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I am the “US-based Kremlin intermediary” that tried to help Tucker Carlson book an interview with Putin

By Anya Parampil · The Grayzone · March 20, 2023

Tucker Carlson accused the NSA of spying on his personal communications when he tried to schedule an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. I can corroborate his story.

On March 10, Fox News host Tucker Carlson told the Full Send podcast that the US government “broke into [his] text messages” in the summer of 2021, just months before the launch of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Carlson claimed the spying occurred as he was planning a trip to Russia, where he hoped to record a conversation with the country’s president. According to Carlson, he learned of the surveillance after a US government source arranged to meet him in Washington and proceeded to share information with him that only someone with access to his private, personal text messages could have known.

“This person’s like… ‘Are you planning a trip to go see Putin?’ This was the summer before the war started. And I was like, ‘how would you know that? I haven’t told anybody,’” Carlson recalled.

“I was intimidated,” he added. “I’m embarrassed to admit, but I was completely freaked out by it.”

Carlson’s interview with Full Send did not represent the first time he spoke publicly about the NSA’s surveillance of his private communications. On June 28, 2021, Carlson opened his primetime Fox News show with a monologue accusing the Biden Administration of spying on his team, disclosing that an NSA whistleblower had contacted him and “repeated back to us information about a story that we are working on that could have only come directly from my texts and emails.” At the time, he did not disclose specific details about the story in question.

“The NSA captured that information without our knowledge, and did it for political reasons,” the Tucker Carlson Tonight host declared, asserting his source informed him that the Biden Administration planned to “leak” his private texts “in an attempt to take this show off the air.”

Carlson’s colleagues at Fox proceeded to studiously ignore his allegations, while other mainstream news outlets appeared to mock the host for going public with the information. When anonymous NSA officials announced that an internal agency review found “no evidence” to support Carlson’s claims the following month, the corporate press took them at their word.

Amidst the NSA’s denials, however, a report surfaced that seemed to directly support Carlson’s narrative. On July 7, an Axios “scoop” cited unnamed US officials accusing the Fox host of “talking to U.S.-based Kremlin intermediaries about setting up an interview with Vladimir Putin shortly before [he] accused the National Security Agency of spying on him.”

Though the government officials who planted that story remain anonymous, I can confirm the identity of at least one of the “US-based Kremlin intermediaries” in question.

It was me. They lied.

In April 2021, Tucker Carlson told me that he was trying to book an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but that he kept running into roadblocks. Though Tucker knew I previously worked as an anchor and correspondent for the Russian government-funded news channel RT America in Washington DC, he was not asking for my assistance. In fact, I do not believe he even considered that I could help him book the interview in any way.

Regardless, I attempted to assist Tucker’s pursuit of the interview through a senior Russian government contact. Ironically, the contact had not been established through my time at RT America, but my work as a correspondent for The Grayzone, the online outlet that has employed me since early 2019. The Grayzone is fully independent and not connected to Russia or any other government, financially or otherwise.

In July 2019, I traveled to Caracas, Venezuela, to cover a high-level diplomatic meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement. While in Caracas, I met Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergey Ryabkov and interviewed him for The Grayzone’s YouTube channel. (Many of the predictions Ryabkov made, including that the US dollar would soon lose its significance in the global economy, are currently playing out as a direct result of US and European sanctions levied in response to the Ukraine war).

Having found his insights on international relations extremely relevant to my coverage of the emerging multi-polar world, I maintained occasional contact with Ryabkov over email in the months following our discussion. When Tucker told me that he was hoping to arrange an interview with Putin, I offered to connect him with Ryabkov.

I had met Tucker in July 2018, when we both covered President Trump’s highly anticipated summit with his Russian counterpart in Helsinki, Finland. Though Tucker had been dispatched to the Finnish capital for an interview with Trump, I personally always believed that a far more interesting conversation would have resulted from an exchange between him and Putin (who was instead left to have a predictably hostile, largely forgettable encounter with Chris Wallace, then of Fox, now at CNN).

When Tucker expressed his desire to interview Putin three years later, I volunteered to put him in contact with Ryabkov by email so they could discuss his plan to visit Russia. I expected to write a basic introductory email, receive a standard “thank you” from both parties, and let Tucker’s team manage communication from there.

Both Tucker and Ryabkov replied to my initial message within hours. Yet their digital exchange took an inexplicable turn.

On the evening of April 16, 2021, I sent a brief email introducing Ryabkov to Tucker. Tucker responded within minutes, informing Ryabkov that he planned to record shows in Russia in the summer of that year. Just over five hours later, Ryabkov replied that he would be happy to talk with Tucker and proposed time slots for a phone call the following week.

I assumed my role was done. Yet on April 20, I received a follow-up email from Ryabkov.

“Strangely, I can not send my message of interest to talk to Mr.Carlson directly to him. I tried it twice with no success,” the diplomat informed me, before asking me to relay his message.

At the time, I did not think much of the issue. I thought that perhaps Tucker’s email service, which was different than mine, had sent the note to spam, or that I had mistyped an email address. In retrospect, however, I should have been suspicious. Both Tucker and Ryabkov had received and replied to my initial message, meaning their respective addresses were typed correctly in the thread. And Ryabkov’s email to Tucker wasn’t going to spam – it was failing to deliver altogether.

The digital communication error between Ryabkov and Tucker was not a one-off event. Weeks later, on May 25, I received a message from Ryabkov’s team explaining that Tucker had failed to reply to a yet another email. They kindly requested I ask Tucker if he had received their message. Once again, he had not.

Roughly one month later, Tucker informed me that a source inside the NSA had contacted him to warn that the US government had caught wind of his effort to interview Putin by spying on his electronic communications. Tucker went public with the story on June 28. As summarized above, virtually every single mainstream reporter, including those at Fox, trusted the denials of the US government rather than rally behind one of their own.

There are three points I must emphasize here. One: it is completely normal and routine for journalists to maintain contact with high-level government sources, domestic or otherwise. Two: it is also normal and routine for journalists to share those connections with trusted colleagues and friends. Three: at the time, I genuinely believed that a Tucker-Putin interview would have moved us closer to peace. Instead, we are currently positioned on the brink of nuclear war.

Oh, and the obligatory fourth point: I am absolutely not a Kremlin operative or “intermediary.” I have no relationship with the Kremlin, and I have not accepted financial support from any state or state-sponsored organization since my departure from RT America in December 2018. Even then, my “relationship” with the Russian government was completely transparent. Would anyone suggest that US or British citizens employed by Al Jazeera, for example, are representatives of the Emir of Qatar? I worked for RT America because they gave me an opportunity to cover the actions of my own country at home and abroad from a perspective that domestic, corporate-run networks would have never allowed. When that reality changed (paradoxically thanks to US, not Russian, government interference), I walked out — but that’s a story for another day.

In truth, even my “Russian” forename is simply a product of the fact that my Indian-American father and American mother could not agree on anything else to call me. So why did US government sources characterize me as a Kremlin intermediary? Do they have any evidence to formally accuse me of being such? Or did they simply dump that information on an unquestioning Axios reporter without even offering them my name?

The answer to the second question is of course, no. The answer to the third: probably. As for the first? Clues can be found in the more recent effort to tarnish Tucker’s reputation through legal machinations and the selective leaking of his private text messages.

Target: Tucker

In March 2021, Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News on the basis that it incurred financial damages as a result of the network’s coverage of the 2020 Presidential Election. Though Tucker is not named in the suit, last year a judge allowed Dominion to seize the Fox host’s private text messages. Within months, the contents of Carlson’s personal texts had made their way to the pages of the Washington Post.

Curiously, coverage of Carlson’s private messages has so far focused on a single comment he made about former President Trump — not Dominion Voting Systems. Earlier this month, mainstream outlets seized on a January 2021 text the Fox host sent one of his producers in which he claimed to “passionately” hate the former president. The story represented an obvious attempt to drive a wedge between Carlson and Trump just before the the 2024 presidential election season officially heats up.

Whether such tactics will succeed in undermining Carlson and Trump’s relationship is a question only they can answer. It is worth noting, however, that Carlson consistently attempted to reorient Trump toward his “America First” agenda throughout the latter’s time in the White House, using his show to offer principled critiques of the former president’s decision to bomb Syriaescalate regime change operations against Venezuela, and assassinate Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. In June of 2019, Carlson personally persuaded Trump to reject the advice of his national security team and elect not to retaliate against Iran over its decision to shoot down a US drone that had violated its sovereign airspace. The Fox host’s actions not only averted a deadly US military strike on Iran, but a potential regional war.

For anyone who values peace and diplomatic engagement over military conflict, Carlson’s influence over Trump — and the US public, for that matter — must be regarded as positive. Perhaps that is why the press, including his colleagues at Fox, have refused to publicly denounce the US government’s selective targeting of Tucker. After all, aside from a handful of Fox News hosts who have attempted to cop his anti-interventionist style, the mainstream media are in virtual lockstep when it comes to inciting continued US involvement in the Ukraine conflict.

Tucker is by far the most popular US media figure to consistently denounce Washington’s escalations in the Ukraine battle, articulate the looming reality of World War III, and sound the alarm over the threat of global nuclear war. As if such positions did not threaten powerful forces enough already, last December he even dedicated a lengthy show open to investigating the murder of President John F. Kennedy, revealing a source with “direct knowledge” of classified information told him the CIA did in fact have a hand in the assassination.

Though the campaign to cancel Tucker is largely framed in terms of the culture wars and partisan debate over the events of January 6, it is substantially driven by neoconservative interventionists seeking to muzzle the pro-war Uniparty’s single greatest foe. If the Dominion lawsuit succeeds in bankrupting Fox, or even casting Tucker as the network’s scapegoat, it will have succeeded in punishing the media’s pre-eminent opponent of the escalating Ukraine proxy war.

Which brings us back to the question: why did US government sources characterize me as a “Kremlin intermediary” while feeding a “journalist” information about Tucker’s private texts back in July 2021? The answer is simple: US officials weaponized my mere existence, through innuendo, in order to suggest Tucker was involved with Kremlin agents. By undermining his credibility, they aimed to invalidate his character and by extension, his anti-war positions.

