NORDSTREAM SABOTAGE: A NEW LOW FOR WESTERN MAINSTREAM MEDIA
By Dimitri Lascaris | October 7, 2022
The Guardian’s coverage of the recent Nord Stream sabotage highlights the increasingly absurd lengths to which Western media will go to promote the U.S. government’s hegemonic agenda.
Guardian coverage of this portentous event has included at least three, shameless exercises in propaganda-masquerading-as-journalism.
On September 28 – two days after natural gas began belching into the Baltic Sea due to multiple blasts targeting Nord Stream – the Guardian published an article by Philip Oltermann, the Guardian’s Berlin bureau chief, entitled “Nord Stream blasts could herald new phase of hybrid war, say EU politicians”.
By focusing attention on the perspective of EU politicians, the title of Oltermann’s article left no doubt as to its bias: E.U. governments have flooded Ukraine with weapons and have imposed sanctions on Russia that were plainly designed to destroy its economy. None of the E.U. officials quoted in the article can plausibly claim to be independent, objective arbiters of the debate over who attacked the Nord Stream pipelines.
According to Oltermann:
Roderich Kiesewetter, a member of parliament for the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), told the Guardian the pipeline attack had the hallmarks of the “hybrid warfare approach” Russia has pursued for the last decade, with the aim of “dividing the European Union not by military but through social and diplomatic means”.
“We have to ask who has an interest in destroying this infrastructure,” said Kiesewetter, a member of the Bundestag’s committee on foreign affairs. While it was in the interest of the US, states in central and eastern Europe and the Baltics that Nord Stream 2 would never be activated, he argued that an act of state-sponsored sabotage by a Nato ally would have come attached with too large a risk of a political backlash.
“Russia, on the other hand, has an interest in sending us a signal: to threaten it could cause similar damage to pipelines between Algeria and France, to our power lines or submarine fibre-optic cables […] I consider it likely that Russia was behind this attack.”
What does Keisewetter mean by “hybrid warfare approach”, and why is this approach uniquely that of Russia? For decades, the U.S. military has degraded and destroyed the civilian infrastructure of its official enemies – for example, in Iraq and Libya. Therefore, one could just as easily argue that this act of sabotage has all “the hallmarks” of U.S. aggression.
Keisewetter does acknowledge that the U.S. (as well as certain unnamed European states) had an interest in killing the Nord Stream pipelines (more on that later), but he claims that the political backlash from their sabotage of Nord Stream would constitute “too large a risk”.
Yet, if recent history teaches us anything about relations between the United States and the E.U., it’s that the U.S. can get away with just about any betrayal of the E.U.’s trust.
In 2014, the Guardian and other Western media outlets revealed, thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, that the U.K. intelligence agency, GCHQ, had tapped into fibre-optic cables carrying global communications, and that GCHQ had shared vast amounts of data with its U.S. counterpart, the NSA. The targeted fibre-optic cables included three undersea cables with terminals in Italy.
The Snowden documents also disclosed that the U.S. had spied on E.U. internal computer networks in Washington and the E.U.’s United Nations office in New York, and that the NSA had conducted an electronic eavesdropping operation in a building in Brussels, where the E.U. Council of Ministers and the European Council were located.
At the time, Western media outlets also reported that the U.S. had secretly intercepted and monitored cell phone conversations of Angela Merkel, who was then Germany’s Chancellor.
What was the “backlash” resulting from U.S. spying on Merkel and other top E.U officials? What price did the U.S. government pay for undermining the integrity of telecommunications infrastructure in the E.U.?
Apart from a few theatrical, you-hurt-our-feelings protestations from E.U. leaders — for example, Merkel’s pathetic complaint to Obama that U.S. spying on her cell phone conversations was “completely unacceptable” — there was no meaningful “backlash”.
The E.U. imposed no sanctions on the U.S. It did not sever diplomatic relations with the U.S.. It did not close down a single U.S. military base. Indeed, since the Snowden revelations emerged, U.S.-E.U. relations have been conducted essentially on a business-as-usual basis.
Predictably, Oltermann mentions none of these facts in his article of September 28. In fact, Oltermann evinces no scepticism that the political backlash would be too great if, indeed, the U.S. and/or its proxies had sabotaged Nord Stream.
Oltermann continues:
Nord Stream has been at the heart of a standoff between Russia and Europe over energy supplies since the start of the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, but it is not immediately clear who stands to benefit from the destruction of the gas infrastructure.
Several paragraphs earlier, Oltermann had revealed that a member of the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Committee had acknowledged that the U.S. and certain European states had an interest in preventing the activation of Nord Stream, yet it was “not immediately clear” to Oltermann who stands to benefit from the destruction of that infrastructure?
Oltermann then acknowledges that, in Germany, there had been calls recently “to open the pipeline as an energy crisis looms over Europe”, but he dismisses those calls as having come from “political parties on the far right and the far left.”
The reality is that, due to the inaccessibility of affordable Russian gas, Germany’s economy is now on the verge of collapse. That is why, immediately prior to the sabotage of Nord Stream, German protesters took to the streets to demand that Nord Stream be reopened and that a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine war be pursued.
