to control the many.

In addition to Foucault, the concept of the Panopticon has been vigorously studied over the past few centuries and it has special relevance in understanding modern forms of mass surveillance. The aim of many of the modern day state surveillance apparatus function under a similar doctrine to the original ideology behind the invention of the Panopticon.

The British GCHQ, the US’s NSA, the Israeli’s Unit 8200, among many others, are the all seeing eyes of national intelligence agencies who have longed for a way to watch their populations remotely, i.e. online, without their citizens knowing whether or not they’re actually being observed. One man has striven to be at the center of the growing global Panopticon, from his base in the Panopticon’s birthplace — Britain. His name is Daniel Korski.

The Creator

When I first came upon the NHS Healthtech Advisory Board, a body created in 2018 to “advise” the UK’s Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock, its members opened my eyes to some of the darker actors involved in designing our tech-guided futures. One of the panelists on Matt Hancock’s team of tech pioneers, who are seeking “to transform technology in the NHS [National Health Service],” was Nicole Junkermann.

The Israeli Intelligence-Linked Team behind Carbyne911 (including Nicole Junkermann)

Junkermann’s multiple links with Jeffrey Epstein, which appear to have begun around 2002, exposed her as someone who couldn’t be trusted with the future direction of the UK’s healthcare system. Furthermore, Junkermann’s connections with Ehud Barak, Peter Thiel, and Jeffrey Epstein via her investment in the Israeli intelligence-linked surveillance company Carbyne911, made her entry into the United Kingdom’s government advisory panel very problematic for everyone involved. But she was not the only interesting character intimately involved in this particular government project.

While the Healthtech Advisory Board has been hailed since its creation as the brainchild of Matt Hancock, he was actually guided to the project by the man who was, and is, the real mastermind behind the board’s founding, a man who has been helping to quietly write the history of Britain from behind the scenes for the last two decades. He is somebody you’ve probably never heard of, even though his impact on public policy is felt not only in the United Kingdom, but globally.

This man has been a senior advisor to the US State Department, an advisor to Hamid Karzai in post-invasion Afghanistan, the team leader of the Basrah Reconstruction Team in post-invasion Iraq, the Head of Political-Military Affairs for the Office of the High Representative to Bosnia-Herzegovina, and a Committee Specialist for the House of Commons Defence Committee. If that weren’t enough, he was also a founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, an advisor to the Vice President of the European Commission, a special advisor to UK Prime Minister David Cameron, deputy head of policy at 10 Downing Street. Yet, even  these are just some of the public offices he has held. This man’s name is Daniel Korski and he should be notorious.

Described as a “Foreign Policy Writer” and a “Post Conflict Expert”, Daniel Korski is currently only in his early forties and yet his experience is vast. How does one get the opportunities which have been afforded to Mr Korski? Do you need to be a member of a special club from a very young age? Everything about Korski points to military intelligence, so to find him on the same advisory board as a Mossad-linked Epstein associate isn’t too much of a shock, but it does deserve further scrutiny.

This is especially true now that Daniel Korski has left public office and set up a venture capital firm which specifically funds government-related tech startups. While Korski wants to publicly appear to have left government work, it is pretty clear that, upon further inspection, he hasn’t drifted too far from the authorities. So, let us look at Mr Korski’s history in more detail and work our way forward towards his more current projects. In doing so, I truly believe that you will not be able to deny his continuing role as an intelligence operative. You will also be shown evidence of his dystopian side projects and connections to one of the largest growing, government-backed mass surveillance projects in the world. This is an introduction to Daniel Korski, one of the creators of the current digital panopticon.

Daniel Korski’s Curious Past

Henryk Korski, grandfather of Daniel Korski eluded the Nazi’s whilst living in Poland in the 1940s. After the war, he would join the Polish Communist Party and by the mid-to-late 60s he was working in the Ministry of Foreign Trade. But a decade later, when his grandson Daniel was born, the whole family had already relocated to Copenhagen. If you were to go by Daniel Korski’s Wikipedia page then you would be told that his family were expelled from Poland in the late 1960s. But, if you were to look behind the scenes at Korski’s Wikipedia pages history then you’d discover that someone disagreed with that description of events.

On 21st April 2013 someone edited this part of Daniel’s Wiki page. This editor wanted people to know: “Korski is the son of Polish Jewish refugees, who fled persecution.” I decided to see if I could trace the I.P. Address of the person who made this change. I managed to track the computer to Brussels in Belgium and the edit was made while Daniel Korski was living in the Belgian capital when working as an advisor to the Vice President of the European Commission. It’s also just before he left that post and headed off to become a special advisor to the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron. It seems that Daniel Korski wanted everyone to believe that his parents had fled persecution in Poland, but was this true?

Daniel Korski himself would eventually head to Twitter to show people the evidence that his parents were Jewish refugees fleeing persecution. He would post two images of official court documents sealed in plastic sleeves and describe it as evidence of a pogrom. For those who are unaware, a pogrom is described as “an organized massacre, especially of Jews”. But do the documents supplied by Daniel Korski provide any evidence of a massacre of Jewish people? The straight answer is a definite no. The court papers Korski so proudly presents on Twitter do not mention Judaism at all, but they do mention Henryk Korski’s stance on the war between Israel and Egypt. The documents, which were written in Polish, relate to a court case involving Henryk Korski and his employer.

Henryk demanded to be reinstated into his previously held position in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Trade and compensation to be paid for the wages he had been denied. The court refused Mr. Korski’s application and the Korski family would soon move to Denmark, a decision which Henryk himself said turned out to be a lucky move. There is no massacre of Jews in Poland at this time and there is no pogrom involving Korski’s family either. In fact the last recorded pogrom happened in 1946. Instead, Daniel Korski is caught misleading the public in an attempt to appear as though his parents were Jewish refugees fleeing the threat of death in communist Poland. Is it any wonder then that in the same year as Daniel Korski was making up parts of his family’s history, he would also be appointed as vice president of the United Kingdom’s Jewish Leadership Council.

Daniel Korski grew up in Denmark, so how did he become such an important part of the British government? Korski didn’t start studying for his degree until 1997 when he was 20 years old. He would attend the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and would later attend Cambridge University for his Masters. He was either well connected or very talented, maybe even both, as by the age of 25 he was working for ex-Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown as Head of Political-Military Affairs while Ashdown was serving in the office of High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina. Korski would hold that position between 2002 until 2004 and he would then go on to be the Committee Specialist for the UK House of Commons Defence Committee. That short term position would be followed by his first official role overseas on behalf of the British government. In 2005, Korski would be in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was officially advising the Karzai government on counter-narcotic operations. He would also soon become part of the UK Government’s “Stabilisation Unit” for the war-torn country.

His next appointment, in 2007, was a move to Iraq as the team leader for the Basrah Provincial Reconstruction Team and during this work in Afghanistan and Iraq, Korski became a senior advisor to the US State Department. With all this experience, we are able to see that Daniel Korski, who was still only 30 years old, had very clear intelligence connections. So it will come as no surprise that in 2009 Daniel Korski helped to found the European Council on Foreign Relations where he would also be named a “Senior Policy Fellow”. Korski would, soon after the creation of the European CFR, become an advisor to the vice president of the European Commission, Catherine Ashton, also referred to as Baroness Ashton of Upholland.

In 2013, Korski would return to the UK as a special advisor to the David Cameron government. In May 2015, he would take up the position as deputy head of policy at 10 Downing Street and would stay in that position until Cameron stood down following his defeat in the EU referendum. The Brexit defeat hit everyone involved in the Cameron administration like a hurricane. Many of the politicians who orchestrated the lacklustre campaign for Britain remaining part of the EU immediately stepped down and some went into hiding.

Quite amazingly for any advisor to a Conservative government, Daniel Korski had managed to get through almost 15 years in leading Whitehall positions without being involved in a single sex scandal; at least that’s what he thought. Yet, on 14th November 2017, the Telegraph, in an article entitled “David Cameron aide denies groping television writer at Downing Street event,” the paper named Daniel Korski as the man who allegedly groped producer Daisy Goodwin. The article states:

“Daniel Korski, who left his post as special adviser following the Brexit vote, admitted that he had met the TV producer in Number 10 on two occasions, but said that any accusation of inappropriate behaviour was “not only totally false but also totally bizarre”

Ms Goodwin, 55, has claimed that she was “summoned” to Downing Street to discuss a proposed TV show when Mr Cameron was Prime Minister and an official told her she looked like a Bond girl before putting his hand on her breast as she went to leave.” Korski, by the time the sexual assault accusation had been made public, had started his own venture capital firm called simply “Public” or Public.io. Even though he was officially outside government at the time, Korski’s capitalist venture would specifically focus on tech startups designed for government applications. They set up base at an address in 1 Horseguards Avenue, Westminster, just opposite the HQ for the UK Ministry of Defence. Public.io also owns Eva Health Technology, previously named Microtest Ltd, which supplies patient management systems for healthcare professionals, including everything from simple customer booking software through to documentation software for vaccines.