Beyond the financial threat it poses to Fox, the Dominion suit similarly aims to discredit Tucker. And politics aside, it poses a major threat to the First Amendment.

What does the fact that a corporation can sue a media organization over critical coverage, allege financial damage, and gain access to a journalist’s private texts say about a society that claims to value a free press? If Dominion is able to target a company as powerful as Fox in such a manner, what does that mean for those of us who challenge corporate and government interests in independent media? Why aren’t more journalists asking these questions?

And finally, if the Fox-obsessed Beltway press corps is truly so concerned with holding journalists accountable for “knowingly lying” to the public, there is no shortage of willful deceptions to reckon with. After all, this week marks 20 years since the launch of the US military campaign in Iraq, a catastrophic war that was directly enabled by lies its greatest cheerleaders in the press still repeat to this day.

Anya Parampil is a journalist based in Washington, DC. She has produced and reported several documentaries, including on-the-ground reports from the Korean peninsula, Palestine, Venezuela, and Honduras.

March 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , | 2 Comments

Sy Hersh Slams ‘Stupid’ NYT Story on ‘Ukrainian’ Trace Behind Nord Stream Blasts

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 18.03.2023

The veteran investigative journalist best known for blowing the lid off major US government lies, from Watergate and the My Lai Massacre to the Syrian gas attacks, penned a series of explosive Substack pieces last month revealing direct US complicity in the Nord Stream pipeline attacks.

Seymour Hersh says he has even more details corroborating the Biden administration’s involvement in the Nord Stream sabotage attacks, but cannot share them for fear of outing his sources.

“Biden authorized the blast. And the people involved know what he did. You know what orders came. I know a lot more about this than I want to say. But I have to protect the people who talk to me,” Hersh said in an interview with Austrian media.

“I know what I wrote is true. I know that it is right. I know the meetings I have described and the details of what happened in Norway. I’ve been involved with the intelligence community for 50 years,” the 85-year-old veteran journalist said, addressing the smear campaign being run against him by the legacy media in the wake of his bombshell Nord Stream-related publications.

Commenting on the story put out by The New York Times and German media earlier this month claiming that a “pro-Ukrainian group” without links to any state blew up the pipelines using a rented commercial yacht, Hersh called this version “stupid,” “unbelievable,” and a “crazy story with no sources.”

The veteran investigative journalist, one of the few in the contemporary US media landscape who still believes in the media’s role as the fourth estate, also took aim at the legacy media for ignoring his story in fealty to power. “If 90 percent of editors were fired, we’d be much better off, because they’re so afraid to write anything critical of Biden, thinking they’re going to put a Republican back in the White House,” he said.

Hersh said the attack on Nord Stream was a “signal” to the Western Europeans from Biden – that if they didn’t “want to go all the way” in the conflict with Russia, the US would cut them off. “He did it. And the price for that will be very high in Europe. Europe will not have the gas it needs and you will have to pay more for it,” he said.

Hersh, a sympathizer of the Democratic Party when it comes to social, environmental, and immigration issues, characterized Biden’s foreign policy as a disaster, with Washington’s badmouthing of China and Russia ultimately helping to “weld the two of them together.” As for the crisis in Ukraine, the journalist expects the NATO proxy conflict to fail. “Russia is going to win this war,” he said.

Seymour Hersh published his first piece on the Nord Stream attacks on February 8, detailing how US Navy divers laid the explosives that blew up the pipelines in June 2022 under the cover of NATO’s BALTOPS drills, with a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance aircraft triggering them to explode three months later. Hersh subsequently wrote several follow-up stories with additional information and historical context.

US and German media rolled out their own stories this month, citing intelligence officials, claiming that a “pro-Ukrainian group” without any ties to Kiev blew up the pipelines independently using a rented yacht. Moscow dismissed these stories as “disinformation” designed to divert attention from the real perpetrators, and repeated long-standing calls for thorough and transparent probes into the acts of terror.

March 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Bill Passed by House and Senate to Declassify COVID Origins Documents May Be Attempt to ‘Frame’ China

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | March 13, 2023

Lawmakers and media misrepresented a bill requiring the declassification of documents related to the origins of COVID-19, according to several experts who warned that contrary to what the public was told, the legislation limits the types of documents the government must declassify — raising questions about the bill’s real intent.

According to the sponsors of the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 — which sailed through the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives and is awaiting President Biden’s signature — the bill requires the government to declassify all documents pertaining to COVID-19.

But experts interviewed by The Defender said the bill requires the declassification only of documents related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China — the epicenter of the “lab leak theory.”

They suggested the limitations may be intended to reduce the culpability of U.S. and private actors in the potential leak of — or development of — COVID-19, by placing full blame on China and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Bill’s backers made ‘false claims’

Independent journalist Sam Husseini said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the Senate’s co-sponsor of the COVID-19 Origin Act, made “claims about the bill which are false.”

Hawley, on March 1, tweeted:

Speaking to Fox News March 2, Hawley made similar claims, saying, “My bill … will declassify all of the information the federal government has on COVID origins.”

Hawley later followed up his statements with a letter addressed to Chinese President Xi Jinping, informing him of the bill’s passage. This prompted a response from the Chinese government, according to The Gateway Pundit.

Another of the bill’s Senate co-sponsors, Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), said in a statement:

“The American people deserve transparency, free from censorship or spin. It’s time to declassify everything we know about COVID’s origins and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, now.”

Braun also tweeted:

Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, told the House:

“The American public deserves answers to every aspect of COVID-19 pandemic including how this virus was created, and specifically whether it was a natural occurrence or was the result of a lab related event.”

Statements like these led media outlets, including The Defender, to report that if passed, the will would trigger the release of all documents — not just those related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Bill ‘dubiously named’

On his blog, Husseini said the COVID-19 Origin Act is “dubiously named” and instructs Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines only to:

“Declassify any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), including (A) activities performed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology with or on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army [of China].”

“This means that information not related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology is not being requested and would almost certainly therefore remain classified,” Husseini wrote.

The bill also states:

“There is reason to believe the COVID-19 pandemic may have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology …

“… the Director of National Intelligence should declassify and make available to the public as much information as possible about the origin of COVID-19 so the United States and like-minded countries can —

“(A) identify the origin of COVID-19 as expeditiously as possible, and

“(B) use that information to take all appropriate measures to prevent a similar pandemic from occurring again.”

The bill requires Haines to turn over the declassified evidence “no later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act” and to submit to Congress an unclassified report containing all the documents requested in the bill, with “only such redactions as the Director determines necessary to protect sources and methods.”

Husseini noted that parts of the bill are unusually specific, focusing “on one strain of alleged evidence” by calling for Haines to turn over classified documents pertaining to “researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in autumn 2019.”

“Now, that could be very important,” Husseini wrote. “But why is this legislation limiting disclosures?”

A ‘classic Nixonian limited hangout’?

Husseini suggested some members of Congress may not have been fully aware that the bill they were voting for does not appear to, in fact, fully declassify all documents related to the origins of COVID-19.

“I have no idea if members of Congress have actually read the legislation and realize how limited it is,” wrote Husseini, who, in another post, called Hawley’s public rhetoric regarding the bill “false and misleading.”

Husseini told The Defender the bill may be acting as a “limited hangout” with the purpose of acknowledging the “lab leak theory” on the one hand, but via legislation that “makes us accept half of the truth.”

Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender, “I’m afraid this [bill] is going to be a classic Nixonian limited hangout” that “does not call for the declassification of all those sources [that] should be declassified and/or released.”

Boyle said any information that is declassified “is going to be helpful,” but that the bill’s provision allowing redactions raises concern.

“Who knows what Avril Haines is going to knock out of this report,” he said.

Husseini noted that the bill also makes no provisions for providing information that several groups, including U.S. Right to Know and some media organizations, have requested — but not yet received — via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) submissions. Husseini said this information “is not classified but is being withheld.”

Husseini cited Gary Ruskin, executive director and co-founder of U.S. Right to Know, who said:

“Much of the federal government’s information related to the origins of Covid-19 is not classified, or likely not classified. We just haven’t been able to access much of it yet via FOIA/FOIA litigation.

“The NIH’s [National Institutes of Health] conduct in stonewalling FOIAs is especially outrageous. It’s time for the Biden administration to tell NIH to comply with the FOIA.”

At a March 9 U.S. Department of State press conference, Ned Price, the agency’s spokesperson, appeared to stonewall Husseini when he asked why the government hasn’t responded to U.S. Right to Know’s FOIA requests related to government funding of bioweapons agents’ discovery research, including the funding of such research in China.

“We can respond in writing on a question that specific,” Price replied. When further pressed by Husseini, Price said, “I would ask that you be respectful of your colleagues.”

An attempt to blame the virus exclusively on China?

There has been a flurry of news reports in recent weeks originating from various branches of the U.S. government indicating broader acceptance of the “lab leak theory.”

The U.S. Department of Energy said it now believes COVID-19 most likely emerged from the Wuhan lab — a position subsequently adopted publicly by FBI Director Christopher Wray.

On March 8, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic heard the testimony of experts who also accepted the “lab leak theory.”

“All this — the recent hearings, the Hawley legislation, the WSJ piece — seem part of a coordinated effort on the part of the ‘intelligence community’ to own the pandemic story and use it for their purposes,” Husseini wrote.

Boyle shared similar concerns with The Defender :

“I am concerned that this [bill] is only going to get a part of the truth. Certainly not the full truth of what really happened here with COVID-19, which we need to get at.

“My concern is that all that’s going to get out of this report … will implicate the Wuhan BSL4 [biosafety level 4 lab] in COVID-19. Well, that’s fine with me. But what about the American involvement here?

“And this was funded by Tony Fauci and Francis Collins at NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] and NIH. Those should be in this legislation too, if we really wanted to get to the bottom of what happened here.”

Boyle and Husseini told The Defender there are numerous government and private entities whose classified documents should be declassified.

Boyle said these include the University of North Carolina, the National Center for Toxicological Research, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School, the U.S. Agency for International Development, EcoHealth Alliance and the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick.