Oltermann evidently believes that only Germans on the “far right” and “far left” are alarmed about the immense hardships that Germany’s economic collapse will inflict upon their families and millions of ordinary Germans.
On September 29, the day after the Guardian published Oltermann’s article, it published an editorial focused on the Russian Federation’s just-completed annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts. In that editorial, the Guardian’s editors wrote:
The annexations come alongside the mobilisation order, and, many believe, the damage to the Nord Stream pipelines (while Russia clearly appears the most plausible culprit, US intelligence has been notably cautious about ascribing blame).
Nowhere in the editorial, however, does the Guardian explain the basis for its claim that “Russia clearly appears the most plausible culprit”. Its editors do not offer a scintilla of evidence or logic to support their eye-popping claim that Russia may have blown up its own pipelines. Nor do they explain why U.S. intelligence would hesitate to accuse Russia of sabotage if Russia “clearly” was “the most plausible culprit”. When has U.S. intelligence been reluctant to level evidence-free accusations of criminality at Russia’s government?
Finally, on September 30, the Guardian published an article by Kate Connolly, the Guardian’s Berlin correspondent, entitled “Size of Nord Stream blasts equal to large amount of explosive, UN told”. Connolly wrote:
Intelligence sources quoted in the news magazine Spiegel believe the pipelines were hit in four places by explosions using 500kg of TNT, the equivalent to the explosive power of a heavy aircraft bomb. German investigators have undertaken seismic readings to calculate the power of the blasts.
The first signs of explosions were registered on Monday morning by a Danish earthquake station after suspicious activity in the waters of the Baltic Sea. A monitoring station on the Danish island of Bornholm measured severe tremors.
A representative of the Swedish coastguard told AFP: “There are two leaks on Swedish territory and two on the Danish side.”
It remains a mystery as to how the explosives reached the pipeline. According to initial reports, the explosions happened at depths of between 70 and 90 metres.
There has been speculation that mini submarines might have been used to deliver the explosives. However, the amount of explosives that would have been necessary to cause such large blasts make this theory increasingly unlikely.
Instead, experts are suggesting that maintenance robots operating within the pipeline structure may have planted the bombs during repair works.
If this theory proves to be right, the sophisticated nature of the attack as well as the power of the blast would add weight to suspicions that the attacks were carried out by a state power, with fingers pointed at Russia. Moscow has repeatedly underlined its capability to disrupt Europe’s energy infrastructure.
On Friday, Vladimir Putin blamed the US and its allies for blowing up the pipelines, raising the temperature in the crisis. Offering no evidence for his claim, the Russian president said in a speech to mark the annexation of four Ukrainian regions: “The sanctions were not enough for the Anglo-Saxons: they moved on to sabotage. It is hard to believe but it is a fact that they organised the blasts on the Nord Stream international gas pipelines.”
Three elements of Connolly’s report merit commentary.
First, who are “the experts” who suggest that maintenance robots operating within the pipeline may have planted bombs during maintenance? Connolly doesn’t tell us, nor does she explain why she omitted to reveal their identities. Are they government “experts”? Were they not authorized to speak publicly? If they were government experts, to what governments do they belong? Without this information, Connolly’s readers are unable to assess whether her sources do indeed have relevant expertise and are truly objective.
Second, Connolly claims that Moscow has repeatedly “underlined” its capability to disrupt Europe’s energy infrastructure. Really? I have never seen a threat from the Russian government to disrupt Europe’s energy infrastructure. If indeed the Russian government ever issued such a threat, then why doesn’t Connolly tell us when, how and by whom that threat was issued?
By contrast, the President of the United States explicitly threatened earlier this year to “bring an end” to Nord Stream if Russia invaded Ukraine. That threat was issued in a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz:
What is most damning about Biden’s threat is his response to a reporter’s question about Germany. When the reporter points out to Biden that Germany – a supposedly key ally of the United States – is part-owner of Nord Stream, Biden doesn’t flinch. He simply disregards Germany’s stake in the project and declares (with the hapless, weak-kneed Scholz standing near him) “I promise you, we will be able” to bring Nord Stream to an end.
For the sake of appearances and diplomacy, Biden could have dissembled. He could have said something like “of course, we will consult with our German partners before taking any action to end Nord Stream” or “the decision about ending Nord Stream will be made jointly with the German government”. Yet Biden said no such thing, evidently believing that the whole world should know that Germany’s view of the matter was irrelevant to the U.S. government.
Connolly says nothing in her article about Biden’s recent, explicit threat to ‘bring an end’ to Nord Stream, but she does make an unsubstantiated claim that Moscow had “underlined” its capacity to disrupt Europe’s energy infrastructure.
Finally, Connolly reports that Putin blames “the Anglo-Saxons” – presumably, the British and Americans – for the Nord Stream sabotage.
Let us contemplate that fact for a moment.
If in fact Russia did not blow up its own pipelines, and if the Russian government is convinced that the British and Americans sabotaged Nord Stream, the world is likely heading toward a very dark place, both figuratively and literally. The Russian government is not likely to tolerate Western attacks on vitally important Russian energy infrastructure. Somehow, at some point, Russia is liable to retaliate against the West’s energy infrastructure. The disabling of key energy infrastructure may well have dire consequences for Western economies that are already reeling from a global energy crisis.