In 2018, Korski would become Chairman and Co-Founder of the Govtech Summit, which is planned to be held each year in Paris and is a global stage to pitch next-generation technologies to governments from around the world. Govtech is a place where Daniel Korski and his Public.io business partner, Alexander de Carvalho, can introduce the world to such tech startups as Ehud Barak’s Carbyne, a company frequently advertised by Public.io and Govtech even though they are not direct investors in the Israeli firm. It was also in 2018 that the Healthtech Advisory Board, supposedly the idea of Matt Hancock, was formed and began to bring together such people as Nicole Junkermann and Daniel Korski to help create the future blueprint for the hi-tech “transformation” of the UK’s public health sector.

Some members of the Healthtech Advisory Board, (Rear) Daniel Korski, Parker Moss, Nicola Blackwood, Nicole Junkermann (Front) Dr Ben Goldacre and Matt Hancock

But Korski, since leaving official government employment, has been involved in other activities too. One of his other enterprises is with a man who already has a foothold in the mass surveillance business via a government application and who intends to repeat his early successes on a global scale, as well as many other interesting characters. Please, take your predesignated seats, strap yourself in and welcome to Daniel Korski’s Panopticon.

Enter the Panopticon

Nicole Junkermann and Daniel Korski have many common interests in the big tech sector. In 2017 and 2018, they both began to invest in and focus on mass surveillance technology and future healthcare-related tech with great intensity. If one didn’t know any better, one might come to the conclusion that both Junkermann and Korski had inside knowledge of a coming healthcare crisis, such as a pandemic. Conveniently for Korski’s and Junkermann’s investment portfolios, the current pandemic has become an excuse for government to take away our current civil liberties and implement widespread mass surveillance technologies on an unwitting public.

While Junkermann was personally investing with Epstein and Thiel in Ehud Barak’s Carbyne911, Korski was supporting similar projects in the UK. On 26 March 2018, Daniel Korski became the director of the UK registered company Panopticon Technologies Limited. If you were to go to their previous website, Panopticon.Tech, then you’d be met by a dead link, but the Wayback Machine captured their original site twice in 2018.

The founding team at Panopticon Technologies included:

  • Sir Mark Rowley QPM who is described as “one of the most respected and decorated police leaders in the UK”. Rowley had led the national police counter terrorism effort as Assistant Met Commissioner in the UK.
  • Alastair Aitken CBE, who helped restructure the Army in the UK, informed by his three decades of experience in the UK military. He was also heralded as helping to redesign US military strategy and was involved in every complicated war zone over the last three decades.
  • Mark Austin, a former global board member of PricewaterhouseCoopers and senior executive at IBM. An expert in finance, technology and corporate governance.
  • Dale Murray, a partner in the digital strategy consultancy Founders Technology. She was a co-founder of Omega Logic as well as being another advisor to David Cameron on the “Business Taskforce”.
  • Max Chambers, who is also part of Korski’s Public.io and was a former senior advisor to David Cameron. He was principal adviser on all aspects of home affairs policy, including security, immigration, counter-extremism, policing and criminal justice.

There are two other important players who also played major parts in the creation of Panopticon Technologies. One is Mike Iiams, the CEO and President of Alcohol Monitoring Systems Inc., one of the leading electronic monitoring companies globally. The second is a man named Alasdair James Eli Truett. These last two men should be examined in greater detail.

SCRAM Systems and Mike Iiams

Alcohol Monitoring Systems Inc. was founded in Colorado by Michael Leonard Iiams among others. Iiams would go on to be a very successful President and CEO of Alcohol Monitoring Systems/SCRAM for almost 20 years. His name would also be on the patent as one of the inventors of the SCRAM Systems Bracelet, a useful technology designed specifically for use by professional law enforcement. America has a well-developed law enforcement technologies industry and it also has plenty of problem drinkers. Police departments all over the country are equipped with some of the most state-of-the-art equipment available. One of the first successful forms of police technology to be widely adopted by many states was an alcohol detection system, which was used to track problematic drinkers who would commit offences while under the influence. This system was a simple tool in dealing with crimes related to alcohol abuse.

In 1985, Dr. Daniel J. Brown of Indiana University School of Medicine published studies on the subject of measuring volatile substances through the skin including sensing alcohol in sweat. By 1991, the first patent was filed for the Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor (SCRAM) System. In 2005, the SCRAM system was monitoring 1,700 offenders a day and the program was active in 30 states. Over the following decade and a half, improvements in technologies have seen the addition of further functions on top of the capabilities of the original device. By the rollout of the 4th generation of this technology, it had reduced in size and included the introduction of GPS tracking that would also allow the police to monitor people on house arrest.

Today, this technology has developed into a multifaceted tracking bracelet that allows officers to monitor suspects via a tablet or a mobile phone and it is being rolled out globally. Mike Iiams inclusion into Korski’s Panopticon Technologies came just before SCRAM Systems tagging technology won UK Home Office backing for its use in tackling Britain’s problem drinkers. In 2020, national rollouts were announced in Wales, England, and the Netherlands with the intention to continue its expansion into other countries. According to Public Health England, alcohol-related crime costs the UK economy more than £21.5bn a year and the Ministry of Justice has declared that the Alcohol Abstinence Monitoring Requirement (AAMR) can be imposed by courts in accordance with community-based orders, which allows for the use of these “next-generation” SCRAM Systems bracelets, referred to in the UK as “peace tags”.

Although Mike Iiams is not listed as a director of Panopticon Technologies in the official UK companies database, he is listed as someone with significant control of the company with shares of over 25%. Iiams has also worked for the accounting firm Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. in Alaska, during the building of the TransCanada pipeline, and has been in a senior executive role with JD Edwards, which is now part of Oracle.

Alasdair James Eli Truett

The other person of significance, who was at one point a director at Panopticon Technologies alongside Korski, is Alasdair Truett. Truett’s involvement in the project makes for a fascinating addition to PT, as his background is in military intelligence. Truett’s LinkedIn shows him simply as an officer in the British Army for over 20 years between 1997 and 2017, but the title of officer seriously understates Lt Col Alasdair Truett MBE’s experience.

In the British Army, “Alasdair was advising, planning and executing domestic and overseas intelligence and security policy and operations,” as described on the homepage of Cerebra Global Strategy. His profile goes on to tell us:

“He has operated at the political, strategic and tactical levels for national intelligence, national influence, small and large scale wars and counter-terrorism. Since 2017, Alasdair has provided advice and commercial services to leaders in governments and corporates on a spectrum of matters to do with national, corporate and personal intelligence, security and leadership.”

Truett was not just your average garden variety grunt with a gun on the British Army payroll, Lieutenant Colonel Alasdair Truett was in fact a very focused specialist in the field of military intelligence. Truett claims to have only been at Panopticon Technologies for its first 7 months of operation, afterwards he would found both Fortisat, followed by Cerebra Global Strategy Ltd.

In a Cyber Unplugged podcast entitled Social Engineering: The Threat Is Coming From Inside The HouseTruett describes Fortisat as “a national security advisory and business intelligence company that looks at ‘human network intelligence’ and offers advice to governments on emerging technologies that will enhance their national security.”

Flash in the Pan(opticon)

So, why has Panopticon Technologies recently gone dark? Although it is still an active company, the pulling of the Panopticon.Tech website seems to suggest that the enterprise is on hold, or about to be abandoned. But these data hungry lobbyists for government mass surveillance often work in the shadows.

What do we know about Panopticon Technologies? They described themselves as “a new, ethical, tech-enabled UK security company” and have stated that “we are passionate about new technology and providing immigration, police, intelligence and probation officers with high quality hardware and software to enhance their day-to-day work in monitoring offenders and protecting the public.” But their method, described as using “new behavioural and compliance models powered by cutting-edge analysis,” may have been too much for supporters to bear after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Korski and his Public.io, led by Max Chambers, may have been rash to launch PT so publicly in the first place. For a Panopticon to be successful, the inmates must know that there is the potential for them to be observed and that is very much the society we find ourselves in today. In this vast cyber-Panopticon, the masses are being observed by the few, and people like Daniel Korski, Alasdair Truett, Nicole Junkermann, Ehud Barak, and Mike Iiams lobby governments to expand and normalise their own homeland mass surveillance programmes. It only takes one government to agree to private companies being responsible for the mass surveillance of their populations for this trend to begin to take a permanent place in our societies. Now, with Covid-19, there are many excuses to implement panopticonic technologies to further the observation power of the few over the many.