Husseini noted that state governments and private institutions also are likely to possess important information that the COVID-19 Origin Act does not cover. These include Scripps ResearchTulane University and the Wellcome Trust.”

The Wellcome Trust is headed by Jeremy Farrar, now chief scientist for the World Health Organization. “Farrar played a central role in disseminating the propaganda line that COVID could not have lab origins in early 2020,” Husseini said.

U.S. Right to Know sued the University of North Carolina, which is publicly owned, after it failed to respond to the watchdog group’s FOIA requests.

Husseini said the COVID-19 Origin Act “doesn’t even instruct the DNI [Director of National Intelligence] to declassify what it knows about other Chinese government institutions like the Chinese CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].”

Husseini told The Defender :

“Since [Fauci] retired, the system has seemingly skillfully tried to put the deranged stance of the last three years into the rearview mirror hoping people will forget the massive propaganda.”

Boyle told The Defender that “from this legislation, it does appear they’re trying to pin it all on China.”

Husseini, noting that “China may well have major culpability,” said this is not the same as full or exclusive culpability, which is what the U.S. government may now be attempting to establish.

Husseini wrote that “a general anti-China agenda, has taken primacy and is part of a dynamic which ‘ultimately lets’ U.S. institutions and ‘U.S. biowarfare off the hook.’”

He told The Defender :

“There are two pillars of the U.S. establishment here — one wants to polarize at some level with China and the other wants to ensure the U.S. government continues its discovery of bioweapons agents.

“For the establishment to be maintained, both those strains need to be maintained.”

According to Husseini, this may explain why the bill passed both houses with seemingly little debate. It passed the Senate with “unanimous consent,” and subsequently passed the House in a unanimous vote.

Husseini noted that Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a member of the House Rules Committee, even put forth a rule “to ensure passage of Hawley’s bill.”

Husseini said Biden, who hasn’t yet said if he will sign the bill, has a few options he may be considering, telling The Defender :

“I see no sign of actual opposition from the Biden administration and I suspect this is all being done in coordination with the director of National Intelligence, as were the reports in the Wall Street Journal that drove this narrative.

“It’s possible Biden wants to appear reluctant on this and I suppose Biden could veto it and get an override so he could pose as being conciliatory to the Chinese or the like.”

Husseini said that “with the collapse of the completely fictional Daszak narrative in the late Spring and Summer of 2021 … a backup narrative has been put forward, especially through the Wall Street Journal,” whose report on the Department of Energy pivoting toward the “lab leak theory” was co-written by Michael Gordon, “who with Judy Miller perpetrated the Iraq weapons of mass destruction fraud on the U.S. public.”

He also blamed wide swaths of the independent media, particularly left-leaning outlets, for going along with establishment efforts to discredit the theory that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“Much of ‘the Left’ has basically done everything to kill lab origin — and effectively made it a right-wing issue,” Husseini said.

According to Husseini, those who long promoted the Chinese response to COVID-19 and who now are supporting the push to frame China, are pushing for a world “that combines the worst aspects of the U.S. — corrupt corporate capitalism — with the worst aspects of Chinese society: explicit authoritarianism.”

“The pandemic, it can hardly be ignored, helped isolate people from one another, helped restrict borders, was an excuse for massive civil liberties restrictions — all things useful to the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ agenda,” said Husseini. “This is another reason that intentional release should be seriously examined.”

Lab leak or lab origin?

Husseini said he prefers the term “lab origin theory” over “lab leak theory.”

“I see no good reason to make assumptions,” Husseini said. “‘Leak’ assumes a mistake. It could have been a mistake, but why presume it?”

Boyle adopted a similar view, although he noted that the language of the COVID-19 Origin Act does not mention either term.

“It does not refer to a lab leak,” he said. “It doesn’t say ‘leak’ at all. It says ‘originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.’ Obviously, there could be different interpretations of why it originated there. I still believe it was a leak, but this does leave open why it might have originated there.”

Boyle reiterated his longstanding belief that “COVID-19 is an offensive biological warfare weapon with gain-of-function properties” and called for the halting of gain-of-function research.

According to Boyle, who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, Congress’ reluctance to declassify documents that may implicate U.S. government entities in the origins of COVID-19 is reflective of the massive amounts of federal money spent on biological weapons research.

“They’re not doing that because the U.S. government agencies and scientists involved in the development of COVID-19 [have received] massive sums of money,” Boyle said. “We’ve been devoted to developing offensive biological warfare programs since after Sept. 11, 2001 … I’ve been speaking out about this publicly for years.”

Husseini told The Defender :

“Biowarfare is a deniable weapon, which makes disclosure of documents key. Another reason why the Hawley bill limiting disclosure may well signal a massive coverup in plain sight.”

In a pair of tweets Sunday, British Member of Parliament Andrew Bridgen said he received information from U.S. government sources indicating that the U.S. Department of Defense and the Fort Detrick research facility “were responsible for both the virus and the vaccines” and that “criminal proceedings” may follow.

Bridgen did not clarify which sources provided him with this information or who might face such criminal proceedings. At the March 8 Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Dr. Robert Redfield said COVID-19 was “engineered” and blamed gain-of-function research for “the greatest pandemic our world has seen.”

However, Redfield stopped short of explicitly calling for a full ban on such activities, calling instead for a moratorium.

Boyle told The Defender “all this gain-of-function so-called ‘research’ has to be terminated immediately with legislation by Congress … The only way to protect ourselves is to terminate it immediately. No moratorium.”

“There was a moratorium” during the Barack Obama presidency, said Boyle, “and Fauci undermined the moratorium by outsourcing the work through the EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan BSL4 [laboratory]. So, a moratorium is worthless. We have to terminate all gain-of-function research everywhere. It has to be prohibited, to be made criminal.”

The Defender reached out to the offices of Hawley and Braun, Turner and Bridgen for comment, but did not receive a response as of press time.


Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

March 16, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Anatomy of the sinister Covid Project, Part 5

This is the latest instalment of a series in which Paula Jardine examines how the Covid vaccine programme was conceived by US defence planners nearly 20 years ago as a 21st century ‘Manhattan Project’ for biodefence. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here,  Part 3 here and Part 4 here.

By Paula Jardine | TCW Defending Freedom | March 10, 2023

IN APRIL 2017, three months after the Davos launch of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an opinion piece appeared in the Harvard Business Review arguing that the world needed a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) style programme to prevent pandemics. 

It was co-written by Dante Disparte, later a member of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Council and of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Digital Currency Governance Consortium, and Governor Tom Ridge, a Vietnam veteran who was the first US Secretary of Homeland Security. Ridge co-chairs Dr Robert Kadlec’s Biodefense Commission, a private entity whose funders include the smallpox and anthrax vaccine manufacturers Bavarian Nordic and Emergent Biosolutions, and the Hudson Institute, co-founded in 1961 by Herman Kahn, the Rand Corporation pioneer of situational simulations (like the ones so loved by Kadlec) who was satirised by Stanley Kubrick as Dr Strangelove.

The co-authors wrote: ‘In public health, it is much easier to play offense than it is to play defense. Playing offense well, however, is going to require a lot more co-ordination – both internationally and within national borders. We believe an important first step in this effort is for the United States and governments around the world to develop an equivalent to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that focuses cross-sector efforts on advancing biological and pandemic risk readiness.’

Kadlec’s Covid-19 Manhattan Project, reported on here which was rolled out as Operation Warp Speed in the US and spearheaded internationally by CEPI, an organisation that is the international equivalent to DARPA for vaccines, did just that. The aim was operationalising DARPA’s Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) programme through a network of public-private partnerships. DARPA says P3 aims ‘to support military readiness and global stability through pursuit of novel methods to dramatically accelerate discovery, integration, pre-clinical testing, and manufacturing of medical countermeasures against infectious diseases.’

Dr Michael Callahan, the man hired by Kadlec to investigate the Covid-19 outbreak on the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship, which purported to prove that SARS-CoV2 spread asymptomatically, is a physician scientist who managed DARPA’s biodefence ‘therapeutic’ programmes between 2005 and 2012. It was part of DARPA’s ‘super soldier’ project, the aim of which was to create ‘kill proof’ soldiers with an unfair advantage over enemy troops. Inner Armour was the name Callahan gave to the programme to develop advanced genetic vaccines against infectious diseases, now commercialised by Moderna and BioNTech. If conventionally developed vaccines are conceived of as the regular troops routinely deployed in the War on Microbes, the new genetic rapid response vaccines DARPA wanted were meant to be the guerilla fighters, ‘bushwhackers’ as the Americans call them, to be used as an interim firewall.

The objective behind the kill proofing programme was to make American soldiers deployable anywhere in the world on short notice. Callahan told Wired magazine in 2007: ‘As of today, our soldiers are vulnerable to diseases to which the enemy is immune. When a single soldier is infected, the mission is jeopardized and often terminated.’

During Callahan’s time in charge of the biodefence therapeutics programme, its annual budget ballooned from $61million to $260million. The portfolio involved eight programmes that generated nine investigational new drugs (INDs) and three new drug applications with products in the market.  Callahan also launched the Department of Defense Icon programme Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals (AMP) which generated emergency use pandemic swine flu (H1N1) vaccine, and ZMapp, an experimental monoclonal antibody developed by Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory and the US Army Medical Research Institute of Disease to treat Ebola. ZMapp is ‘pharmed’ in tobacco plants grown by a subsidiary of British American Tobacco and was tested on 200 people during the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak without having previously undergone any human clinical trials for safety or effectiveness.

The genetic vaccine programme called ADEPT: PROTECT is part of the Pandemic Platform Program (P3) launched in 2011. Its focus is on developing ‘rapid discovery, characterisation, production, testing, and delivery of efficacious DNA- and RNA-encoded medical countermeasures’.

Notably absent from this shopping list is the word ‘safe’. This programme is the genesis of the mRNA gene therapy vaccines catapulted on to the pharmaceutical market by Moderna and BioNTech via the Covid-19 pandemic.