If one or more Western governments are behind the sabotage of Nord Stream, they have crossed a red line that will expose Western economies and citizens to heightened energy insecurity in the months and years ahead. They may well have hurt the West far more than they have hurt Russia.
The Case Against Russia
I am a lawyer. I was first called to the bar in the State of New York thirty years ago. For most of my career, I have specialized in class action litigation. Typically, on behalf of my clients, I’ve prosecuted claims of fraud and other forms of corporate wrongdoing. Often, the claims I advance involve potential criminality. The complex evidence underlying these claims must be assessed and interpreted with meticulous attention to detail, but also with a healthy dose of scepticism and common sense.
Like any case of potential criminality, I approach the question of who sabotaged Nord Stream like a lawyer. I bring to bear my experience litigating claims of wrongdoing. Among other things, I ask: who possessed a motive to commit the crime? Who had both the ability and the opportunity to carry it out? Are the protagonists and the witnesses marshalled for and against those protagonists credible? What do qualified experts say? Are those experts unbiased? Taking into account these and other considerations, what are the most rational inferences to be drawn from all available evidence?
Certainly, the Russian military possessed the capacity to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines, but what possible motive would it have to do so?
Gazprom, a fossil fuels behemoth that is controlled by the Russian state, invested over US$5 billion in Nord Stream 2. Moreover, had Russia wanted to stop the flow of gas to Europe through Nord Stream, all it had to do was turn off the gas taps in Russia. There was no need for Russia to destroy those pipelines and jeopardize a state-owned entity’s multi-billion-dollar investment.
As long as Nord Stream remained functional, the Russian government was able to offer an enticement to Germany to remove sanctions on Russia. As long as Nord Stream remains non-functional, Russia’s leverage over Germany is diminished considerably.
Moreover, it is questionable whether the Russian military had the opportunity to commit this sabotage.
The explosions occurred near Bornholm, a Danish island in the Baltic Sea. Bornholm is surrounded by states that are either members of NATO or have applied to join NATO (Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Poland). It is only 100 km from the Polish coastline.
NATO heavily monitors and effectively controls the western Baltic Sea, where the sabotage occurred. How could Russian saboteurs execute this challenging operation while escaping detection by NATO?
The Case Against the United States
Arguably, no government had a greater motivation to destroy Nord Stream than the United States government.
Joe Biden was by no means the first U.S. politician to express a desire to see Nord Stream terminated. For years, U.S. government officials have condemned Nord Stream 2 and have pressured Germany’s government to abandon the project.
Here are but a few examples.
In 2014, former U.S. Secretary of State and unrepentant war criminal Condoleeza Rice gave an interview in which she was asked whether Germany had been sufficiently “aggressive” with Russia. In response, Rice expressed her desire that Europe “depend more on the North American energy platform” and “the tremendous bounty of oil and gas we are finding in North America.” “You want to have pipelines that don’t go through Ukraine and Russia,” she added. “For years, we’ve tried to get the Europeans to be interested in different pipeline routes. It’s time to do that.”
In December 2021, as fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine intensified, Victoria Nuland, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, was questioned by Republican Senator Ron Johnson about the Biden administration’s plans for sanctioning Russia. Johnson prefaced his questions by noting that, despite their differences, Republicans and Democrats were united in their hostility to Russia. Johnson also stated that it was important to make Vladimir Putin understand how “harmful” U.S. sanctions would be to the “Russian people”. Then, after noting the Senate’s strong support for sanctions on Nord Stream, Johnson asked Nuland whether the Biden administration was contemplating sanctions that “would prevent Nord Stream 2 from ever being completed.” Nuland replied “absolutely”.
If Victoria Nuland is familiar to you, that might be due to her infamous 2014 conversation with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt. A leaked recording of that conversation revealed that the U.S. government had handpicked the next Prime Minister of Ukraine in advance of a coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych. In Nuland’s conversation with Pyatt, Pyatt noted that E.U. officials did not agree with Washington’s choice for Ukraine’s next PM. In response, Nuland said to Pyatt “fuck the E.U.”
One cannot overstate the U.S. government’s contempt for the priorities of its European allies vassals.
Despite the extensive and unambiguous record of U.S. government hostility to Nord Stream, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken laughably claimed, on the day after the sabotage, that the destruction of Nord Stream was in “no one’s interest”. If that were true, why would anyone destroy it?
It took the dim-witted Blinken less than one week to publicly contradict himself. On October 2, he giddily declared in a press conference with Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly that the destruction of Nord Stream presented to the United States a “strategic” and “tremendous opportunity” to end Europe’s dependence on Russian gas.
Even in the absence of these and similar statements by U.S. officials, it would be obvious that the U.S. government has a motive to “bring an end” to Nord Stream.
The neocons who control U.S. government foreign policy covet, above all else, global hegemony. Maintaining U.S. global hegemony requires that the U.S. effect regime change in Russia and that it replace Russia’s nationalist government with a Yeltsin-like buffoon who will slavishly do the bidding of his American handlers. Only then will it be possible for the U.S. to isolate and ‘contain’ China, whose growing wealth and power is the primary impediment to U.S. hegemony. As long as the powerful German economy is closely intertwined with that of Russia, the U.S. government’s ability to undermine Russia’s economy will be limited.