Korski has positioned himself to be one of the most influential players in the modern UK government tech sector. He has used his many UK government connections to benefit himself financially and has been eager to remain publicly affiliated with the ruling UK Conservative government since leaving Whitehall. Korski’s Public.io venture capital firm is located at the heart of the UK MoD and is just a stone’s throw away from the UK Parliament. His entry into military intelligence at such a young age suggests he was recruited by an intelligence agency before attending university. He would start studying for his first degree later than most, at the age of 20, leaving us with a small two year gap in his timeline.

Before he’d even reached his thirties, and with no obvious experience in fighting the war on drugs, Korski would become a counter-narcotic operations advisor to the relatively recently installed Afghani leader, Hamid Karzai. Karzai’s brother, Wali Karzai, would later be revealed to have been on the payroll of Western intelligence agencies and also one of Afghanistan’s most prominent, and notorious drug traffickers. His drug trafficking activities were allegedly protected by his brother’s government and his CIA benefactors.

Korski was also heavily involved in the UK government’s stabilisation and reconstruction projects in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He was even acting as a senior advisor to the US Department of Defense just before he would help create the European Council on Foreign Relations. His intelligence links led him to become one of the most important advisors during the David Cameron government.

His links with military intelligence have become clearer since he’s officially left the halls of power, with Korski’s Panopticon Technologies bringing some of the leading advocates for government overreach who also have deep links to military intelligence. Alasdair Truett, Alastair Aitken, Mark Rowley and Max Chambers have all had leading roles in the creation of the modern intelligence networks in the UK for both homeland security and global intelligence strategies. Korski’s work on the Govtech summit has been keenly supported by French President Emmanuel Macron, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Matt Hancock. Korski’s work has also been a vehicle for the normalisation of the use of public big data by private companies.

Daniel Korski listens to Canadian PM Justin Trudeau at Govtech Summit 2019

The NHS Healthtech Advisory Board gives us a brief glimpse inside the on-going creation of the modern digital panopticon. It let us see some of the intelligence-linked tech sector giants vying for opportunities to gain access to mass national databases. Junkermann’s Carbyne911 and Korski’s Panopticon Technologies are the monsters lurking in the shadows of the big tech world. They are constantly circling the part of the public sector that they see as soft targets, because control over the data from the public sector means access to every piece of private information from every citizen. Korski and Junkermann may have beautiful smiles and a charming way about them, but they are simply cogs in a machine leading us towards a dystopian future.

So, who is Daniel Korski actually working for? His deep love and support for the European Union suggests that his whole-hearted allegiance is to the European project. But with his globalist back story, his establishment connections, and his association with both public and private intelligence agencies, Daniel Korski would be a useful asset for any power with a similar agenda of creating a digital Panopticon.

Johnny Vedmore is a completely independent investigative journalist and musician from Cardiff, Wales. His work aims to expose the powerful people who are overlooked by other journalists and bring new information to his readers. If you require help, or have a tip for Johnny, then get in touch via johnnyvedmore.com or by reaching out to johnnyvedmore@gmail.com

October 2, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Climate or Environment?

Klimaatwaarheid | September 19, 2020

The dirty side of so called green energy is somewhat underexposed. In this video I try to shed some light on that dark side.

October 1, 2020 Posted by | Environmentalism, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

David Swanson on “Leaving WW2 Behind”

Review by Kevin Barrett | September 28, 2020

Peace activist David Swanson is the author of the new book Leaving World War II Behind. He debunks the standard misconceptions about the mythical “good war.”

WAS IT ABOUT SAVING JEWS?

“In reality, the U.S. and British governments engaged for years in massive propaganda campaigns to build war support but never made any mention of saving Jews.” (p.21)

WAS IT ABOUT STOPPING HITLER’S EUGENICS?

“Eugenics had British and U.S. roots and was popularized by Americans in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century…eugenics was funded by the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman railroad fortune.” (chapter 4)

WAS IT ABOUT STOPPING NAZI SLAVE LABOR?

“As I write this, California is using prisoners to fight forest fires, paying them $1 an hour…” (p.55)

WAS IT ABOUT STOPPING NAZI “LEBENSRAUM” EXPANSION?

“In Mein Kampf, Hitler invoked the American conquest of ‘the West’ as a model for Nazi continental territorial expansion in ‘the East.’” (p.67)

WERE WE FIGHTING GOOSE-STEPPING MANIACS DRUNK ON THEIR “ONE ARMED SALUTE”?

“If you do a web search for images of ‘Bellamy salute’ you find countless black-and-white photographs of U.S. children and adults with their right arms raised stiffly out in front of them in what will strike most people as a Nazi salute. From the early 1890s through 1942 the United States used the Bellamy salute…” (p.94)

DID WE STOP THE NAZIS FROM CONQUERING AND OCCUPYING THE WHOLE WORLD?

“The Nazis did not have the ability to occupy even half of the Soviet Union. Some of the nations they occupied in Europe, as we will see below, effectively challenged their rule. Nonviolent resistance in Germany itself, as we will also see below, showed great potential. Nonviolent resistance to tyranny around the world, as we will see, in the past 75 years has proven itself more effective than armed struggle. The idea that Nazism could have lasted and grown to eventually include an attack on the United States is more fantasy than history.” (p.130)

WOULD PEACE HAVE BEEN WORSE?

“In recorded human history, there’s no worse catastrophe than WWII. There’s nothing else that did as much immediate and lasting damage in the space of less than a decade. WWII killed 70 to 85 million human beings. In most wars prior to WWII, including WWI, the majority of deaths were of participants in the wars. With WWII and most wars that have followed it, the majority of deaths have been civilians. WWII injured, traumatized, rendered homeless, and displaced millions of people on an unmatched scale.” (p.147)

WAS THE NAZI OCCUPATION OF FRANCE A “REGIME OF TERROR”?

No, that was the US occupation of France: “In the port city of Le Havre, the mayor was bombarded with letters from angry residents complaining about drunkenness, jeep accidents, sexual assault — ‘a regime of terror,’ as one put it, imposed by bandits in uniform.” As for the US occupation of Germany, which continues at a lesser scale today: “Other estimates… go as high as 190,000 rapes, just in Germany, just by U.S. troops.” (p.157)

DID THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS OF JAPAN END THE WAR AND SAVE LIVES?

“The United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that, ‘… certainly prior to 31 December, 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.’” (p.161)

DID THE US PUBLIC SUPPORT WWII?

“In May, 1940, 93% of Americans opposed declaring war on Germany.” (p.172) Only the treasonous Pearl Harbor deception could brainwash Americans into supporting the war.

WAS THE POSTWAR WORLD BETTER?

“World War II created taxes.” (p.178) Now the feds and their bankster masters loot and pillage American taxpayers and the world, claiming that every anti-imperialist leader in the world is a new Hitler. Among the endless parade of “new Hitlers”: Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al Assad, Vladimir Putin…who will be next?

WAS IT A WAR FOR FREEDOM?

“What happens, predictably and consistently, is just the reverse of wars protecting freedoms… liberties are restricted in the name of war.” (p.233) With every war the US fights, the less free it gets. One more big war, and there may be no freedom left at all.

Listen HERE

October 1, 2020 Posted by | Book Review, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Crew Behind New Film About Estonia Tragedy Charged With Violating Sanctity of Underwater Grave

By Igor Kuznetsov – Sputnik – 01.10.2020

Recent underwater footage of the Estonia ferry resting on the bottom of the Baltic Sea has uncovered extensive damage on the starboard side, including a previously unknown 4-metre hole, fuelling renewed interest in the case and demands for a new investigation.

Two Swedes that were part of a crew that worked on a new documentary about the 1994 death of the Estonia ferry have been charged for violating the Estonia Act, which specifically prohibits citizens from the signatory counties to even approach the wreck.

The film team included Swedish, Norwegian, and German citizens, while the boat’s crew included German and Polish citizens as well. The purpose of the documentary was to try and find out the truth about the tragedy, which is the largest peacetime maritime catastrophe in the Baltic Sea.