Wired magazine first reported the US military’s desire for these genetic vaccines in 1996, but until the appearance of Covid-19 little substantive progress had been made in developing them to the point of commercialisation via normal regulatory approval pathways. Regardless, the ambition to see this ‘rapid response’ technology authorised for use remained undented.

In 2017, the P3 Manager Matt Hepburn, another one of Kadlec’s Red Dawn Wolverines, said: ‘DARPA’s goal is to create a technology platform that can place a protective treatment into health providers’ hands within 60 days of a pathogen being identified, and have that treatment induce protection in patients within three days of administration. We need to be able to move at this speed considering how quickly outbreaks can get out of control. The technology needs to work on any viral disease, whether it’s one humans have faced before or not.‘

Sars CoV2, the vehicle that finally delivered this vaccine technological revolution (through regulatory wormholes at warp speed into countless arms), appears itself to be a by-product of other US government programmes intended to achieve the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine, articulated by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Biodefence was a single throw-away line in the PNAC document. ThoughKadlec, Tara O’Toole and their associates attempted to focus the attention of defence planners on bioweapons via the June 2001 Dark Winter tabletop simulation of a smallpox bioweapon attack, it was not until the anthrax attacks that followed 9/11 that this received the attention they desired. Again, despite the FBI coming to believe the so-called Amerithrax attacks were an inside job, the War on Microbes had arrived.

Full Spectrum Dominance in the War on Microbes entails predicting pathogen evolution, attempting to pre-empt it and, finally, defending against it. Since the early 1960s, the US military has been cataloguing pathogens around the world as part of its operational preparedness efforts in order to develop vaccines to defend its personnel. In 2009, USAID, a US government agency that is known to act as a front for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),  launched an Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) programme to target the early detection of new disease threats in the developing world. This virus surveillance programme was called PREDICT. Its aim was to identify the animal sources of coronaviruses, influenza viruses and filoviruses such as Ebola and mitigate the epidemic risk ‘by minimising those practices and behaviours that trigger the spill-over and spread of new pathogens from animal reservoirs to humans’.

Five years into the EPT programme, a non-profit organisation called EcoHealth Alliance, whose president is Dr Peter Daszak, a British zoologist with an interest in disease ecology, joined an international consortium working on the PREDICT programme. Originally called the Wildlife Trust, EcoHealth Alliance was founded in 1971 by the British naturalist Gerald Durrell as a conservation organisation. It has evolved a long way from its original aims.

Dr William Karesh, EcoHealth Alliance’s Executive Vice President for Health and Policy, is a member of Kadlec’s Biodefense Commission who participated in the 2014 workshops that produced the Biodefense Commission’s ‘National Blueprint for Biodefense’. He is also a consultant to the World Health Organisation and is credited with coining the term ‘One Health’ used to describe the interdisciplinary approach promoted by EcoHealth Alliance which says that the health and wellness of all living things on the planet is interconnected. The One Health ‘philosophy’ has been adopted by the WHO and the US government.

In 2016, interested parties gathered at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Conference Center in Italy ‘to develop a vision on the importance and feasibility of the Global Virome Project in building a world safe from the threat of emerging viral diseases.’ Karesh was there. So was Dr George Gao, then Director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control. Under the One Health rationale, once viruses have been identified and catalogued, all creatures, human, or animal are candidates for vaccination, for the good of their health. Last month Sir Jeremy Farrar, the WHO’s incoming Chief Scientist called for governments to invest in developing vaccines for all known animal influenzas just in case they caused a human outbreak. In the War on Microbes there are countless enemies and corresponding opportunities for pharma-profit churning.

The PREDICT consortium contracted out surveillance work on coronaviruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance announced that the WIV had found viruses closely related to SARs in bat caves and that they were capable of infecting humans. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dr Daszak was involved with Dr Baric, Sir Jeremy Farrar and Dr Anthony Farrar in the email chain concerning what’s become known as ‘the proximal origin discussion’ to quash any suggestion of a lab origin for SARS-CoV2.

Once an animal viral reservoir is identified, another DARPA programme called PREMPT, to ‘pre-empt pathogens’ emergence with preventive vaccine’, is meant to activate. This programme, which Michael Callahan also once oversaw, aims to preserve military readiness to deploy to remote locations by protecting against infectious disease threats by targeting the animal hosts of the viruses with self-spreading vaccines.

Not even wild animals fall outside the scope of America’s Full Spectrum Dominance ambitions. In March 2018, EcoHealth Alliance submitted a PREMPT funding proposal to DARPA called DEFUSE which proposed to reverse-engineer a bat coronavirus vaccine.

DARPA rejected it over concerns that it violated a moratorium imposed by the Obama administration in October 2014 on risky gain-of-function research that might make coronaviruses and influenza viruses more pathogenic or transmissible. This was not, tragically, enough to halt the research.

In my next article I will report on exactly how Anthony Fauci circumvented this ban by outsourcing the gains of function research to China.

March 11, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Killing Communists with Impunity

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | March 9, 2023

The New York Times recently carried an interesting article about the death in 1973 of Pablo Neruda, one of the most renowned poets in the world. Neruda was a Chilean citizen. He was also a strong supporter of Chilean president Salvador Allende, who the Chilean national-security establishment, with the encouragement of the U.S. national-security state, ousted from power in a violent coup in that year. The coup was headed by Chilean conservative military strongman General Augusto Pinochet.

At the time of the coup, Neruda was suffering from cancer and was hospitalized. He died during the coup. The Chilean military-intelligence establishment claimed that he died from his cancer. There were always suspicions, however, that he had been murdered by the Chilean national-security establishment. 

Pablo Neruda

The Times article describes a report from a team that examined Neruda’s remains. The team found bacteria within his body that could be deadly. But they could not determine for sure whether it was, in fact, a toxic strain of bacteria and whether it had been injected into him.

One thing is for certain though: It certainly would not have been unusual for Pinochet and his henchmen to murder Neruda, with the full support of the Pentagon and the CIA, both of which had agents on the ground in Chile during the coup.

Remember: This was 1973, when the Pentagon’s and CIA’s Cold War racket was still going strong. As part of that racket, the Pentagon and the CIA had carte blanche to murder communists wherever they found them.

In 1970, the Chilean people democratically elected Allende to be their president. Allende was a socialist, one who immediately established a friendly relationship with the communist world. He even invited Cuban president Fidel Castro to visit Chile. Their parade in downtown Santiago was met with throngs of enthusiastic supporters. 

The U.S. national-security establishment deemed Allende to be a grave threat to national-security. That made him subject to being assassinated by the CIA. Don’t forget that the CIA had already repeatedly tried to assassinate Castro for being a communist. 

Rather than assassinate Allende, however, the Pentagon and the CIA instead decided to encourage the Chilean national-security establishment to initiate a violent coup against him. When the coup took place in 1973, the Chilean military tried to assassinate Allende with missiles fired at him from military planes. Allende fought back but was no match for the power of the Chilean national-security establishment. At the end of the battle, Allende lay dead, supposedly having decided to commit suicide. 

But even if Allende didn’t commit suicide, the outcome was never in doubt. The Chilean military-intelligence establishment was going to kill him, either during the coup or after the coup. That’s because it, like the Pentagon and the CIA, deemed him to be a communist. Like their counterparts in the Pentagon and the CIA, as far as they were concerned they had the omnipotent authority to kill communists, especially those within their own country. 

In fact, after the coup Pinochet and his goons routed up more than 50,000 of Allende’s supporters, including women. They murdered or disappeared around 3,000 of them. They tortured most of them. They raped or violently sexually abused many of the women. 

None of this was considered to be any big deal for the killers, the kidnappers, the rapists, and the abusers because the victims were all considered to be communists or communist sympathizers. In the minds of the Chilean national-security establishment, the only good communist was a dead communist, a tortured communist, a raped communist, or a sexually abused communist. 

All of this met with the fervent approval of the Pentagon and the CIA. U.S. taxpayer-funded money flooded into the Pinochet regime. In the eyes of the Pentagon and the CIA, Pinochet was helping win the worldwide war on communism, even if the U.S. was losing to the communists in Vietnam.

During the coup, the Chilean military took two young Americans into custody, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi. They too were supporters of Allende. They were also opponents of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Chilean officials murdered both men. There is no way that Pinochet would have killed two Americans without first having received a green light from U.S. officials. But it was easy to secure that green light because Horman and Teruggi were considered to be unpatriotic, treasonous American communist sympathizers. 

In 1970, U.S. officials first began planning their coup against Allende. Standing in their way, however, was Gen. Rene Schneider, the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces. The CIA orchestrated his violent kidnaping to remove him as an obstacle to the coup. Schneider was murdered by the CIA-employed thugs during the kidnapping attempt. 

No one in the CIA was ever brought to justice for Schneider’s murder. For that matter, no one in the CIA or the Pentagon was ever brought to justice for Horman’s and Teruggi’s murder. 

Many years later, when the Schneider sons sued in federal court for the murder of their father, the federal judiciary made it clear that it would never interfere with any of the CIA’s or Pentagon’s state-sponsored assassinations. 

So, given all this, it certainly should not surprise anyone if Pablo Neruda was, in fact, one of the murder victims during the Chilean coup. In fact, what would be surprising is if he wasn’t. 

March 9, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | 1 Comment

Did US raise a false flag on Nord Stream blasts?

BY BRADLEY K. MARTIN | ASIA TIMES | MARCH 9, 2023

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh said an odd thing on March 7 when TASS asked him to compare his version of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipeline explosions (US Navy divers did it, he had reported February 8) with a newly released version from the New York Times and German media that points to non-governmental Ukrainians as culprits.

“I don’t want to get into it,” Hersh replied to the Russian wire service. “You should decide for yourself. It’s up to you.” The TASS reporter persisted, asking if Hersh thought the New York Times account had come in response to Hersh’s own investigation. He gave the same reply, saying people should come to their own conclusions.

That was pretty clever. Read both versions and you may conclude that they could fit together to point to a plausible account of how, as war raged over Ukraine, three pipelines supplying Germany’s gas supply from Russia were blown up before Vladimir Putin could use their existence to try to lure Germany out of the pro-Ukraine camp. Before the war, over half of Germany’s gas imports came from Russia.