Quite apart from that, the U.S. fossil fuels industry stands to gain enormously from the E.U.’s rejection of Russian fossil fuels. As Blinken acknowledged, U.S. gas producers are undoubtedly licking their chops at the “tremendous opportunity” created by Nord Stream’s destruction.
Not only did the U.S. have the motive to destroy Nord Stream, it had both the technological capability and the opportunity to do so.
The site of the sabotage lies in waters that are effectively controlled by NATO.
According to Flightradar24 data, U.S. military helicopters habitually and on numerous occasions circled for hours over the site of the Nord Stream sabotage near Bornholm Island earlier in September.
Moreover, in June of this year, the U.S. military conducted the BALTOPS naval exercise off the coast of Bornholm to demonstrate NATO’s mine hunting capabilities. According to an official publication of the Navy League of the United States, this exercise was used as “an opportunity to test emerging technology”:
In support of BALTOPS, U.S. Navy 6th Fleet partnered with U.S. Navy research and warfare centers to bring the latest advancements in unmanned underwater vehicle mine hunting technology to the Baltic Sea to demonstrate the vehicle’s effectiveness in operational scenarios.
Experimentation was conducted off the coast of Bornholm, Denmark, with participants from Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, Naval Undersea Warfare Center Newport, and Mine Warfare Readiness and Effectiveness Measuring all under the direction of U.S. 6th Fleet Task Force 68.
By contrast, I’m aware of no reports of the presence of Russian military assets at or near the site of sabotage in the months leading up to the incident. (If you have seen such reports, I encourage you to share them with me.)
Immediately before the explosions that disabled Nord Stream, German protesters had taken to the streets to call for the reopening of Nord Stream in the face of skyrocketing energy bills. What better way to prevent the German government from acceding to public pressure than making it impossible for Nord Stream to deliver gas to Germany?
Of course, this circumstantial evidence does not prove definitively that the U.S. military or a proxy acting with the consent and support of the U.S. government sabotaged Nord Stream, nor does it disprove definitively that Russia sabotaged its own pipelines.
Nonetheless, the totality of the circumstantial evidence makes a mockery of claims by the Guardian and other pro-NATO, Western media outlets that Russia is ‘the most plausible culprit’.
By any rational measure, the United States government is, by a wide margin, ‘the most plausible culprit’.
Another plausible culprit is Poland.
Not only is Poland closer to the site of the sabotage than Russia, Poland’s government is intensely hostile to Russia.
Poland’s government detests the Nord Stream pipelines. Using highly undiplomatic language against a fellow NATO and E.U. member, the Polish government has repeatedly castigated Germany’s government for the Nord Stream project. In 2021, for example, it accused Germany of forming a “brutal alliance” with Russia against the interests of other European states.
Shortly after the sabotage was revealed, Radek Sikorski, the former foreign and defence minister of Poland, tweeted an image of natural gas spewing from the site of the Nord Stream sabotage, along with the words “Thank you, USA.” He quickly deleted the tweet after it went viral.
It may well be that Poland played a role in the attacks on Nord Stream, but it is difficult to imagine that it would commit a crime of this magnitude without the consent and support of the U.S. government, NATO’s dominant member.
Where do we go from here?
Danish and Swedish authorities are reportedly conducting an investigation into the Nord Stream attacks. The Kremlin claims that it has not been invited to participate in the investigation, while Nord Stream operators say that they were unable to inspect the damaged sections of the pipelines because of restrictions imposed by Danish and Swedish authorities who had cordoned off the area.
Denmark is a member of NATO, while Sweden has applied for NATO membership.
If Germany was a truly sovereign state, its government would demand an independent, international investigation into the attacks on Nord Stream.
Moreover, no investigation supervised by a NATO or a wannabe-NATO government could be truly independent, especially if Russian authorities have been excluded from the investigation. All NATO states, and particularly NATO’s most powerful member (the U.S.), have a strong interest in pointing the finger at Russia.
The fact that Germany’s government has not demanded a truly independent investigation speaks volumes about Germany’s supposed sovereignty, but the German government’s feeble response should surprise no one. At the behest of their masters in Washington, German ‘leaders’ committed their country to economic suicide months ago.
Sooner or later, however, the truth about Nord Stream may well emerge. If it is ultimately demonstrated that the United States or a U.S. proxy attacked Nord Stream, and did so at a moment when Germany’s economy is collapsing under the weight of an energy crisis, the consequences will be enormous, not only for Russia’s relations with the West, but also for Germany’s (and the E.U.’s) relations with the United States and NATO.
Indeed, the Nord Stream sabotage may ultimately prove to be one of the most consequential crimes of the twenty-first century. If the U.S. committed the crime, Western media will have played a key role in protecting the criminals who did it.
I leave you with this video clip of an October 3, 2022 interview of Professor Jeffrey Sachs, former director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. When Dr. Sachs has the temerity to suggest that the U.S. government is behind the Nord Stream sabotage, two Bloomberg reporters freak out and attempt, unsuccessfully, to shut him down. (Check out his priceless facial expression when the Bloomberg reporters lose it.)