“The grave peace at the Estonia has been violated by the incident”, chamber prosecutor Helene Gestrin at the National Unit against International and Organised Crime, said in a press release. “The Estonia is located in international waters, but to protect the wreck, there is special legislation in place based on an agreement between several Baltic Sea states that Sweden has signed”, she reminded. The law of the the sanctity of the sea grave has been signed by Estonia and Finland as well.

The filming took place in September 2019, when a German-flagged boat sent an underwater drone to the wreck of the Estonia in a bid to uncover new details about its sudden and tragic death. Significantly, Germany is not among the signatories of the Estonia Act. The penalty for the crime is a fine and imprisonment for up to two years.

“The law has never been tried by a court before. The question is whether Swedish law outweighs the fact that the underwater activities took place in international waters and by a German-flagged boat”, Helene Gestrin said.

37-year-old shipwreck expert Linus Andersson from Gothenburg is one of the accused. He maintains that he hasn’t done anything wrong.

“Sweden cannot assert its own legislation in international waters”, he told national broadcaster SVT. “I understand that the law is meant to protect the Estonia wreck. The ethical and moral aspects were also important to me. But when I heard that the relatives’ association almost encouraged us [to perform a new survey], I felt safe”, Linus Andersson said.

He criticised the previous surveys as “deficient” for not being methodical enough and not following the same pattern and expressed hope that his finds, which include a previously unknown 4-metre hole in the starboard side, will pave the way for a new, thorough investigation.

​The find also rekindled the old criticism of the previous investigation, which placed the blame on a faulty bow visor that allowed thousands of tonnes of water to flood in, as hasty and insufficient. It also rejuvenated popular alternative theories, such as the massive ferry, which, as former Estonian public prosecutor Margus Kurm speculated, could have carried a “sensitive consignment” of sorts, sinking after a collision with a submarine. These theories were also fuelled by the Swedish government deciding to drop thousands of tonnes of pebbles on the site while the previous inquiry was still underway.

In the aftermath of the film, Estonia survivors also penned an open letter demanding the Swedish government hold a new investigation.

While Prime Minister Stefan Löfven finally broke the silence and responded to the criticism by saying that he didn’t rule out new dives at the Estonia site, prosecutor Gestrin stressed this is virtually impossible with current legislation. She emphasised that it is “completely forbidden” – even for the Swedish Accident Investigation Board – to carry out dives at the wreck site.

The Estonia sank in the Baltic Sea on 28 September 1994, on its way from Tallinn to Stockholm, killing 852 people.

October 1, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

The Leahy Laws: why Biden’s promise to Israel is illegal

By Zarefah Baroud | MEMO | September 30, 2020

While co-hosting an interview for the Palestine Chronicle, I asked Professor Richard Falk, a former UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, about his thoughts on Kamala Harris’ promise to maintain unconditional aid to Israel. Harris is the Democratic Party vice presidential candidate in November’s election.

“I am disappointed of course by the Harris-Biden positions on Israel,” replied Falk. “I would have hoped for something closer to what Bernie Sanders was saying as a way of shifting the policies closer to what I think a majority of American people would support and want. Again, it illustrates this disparity between the will of the people and the will of the governing elites… I don’t think we can be very hopeful. Possibly on the annexation issue… but I am not very optimistic that there will be any changes.”

Once more, the only option that this presidential election cycle gives American voters is to choose between the lesser of two evils. It is particularly difficult to find any differences between the two candidates, sitting President Donald Trump and Joe Biden, especially their attitudes towards the Israeli occupation and American responsibility for this as the Israel Defence Forces’ largest sponsor.

Notably, the “progressive” Biden does not have a discourse which is more developed than his conservative opponent. In July, he ordered the removal of any reference to the “Israeli occupation” from his campaign platform, which contradicts international recognition of Israel’s presence in the Palestinians territories as a belligerent occupation.

Progressive Americans have organised against Trump for his frequent violations of constitutional law and lack of human rights standards, domestically and internationally. Many, though, have missed that Biden has already committed himself to campaign promises which guarantee not only a lack of regard for international law, but also that he is ready to violate US law.

According to Tony Blinken, Joe Biden’s senior advisor, “He [Biden] would not tie military assistance to Israel to any political decisions that it makes. Period. Full stop. He said it; he’s committed to it.”

Of course, Biden’s running mate Harris has reaffirmed the sentiments communicated by Blinken. She said during an online event on 26 August that, “Joe [Biden] has made it clear he will not tie security assistance to any political decisions that Israel makes, and I couldn’t agree more.”

These various statements should have struck many as more problematic than they did. After all, Biden and Harris are pledging to break US law for Israel. In 1998, the first of what are known as the Leahy Laws were established by Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy. The first institution of this resides in the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) of 1961 in Section 620M, and the second in the Department of Defence appropriations bill/the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014. Essentially, the law states that foreign military assistance must be suspended or discontinued if there exists credible information that the recipient foreign security force unit has committed a gross human rights violation. A “gross human rights violation” is defined by the FAA as: “Cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment or punishment; prolonged detention without charges and trial; causing the disappearance of persons by the abduction and clandestine detention of those persons; and other flagrant denials of the right to life, liberty, or the security of person.”

Since 1946, the American government has provided billions in military aid to Israel, as well billions in loan guarantees to help Israel develop its qualitative military edge which it uses almost exclusively to torment and slaughter Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Specific infractions include Israeli prisons holding around 700 Palestinian children, over 75 per cent of whom report being tortured and physically abused; the use of white phosphorus on civilian targets in Gaza; and the bullets that have murdered and disabled thousands of peaceful Palestinian demonstrators.

In theory, a single violation is enough to have military aid revoked from the violating unit — in this case Israel — as per the Leahy Laws. The most reputable human rights organisations have reported on and recorded details of Israel’s violations extensively. However, aid packages to Israel have been increased annually, with the help of Joe Biden. Only a single publically known investigation has ever taken place against Israel, in 2006, even though the author of the law, Senator Leahy, requested that the State Department investigate Israeli human rights violations in 2016.

In 2017, and again in 2019, Minnesota Representative Betty McCollum drafted a bill, now classified under H.R. 2407: Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act. The bill employs the Leahy Laws to argue for an inclusion into US legislation of the issue of Palestinian youth forced to stand before Israel military courts, and therefore revoke aid from Israeli military and police units which carry out such practices.

In August of this year, Representative McCollum similarly released H.R. 8050: Israeli Annexation Non-Recognition Act, which vows to revoke aid from Israel that could be used to directly or indirectly assist the annexation of Palestinian land in the West Bank.

This legislation has garnered more and more support from representatives around the country, including Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (NY-14), Rashida Tlaib (MI-13), and Ilhan Omar (MN-05), reserving a space for Palestine in American politics. Unfortunately, though, the conversation amongst election candidates remains uninformed, trivial, and dangerous.

Regardless of who prevails in November, both presidential candidates undoubtedly have an “unshakeable” commitment to the apartheid regime that is Israel and must be held to account according to US law at the very least. This is not about electability, but complicity in crimes against humanity (and possibly war crimes), and American voters have every right to insist that they raise their standards.

September 30, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

YouTube Regrets – #PropagandaWatch

Corbett • 09/30/2020

Watch on Archive / BitChute / LBRY / Minds / YouTube

Are you concerned that watching YouTube-recommended CNN propaganda has turned you into a raging imperial warmonger? Or that that MSNBC video in the sidebar harmed you with its medical misinformation? Well, the Mozilla Foundation wants to hear all about your #YouTubeRegrets.

SHOW NOTES
8Gc58 links to Mozilla campaign

YouTube Regrets Introduction

About YouTube Regrets

How to save the library – Questions For Corbett #069

Episode 342 – Pricking the Filter Bubble

History of Mozilla

Pledge for a Healthy Internet

Firefox browser maker Mozilla is taking on fake news

[Don’t] Download RegretsReporter today

CNN: #Gaddafi arming troops with Viagra, again!

JUST GET THE DAMN FLU VACCINE!!!

Is There A Flu Shot / COVID Link? – Questions For Corbett #068

7-year-old girl’s heartbreaking cry for help

September 30, 2020 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Engineering Contagion: UPMC, Corona-thrax and “the Darkest Winter”

Researchers at a BSL-3 lab tied to the organizers of the 2001 Dark Winter simulation, DARPA, and the post-9/11 biodefense industrial complex are genetically modifying anthrax to express Covid-19 components, according to FOIA documents.