Assemble a whole from the two versions and you might come up with this: On US President Joe Biden’s orders, US government covert types put together and with Norwegian help carried out the operation (that’s Hersh’s story); to avoid detection, they left some clues pointing elsewhere, to Ukrainians or “pro-Ukrainians” – the main clue mentioned so far being that the yacht from which the divers worked could be traced back to a yacht-rental company in Poland, a company owned by Ukrainians.

The German media account

What you might end up suspecting is a false flag.

Die Zeit, a leading German newspaper that is part of a media investigative consortium that talked with officials in several countries to put together its narrative, acknowledges the possibility thusly: “Even if traces lead to Ukraine, the investigators have not yet been able to find out who commissioned the suspected group of perpetrators. In international security circles, it is not ruled out that it could also be a false flag operation.”

The paper hastens to add that investigators “have apparently not found evidence that confirms such a scenario.” But “the nationalities of the perpetrators are apparently unclear” since they used “professionally forged passports.”

Die Zeit narrows the gang down to “a team of six people. It is said to have been five men and one woman.” Functionally, they were “a captain, two divers, two diving assistants and a doctor.”

Like the New York Times, the German media outlets suggest that the demolition crew consisted of  Ukrainian civilians from a non-governmental “commando” force opposed to the Russian invasion.

There’s no point in asking for a smoking gun at this point. His critics point out that Hersh – who has acknowledged he opposed NATO expansion into the former Soviet Union and who is not known to be a fan of allied efforts to help Ukraine fight the war – based his own account on a single unnamed US government source. Likewise, the German media organizations that make up the investigative consortium name no sources.

Die Zeit reports that “a Western secret service is said to have sent a tip to European partner services in the autumn, shortly after the destruction,” talking about Ukrainian commando responsibility for the destruction. “After that, there are said to have been further intelligence indications that a pro-Ukrainian group could be responsible.”

A Kremlin spokesperson on March 8 was having none of it, telling journalists that “Western media reports which exonerate NATO state actors from involvement in the explosions that ruptured the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines have the hallmarks of a synchronized misinformation campaign.”

The Hersh version

Hersh’s version is that US Navy divers, “operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.”

Remarkable for its detail, the Hersh account claims that “Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back-and-forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.”

The debate and preparations proceeded from December 2021 when Russia was marshaling its troops, preparing to strike Ukraine from Belarus and Crimea, Hersh writes. “As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia,” he notes.

The interagency task force thus assembled “was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation,” Hersh writes.

“‘It would be a goat fuck,’ the agency was told. Throughout ‘all of this scheming,’ the source said, ‘some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, “Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.”’

“Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to [national security adviser Jake] Sullivan’s interagency group: ‘We have a way to blow up the pipelines.’ What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, ‘If Russia invades … there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.’”

Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland gave a similar warning, Hersh says, and lower-ranking officials were concerned by what they viewed as their seniors’ indiscretion.

The operation was headquartered in Norway, whose navy, Hersh says,

was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta-class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.

As cover, Hersh writes, the Americans had Sixth Fleet planners add to the annual naval maneuvers, already scheduled for that time and place, a research and development exercise involving “NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them… The C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22.”

After a decent interval of three months,

on September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission…

In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House – but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution… No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.

Fact-checkers and Hersh

Critics found what they said were some errors in Hersh’s version. Here is Wikipedia on that:

Hersh wrote that NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg had been cooperating with US intelligence services since the Vietnam War and has been cleared ever since. At the time the Vietnam War ended, Stoltenberg was 16 years old, and he had participated during the peak of the Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in Norway. In 1985, Stoltenberg was part of the Workers’ Youth League in Norway, when the Labor Party was working to withdraw Norway from NATO.

Hersh’s article said the US divers who planted the explosives had operated from a Norwegian Alta-class minesweeper. The Norwegian Defence Forces said no Norwegian Alta-class mine sweepers had participated in BALTOPS 22 and were not in the vicinity of the explosions during the exercise.

Regarding Hersh’s allegations against the Norwegian P-8 Poseidon surveillance plane, Lieutenant Colonel Vegard Norstad Finberg of the Norwegian armed forces said the Norwegian P-8 Poseidon surveillance plane is a brand new plane that has never been in an operational operation, and has only flown test flights in Norwegian airspace, and has never been over the Baltic Sea…

In the German Bundestag, members of parliament from the government disputed Hersh’s credibility and urged that public discussion of the topic be minimized for security reasons; opposition members of parliament from AfD and Die Linke initiated a parliamentary debate on February 10 about Hersh’s allegations, with Die Linke MP Sevim Dağdelen arguing that the government seemed uninterested in clarifying the truth about the bombings.

If the divers’ platform wasn’t an Alta-class minesweeper, then was it a yacht rented from a Ukrainian-owned company in Poland – the vessel the German media/European intel account mentions?

The German account tells us that the saboteurs on their rented yacht proceeded to the dive location on September 6, 2022, from the German Baltic Sea port of Rostock after loading their equipment aboard there from a delivery truck. Rostok’s a long day’s sail (325 nautical miles) from Gdynia, the major Polish port on the Baltic (in case that’s where, in Poland, the Ukrainian-owned yacht rental company is situated).

The New York Times

Disclaimer here: In my 54 years in the news business, I have generally avoided asking spooks for help. I have nothing against them and realize they are colleagues of sorts, but I can recall only a couple of cases when I sought their help. They have their jobs and I have mine. I certainly don’t rush to get their version of events whenever something happens. I assume their version is whatever their agencies have told them should be their version so I prefer to spend my time getting my own version from more direct sources.

That may help to explain why the New York Times piece bothers me. The reporters – maybe the spooks are their beat and they have to get along, or else? – seem overeager to peddle Washington’s version:

Ukraine and its allies have been seen by some officials as having the most logical potential motive to attack the pipelines. They have opposed the project for years, calling it a national security threat because it would allow Russia to sell gas more easily to Europe.

I’d advise checking your wallet if you hear from your pipe-smoking spook source that “officials who have reviewed the intelligence said they believed the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals or some combination of the two. US officials said no American or British nationals were involved.”

Would you credit “US officials who have reviewed the new intelligence” and who say that “the explosives were most likely planted with the help of experienced divers who did not appear to be working for military or intelligence services”?

After all that Seymour Hersh has told you?

Well, at least they have a policy at the New York Times permitting them to emulate Seymour Hersh (born 1937, a real veteran with a record) and stick to anonymous sources:

Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.

Whew. What a relief.

Bradley K Martin is a veteran foreign correspondent.

March 9, 2023 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, War Crimes | , , | 1 Comment

In Nord Stream attack, US officials use proxy media to blame proxy Ukraine

One month after Seymour Hersh reported that the US blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, US regime finds a scapegoat in Ukraine and stenographers in the NYT.

By Aaron Maté | March 8, 2023

Nearly six months after the Nord Stream pipelines exploded and one month after Seymour Hersh reported that the Biden administration was responsible, US officials have unveiled their defense. According to the New York Times, anonymous government sources claim that “newly collected intelligence” now “suggests” that the Nord Stream bomber was in fact a “pro-Ukrainian group.”

The only confirmed “intelligence” about this supposed “group” is that US officials have none to offer about them.

“U.S. officials said there was much they did not know about the perpetrators and their affiliations,” The Times reports. The supposed “newly collected” information “does not specify the members of the group, or who directed or paid for the operation.” Despite knowing nothing about them, the Times’ sources nonetheless speculate that “the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals, or some combination of the two.” They also leave open “the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services.” (emphasis added)

When no evidence is produced, anything is of course “possible.” But the Times’ sources are oddly certain on one critical matter: “U.S. officials said no American or British nationals were involved.” Also, there is “no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian government officials.”

Despite failing to obtain any concrete information about the perpetrators, the Times nonetheless declares that the US cover story planted in their pages “amounts to the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.”

It is unclear why the Times has deemed their evidence-free “lead” to be “significant”, and not, by contrast, the Hersh story that came four weeks earlier. Not only does Hersh’s reporting predate the Times’, but his story contained extensive detail about how the US planned and executed the Nord Stream explosions.

Tellingly, the Times distorts the basis for Hersh’s reporting. “In making his case,” the Times claims, Hersh merely “cited” President Biden’s “preinvasion threat to ‘bring an end’ to Nord Stream 2, and similar statements by other senior U.S. officials.” In falsely suggesting that he relied solely on public statements, the Times completely omits that Hersh in fact cited a well-placed source.

By contrast, the Times has no information about its newfound perpetrators or about any other aspect of its “significant” lead.

“U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains,” The Times states. Accordingly, US officials admit that “there are no firm conclusions” to be drawn, and that there are “enormous gaps in what U.S. spy agencies and their European partners knew about what transpired.” For that apparent reason, “U.S. officials who have been briefed on the intelligence are divided about how much weight to put on the new information.” The Times, by contrast, apparently feels no such evidentiary burden.

In sum, US officials have “much they did not know about the perpetrators” – i.e. everything; “enormous gaps” in their awareness of how the (unknown) “pro-Ukraine group” purportedly carried out a deep-sea bombing; uncertainty over “how much weight to put on” their “intelligence”; and even “no firm conclusions” to offer. Moreover, all of this supposed US “intelligence” happens to have been “newly collected” — after one of the most accomplished journalists in history published a detailed report on how US intelligence plotted and conducted the bombing.

Given the absence of evidence and curious timing, a reasonable conclusion is not that a Ukrainian “proxy force” was the culprit, but that the US is now using its Ukrainian proxy as a scapegoat.

As the standard bearer of establishment US media, the Times’ “reporting” is perfectly in character. Days after the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, the Times noted that “much of the speculation about responsibility has focused on Russia” – just as US officials would certainly hope. The narrative was echoed by former CIA Director John Brennan, who opined that “Russia certainly is the most likely suspect,” in the Nord Stream attack. Citing anonymous “Western intelligence officials”, CNN claimed that “European security officials observed Russian Navy ships in vicinity of Nord Stream pipeline leaks,” thus casting “further suspicion on Russia,” which is seen by “European and US officials as the only actor in the region believed to have both the capability and motivation to deliberately damage the pipelines.”