Lavrov explains why Russia sees Ukraine as a threat
Samizdat | October 7, 2022
A call by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky for NATO members to deploy nuclear weapons against Russia is a reminder of why Moscow launched military action against his country, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.
“Yesterday, Zelensky called on his Western masters to deliver a preemptive nuclear strike on Russia,” Moscow’s top diplomat stated during a media conference on Wednesday.
In doing so, the Ukrainian leader “showed to the entire world the latest proof of the threats that come from the Kiev regime.” Lavrov said Russia’s special military operation had been launched to neutralize those threats.
He dismissed as “laughable” an attempt to downplay Zelensky’s words made by his press secretary, Sergey Nikoforov.
“We all remember how [Zelensky] declared in January Ukraine’s intention to acquire nuclear weapons. Apparently, this idea has long been stuck in his mind,” the Russian minister said.
On Thursday, Zelensky told the Australian Lowy Institute that NATO must carry out preemptive strikes against Russia so that it “knows what to expect” if it uses its nuclear arsenal. He claimed that such action would “eliminate the possibility of Russia using nuclear weapons,” before recalling how he urged other nations to preemptively punish Russia before it launched its military action against his country.
“I once again appeal to the international community, as it was before February 24: Preemptive strikes so that [the Russians] know what will happen to them if they use it, and not the other way around,” he said.
His spokesman then claimed that people interpreting Zelensky’s words as a call for a preemptive nuclear strike were wrong, and that Ukraine would never use such rhetoric.
Whodunit?
By Way of Deception, Thou Shalt do War
By Doug E. Steil | Aletho News | October 7, 2022
With the mainstream crying Russia, which makes zero sense… (I have the keys to the taxi I’m driving, which pays my bills but to turn it off, I’ll blow it up also:
On 25 July 2022, Gazprom announced it will reduce gas flows to Germany to 20% of the maximum capacity, or 50% of the current throughput. The company shut down the pipeline for 10 days because of maintenance.
On 31 August 2022, Gazprom halted any gas delivery through Nord Stream 1 for three days, officially because of maintenance. On 2 September 2022, the company announced that natural gas supplies via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline would remain shut off indefinitely until the main gas turbine at the Portovaya compressor station near St Petersburg was fixed from an engine oil leak.
And the alternative mainstream crying USA, which makes more sense, but the plethora of memes and ease in which the ‘almost mainstream’ talks about this option… including the infamous ‘thank you USA’ tweet from the (Jewish) former Polish foreign minister, Sikorski, who then deleted it (after millions of views and re-tweets)… it all looks remarkably ‘black or white’; and this, as always, should be a red flag.
Who? How? Why? are the questions everyone is asking… but no one asked when?
So when did this happen?
On 26 September 2022, Danish and Swedish authorities reported a number of explosions at both Nord Stream lines (only string A in NS2): the resulting damage causing a series of gas leaks. The European Union considers the incident to be intentional sabotage.
Anything else occured on September 26, 2022?
Rosh Hashanah 2022 began in the evening of Sunday, September 25 and ended in the evening of Tuesday, September 27.
Ah… but what is Rosh Hashanah ?
Rosh HaShanah (Hebrew: רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה, Rōʾš hašŠānā, lit. “head of the year”) is the Jewish New Year. The biblical name for this holiday is Yom Teruah (יוֹם תְּרוּעָה, Yōm Tərūʿā), literally “day of shouting or blasting.” It is the first of the Jewish High Holy Days (יָמִים נוֹרָאִים, Yāmīm Nōrāʾīm; “Days of Awe”).
Literally day of shouting or BLASTING?
Who suffers most with Nordstream being blown up? Germany. Do a little google search for « germans to freeze this winter »… there are thousands of articles… most written even before september…
Nordstream was a way for Germany to get gas direct from Russia, without paying expensive transit costs through Eastern European middlemen… Eastern European middlemen.
Informed Consent Action Network obtains CDC V-Safe data
ICAN | October 3, 2022
ICAN has now obtained CDC data for the approximate 10 million v-safe users.
As explained in our prior update, v-safe is a new smartphone-based CDC program that allows users to register after getting a Covid-19 vaccine and provide health check-ins.
ICAN wanted to obtain this data. So, it deployed its legal team, headed by Aaron Siri, to obtain the v-safe data.
After suing the CDC twice, and following months of legal wrangling, the CDC finally capitulated, resulting in a court order that required it to produce this data. The first batch of data, containing 144 million rows of health entries by v-safe users, has now been obtained by ICAN and you can search it using a user-friendly interface that ICAN worked around the clock to create.
This first batch of data includes the responses v-safe users provided to pre-populated ‘check-the-box’ fields. It does not include data from the fields that allowed free-text responses. It nonetheless reveals shocking information that should have caused the CDC to immediately shut down its Covid-19 vaccine program.
Among numerous alarming results, out of the approximate 10 million individuals that registered and submitted data to v-safe, 782,913 individuals, or over 7.7% of v-safe users, had a health event requiring medical attention, emergency room intervention, and/or hospitalization. Over 25% had an event that required them to miss school or work and/or prevented normal activities.