By Whitney Webb | The Last American Vagabond | September 25, 2020

Soon after having been fired from his post as secretary of the treasury in December 2002, after a policy clash with the president, Paul O’Neill became a trustee of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Despite having just worked under and clashed with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, it wasn’t until O’Neill began answering to UPMC CEO Jeffrey Romoff as a member of the Center’s board that he chose to publicly denounce a superior as “evil.”

He wants to destroy competition. He wants to be the only game in town,” O’Neill would later state of Romoff, adding that “after 18 months I quit [the UPMC board] in disgust” due to Romoff’s “absolute control” over the board’s actions. O’Neill subsequently noted that UPMC “board members who have wealth of hundreds of millions of dollars are not willing to take this guy on.” When pressed by a local reporter, O’Neill further elaborated that he had been told by other board members that they were “afraid” of Romoff because Romoff might “harm them in some way.”

O’Neill’s criticisms of Romoff are hardly an outlier, as local community activists and even a state attorney general have noted that UPMC’s board lets Romoff do as he pleases.

Jeffrey Romoff has ruled UPMC with an iron fist since his predecessor, Thomas Detre, had a heart attack in 1992. As a result of the Center’s massive wealth accumulation, at first spurred by his magic touch for receiving National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, Detre was able to use the financial power afforded to him to consolidate control over enough of the University of Pittsburgh to create his “own personal fiefdom,” which is now the stand-alone corporation known as UPMC.

Not long after Romoff took over the Center’s reins, he made his intentions clear to faculty and staff, stating at one 1995 UPMC meeting that his “vision” for the future of American health care was “the conversion of health care from social good to a commodity.” Motivated by profit above all else, Romoff aggressively expanded UPMC, gobbling up community hospitals, surgery centers, and private practices to create a “health-care network” that has expanded throughout much of Pennsylvania and even abroad to other countries, including China. Under Romoff, UPMC has also expanded into the health-insurance business, with 40 percent of the medical claims it pays out going straight back into places of care that are owned by UPMC—meaning UPMC is essentially paying itself.

In addition, since UPMC is officially a “charitable nonprofit corporation,” it is exempt from property taxes and has special access to the tax-exempt municipal bond market. UPMC can also solicit tax-deductible grants from private individuals and organizations, as well as governments. These grants totaled over $1 billion dollars between 2005 and 2017.

Despite these perks being officially justified because of UPMC’s “charitable institution” status, the UPMC board, with Romoff at the top, have seen their own multimillion-dollar-per-year salaries continue to climb. Perhaps this perk also comes from UPMC being a nonprofit corporation, as there are no stockholders to whom Romoff and the board must explain their increasingly exorbitant salaries. For instance, Romoff made $8.97 million last year as UPMC’s CEO, a marked increase over the $6.12 million he had raked in the prior year.

UPMC’s financial chicanery is so out of control that even Pennsylvania’s attorney general has taken action against it, suing UPMC in February 2019 for violations of the state’s charity laws based on their “unjust enrichment” and engaging in “unfair, fraudulent or deceptive acts or practices.” Though UPMC decided to settle out of court, the Center and Romoff came out of the affair relatively unscathed.

Now, thanks to the crisis caused by Covid-19, UPMC is once again on the path toward growing even larger and more powerful in pursuit of Romoff’s ultimate goal, which is, in his own words, to make UPMC the “Amazon of health care.”

In this fourth installment of the The Last American Vagabond series Engineering Contagion: Amerithrax, Coronavirus and the Rise of the Biotech-Industrial Complex”, the “nonprofit” health-care behemoth that is UPMC is squarely placed at the intersection of post-9/11 “biodefense” public-private partnerships; corporate-funded academics who shape public policy on behalf of their private-sector benefactors; and risky research on dangerous pathogens that threatens to unleash the very “bioterror” that these institutions claim to guard against.

The Odd Trajectory of UPMC’s Covid-19 Vaccine Efforts

In January 2020, when much of the world remained blissfully unaware of the coming global pandemic, UPMC was already at work developing a vaccine to protect against the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, known as SARS-CoV-2. That month, before the state of Pennsylvania had a single case of Covid-19, UPMC formed a “coronavirus task force,” which was initially focused on lobbying the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to obtain samples of live SARS-CoV-2 for research purposes. That research was to be conducted at the Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL) housed within UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research. A day after the director of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, W. Paul Duprex, revealed UPMC’s efforts to access the SARS-CoV-2 virus, he announced that the virus samples, containing an estimated 50 to 60 million coronavirus particles, were already en route to the university. At the time, UPMC was one of only a handful of institutions on the CDC’s short list to receive live SARS-CoV-2 samples.

UPMC later stated that they began work on a vaccine for Covid-19 on January 21st, weeks before the February 14th announcement that the virus was on its way to the university. That original vaccine candidate used the published genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, released in early January 2020 by Chinese researchers, to synthetically produce SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins that would be transported into cells by an adenoviral vector, which is commonly used in a variety of vaccines. The vaccine candidate was nicknamed PittCoVacc, short for Pittsburgh Coronavirus Vaccine.

A little over a month after the live SARS-CoV-2 samples were received by UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, UPMC received a $5 million grant from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an international organization founded in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India along with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant was officially awarded to “an international academic-industry partnership” that the Center for Vaccine Research had recently formed with the Institut Pasteur in France and Austrian vaccine manufacturer Themis. Soon after, in May, Themis was acquired by vaccine giant Merck, which began recruiting volunteers for human trials earlier this month on September 11. Merck has incredibly close ties with UPMC, particularly its commercialization arm known as UPMC Enterprises.

The CEPI grant seems to have drastically altered the Center for Vaccine Research’s interest in the original adenovirus-vector vaccine candidate, PittCoVacc, as the CEPI grant was specifically aimed at funding a different vaccine candidate that instead uses the measles virus as a vector. The measles virus and the genetic manipulation of measles for use in the measles vaccine is, notably, the principal research interest and expertise of Center for Vaccine Research director Paul Duprex.

This measles-based vaccine candidate has been described as “a modified [genetically altered] measles virus that delivers bits of the new coronavirus into the body to prevent Covid-19” as well as an “attenuated [genetically modified yet weakened] measles virus as a vector with which to introduce genetic material from SARS-[CoV-]2 to the immune system.” The combination of this weakened measles virus and SARS-CoV-2, per Duprex, will produce a “more benign version of coronavirus [that] will acquaint a person’s immune system” with SARS-CoV-2. No vaccine using this modality has ever been licensed.

On April 2nd, less than a week after the CEPI award had been announced, the UPMC researchers who had developed the original vaccine candidate using the more traditional adenovirus-vector approach published a study in EBioMedicine (a publication of the medical journal Lancet) that reported promising results of their vaccine candidate in animal studies. The news that a US institution was among the first in the world to develop a Covid-19 vaccine candidate with promising results from an animal study was heavily amplified by mainstream US media outlets, with those reports noting that UMPC was requesting government permission to quickly move onto human trials.

This original vaccine candidate, however, was mysteriously dropped from subsequent reports and statements from UPMC regarding its Covid-19 vaccine efforts. Indeed, in recent months, Duprex’s statements on the center’s Covid-19 vaccine candidates no longer mention the once-promising PittCoVacc at all. Instead, new reports, citing Duprex, claim that the only UPMC vaccine candidates are the CEPI-funded measles-vaccine candidate and another, more mysterious vaccine candidate, whose nature has only been recently revealed by documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Equally odd is that recent media reports on the original vaccine candidate have stopped mentioning UPMC at all, instead citing only Themis, its new owner Merck, and France’s Institut Pasteur. There are no reports indicating a break-up of the original “academic-industry partnership” that had received the CEPI grant. It seems that this is what may have come to pass, as Duprex stated that the UPMC measles-vector vaccine candidate had partnered with the Serum Institute of India for mass production, first for trials and then for public use, depending on how the vaccine advances through the regulatory process. In contrast, Themis/Merck have stated that their vaccine is being produced in France. It remains unclear what the relation is between these two, and apparently analogous, vaccine candidates.

Though Duprex has been relatively forthcoming about the nature of the first UPMC vaccine candidate (i. e., the CEPI-funded measles-vector vaccine), he has been much more tight-lipped about its second vaccine candidate. In late August, he told the Pittsburgh Business Times that the second vaccine candidate that UPMC was developing “works by delivering genetic material coding for a viral protein instead of the entire weakened or killed virus as is standard in other vaccines.” Yet Duprex declined to state what vector will be used to deliver the genetic material into human cells. Recent FOIA revelations, nevertheless, have revealed that UPMC’s second vaccine candidate involves genetically engineering a combination of SARS-Cov-2 and anthrax, a substance better known for its potential use as a bioweapon.