With the story that Russia blew up its own pipelines no longer tenable, the Times’ new narrative asks us to believe that some unnamed “pro-Ukraine group”, which “did not appear to be working for military or intelligence services” somehow managed to obtain the unique capability to plant multiple explosives on a heavily sealed pipeline at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

That narrative is already being laundered through the German media. Hours after the Times story broke, the German outlet Die Zeit came out with a story, sourced to German officials, that claims the bombing operation was carried out by a group of six people, including just “two divers.” These supposed perpetrators, we are told, arrived at the crime scene via a yacht “apparently owned by two Ukrainians” that departed Germany. How a yacht managed to carry the equipment and explosives needed for the operation is left unexplained.

The saboteurs somehow possessed the capability to carry out a deep-sea bombing, but not the awareness to properly clean up their floating crime scene. According to Die Zeit, the boat was “returned to the owner in an uncleaned condition,” which allowed “investigators” to discover “traces of explosives on the table in the cabin.” Should this lean “pro-Ukraine” crack team of naval commandos conduct another act of deep-sea sabotage, they will only need to hire a cleaning professional to get away with it.

As for motivation, we are somehow also asked to forget that Biden administration officials not only expressed the motivation, but the post-facto satisfaction. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward,” senior US official Victoria Nuland vowed in January 2022. President Biden added the following month that “if Russia invades… there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” After the Nord Stream pipelines were bombed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken greeted the news as a “tremendous strategic opportunity.” Just days before Hersh’s story was published, Nuland informed Congress that both she and the White House are “very gratified” that Nord Stream is “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Not only are global audiences asked to ignore the public statements of Biden administration principals, but their blanket refusal to answer any questions. This was put on display in Washington this past weekend, when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz paid Biden a White House visit. Unlike Scholz’s last DC trip, there was no joint news conference. This was understandable: the last time they appeared together, Biden blurted out that he would “bring an end” to Nord Stream, leaving Scholz to stand next to him in awkward silence. This time around, the two briefly sat before a group of reporters who were quickly shooed out of the room, much to Biden’s apparent glee.

Inadvertently, the Times’ account exposes new holes in the failed attempts to refute Hersh’s story.

Members of the NATO state-funded website Bellingcatfalsely presented to NATO state audiences as an independent investigative outlet, have attempted to cast doubt on Hersh’s claims by arguing that open-source tracking at the time of the bombing fails to detect the vessels he reported on. But as the Times story notes, investigators are seeking information about ships “whose location transponders were not on or were not working when they passed through the area, possibly to cloak their movements.” Hersh has made this same point in interviews, noting that when Biden flew into Poland before his visit to Kiev last month, his “plane switched off its transponder” to avoid detection, as the Associated Press reported. Unfortunately for self-styled digital sherlocks, major international crimes – particularly those involving intelligence agencies – cannot be solved from their laptops.

Hersh was also pilloried for citing a single anonymous source. The Times’ story, by contrast, relies on multiple anonymous sources, who, unlike Hersh, have no tangible information to offer. After ignoring Hersh’s story for a full month, the Times’ news section was forced to acknowledge it for the first time. And the best that its anonymous sources could come up with is not only an evidence-free, caveat-filled narrative, but a story that does not challenge a single aspect of Hersh’s detailed account.

In another contrast, Hersh is one of the most accomplished and impactful journalists in the history of the profession. Two of the journalists on the Times story, Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, have bylined multiple stories that spread demonstrable falsehoods sourced to anonymous US officials.

In the summer of 2020, Barnes and Goldman were among the Times journalists who laundered CIA disinformation that Russia was paying bounties for dead US troops in Afghanistan. When the Biden administration was forced to acknowledge that the allegation was baseless, the Times tried to water down its initial claims in an attempt to save face.

In January, Barnes co-wrote a Times story which claimed, citing unnamed “U.S. officials” more than a dozen times, that “Russian military intelligence officers” were behind “a recent letter bomb campaign in Spain whose most prominent targets were the prime minister, the defense minister and foreign diplomats.” But days later, as the Washington Post reported, Spanish authorities arrested “a 74-year-old Spaniard who opposed his country’s support for Ukraine but appears to have acted alone.” (Moon of Alabama is one the few voices to have called out the Times’ fraudulent reporting).

That same month, Goldman shared a byline, alongside fellow “Russian bounties” stenographer Charlie Savage, on a Times story which argued that Special Counsel John Durham has “failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry,” even though Durham’s findings have yet to be released. As I reported for Real Clear Investigations, the Times made its case by omitting countervailing information and distorting the available facts – as is the norm for establishment media coverage of Russiagate.

The US officials behind the Times’ latest Nord Stream tale presumably believe that they have offered the best counter to Hersh that they could. That it is devoid of concrete information, and written by Times staffers with a track record of parroting US intelligence-furnished propaganda, ultimately has the opposite effect.

The Times’ narrative can only be seen as further confirmation that Hersh found the Nord Stream bomber in Washington. That explains why anonymous US officials are now using proxies in establishment media to scapegoat their proxy in Ukraine.


Watch or listen to my recent interview with Seymour Hersh here.

March 9, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | 1 Comment

The American People Must Draw Red Lines Now

By Connor Freeman | The Libertarian Institute | March 2, 2023

Washington and NATO have rapidly escalated their war with Russia. The White House appears to have blown up the Nord Stream pipelines in a blatant act of war against Russia, not to mention Germany and other European allies.

The CIA is reportedly conducting sabotage attacks on Russian infrastructure and the Pentagon has tacitly endorsed Kiev’s drone strikes hundreds of miles deep inside the Russian mainland.

Along with an assortment of NATO commandos, U.S. troopsCIA, and Special Operations forces are on the ground in Ukraine as well. The White House has greenlit the transfer of Bradley armored fighting vehicleslonger range rockets, and M1 Abrams battle tanks to the battlefield.

Kiev is demanding hundreds of tanks. Concurrently, multiple European NATO members are sending their own main battle tanks to Ukraine, and a U.S. backed assault on Crimea is expected soon.

While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky goads London, Berlin, and Paris into handing over fighter jets, his country has already suffered more than 100,000 casualties, hundreds of Ukrainian troops are dying every day just over a battle for the eastern Donetsk city of Bakhmut.

In recent months, officials in Kiev have explicitly stated that Ukraine—a “de facto” NATO member—is “shedding blood” for a “NATO mission.” The goal is eliminating Moscow as a “threat” to the alliance by weakening, destabilizing, and disintegrating Russia.

In the process, Ukraine, the human battering ram, is being destroyed. But in the words of Madeline Albright, from the Empire’s perspective, “the price is worth it.”

Russia must be crippled before the Pentagon launches its impending war against China, “the big one,” which top military commanders and four star generals now warn will take place in only a few years.

In the meantime, experts and analysts continue to point out—along with even The New York Times—that we are systematically pushing “the United States and its NATO allies closer to direct conflict with Russia.”

What is the justification for this seemingly perpetual escalation? The U.S. war machine reasons that since Russian President Vladimir Putin has not yet ordered strikes on NATO territory or pushed the nuclear button, Washington and its NATO vassals can freely provide Kiev with increasingly advanced weapons and even support assaults against the Crimean Peninsula as well as the Russian homeland itself.

The aforementioned tanks will likely be used for the potential attacks on Crimea (read: Russian territory) currently being considered by the White House. Such an escalation could swiftly lead to World War III and a nuclear exchange.

Incidentally, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists warns nuclear war is now a more likely possibility than at any time during the Cold War. In making their case for turning the clock to 90 seconds to midnight—for the first time—the group partly refers to the refusal of the United States, Ukraine, and its allies to come to the negotiating table.

BAS president and CEO Rachel Bronson said in a statement following the decision that the “U.S. government, its NATO allies and Ukraine have a multitude of channels for dialogue; we urge leaders to explore all of them to their fullest ability to turn back the clock.”

Last fall, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was advocating a negotiated settlement between Kiev and Moscow. However, he was all but vetoed by the so-called diplomats in Antony Blinken’s State Department.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett recently discussed how he attempted to mediate a peace deal with Russia and Ukraine in early March 2022. According to Bennett, both sides made major concessions and “there was a good chance of reaching a ceasefire.”  He has now revealed the effort was overruled and ultimately “blocked” by President Joe Biden and former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

According to current and former U.S. officials, that same month, Turkish brokered talks in Istanbul between the warring sides also established a workable foundation for a future settlement. The whole enterprise was squashed again by Johnson, acting on behalf of the “collective West.”

Even when U.S. military leadership expresses uneasiness about the war’s trajectory, the provision of heavy western-made tanks, or the sheer inability of Ukrainian forces to regain all the territory Russia has captured, the escalations continue anyway.

The hawkish Secretary General of NATO himself has said “I fear that the war in Ukraine will get out of control, and spread into a major war between NATO and Russia.”

Likewise, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned “I fear the world is not sleepwalking into a wider war. I fear it is doing so with its eyes wide open.”

The American people must draw red lines now and stop their out of control ruling class waging wars against nuclear armed powers. As Roger Waters says, this is not a drill.

Our fellow countrymen have become dangerously desensitized to the thought of direct conflict with both Russia and China.

Tragically, our people have been numb for a long time. They have yet to truly reckon with our government’s mass murder marathon of the last 20 years including one million dead Iraqis, half a million dead Syrians, as well as the hundreds of thousands killed in AfghanistanLibya, PakistanSomalia, and Yemen.

Designedly, our enemies in Washington need us to be numb to the inevitable results of their reckless, murderous policies.

The hawks will next try the same proxy war strategy in Taiwan, we will not get another chance to draw red lines.

We must demand all military aid be terminated, and that the White House and the State Department be forced to support or at least not interfere with negotiations.

We must demand an immediate end to this war now.

Connor Freeman is the assistant editor and a writer at the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on Conflicts of Interest.