There were also 71 million reports of symptoms in the pre-populated fields from the approximately 10 million users. This is an average of over 7 symptoms reported per v-safe registrant. Reported symptoms include, for example, over 4 million reports of joint pain, a very concerning immune reaction. While around 2 million of these joint pain reports were mild, over 1.8 million of the reports were for moderate joint pain and over 400,000 were for severe joint pain. Since v-safe only included less than 4 percent of people that received a Covid-19 vaccine, tens of millions of Americans likely had an immune reaction to the Covid-19 vaccine in their joints that resulted in debilitating pain and potential long-term harm.
There were also approximately 13,000 infants under 2 years of age who were registered for v-safe. For these 13,000 children, there were over 33,000 symptoms experienced that were significant enough to report, with the most common symptoms being irritability, sleeplessness, pain, and loss of appetite. These are very concerning since babies cannot speak and hence these symptoms are how they often communicate that something is wrong.
These data also reflect a disproportionate amount of negative health impacts, including medical events, following the Moderna vaccine versus the Pfizer vaccine. There was also a disproportionate number of negative events reported by women versus men. This is consistent with what was seen in Pfizer’s initial post-authorization safety report sent to the FDA (a report which likewise had to be obtained by lawsuit) which similarly showed a disproportionate number of neurological events experienced by women following the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.
But please do your own research. The data is voluminous (one of the files, alone, is over 23 gigabytes) and so ICAN worked diligently and around the clock to get it into a user-friendly format for you to review, which you can do here.
And remember, the data produced thus far is only from the pre-populated fields within v-safe, which supplied v-safe registrants with only a limited number of options to choose from. There are also numerous free-text fields within v-safe where registrants were able to enter additional information. No doubt a lot of the detailed and interesting information is in these free-text fields. ICAN’s legal team continues to litigate to obtain that data.
This is a big win in the nearly two-year-long fight for transparency from our federal health agencies on the real safety data for Covid-19 vaccines. As additional v-safe data is produced, ICAN will immediately bring it to your attention and make it available.
Roger Waters says he’s on Ukrainian ‘kill list’
Samizdat – October 4, 2022
British rock star Roger Waters, a co-founder of Pink Floyd, has allegedly been placed on a Ukrainian “kill list” after speaking out against Western military meddling and calling on Kiev to make peace with Russia.
In an interview with Rolling Stone published on Tuesday, the 79-year-old pushed back against accusations that he’s been repeating Russian talking points about the conflict in Ukraine. “Don’t forget, I’m on a kill list that is supported by the Ukrainian government. I’m on the fu**ing list, and they’ve killed people recently… When they kill you, they write ‘liquidated’ across your picture. Well, I’m one of those fu**ing pictures.”
Waters gave the example of Darya Dugina, the Russian journalist murdered in August after appearing on the Ukrainian Mirotvorets list. As the musician noted, her entry on the list was marked “liquidated” after she was killed in a car-bombing. Others who have questioned or criticized the Kiev regime, such as photojournalists Andrea Rocchelli of Italy and Andrei Stenin of Russia, have also been killed after appearing on the Mirotvorets list. The site lists personal information on its blacklist targets, which also include politicians and NGO activists.
Mirotvorets, or “Peacemaker,” is an independent database of individuals whom anonymous moderators consider to be threats to Ukrainian national security. The site denies being a kill list; rather, it claims to be a source of information for law-enforcement agencies and “special services” about pro-Russian terrorists, separatists and war criminals, among others. It allegedly has links to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry.
Waters stirred backlash earlier this year, when he suggested that US President Joe Biden was a “war criminal” for fueling the Ukraine crisis and sent an open letter to the wife of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, urging her to help “stop the slaughter” by pushing for a negotiated peace deal with Russia. He later sent an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, asking for guarantees that Russia wouldn’t expand beyond Crimea and the Donbass region.
Pressed by Rolling Stone on why he isn’t supportive of Ukraine’s resistance against Russian forces, Waters said, “Because it’s an unnecessary war, and those people should not be dying. And Russia should not have been encouraged to invade Ukraine.” He also dismissed reports of Russian war crimes in Ukraine as Western propaganda.
Two concerts that Waters had scheduled for next April in Krakow, Poland, may be canceled because of his push for a negotiated peace in Ukraine, the musician said late last month. “Draconian censoring of my work will deny them the opportunity to make up their own minds,” he said of his Polish audiences.
The wide-ranging Mirotvorets kill list also includes Faina Savenkova, a 13-year-old girl in the Lugansk People’s Republic who called for the United Nations to end the fighting that has dragged on in her region since 2014.
The Morning After
By CJ Hopkins | Consent Factory, Inc. | October 3, 2022
This is the weirdest part of the PSYOP. It’s like the morning after an office party on which you wake up almost terminally hungover to hazy memories of having performed a Tequila-fuelled blowjob on Bob in Accounting in what was either the 9th Floor Reception Area or possibly the downstairs lobby of your building while someone vaguely resembling that smirking kid in the Mail Room filmed it on his phone.