Corona-thrax

The recently obtained documents reveal that the BSL-3 lab that is part of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research is conducting eyebrow-raising research involving combining SARS-CoV-2 with Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax infection. Per the documents, anthrax is being genetically engineered by a researcher, whose name was redacted in the release, so that it will express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is the part of the coronavirus that allows it to gain access into human cells. The researcher asserts that “the [genetically engineered anthrax/SARS-CoV-2 hybrid] can [be] used as a host strain to make SARS-CoV-2 recombinant S protein vaccine,” and the creation of said vaccine is the officially stated purpose of the research project. The documents were produced by the University of Pittsburgh’s Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), which held an emergency meeting on June 22nd of this year to “discuss specific protocols involving research with the coronavirus,” which included a vote on the aforementioned proposal.

Edward Hammond, the former director of the Sunshine Project, an organization that opposed chemical and biological weapons and the expansion of “dual use” biodefense/bioweapon research, obtained the documents. Other FOIA documents recently obtained by Hammond have revealed an “explosion” of risky Covid-19-related research at other academic institutions, such as the University of North Carolina, which has already had lab accidents involving genetically engineered variants of SARS-CoV-2.

Hammond told The Last American Vagabond that the experiment, which he dubs “Corona-thrax,” is “emblematic of the pointless research excesses that often characterize the response of scientists to the federal government throwing billions of dollars at health crises.” Hammond added, “While I don’t think that Corona-thrax would be infectious, it falls into the categories of pointless and crazy. The biggest immediate risk of all this activity is that a researcher will deliberately or inadvertently create a modified form of SARS-CoV-2 that is even more difficult to treat, or more deadly, and this virus will escape the lab. It only takes a stray droplet.”

Jonathan Latham, a virologist who previously taught at the University of Wisconsin and who is the current editor of Independent Science News, agreed with Hammond that the Corona-thrax experiment is odd and said that he was “concerned here specifically about the research process and the risks of these specific experiments at Pittsburgh.” In an interview with The Last American Vagabond, Latham asserted that it is “unusual by historical standards . . . the combining of two highly pathogenic organisms in a single experiment.” He did note, however, that such studies for the purposes of vaccine research have become more common in recent years, as is made clear in a 2012 study.

Few experiments have been conducted that specifically utilize anthrax in this way. Since 2000, the studies that have examined the use of genetically modified anthrax as a potential vaccine vector have been affiliated with Harvard University. One of these studies was on the use of anthrax as a vector in a potential HIV vaccine and was jointly conducted in 2000 by Harvard researchers and the vaccine company Avant Immunotherapeutics (now part of Celldex).

Despite reporting positive preliminary results in their experiments, Avant/Celldex did not fund further experiments into a vaccine that used this anthrax-based modality, and it does not currently market or have any such vaccine in its product pipeline. This suggests that, for whatever reason, this company did not see much value in this vaccine, despite the preliminary study with Harvard claiming that the methodology was safe and effective.

The Harvard researchers involved in that 2000 study, however, continued to investigate the possibility of an anthrax-based HIV vaccine in 2003, 2004, and 2005, though without corporate sponsorship. Related yet different research has explored the use of “disarmed” anthrax components as an adjuvant in vaccines and as the basis for enzyme-linked immunospot assays.

The aforementioned Harvard researchers patented their methodology of using anthrax in this way for the production of a vaccine in 2002. This means that the anthrax-based “vaccine” currently being developed by UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research would have to develop a new method that utilizes anthrax in much the same way so as not to infringe on the patent, which is unlikely. The other alternative is that UPMC would pay the patent holders for use of their methodology if they want to commercialize it in a vaccine. Yet, given UPMC’s business model in general, as well as that of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research specifically, this also seems unlikely.

Also odd is what sort of incentive UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research possesses for the Corona-thrax experiment. There are currently over a hundred vaccine candidates that use existing and tested vaccine platforms in pursuit of a Covid-19 vaccine, a fact Duprex himself has acknowledged. As Hammond told The Last American Vagabond, “It is perfectly obvious that there are numerous existing vaccine platforms for Covid-19 and that some of them will, sooner or more likely later, succeed. There is no serious need for some sort of quite strange bacterial platform, much less one that happens to be anthrax. It’s completely unnecessary and frankly bizarre.”

The Crown Jewel of the Biotech-Industrial Complex

UPMC

Ribbon cutting for the Center for Vaccine Research – From left: Donald S. Burke, U. S. Congressman Mike Doyle, Arthur S. Levine, Dan Onorato, Mark A. Nordenberg.

The Corona-thrax experiment is being conducted at the Center for Vaccine Research’s Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL), where the center’s work with pathogenic agents, such as anthrax and SARS-CoV-2, is conducted.

The creation of UPMC’s RBL was first announced in 2003, when the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, then and currently led by Anthony Fauci) stated it would fund the laboratory’s construction with an $18 million grant. It was originally planned to be mainly “dedicated to research on agents that cause naturally occurring and emerging infections, as well as potential agents of bioterrorism.” The plan to create the lab was part of the US government decision to dramatically ramp up “biodefense” research in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The lab was also intended to work on “developing a vaccine program focusing on basic and translational research” related to viruses of pandemic potential that are at risk of being “weaponized,” including SARS. After the creation of the lab was initially announced, the project expanded, eventually becoming UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, which was launched in 2007. The Center for Vaccine Research was the second such institution to be officially added to the NIAID’s “biodefense” RBL network.

The opening of both this lab and UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research was made reality thanks to the efforts of the main authors of the June 2001 Dark Winter bioterror simulation, a controversial exercise that eerily predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks as well as the initial, yet bogus, narrative that Iraq and Islamic extremist terror groups were responsible for those attacks. However, the anthrax used in the attacks was later revealed to be of US military origin. As noted in Part I of this series, participants in the Dark Winter exercise had foreknowledge of the anthrax attacks and others were involved in the subsequent “investigation,” which many experts and former FBI investigators describe as a cover-up.

Dark Winter was largely written by Tara O’Toole, Thomas Inglesby, and Randall Larsen, all three of whom played integral roles in the founding or operations of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, along with O’Toole’s mentor, D. A. Henderson. UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity was launched in September 2003, just days before the NIAID announced it would fund the RBL lab that would later become the UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research.

Notably, just days after the attacks on September 11, 2001, O’Toole, Inglesby, and Larsen personally briefed Vice President Cheney on Dark Winter. Simultaneously, Cheney’s office at the White House began taking the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin to prevent anthrax infection. In the weeks between that briefing and the 2001 anthrax attacks, Dark Winter participants and several associates of Cheney, namely members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) like Donald Kagan and Richard Perle, asserted that a bioterror attack involving anthrax would soon take place.

In the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, Henderson “was tapped by the federal government to vastly increase the number of [biodefense] labs, both to detect suspected pathogens like anthrax and to conduct bio-defense research, such as developing vaccines,” with the announcement of UPMC’s RBL being part of the launch of the O’Toole-led Center for Biosecurity at UPMC, where Henderson was named senior adviser. In 2003, the Center for Biosecurity was set up at UPMC partially at the request of Jeffrey Romoff to be “the country’s only think tank and research center devoted to the prevention and handling of biological attacks,” with UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research being the hub of a new “biodefense research” lab network Henderson was setting up and managing at the time. That network remains technically managed by the Fauci-led NIAID.

Also noteworthy is that the Center for Vaccine Research’s director, from its opening in 2007 until 2016, was Donald Burke. Burke is a former biodefense researcher for the US military at Fort Detrick and other installations and, immediately prior to heading the UPMC center, was a program director at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he worked closely with O’Toole and Inglesby.

At the time of the 2003 announcement regarding the creation of what would become UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, Tara O’Toole stated:

“This new laboratory will enable University of Pittsburgh medical researchers to delve further into possible treatments and to develop vaccines against diseases that might result from bioterrorist attack or from natural outbreaks.”

A few years later, after she was nominated to a top post at the Department of Homeland Security, O’Toole was slammed by experts over her excessive lobbying “for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security.” Rutgers microbiologist Richard Ebright remarked at the time that “she makes Dr. Strangelove look sane.” It was also noted in hearings that O’Toole had worked as a lobbyist for several “life sciences” companies specializing in the sale of biodefense products to the U.S. government, including Emergent Biosolutions – a very controversial company and a key suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The history of the Center for Vaccine Research’s RBL, particularly the network of people who prompted the lab’s creation, raises concerns about the nature of the Corona-thrax experiment currently being conducted within the facility. This is especially true because the researcher conducting the experiment appears to be ignorant about key parts of the research he or she is conducting.