March 2, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

West helped Nusra, ISIS obtain chemical weapons: Syrian FM

The Cradle | March 1, 2023

Syrian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Faisal Mekdad, claimed at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva on 28 February that “well-known countries had used weapons of terrorism against the Syrian people,” in violation of the United Nations charter and their international obligations.

Foreign Minister Mekdad stated in a video address to the conference that, “Syria faced an unjust war, during which well-known countries employed weapons of terrorism against the Syrian people, sent tens of thousands of foreign terrorists, and provided them with various types of support and weapons, including internationally prohibited ones, to serve their aggressive agendas.”

He added that the policies of these countries have led to terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra obtaining chemical weapons and using them repeatedly against Syrians, which highlights the need to address the shortcomings in international instruments governing the use of such weapons. Mekdad also called for joint action to find a politically neutral mechanism to coordinate international efforts to address acts of chemical terrorism.

Not only the Syrian government but independent sources have suggested that armed opposition groups supported by the US, Israel, Turkiye, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia used chemical weapons against the Syrian army and Syrian civilians during the conflict, which began in 2011.

Carla del Ponte, a member of the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic and a former war crimes prosecutor, gathered testimonies indicating that opposition armed groups used sarin gas against the Syrian army and civilians in the town of Khan al-Assal in March 2013.

Journalist Seymour Hersh reported that a classified US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) briefing in June 2013 indicated that Nusra maintained a sarin production cell and was attempting a large-scale production effort in Syria.

A report published by Rootclaim in 2021 showed that the Saudi-backed armed opposition group, Liwa al-Islam, launched the sarin-filled rockets used in the chemical attack in East Ghouta in August 2013.

A detailed report from the Libertarian Institute showed that the Ghouta attack was a false flag attack meant to trigger Western military intervention in Syria as part of the broader CIA program known as Timber Sycamore.

Foreign Minister Mekdad pointed out that Syria’s experience with the UN’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) showed that the watchdog group had become politicized and a tool of the Western powers to manufacture hostility toward the Syrian government.

Mekdad called on the states who are party to the OPCW to carry out a responsible and careful review of the work of the organization and to correct errors and clear violations of the provisions of the convention that governs the group.

As reported by journalist Aaron Mate, veteran OPCW inspectors provided evidence showing the Syrian government was not responsible for an alleged chemical attack in Douma in April 2018, but their probe was censored and manipulated by top OPCW officials. Under direct US government pressure, the OPCW concealed this evidence provided by its own inspectors and released a report that suggested the Syrian government was responsible for the attack.

Foreign Minister Mekdad also stressed that the Israeli occupation constitutes a source of permanent and serious threat to regional and international peace and security. In addition to launching repeated attacks on Syrian and Palestinian territories, it continues to modernize and expand its arsenal of all types of weapons of mass destruction.

March 1, 2023 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | 2 Comments

How US’ False Flags Record Prompts Public to Trust Hersh’s Nord Stream Bombshell Even More

Sputnik – 24.02.2023

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh previously teased about unveiling the mechanism of Nord Stream’s destruction. Despite the media silence surrounding his latest expose, the journalist’s research keeps attracting the public’s attention, as the US and its Nordic allies remain tight-lipped about the incident.

“In my view, Hersh is facing a reality which he has never faced before in his long and distinguished life,” Hans Mahncke, a US investigative journalist and lawyer, told Sputnik. “His life-long audience of traditional leftists has dissolved. Whereas a Hersh expose in the past would immediately cause a big furor both in media and politics, he is now being ignored. That is an entirely new situation for him. But it is not just Hersh. If the entire Edward Snowden story would play out now in 2023 instead of in 2013, no one would report it or care. This is the new reality we live in.”

Mahncke drew attention to “the complete disappearance of the old, anti-war left in the United States,” which he called “an extraordinary event which historians will study long into the future.”

“Some say that hatred of Trump caused this shift in that if Trump wanted peace, the left wanted war just to spite Trump, but the trend started under Obama and also captured Europe, where even the German Green Party, which used to be fervently anti-war, is now extremely hawkish. The exact reasons remain unclear, but there is no question that the Western anti-war movement is largely dead. In turn, the prospect of slithering into World War III is much higher now than at any time during the Cold War.”

Earlier this month, Hersh released a bombshell report on Nord Stream’s destruction on September 26, 2022, claiming that US Navy divers, with assistance from Norway, planted explosive charges at the pipeline under the cover of a NATO military exercise in the Baltic during summer 2022.

Observers warn that the destruction of the Nord Stream could be equated to a declaration of war, and yet it appears that Western leaderships are not interested in getting to the bottom of it.

West Surprisingly Uninterested in Investigating Nord Stream Sabotage

Earlier this week, Russia presented a UN Security Council draft resolution requesting that the secretary-general conduct an independent international investigation to verify the facts brought forward by Hersh. Moscow’s request for an independent investigation was prompted by doubts about the integrity and transparency of Denmark, Germany, and Sweden in their ongoing inquiries.

Permanent Representative of Russia to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya has repeatedly noted that Moscow hasn’t been allowed to take part in the investigations by any of the three countries. He insisted they were “not only not transparent, but it is quite clear that they seek just to cover the tracks and stick up for their … American brother.”

For its part, the US reiterated its “concerns” with regard to the Nord Stream attack, and, simultaneously, bashed Hersh’s account of events as “false” and “fiction.” Sweden, Denmark, and Germany have yet to complete their separate probes into the blast: they signaled recently that “at this point, it is not possible to say when they will be concluded.”

When asked what they had found so far, the investigators told the UN Security Council on February 21, that they had established “that there has been extensive damage” to the pipelines “and that the damage was caused by powerful explosions due to sabotage.” Actually, this was already known roughly five months ago. Probably, the nations are keeping other findings close to their chests.

Sachs and McGovern: UN Probe is Global Priority

Remarkably, two American experts who testified at the UNSC meeting openly said that they do not buy into the West’s Nord Stream narrative. Jeffrey D. Sachs, a professor at Columbia University and specialist in global economy, stated on February 21 that “the investigation by the UN Security Council of the Nord Stream explosions is a high global priority.”

“There is only one detailed account to date of the Nord Stream destruction, the one recently put forward by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, ostensibly based on information leaked to Hersh by an unnamed source,” stated Sachs. “The White House has described Hersh’s account as ‘completely and utterly false,’ but did not offer any information contradicting Hersh’s account and did not offer any alternative explanation.”

Retired CIA officer and political activist Raymond McGovern, who also participated in the UNSC summit, said that he “associate[d] [himself] completely with Sachs’ comments.”
Sachs was one of the first prominent American figures to suggest in the wake of the blasts that the Biden administration could potentially have been involved in the attack.

Growing Mistrust Towards US Government Machine

In his latest Substack report, Hersh shed some light on US-Norwegian military cooperation which started after the Second World War. He also shed light on the special role played by the CIA during the War in Vietnam and, especially, prior to the Gulf of Tonkin “false flag.”

“The problem of rogue US intelligence agencies has been around for a long time, as even John F. Kennedy noted,” Mahncke said. “After Nixon’s forced resignation, there was an effort to clean up these agencies, but not much changed in the short term and in the long run, we now have a situation where these agencies not only create mischief overseas, but also target domestic groups. That is what might bring real change, as at least half the country no longer trusts these agencies. While claims of Iraqi WMDs might have been readily accepted in the past, people now ask questions. Ironically, had US intelligence agencies not started targeting its own citizens, the fake narrative that Russia bombed its own pipeline might have prevailed.”

Indeed, it seems that Americans’ trust in their security services and federal government has been shattered by the Trump-Russia hoax, Big Tech’s collusion with the feds to censor free speech in the US, and the manhunt for January Sixers, to name but a few.

Earlier this month, extensive research by Jeff Gerth debunked the US media’s journalistic malpractice in covering Russiagate, while the Twitter Files released by Elon Musk last year told the story of information manipulation and machinations by the FBI and other agencies in coordination with Big Tech and Big Media. Apparently, the potential release of 41,000 hours in footage from January 6, 2021 protests would answer the question whether the crackdown against January Sixers was justified.

However, the reported “fakes” and “hoaxes” created and peddled by the feds did not start with Trump’s ascendance to power. Back in 2015, Seymour Hersh played down the “glorious” Obama-era story of the capture and elimination of “Terrorist No 1” Osama bin Laden.

Osama Bin Laden’s Death

According to the US government’s account of events, the US tracked Bin Laden to a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan; conducted a secret Navy Seal raid which resulted in the terrorist’s death; after that, Bin Laden’s body was treated with respect and buried at sea. Still, Hersh suggested, citing his sources, that in reality, Pakistani intelligence services captured Bin Laden in 2006 and kept him in prison.

In 2010, Pakistan agreed to give Bin Laden away to the US under the guise of a staged military raid. US Navy Seals met no resistance at Abbottabad on May 2, 2011 and killed Osama in his bedroom in cold blood. His body was “torn apart with rifle fire” and his remains were “tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains” by Navy SEALs during their flight home. There was no burial at the sea since “there wouldn’t have been much left of Bin Laden to put into the sea in any case.”

Hersh’s version of Bin Laden’s death looks especially tragic given that 18 years earlier, on December 6, 1993, Osama bin Laden was described as “every inch the mountain warrior of mujahedin legend”; a “shy man” dressed in “his gold-fringed robe”; a man who helped the Afghans win a war against the USSR. This is how Osama was portrayed by The Independent at the time.

Khan Sheykhoun False Flag

In 2017, Hersh challenged the US official narrative about a chemical incident in the town of Khan Sheikhoun that was used by the Trump administration to justify the April 6, 2017 US cruise missile strike on Syrian government forces’ al-Shayat air base.

Hersh’s account of events showed that not only was there no evidence to back Washington’s claims about Syrian government forces’ alleged “chemical attack” on Khan Sheikhoun, but that the US military and intelligence apparatus were not aware of such an “attack” before the cruise missile strike was ordered. In reality, the Khan Sheikhoun chemical incident was staged by al-Nusra* terrorists, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

The aforementioned cases raise the question: what else could the US government and its agencies be hiding?