Yes, it’s the Morning After … that revolting regurgitant chorus you’re hearing is the sound of millions of Covidian Cultists down on their knees in their gender-neutral bathrooms praying to the Porcelain God.
It has been quite a trip these last two and a half years, but the orgy of fear and hatred is over, the mass hysteria is wearing off, and the reality of the damage they have done is beginning to become undeniable.
Countless thousands of people have been killed, seriously injured, and permanently disabled, victims of experimental “vaccines” they did not need but were coerced into taking. Societies have been torn apart, economies crippled, institutions discredited, democratic precepts like the rule of law and constitutional rights made mockeries of themselves, friends and families turned against each other, and so on, and the dust hasn’t even settled yet. It will take many years to assess the damage … or, rather, to recontextualize, rationalize, deny, and memory-hole the damage (while simultaneously “normalizing” the fascistic biosecurity dystopia the damage made it possible to implement).
This process is now well underway. As I’m sure you’ve noticed over the past several months, governments, global health authorities, the corporate and state media, the culture industry, and other key components of “The New Normal Reich” have been quietly phasing out their “Covid restrictions,” rewriting “The Science,” rewriting history (i.e., the science and history they had previously rewritten), executing limited hangouts, and otherwise transitioning the masses out of “emergency” mode and into the New Normal.
In other words, everything is going to plan.
You can’t keep people whipped up into a state of full-blown hysteria indefinitely. When you’re radically destabilizing and restructuring a society, you hit them hard with the Shock-and-Awe for a few weeks, or months (or years in this case), and then you gently ease them into the new “reality.” Which, after being systematically terrorized, gaslighted, threatened, and otherwise tormented for however long you did that to them, they’ll be grateful for anything resembling “normality,” no matter how fascistic it turns out to be.
You have to be delicate executing this phase, in which the vast majority of the masses, having forced themselves to believe whatever you needed them to believe during the Shock-and-Awe phase, have to force themselves to believe they never believed whatever you needed them to believe then, and believe whatever you need them to believe now, which typically completely contradicts whatever they had previously forced themselves to believe (and actually, literally, believed) in a desperate attempt to keep you happy, so that maybe you would eventually stop beating on them, and relentlessly gaslighting and terrorizing them.
Now, a lot people seem to be having trouble understanding or accepting this fact, i.e., the fact that human beings are capable of forcing themselves to believe whatever they need to believe in order to survive or remain in good standing with “normal” society (or whatever social body they are members of and depend on to meet their basic needs). Not pretend to believe, literally believe, the way that religious converts believe, the way we believe whatever we believe today that we didn’t believe ten years ago.
I must say, I find it rather baffling, people’s lack of understanding and acceptance of this fact, as this capability is a fundamental human attribute that has been documented, over and over, throughout the course of human history. It is not some “theory” I just made up. It is how we maintain social cohesion. It is how we socialize our children. It is how armies and university departments work. It is a basic part of how social bodies function; conformity is rewarded and non-conformity is punished. There’s nothing new about this phenomenon. People have been conforming to new official “realities” and making themselves believe whatever they have to believe to survive within them for approximately five thousand years.
It is, however, a rare occasion when we are able to observe the process this clearly. It usually takes place more or less invisibly within the context of normal everyday life. It is only during sudden radical shifts from one “reality” to another “reality” that we can watch people force themselves to believe whatever they perceive they need to believe, or are instructed by their rulers to believe, in order to survive and thrive in society (e.g., cult indoctrinations, religious conversions, the outbreak of war, physical torture, or in the wake of political revolutions).
This is what we’ve been watching since March 2020, not mass hypnosis, or mass formation psychosis, but the masses forcing themselves to believe whatever they sensed they needed to believe (or were instructed by the authorities to believe) in order to remain parts of “normal” society and not be demonized by their governments and the media, ostracized by their friends and family, fired from their jobs, segregated, censored, beaten and arrested by the police, and otherwise punished for non-conformity as a new “reality” was manufactured and imposed on societies throughout the world.
And now their “reality” is changing again, or “The Science is evolving,” or whatever, and the absurdities they forced themselves to believe are being exposed as … well, as absurdities, and their fanatical and often fascistic behavior, as it turns out, was based on absolutely nothing.
Many of them couldn’t care less, as their behavior was never “based” on anything other than going along with the herd, and so they have simply transitioned from fanatically hating “the Unvaccinated” to fanatically hating “the Russians,” and fanatically supporting Ukrainian neo-Nazis, and fanatically doing whatever else the GloboCap puppets on their televisions instruct them to fanatically do. However, a significant number of them have retained enough of their critical faculties that being yanked back and forth from “reality” to “reality” is causing them to experience mild cognitive dissonance, and confusion, and shame, or borderline psychosis.
Believe it or not, my heart goes out to them … these formerly fanatical Covidian Cultists that wanted me segregated from society, and silenced, and locked up in an internment camp. I cannot make it easier for them by pretending they didn’t do what they did (and in too many cases are still actively doing), or pretending they were hypnotized, or in some other altered state of consciousness, while they did what they did for the past two and half years, but just imagine how they must be feeling now that the party is finally over and the brutal morning after has arrived.