For instance, the FOIA-redacted researcher incorrectly states that a recombinant virus proposed for use in the study is incapable of infecting human cells, while the IBC members note that this is not the case. In addition, the unnamed researcher falsely claimed that one of the viral vectors for use in the investigator’s study did not express Cas9 (a protein associated with CRISPR gene editing) and gRNA (“guide RNA,” also used in CRISPR) and was unaware that handling those agents requires an enhanced BSL-2 lab (BSL-2+) as opposed to a typical BSL-2 lab.

Apparently such errors among researchers involved in Covid-19 research at UPMC is not an anomaly. During another UPMC IBC meeting included in the FOIA release, the IBC noted the following about a separate research proposal:

“In the investigator’s notes in responses to changes requested by the IBC pre-reviewers, the investigator indicates that RNA from SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 infected cells will be obtained from BEI resources. Genomic RNA isolated from cells infected with SARS-CoV-1 is regulated as a Select Agent by the Federal Select Agent Program and neither the University nor this investigator are registered for possession and use of these materials [emphasis added] (SARS-CoV-1). The investigator must NOT obtain SARS-CoV-1 genomic RNA without prior consultation with the University’s RO/AROs for Select Agents.”

This part, in particular, caught the attention of Jonathan Latham, who noted that it was odd that “a university researcher is trying to obtain approval for an experiment which no one at the university is allowed to do.” Latham added in an interview that “apparently this applicant is totally ignorant of the regulatory environment and by extension the risks of SARS-CoV, which is a highly infectious virus whose escape from a lab has already led to at least one death.”

While Latham assumed that this was a “university researcher,” it is worth noting that the use of the UPMC Center for Vaccine Research’s RBL is not exclusive to researchers affiliated with the university. Indeed, as noted on the NIH website, “Investigators in academia, not-for-profit organizations, industry, and government studying biodefense and emerging infectious diseases may request the use of biocontainment laboratories,” including the RBL managed by the Center for Vaccine Research.

In addition, the Center for Vaccine Research website notes that “scientists from outside the University of Pittsburgh can work in the RBL through a collaboration or contract. Outside scientists must comply with all University of Pittsburgh training, documentation, regulatory, and medical requirements.” This means that outside scientists using the facility are also subject to IBC review. Both the NIH and Center for Vaccine Research sites note that, for an outside researcher to use the UPMC RBL facility, approval from the center’s director must be obtained.

Since the name of the Corona-thrax researcher is redacted, there is no way of knowing if he or she is affiliated with the university or a separate institution, corporation, or government agency. Regardless of who is conducting this experiment, however, it is possible to examine the history and motivations of the man who ultimately signed off on it—the Center for Vaccine Research’s director, Paul Duprex.

Paul Duprex: DARPA-Funded Researcher and Gain-of-Function Enthusiast

Director of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, W. Paul Duprex

Paul Duprex is a former chief scientist for Johnson & Johnson whose subsequent foray into academia was largely funded with research grants from the NIH and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Much of Duprex’s research has focused on recombinant (i. e., genetically engineered) viruses or viral evolution.

In terms of his research funded by DARPA, Duprex was most closely associated with DARPA’s “Prophecy” program, the creation of which was overseen by Michael Callahan. Callahan’s suspect past and his ties to the origin of the current Covid-19 crisis in Wuhan, China, were the subject of a recent Unlimited Hangout article by Raul Diego.

In that article, Diego notes that the now-defunct Prophecy program had “sought to ‘transform the vaccine and drug development enterprise from observational and reactive to predictive and preemptive’ through algorithmic programming techniques” and that the program further “proposed that ‘viral mutations and outbreaks could be predicted in advance to more rapidly counter the unknown disease with preemptive drug and vaccine development.”

By all indications, Prophecy was DARPA’s first major foray into “predictive” AI-powered health care, which has expanded considerably in the years since. It also involved a component, which Duprex was particularly involved in advancing, whereby the “predictive” viral evolutions algorithms would be “validated and tested . . . by using multiple selective pressures on at least three closely related virus strains in an experimental setting.”

Such experiments, like this study by Duprex, involved the genetic engineering of three viral pathogen strains and then seeing which would become most transmissible and virulent in an animal host. Such studies are often referred to as gain-of-function (GOF) research and are incredibly controversial given that they often create pathogens that are more virulent and/or transmissible than they otherwise would be. It is also worth noting that UPMC, before Duprex joined the center, had also received millions in funding from DARPA’s Prophecy program “to develop in vitro and computational models for predicting viral evolution under selection pressure from multiple evolutionary stressors.”

Duprex has also been involved in conducting research for DARPA’s current INTERfering and Co-Evolving Prevention and Therapy (INTERCEPT) program, a successor to Prophecy that “aims to harness viral evolution to create a novel, adaptive form of medical countermeasure—therapeutic interfering particles (TIPs)—that outcompetes viruses in the body to prevent or treat infection.” TIPs are genetically engineered viruses with defective genomes that theoretically compete with real viruses for viral components in the human body but “evolve with” the viruses they are meant to protect the body against and are “susceptible to mutation over time.”

The goal of the INTERCEPT program is to use TIPs as “therapeutics” and have them injected into the human body to “preemptively” protect against the virus from which a particular TIP was developed. It is worth noting that, while DARPA frames much of its gene-editing research (including its “genetic extinction” technology research) as being aimed at promoting either human or environmental health, it has also openly admitted that these same technologies are of interest to DARPA for their ability to “subvert” the genes of human adversaries of the US military via “genetic weapons.”

Duprex led an INTERCEPT study published in February of this year in which he and his coauthors explored how to create a synthetic TIP of the Nipah virus, a deadly virus with a fatality rate of over 70 percent. In that study, they used both wild and genetically engineered strains of Nipah virus. Notably, the Clade X pandemic simulation, which will be discussed in detail in the next installment of this series, involved a genetically engineered combination of the Nipah virus and a parainfluenza disease.

Clade X took place in 2018 and was led by much of the same team that was responsible for the 2001 Dark Winter bioterrorism simulation, including former FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg and Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the UPMC Center for Biosecurity. Another notable participant at Clade X was Julie Gerberding, former CDC director and current executive vice president at Merck, which has close ties to UPMC as well as the Center for Biosecurity’s failed “21st Century Biodefense” project.

A few months after publishing the study funded by DARPA’s INTERCEPT program, Duprex coauthored another study on the use of synthetic “nanobodies” (i. e., bioengineered synthetic nanoparticles acting as antibodies) that was published in August. This effort mirrors other DARPA “health-focused” projects. That study was funded by the University of Pittsburgh, the NIH, and Israel’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

In addition to his ties to DARPA programs involving the genetic engineering of viral pathogens, Duprex is a leading advocate for controversial gain-of-function research and was appointed to direct UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research less than three months after the federal moratorium on GOF research ended.

In October 2014, five days after that moratorium was first imposed, Duprex gave a talk to the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity entitled “Gain-of-Function Studies: Their History, Their Utility, and What They Can Tell Us.” In the talk, he asserted that “cross-species infection studies have already helped to improve surveillance in the field, have shed new light on basic influenza virus biology, and could assist in growing vaccine viruses better” and argues against the recently imposed moratorium.

In 2014, Duprex also wrote in a paper published in Nature that “GOF approaches are absolutely essential in infectious disease research; although alternative approaches can be very useful, these can never replace GOF experiments.” He added that, in his view, there were only two reasons for GOF research, the first being to “improve surveillance or to develop therapeutics” and the second being merely to learn “interesting biology.”

In that same paper, he also argued that “genetic engineering that is intended and likely to endow a low-pathogenicity, low-transmissibility agent with either enhanced pathogenicity or enhanced transmissibility may be appropriate if the benefits are substantial.” He also suggested in this 2014 paper that it “might” be necessary “to enhance pathogenicity of coronaviruses in order to develop a valid animal model for coronaviruses.” Years later, during the current coronavirus crisis, Duprex and other officials from the UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research co-developed a Covid-19 research and development “blueprint” for the UN’s World Health Organization.

In addition, Duprex’s work for DARPA’s Prophecy program involved GOF research, as noted above, and the creator of that program, Michael Callahan – former head of DARPA’s biodefense therapeutics initiatives, is also a proponent of GOF who believes that such risky research is inseparable from “the research and development enterprise in the life sciences and for biotechnology.”