Meanwhile, Hersh’s latest expose describes a case that appears to be far more dangerous than the My Lai massacre or the Khan Sheykhoun false flag.

“We are now in a far more dangerous situation than at any time in the Cold War,” warned Mahncke. “Western elites claim that Russia in 2023 is akin to Germany in the 1930s. That is nonsense. The situation we are facing is far more akin to the pre-World War One situation in Europe. It’s as if reason has been abandoned and the entire Western establishment is itching for war.”

February 24, 2023 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism | , , , , | Leave a comment

West unwilling to cooperate on Nord Stream probe: Russian diplomat

Press TV – February 22, 2023

Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations has once again accused the United States of being behind the explosions on Nord stream gas pipelines in September last year, saying the national investigations of Germany, Denmark, and Sweden into the sabotage are aimed at protecting Washington.

Vasily Nebenzia made the remarks at a UN Security Council session in New York on Tuesday, stressing that Western countries were showing no intention of cooperating with Moscow in an inquiry into the blasts.

“We have strong reasons to doubt the effectiveness, transparency, and impartiality of investigations that are being carried out under some national jurisdictions,” Nebenzia said, adding, “We do not see our partners being eager to cooperate.”

The senior diplomat also noted that “the so-called investigations by Scandinavian states and Germany into the incident not only lack transparency but are aimed at covering up the tracks and exculpating the big American brother.”

Nebenzia said Russia was not allowed to partake in the probe, and all its requests “are ignored with arrogance.”

Nebenzia further explained that Germany, Denmark, and Sweden had ignored Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin’s communications last October regarding the participation of Russian energy giant Gazprom and other relevant agencies in the investigations.

He said, “Since we talk about a crime that was committed by means of an explosive device, which makes it subject to the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings of 15 December 1997, we expect that all states that have to do with the incident, namely the US, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, will fulfill their obligations under this document.”

“But leadership of these states do not show any political will or rather do not have any,” the Russian diplomat said.

On September 26, 2022, a series of explosions took place on the pipelines, knocking out three of the four strings of the Nord Stream network, off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea.

Two of the pipelines, known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, known as Nord Stream 2, was not yet operational.

Following the blasts, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden conducted investigations into the incident. The preliminary results of a joint probe by Sweden and Denmark showed that the explosions had been “intentional sabotage,” but responsibility was not assigned to any party.

American journalist Seymour Hersh recently claimed that the bombing of the pipelines had been directly ordered by US President Joe Biden and carried out by the CIA with the help of the US Navy.

The White House rejected the report as “utterly false and complete fiction.”

February 22, 2023 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Leaked files reveal Britain’s ambulances aided terrorists in war-torn Syria

B‌y Kit Klarenberg | Press TV | February 20, 2023

On February 6, Syria and Turkey were rocked by devastating back-to-back earthquakes. Ever since, people in these countries and the region have been subjected to a particularly merciless – yet illuminating – crash course in Western double standards on humanitarian aid.

While aid and assistance have flowed into Istanbul and Damascus from all neighbors, initially many governments were reticent to dispatch anything at all to Syria, because US and EU sanctions made it illegal for planes to land in its airports.

It meant that those eager to provide humanitarian assistance could not dispatch it, for fear of dire repercussions. Such concerns were well-founded. Washington enforces sanctions with an iron fist, and any individual or state breaching them faces severe penalties.

Giving in to intense global public pressure, the US Treasury on February 10 enacted a 180-day waiver on certain sanctions imposed on Syria, to allow for vital earthquake relief to reach the country.

Still, neither Washington nor its constellation of international allies has provided any meaningful assistance to Damascus whatsoever, despite the death toll in the country grimly ratcheting daily.

Meanwhile, Israeli regime officials expressed the readiness to bomb Iranian aid deliveries arriving by land. And, in the end, they ended up bombing the people still recovering from the shock of a colossal human tragedy.

Complicating matters further, terrorist groups that still occupy portions of Syrian territories, such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in the northwest, are blocking the government’s attempts to distribute provisions, a spokesperson for HTS in Idlib telling Reuters no shipments would be permitted to pass its checkpoints, on the basis, “we won’t allow the regime to take advantage of the situation to show they are helping.”

These pockets crisscross the country, an enduring and shameful legacy of the West’s failed decade-long dirty war against Damascus.

Almost never acknowledged by the mainstream media, their continued presence is particularly relevant to consider now, for they are relics of a time when the Western world was only too eager to invest vast sums to flood Syria with medical aid, albeit in service of “regime change”.

Healthcare as psychological warfare

In August 2016, a remarkable and never-before-disclosed covert British intelligence operation began near Amman, Jordan.

At a secret training site operated by London and Washington, British Foreign Office contractor Torchlight – which this journalist has repeatedly exposed for assisting Britain’s infiltration of security and spying agencies across West Asia – extensively tutored violent groups funded and armed by the spy agencies CIA and MI6 in providing medical assistance to terrorists and mercenaries.

Dubbed “MAO CASEVAC” (Moderate Armed Opposition Casualty Evacuation), the program ran the gamut from practical training for paramedics to the provision of multiple ambulances purchased from Qatar, advanced medical technology, elaborate communications systems to ensure the safe and timely transfer of injured “rebels” from the frontline, and the creation and maintenance of dedicated facilities to treat the wounded, at a cost of millions.

Internal documents related to the effort note that at the time it was launched, injured fighters relied “on inadequately prepared and supported self-help at the point of injury, followed by ad hoc systems and capabilities to evacuate and treat them in a hostile and austere environment,” with an overwhelming reliance on civilian hospitals and healthcare infrastructure.

Moreover, CIA and MI6-supported terrorist groups lacked “dedicated doctors”, and medical professionals locally, while willing to treat anyone whatever their ailments, remained “keen to maintain their independence” lest they be accused of serving as in-house doctors for armed actors.

These practitioners even lacked high-tech equipment such as scanners for detecting internal bleeding, and access to resources such as blood products.

So it was Torchlight that set about training 200 opposition actors every year for three years in all conceivable medical disciplines and equipping them accordingly.

While London was careful not to publicize the initiative’s existence in any way, its results were intended to be broadcast widely locally and internationally – for MAO CASEVAC’s objectives were as practical as they were psychological.

It was hoped that on top of saving lives and protecting the welfare of terrorists, their “morale and motivation” would all “be enhanced”, while “purpose, ethos and culture” would be instilled in them:

“If the MAO is able to provide this support then fighters will have greater confidence that they can be provided for in case of injury. Consequently, this will improve motivation, a sense of welfare, and the credibility of MAO troops, as well as reduce battlefield losses. This will add credibility to the MAO.”

As such, MAO CASEVAC was but one component of Britain’s wide-ranging information warfare campaign throughout the Syrian dirty war, designed to destabilize the democratically-elected government of Bashar al-Assad, while rebranding the murderous militant groups rampaging across the country as a “moderate” alternative. Its founding documents make these objectives very clear.

Noting that the British government sought to “foster a negotiated political transition” in Syria, these papers openly state that MAO CASEVAC’s aim was to “generate pressure” on the Assad government.

This was predicated on the notion that “regime change” required “an empowered opposition on the ground,” capable of convincing locals, Western citizens and international bodies that they were courageous freedom fighters on a righteous mission, rather than a ragtag bunch of crazed fundamentalists complicit in countless hideous atrocities, wholly dependent on foreign backing to survive in every way.

Of course, if the opposition could demonstrate to the world they were highly skilled in saving lives, it would go some way to cementing the perception of a professional, humanitarian-orientated force.

This was precisely the rationale behind the creation of the White Helmets – a terrorist group masquerading as a civil defense force – by the British intelligence agency.

‘Risk of ricochet’

Another indication of MAO CASEVAC’s darker nature is provided in Torchlight documents on risks related to its operation.

The training area in Jordan, provided to the company by British intelligence “at no cost to the project,” offered “accommodation, ablution, dining, classrooms, driving tracks, outside rural environment areas, and open space for equipment storage.”

However, the milieu was far from idyllic – medics would be trained alongside opposition fighters learning the art of killing, including the use of AK47s and other weaponry. The proximity between the two programs was such, Torchlight repeatedly warned of the “physical security risk” posed to their students by the site’s dual purpose:

“Another training conducted on the site involves live firing. Consequently, third-party personnel are in possession of weapons and live ammunition on the camp in addition to the Jordanian Security Personnel on site. Risk of ricocheting from the live firing ranges onto the driving range and wider area behind. There is likely to be an overlap of live firing and driving courses [emphasis added].”

If that wasn’t enough, Torchlight also forecast the threat of a “disaffected student” or Jordanian security operative “in possession of a weapon and ammunition” carrying out an armed attack on its staff and trainees to be “high” risk.

Absent was any consideration of students joining the al-Nusra Front and Daesh Takfiri group, and equipment being one way or another appropriated by these terrorist groups, although such considerations are writ large in leaked Foreign Office risk assessments of the fighter training program, which was likewise overseen by British intelligence cutouts.

However, the UK Foreign Office, which funded the program to the tune of $21 million over the same timeframe as MAO CASEVAC, with up to 600 fighters trained annually as a result, was intensely relaxed about those prospects. Any loss of equipment was to be “tolerated” to “a reasonable degree.”

The same was true of AJACS, a controversial British intelligence “aid” project that created the Free Syrian Police, which was run in coordination with Nour al-Din al-Zinki, a CIA-backed entity linked to heinous crimes against humanity, including the videotaped beheading of a Palestinian teenager in 2016.

The implementing contractor of that effort, the notorious Adam Smith International, simply didn’t consider it “cost-effective” to prevent their participation.

All of this begs the question of whether the real objective behind MAO CASEVAC and other interrelated British intelligence operations was to insidiously bolster and equip the most violent, deranged elements on the ground in Syria.

At the very least, it’s evident that whatever anxieties London may harbor today about humanitarian aid making its way to earthquake-hit Syria, an enemy state in dire need of respite, hasn’t historically applied to terrorist groups that further its interests in the country.

This may explain why they remain active there so long after the dirty war theoretically ended.

February 20, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | 3 Comments