Imagine realizing at this late stage of things that everything you believed, thought, and said, the incalculable harm you have done to people, and to society, was never about a pandemic, but was always about conditioning the masses to respond to fear, coercion, and control like some global Pavlovian behavioral experiment.
Or just take it from actress Jennifer Gibson …
And now comes the really nauseating part, the part where the New Normal authorities admit that they “overreacted,” and that “mistakes were made,” and that they deeply regret having needlessly murdered and seriously injured God knows how many people, and psychologically crippled countless children, and accidentally totally destabilized and restructured the entire global economy, and explain in a lengthy piece in The New Yorker how they’re sorry, but they were drunk at the time, and swear they will never do it again.
You remember this part from 2004 after the invasion and occupation of Iraq when the photos of Abu Ghraib were published, and the American masses who had been hooting and hollering and waving American flags around, and calling people “ragheads” and “sand niggers,” and so on, had to stare themselves and their war crimes in the face.
You recall how the Americans dealt with their shame. That’s right, they reelected George Bush and carried on murdering and torturing Iraqis, and Afghans, and assorted other brown people, and hooting and hollering “we’re number one,” and waving American flags around, because in for a penny, in for a pound.
You see, another fundamental human attribute (in addition to our ability to force ourselves to believe whatever we need to believe in order to survive and thrive in society) is that we don’t tend to deal with shame very well. We tend to repress it and react aggressively to anyone who tries to force us to face it. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone you know who has been (or still is) in an abusive relationship. Ask them how their abuser reacts when they try to get them to take responsibility for their abusive behavior.
I can’t tell you exactly what’s going to happen over the coming months, but I told you back in January that there was going to be wailing and gnashing of teeth, and wailing and gnashing of teeth there has been, and there is certainly going to be a lot more of it … and probably not just wailing and gnashing.
This is just the dawn of the Morning After. I have a feeling we ain’t seen nothing yet.
The targeted killing of Palestinians is the next Israeli crime to be normalised
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | October 3, 2022
For decades, the international community has sought to portray the occupied West Bank as being distinct from Gaza by focusing on the Palestinian Authority in terms of diplomacy, and showcasing Ramallah as an example of prosperity. Israel’s colonial violence in the occupied West Bank and the PA’s “sacred” security collaboration to oppress Palestinians don’t suit this narrative. Neither does it suit the PA’s financial backers to speak about how Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem are also active in legitimate anti-colonial resistance, against both the PA and Israel.
The truth is that while Palestinians’ experiences in Gaza differ from those of Palestinians under the PA in the occupied West Bank, colonial violence is a reality across the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel has the power to implement measures that can make both on a par in terms of violence, because it enjoys unparalleled international impunity.
Despite the efforts by Israel and the PA, particularly given Washington’s insistence that the latter should be strengthened to avoid the possibility of Hamas gaining ground politically, the Palestinian people have reclaimed their anti-colonial struggle from the manipulation of political factions. The refugee camps in particular have displayed unity in resistance which has prompted Israel to approve the use of drones during raids by the Israeli military, thus making targeted killings of Palestinians another violation to which the international community will soon be turning a blind eye.
According to Israeli media reports, drones will now be used “not only as cover and intelligence for forces during operations but also to carry out strikes should armed gunmen be identified as posing imminent threats to their troops.” The targeted killings of Palestinians are thus the next Israeli crimes to be normalised.
Both Israel and the PA have attempted to write off Palestinian refugees as irrelevant. For Israel, refugees represent an absolute demographic alteration if their legitimate right of return is ever implemented. During the Trump administration, Israel sought to change the definition of who constitutes a Palestinian refugee to the point of their elimination altogether. The PA, on the other hand, has written off Palestinian refugees and the right of return as symbolic references in its rhetoric, while removing their relevance to the formation of a Palestinian state by diluting the already compromised right of return, and has no apparent issue at all with Zionist colonialism.
Palestinian anti-colonial struggle has been moving towards its roots, recognising the strength within communities on the ground and uniting with a common objective. The emergence of new brigades which are not affiliated to political factions is also evidence of the changes which Palestinians are now displaying. Mistrust of the PA, largely due to its security services carrying out purges within the occupied West Bank for the benefit of Israel and PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, have prompted Palestinians to reclaim not only their narrative, but also their political expression.
Extending not only the use of drones, but also the targeted killings of Palestinians, should prompt us all to questions about Israel and its accomplices, including the PA. Just months ago, an Israeli sniper murdered Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who posed no threat to the Israeli army at the time of her killing. The absence of on the ground contact in Israel’s new page of aggression against the Palestinians will take targeted killings like that of Akleh to a new level. In the past, such killings made headlines due to the involvement of Israel’s domestic security agency, Shin Bet. The Israeli plan to normalise such violence within the occupied Palestinian territories using the latest technology is upping the ante against Palestinian refugees, while extending the boundaries of what constitutes normalised and acceptable violence, as long as Palestinians are the victims.
We have to ask both the PA and the international community why they continue to speak of a “two-state solution” even while Israel is seeking to make the killing of Palestinians even easier. Why are they not talking about protecting Palestinians from, and their right to resist, Israel’s brutal military occupation?
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Insanely disproportionate use of violence against unarmed civilians… continue
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