Duprex is also a founding member of Scientists for Science, a group of researchers (most of whom are involved in GOF research) who opposed the GOF moratorium and were “confident that biomedical research on potentially dangerous pathogens can be performed safely and is essential for a comprehensive understanding of microbial disease pathogenesis, prevention and treatment.” Another of the group’s founding members is Yoshihiro Kawaoka, whose controversial GOF experiments that made pathogenic viruses more deadly have garnered considerable media attention.

When the moratorium on GOF was lifted in December 2017, Duprex called it a “sign of progress,” adding that “on a personal level I’m really pleased these NIH funded scientists [conducting GOF research] get some clarity.” As previously mentioned, he became the Center for Vaccine Research’s director less than three months later, in March 2018.

The “Darkest Winter” Looms

UPMC

After a cursory examination of the background of UPMC, its Regional Biocontainment Laboratory, and the man directing its Center for Vaccine Research, the question about the nature of the Corona-thrax experiment becomes: Is this yet another ill-advised experiment by a lab led by a GOF enthusiast and fueled by a feeding frenzy over the billions of dollars thrown by the government and other entities into Covid-19 research? Or is there perhaps a more nefarious motive to genetically engineering something as bizarre as Corona-thrax?

While the latter question may appear conspiratorial, it is worth pointing out that the institutions most likely to have been the sources for the anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax attacks were conducting GOF research on anthrax funded by the Pentagon and the CIA that was justified as “improving” the controversial anthrax vaccine known as BioThrax.

For instance, Battelle Memorial Institute—a Pentagon and CIA contractor—began genetically engineering a more virulent form of anthrax “to see if the [anthrax] vaccine the United States intends to supply to its armed forces is effective against that strain.” While these experiments were going on, the embattled manufacturer of the anthrax vaccine now known as Emergent Biosolutions, entered into a contract with Battelle that gave Battelle “immediate exposure to the vaccine” it was using in connection with the genetically modified anthrax program.

As noted in Part II of this series, BioPort was set to lose its Pentagon contract for anthrax vaccine entirely in September 2001, and the entirety of its anthrax vaccine business was rescued by the 2001 anthrax attacks, which saw concerns over BioPort’s corruption and its horrendous safety track record replaced with fervent demands for more of its anthrax vaccine. Furthermore, as noted in detail in Part III of this series, Battelle was the most likely source of the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks. The ties between UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, Battelle, and Emergent Biosolutions will be discussed in the next installment in the series.

What is also notable about these Corona-thrax experiments occurring at UPMC are the ties of UPMC’s RBL and Center for Vaccine Research to another key component of the center’s “biodefense” complex, the UPMC Center for Biosecurity. As previously mentioned, the people recruited to head this center at its founding in 2003 were intimately involved in the 2001 bioterror simulation Dark Winter, namely Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby.

While leading the UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, O’Toole and/or her successor Inglesby engaged in other notable bioterror simulations, including one that took place last year— Event 201, which eerily predicted the coronavirus crisis that began this year. Inglesby, who is also the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in addition to his post at UPMC, was the moderator at Event 201.

Though Event 201 has garnered considerable scrutiny in recent months, another but less well-known exercise in 2018 that involved O’Toole and Inglesby, examined how a bioterror attack involving a genetically engineered pathogen could trigger a Continuity of Government (CoG) scenario, a government roadmap for the imposition of martial law in the United States. As other investigative series of mine have noted, there have recently been a myriad of intelligence agency–linked simulations that predict the imminent imposition of martial law in the United States following the 2020 election.

It is also notable that George W. Bush’s controversial and classified update to CoG plans in 2007, known as Executive Directive 51, was directly inspired by Dark Winter, and Barack Obama’s subsequent executive orders on CoG gave near-complete control of American infrastructure to the Department of Homeland Security in a such a situation. At the time Obama issued those executive orders, O’Toole was the DHS undersecretary for science and technology and also influenced those updates to the CoG plans. O’Toole is currently the executive vice president of the CIA’s In-Q-tel.

The simulation known as Clade X will be examined in greater detail in the next installment of this series as will the numerous and recent “predictions” from US government sources, controversial billionaires such as Bill Gates, and a web of individuals tied to UPMC who have warned that a bioterror attack or related public health catastrophe is set to take place in the United States in the latter half of 2020. As one high-ranking government official put it earlier this year, this allegedly imminent event will result in “the darkest winter in modern history.”

September 29, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Was the Estonia Downed by Submarine? Huge Hole in Hull Kindles New Theories About 1994 Tragedy

MS Estonia model

By Igor Kuznetsov – Sputnik – 29.09.2020

The Estonia catastrophe 26 years ago that claimed 852 lives is the worst peacetime tragedy in the Baltic Sea and the second-deadliest peacetime sinking of a European ship, second only to the Titanic.

The foreign ministers of Finland, Estonia, and Sweden have agreed to jointly assess new evidence regarding the Estonia ferry that sank in 1994.

New underwater footage of the shipwreck from a Swedish documentary about the disaster shows extensive damage on the starboard side, including a previously unknown 4-metre hole.

The find has since fuelled renewed speculations and theories about the massive cruise ship’s tragic fate.

Margus Kurm, former public prosecutor and former chairman of the Estonian government’s investigation into the disaster, suggested that the Estonia probably collided with a submarine, a Swedish one at that.

Based on the new information, Kurm speculated that there could have been a “sensitive consignment” on board the ship that needed to be monitored. The botched surveillance operation was likely performed by a Swedish submarine, he mused in an interview with the Estonian newspaper Postimees, suggesting that Sweden “lied straight to our face”. Kurm stressed that 400,000 cubic metres of sand and stone had been transported there and a decision to declare the sanctity of the site was made very quickly in 1995 when the inquiry was still underway.

​Former Estonian Defence Minister Enn Tupp, active when the disaster occurred, also argued that the ship sank after a collision with a submarine, but didn’t point out Sweden specifically.

Lars Ångström, a former member of the parliamentary defence committee for the Green Party who has been involved in the issue for several years, believes that the hole was probably caused by another ship, most likely a military one.

However, ex-Swedish Defence Minister Anders Björck has dismissed the claims as “rather incredible”. “Had it been so, we would have immediately received a report about it, and it would have been noticed”, he told Swedish national broadcaster SVT. He also stressed that it would have taken a huge blackout operation to perform anything like that and then try to hide it.

None of Sweden’s other top ministers who in the 1990s were responsible for the Estonia investigation, including Prime Ministers Carl Bildt and Göran Persson, have commented on the matter.

The hole discovered in the hull of the Estonia can be explained in several ways, suggested Jørgen Amdahl, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, who ran a computer simulation of the disaster. He dismissed the results of the official 1997 investigation that the sinking was caused by a broken bow visor.

Two other explanations are more likely, Amdahl mused to SVT. One is that the ship was damaged when it hit the bottom. Another possibility is that an object hit the ship from the side with a force of up to 600 tonnes.

Survivors Demand Justice

Meanwhile, an open letter by Estonia survivors has been published by the daily Aftonbladet, demanding a new investigation.

“It is the Swedish government’s responsibility to immediately take the initiative for such a diving operation with full and open presentation of the results to the public and the media in all countries affected by the disaster”, they wrote.

Kent Härstedt, survivor and former MP for the Social Democrats, supported the demand for a new investigation as the current one doesn’t feel “complete and credible”, he said.

“I am not conspiratorial, but with what has emerged today, there will be further questions – why is the hole not included in the official investigation”, Härstedt told SVT.

Estonian Prime Minister Jüri Ratas has called for a new Estonian investigation since the findings were presented in a new documentary. He suggested that the new information raises questions that must be answered in a “clear, dignified, and transparent way”.

Second Only to the Titanic

The sinking of the Estonia in the Baltic Sea between Sweden, Åland, Finland, and Estonia is seen as one of the worst maritime disasters of the 20th century, second to only the Titantic in peacetime. Some 852 people died in the disaster and only 137 survivors were rescued. The official version has so far been that the bow visor separated and the ship’s bow door opened, whereupon it immediately took on a heavy starboard tilt, as water flooded into the vehicle deck.

Based on a suggestion by the Swedish government, thousands of tonnes of pebbles were dropped on the site to bury the whole ship in situ. The subsequent 1995 Estonia Agreement prohibits citizens from the signatory counties to even approach the wreck, which has long fuelled various speculations. The wreck is monitored by radar by the Finnish Navy.

September 29, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment