Cyberattacks: A New False Flag Frontier
BY KIT KLARENBERG | JULY 15, 2024
At the start of June, Admiral Robert Bauer, head of NATO’s military committee, announced that the military alliance had finalised plans to recognise state-backed cyberattacks on its members as a dedicated pretext for activating Article 5. Reportedly “a joint decision of all allies,” from now on, foreign hacking blitzes can be countered with a collective NATO response, up to and including military measures. Bauer’s disclosure passed the media by entirely – but this is a seismic development, heralding a modern, digital form of ‘false flag’.
Article 5, which provides for collective defence in the event a NATO member is attacked, was a core component of the military alliance’s founding treaty. While it has been invoked just once – by the US, in the wake of 9/11, to invade Afghanistan – there have been efforts to spark it before and since. Most recently, in November 2022, the government of Ukraine falsely declared a missile fired by Kiev that struck Poland, killing two people, was Russian in origin.
The purpose of this deceit was undoubtedly to embroil NATO formally and directly in the proxy war. Wise to the ruse, US officials harshly rebuked President Volodmoyr Zelensky publicly for the World War-threatening fraud. Such incidents amply underline Article 5’s susceptibility to abuse. Yet apparently, military alliance chiefs – and the bloc’s members – are keen to ever-expand its terms, well-beyond its initial remit. Adding cyberattacks to the roster of grounds for collective response is a long-standing objective.
In August 2019, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg authored a bombastic op-ed declaring the military alliance would “guard its cyber domain and invoke collective defence if required.” A “serious cyberattack” on one member state could be “treated as an attack against us all,” he wrote, triggering Article 5 in the process. Fast forward two years, and Keith Alexander, US National Security Agency director 2005 – 2014, called on the ‘Five Eyes’ global spying network to construct a global unified cyberattack “radar”:
“Imagine if we built a radar picture for cyber that covered not only what impacts Australia, but what impacts other countries, and we could share, in real time, threats that are hitting our countries… What we can do is share information and work together… Cyber is going to be hugely important for our future. It’s the one area where adversaries can attack Australia and the US without trying to cross the oceans… We have this anomaly: how are you gonna defend that which you can’t see?”
Alexander, who lied brazenly to the public about his agency’s spying capabilities – including while while testifying under oath to Congress – during his time as NSA chief, suggested this worldwide dragnet would contribute significantly to collective defence, in the obvious spirit of NATO’s Article 5. Given “proposals” for Orwellian, futuristic resources from Western politicians and military and intelligence officials almost invariably presage their real-world rollout, we can only assume in light of Bauer’s announcement such a “radar” is incoming.
‘Security Failures’
This interpretation is reinforced by Bauer observing how invoking Article 5 could only happen once it was confirmed a cyberattack was carried out by a state actor, not a private person or structure. “In that case, it would not be clear who to go to war with,” he added. It’s certainly a source of some relief that NATO is committed to securing clarity on “who to go to war with”, before launching a military “response” to a cyberattack.
However, these comments illuminate a very obvious, grave problem with adding cyberattacks to Article 5’s ambit. Identifying who or what is responsible for them to an absolute certainty is extremely difficult. This task is further complicated by a frequent lack of certainty over whether hackers operating from a particular state are doing so at the behest of authorities. For example, much has been made in Britain recently of Russian hacking group Qilin, which supposedly infiltrated NHS servers.
Mainstream media reports have universally framed Qilin as a malign instrument of the Kremlin, although whether Russian officials command the group, let alone even know of its existence, is far from clear. A representative iNews article refers to Qilin as “a syndicate made up of more than 100 groups…not believed to be under the direct control [emphasis added] of the Russian government.” Instead, Qilin is claimed to be “a useful tool of global disruption the Kremlin is happy to turn a blind eye to.”
Further muddying the picture, it has been confirmed that Western intelligence services can falsely attribute cyberattacks, with devastating effect. In 2017, CIA files published by WikiLeaks revealed how the Agency masks its hacking exploits, to make it appear another state actor was responsible. Dubbed ‘Marble Framework’, among other things the resource inserts foreign-language text into malware source codes to misdirect security analysts. The Framework can obfuscate in this manner via Arabic, Chinese, English, Farsi, Korean, and Russian.
Excerpt from leaked Marble Framework files
Moreover, CIA hackers employ crafty tricks and double bluffs to reinforce these bogus attributions, such as creating the appearance of attempts to conceal foreign-language text. Thus, forensic investigators are successfully conned into concluding even more strongly that the country framed by Langley is responsible. Unbelievably, this seismic disclosure prompted no Western journalist to reappraise the widely received narrative that Moscow’s GRU was responsible for the hack and leak of damaging Democratic National Committee emails in 2016.
That conclusion, universally reinforced by the Western media, was initially peddled by Matt Tait, a former GCHQ spy. He didn’t base his conclusions on anything technical, but “basic operational security failures” he detected on the part of the individual(s) who released the communications, including their computer username referencing the founder of the Soviet Union’s secret police, and “ham-fisted” attempts to pose as Romanian. Which is, of course, precisely how the CIA would cover its own tracks via Marble Framework.
‘Irrevocable Proof’
There has similarly been no mainstream discussion of why the Agency would seek to acquire and maintain this capability in the first place. Now that NATO considers cyberattacks an Article 5 matter, this question has never been a more urgent question, given the CIA’s extensive and deplorable history of false-flag operations to overthrow governments, and kickstart conflicts.
For example, in April 1953, the CIA and MI6 launched a welter of covert actions to undermine Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, in order to lay the foundations of his ouster. One key tactic in which the pair engaged was bombing mosques, and homes of prominent Muslim figures by operatives posing as members of Tehran’s Communist Party. A subsequent internal review of the coup noted that this incendiary activity mobilised Mullahs to take action against Mosaddegh.
These efforts were judged to have contributed to the “positive outcome” of the wider coup effort. Such a glowing appraisal of these false flag manoeuvres may have informed the dimensions of Operation Northwoods, a daring set of proposals under which the CIA would stage and commit acts of terrorism against US military and civilian targets. These could then be blamed on the government of Fidel Castro, precipitating all-out war with Cuba.
Potential false-flag actions outlined in extraordinary declassified documents include assassinating of Cuban immigrants on US soil, sinking boats ferrying Cuban refugees to Florida, shooting down US civilian airlines, blowing up US ships, and more. One specific element of Operation Northwoods is particularly relevant to consider in light of alleged state cyberattacks becoming Article 5 worthy. If the 1962 Mercury launch – the first US orbital spaceflight – went awry, Castro would be blamed by concocting:
“Irrevocable proof… the fault lies with the Communists… this to be accomplished by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans.”
While Northwoods was ultimately rejected by President John F. Kennedy, the US military and intelligence community continued constructing false-flag blueprints thereafter. In 1963, a Pentagon policy paper advocated making it appear that Cuba had attacked a member of the Organization of American States (OAS), justifying US retaliation:
“A contrived ‘Cuban’ attack on an OAS member could be set up, and the attacked state could be urged to take measures of self-defense and request assistance from the US and OAS.”
Langley’s cyberattack connivances have surely only grown more sophisticated, and more complex to unravel, in the years since Marble Framework was publicly exposed. Pinning blame on a foreign country for a cyberattack it didn’t actually commit is no doubt even easier and more effective today. Resultantly, a false flag tripwire for Beijing, Moscow, or any other Washington-mandated ‘enemy’ state to unwittingly and unwillingly stumble over, triggering the outbreak of global war, has now been forged by NATO.
The Prince And The Spy
By Whitney Webb | The Last American Vagabond | May 12, 2023
A TLAV investigation has found that Erik Prince, the man behind the Blackwater mercenary group, recently teamed up with an Israeli spy, creating a front company with her to help Israeli defense technology providers exploit loopholes and sell their products to the American military.
For years, Erik Prince – the founder of mercenary firm Blackwater (now Academi) – has been a major source of controversy. Ever since he left Blackwater over a decade ago, Prince has appeared in the news for pushing to privatize several wars, his ties to former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns, his violation of international arms embargoes and his unusually close ties with Project Veritas, among other notable events and connections.
However, some of Prince’s antics in recent years have not yet made it into the news – namely his decision to team up with an Israeli spy to build a very secretive company that has – until now – evaded scrutiny. That company, Comframe Solutions, appears to operate as an intelligence front and explicitly targets parts of the American military involved in highly sensitive combat operations. As this investigation will show, Prince’s partner in Comframe – Lital Leshem – has been tied to a series of apparent, and admitted, Israeli intelligence front companies, several of which have a focus on technology. Yet Prince and his close associate Chris Burgess – Comframe’s supposed president – have done everything they can to hide their association with the incredibly secretive company. Why might that be and what exactly is Comframe up to?
From “Army Brat” to Cyber Spy
Lital Leshem was raised as an “army brat” in Reut, Israel and Pennsylvania, USA. She later enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as she was “truly devoted to safeguarding the State of Israel.” She quickly rose in the ranks, becoming Operations Officer in the IDF of the besieged Gaza Strip and later becoming a Major, a position she continues to hold to this date through her “reserve duty activities.” According to her LinkedIn, she served in Israeli military intelligence from 2005 to 2011 and, more specifically, served in its signals intelligence unit – Unit 8200. She later attended IDC Herzliya, an Israeli university deeply tied to its military and intelligence apparatus. There, she met Amir Elichai and the two would co-create the company Reporty, which later became Carbyne911 – today known only as Carbyne.
Carbyne was originally founded as Reporty in 2014 by Leshem, Elichai and Alex Dizengof. Leshem and Elichai are Unit 8200 veterans, while Dizengof previously worked for Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office. Before it was revealed that Jeffrey Epstein had poured at least 1 million dollars into the company at the behest of his close associate Ehud Barak, Cabryne’s board of directors – which Barak chaired – included the former commander of Unit 8200, Pinchas Buchris, as well as Epstein associate turned venture capitalist Nicole Junkermann. In the wake of the Epstein scandal, Buchris, Barak and Junkerman, among others, were removed from the board and were largely replaced with veterans and former heads of American intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Leshem had left the company in 2017, but has continued to own shares in the company.
Carbyne is a Next-Generation 9-11 (NG911) platform and the explicit goal of NG911 is for all 911 systems nationwide to become interconnected. It is currently active throughout the United States, its main target market. Its software has been criticized due to “serious privacy concerns” about the amount of information it harvests from smartphones that call a 911 call center running Carbyne’s software. For instance, Carbyne’s smartphone app extracts the following information from the phones on which it is installed:
“Device location, video live-streamed from the smartphone to the call center, text messages in a two-way chat window, any data from a user’s phone if they have the Carbyne app and ESInet, and any information that comes over a data link, which Carbyne opens in case the caller’s voice link drops out.”
The potential for Carbyne as a tool for mass surveillance has been extensively reported by Narativ, MintPress News and other outlets. In addition, Carbyne stores all data on past calls and events in order to “enabl[e] decision makers to accurately analyze the past and present behavior of their callers, react accordingly, and in time predict future patterns.” As a result, Carbyne – along with other Israeli intelligence-connected companies seeking to dominate the American “public safety” market – has the potential to facilitate controversial “predictive policing”, i.e. pre-crime, policies.
In addition to Carbyne, Leshem also worked for Black Cube, which has since been removed from her LinkedIn. There, she had been the firms Director of Marketing. Black Cube was specifically outed as an Israeli intelligence front organization in a 2019 article published by Calcalist Tech. That same article also contains the stunning revelation that many Israeli companies, including Black Cube, have been founded as fronts for intelligence operations since 2012. It states that “since 2012, cyber-related and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli military and Israel’s main intelligence arms are transferred to companies that in some cases were built for this exact purpose.” The article also adds that:
“In some cases, managers of development projects in the Israeli military and intelligence arms were encouraged to form their own companies which then took over the [military and/or intelligence] project.”
With Leshem having worked for one company already known to be a product of this deliberate policy, it is worth scrutinizing Carbyne as being one such front, especially considering the common tie of Ehud Barak to both companies. In addition, Leshem has also worked for another company tied to Barak that has been described as worse than the NSO Group, which produced the notorious Pegasus software. Called Toka, its top executives – like Carbyne – are largely veterans of Israeli’s Unit 8200, where Leshem also served, or former commanders of Israeli military cyber operations.
Toka, which Ehud Barak founded in 2018, is very, very likely to be one of the front organizations produced as a result of the aforementioned 2012 Israeli intelligence policy. The company is directly partnered with Israel’s Ministry of Defense and other Israeli intelligence and security agencies since its founding and the company only sells its products to countries that are considered allies of Israel. It purports to be able to hack, not just smartphones, but any device with internet connectivity, such as doorbell cameras and other “smart” devices. As will be noted later in this article, Leshem herself has noted that Toka has a relationship with the CIA.
After being involved with a series of Israeli intelligence fronts and her enduring ties to Israeli military intelligence through her “reserve duty activities”, Leshem was courted by a surprising figure – Erik Prince, war profiteer and founder of the controversial mercenary outfit Blackwater.
Partnering with Prince
Leshem says that she met Prince after she “randomly stumbled across his path and joined his team.” There, per her website, she “managed his business portfolio and his global investments.” Her LinkedIn lists her as serving as the executive director of global business development of Frontier Resource Group (FRG) from 2018 to 2021. Frontier Resource Group was founded by Prince and is “an Africa-dedicated investment firm partnered with major Chinese enterprises, including at least one state-owned resource giant that is keen to pour money into the resource-rich continent,” according to the South China Post. It not only operates in Africa, but also other countries due to its contracts to support China’s One Belt One Road initiative, which were signed in 2019.
FRG is a subsidiary of Frontier Services Group (FSG), which Prince also founded. In 2013, he sold a majority share of FSG to the China International Trust Investment Corporation (CITIC), a state-owned Chinese investment company that is among the largest of the country’s state-run conglomerates. CITIC, during the mid-1990s, was chaired by Wang Jun, who doubled as China’s chief arms dealer and was a key figure in the “Chinagate” scandal of the Clinton White House. As detailed in One Nation Under Blackmail, that scandal involved the illicit transfer of American military technology to China and the illicit transfer of Chinese weapons, whose sale in the US was banned during this time, into the United States. Mark Middleton, a White House aide, and Jeffrey Epstein are some of the names apparently involved with those activities. “Chinagate” appears to have been a joint venture between factions of the CIA and Israeli intelligence and has never been properly investigated by federal authorities. It seems that Prince, who was (and may still be) a CIA asset, and Leshem have engaged in similar activities via FRG/FSG. For example, TRTWorld reported that Leshem is “speculated” to have transferred Carbyne’s technology to China via her role at FRG and her connection to Prince. China launched an app that was nearly analogous to Carbyne, but more explicitly focused on surveillance, at the same time that Carbyne launched its first 911 call system in the United States.
In addition, TRTWorld notes, the company DarkMatter, a UAE surveillance and intelligence group that employs former US intelligence operatives, attracted the attention of Chinese officials at a smart cities conference in 2015. DarkMatter, which was launched to modernize Emirati intelligence and military operations, signed a Global Strategic Memorandum of Understanding with Huawei, the Chinese tech giant. The middle man in this sale was none other than Erik Prince. Leshem and another Prince associate, Dorian Barak, also have business ties to the UAE via their prominent roles at the UAE-Israel Business Council.
As TRTWorld concluded:
“With similar technology being used, and the same mercenary middle-man between Carbyne and China who brought together UAE’s DarkMatter surveillance technology with China, indications point to a likely transfer of surveillance technology from Epstein’s Israeli company [Carbyne] to China.”
Comframe – Secretive Company or Intelligence Front?
Prince’s and Leshem’s joint activities after Leshem left FRG suggest that this pattern of behavior has not only continued, but deepened. According to Leshem’s website, a year and a half after she started working for Prince, she and Prince “joined forces to found Comframe, a company that takes the best of Israeli defense technology providers, and helps them penetrate the American market by bridging prevalent gaps.” Leshem also says Comframe was assisted by her “premier integrator and business development platform for deploying advanced military, special operations, public safety and HLS solutions in the United States, and a wide network of partnership, both government and civilian.”
In discussing Comframe elsewhere, Leshem writes that the company she co-founded with Prince “is led and staffed by Special Operations and defense procurement veterans with billions of dollars of successful sales to USG and foreign government to their names.” She says that Comframe has a “track-record of success implementing complex procurement and integrations programs from intelligence gathering & analysis, to contracting, program sales and personnel deployment, is exceptional.”
What Leshem says of the company clashes with Comframe’s threadbare public presence. For instance, its website, which is notably short on content, lists the following companies as partners – TomCar, BlueBird Aero Systems, General Robotics, SafeStrike, Ops-Core (now part of Gentex Corp) and Axon. On its partners page, Comframe says that this is “a small sampling of our current partners we have chosen to work with.” Most of these companies were created by Israeli military/military intelligence veterans.
Aside from the partners page, there is little other information available on the Comframe site. It describes its mission as “to source cutting-edge, innovative technologies that safely and securely solve articulated U.S. government problems” and touts its “get it done” commitment and how its employees “wake up every morning wanting to find solutions that keep the U.S. government safe and more lethal.” It lists the company’s president as Chris Burgess. Burgess, a former NAVY Seal who trained with Erik Prince, does not list Comframe on his LinkedIn or in any other site discussing his work history. He is currently the CEO of military contractor Regulus Global. Burgess previously ran a mercenary firm he founded, Greystone Ltd., that was previously affiliated with Prince’s Blackwater and was originally intended to be Blackwater’s “sister company.”
Both Blackwater (now Academi) and Greystone have been accused of sending mercenaries to fight in the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Both companies deny this. The accusations came after Prince had planned to create a “private army” in Ukraine, something he has attempted to do (and sometimes succeeded) in various conflict zones, such as Afghanistan. Prince has also attempted to offer “lethal services” to Russia’s Wagner group.
Aside from Burgess’ apparent unwillingness to associate himself publicly with Comframe, there is also the fact that the only employee publicly associated with Comframe at all is Lital Leshem. Indeed, even Erik Prince has declined to publicly affiliate himself with the company. Another oddity is the fact that Comframe’s website has an “Industry News” page that contains several blog posts with titles discussing oil markets and geopolitics. However, the content of the posts themselves are all filler generated by WordPress. Was Comframe also intended to work in commodities markets? The odd and sparse nature of the website seems to clash with Leshem’s characterization of the company.
So, what is Comframe exactly and what is it intended to do? Why are the only people associated with the company two professional mercenaries, one of whom is a known CIA asset, and an Israeli spy? A 2020 article published in the Jerusalem Post seems to highlight Comframe’s mysterious inner workings and likely purpose.
That article notes that Comframe acted as a middleman in forging an agreement to create an assembly line in El Paso, TX in order for the Israeli company Tomcar to “offer its latest models to the US Armed Forces.” The agreement was made between Tomcar and Prince Manufacturing, a major contract manufacturing company that works with Ford, General Motors and Tesla, among others. Prince Manufacturing was notably founded and run for many years by Edgar Prince, Erik Prince’s father. Notably Tomcar, its founder – Yoram Zarchi – and his son (works for Tomcar) – Ram Zarchi – appear in the Panama Papers as does the former holding company that owned Tomcar from 2004 to 2011.
The article notes that Comframe “is focused on recognizing needs in the US defense industry and matching them to possible solutions, usually involving innovative Israeli companies.” However, the article notes, “to meet the demands of American security needs, one must have an American entity.” Leshem is then quoted as saying, “Ram [Zarchi of Tomcar] had been living in Phoenix for 15 years, but he can’t do that [sell to the American military because he is not a US citizen]. We can.”
In other words, per Leshem, Comframe utilizes Prince and presumably Burgess to sell Israeli defense technology and products to the American military that would otherwise not happen due to national security concerns around buying foreign-made products for sensitive defense and military operations. Leshem goes on to state Comframe sells “to the US Special Forces and other branches of the service [i.e. US military],” noting that Comframe is specifically targeting Special Ops. She also suggests that, aside from the US military, another intended market for the company is NATO – she told the Jerusalem Post that the US “controls 70% of NATO’s defense industry.”
The article ends by stating that, for Comframe, when sales are related to national security, one still has to have “boots on the ground,” suggesting why Comframe has such a minimal web and online presence. This is similar to another company Leshem has been working for while at Comframe, Ehud Barak’s Toka. Notably, at the end of this very article, Leshem uses Toka as an example regarding Comframe’s “boots on the ground” sales approach. She states:
“Hi-tech companies like Toka with clients like the CIA, can’t discuss what they do using Zoom.”
A New Pattern for Prince
Comframe is a very suspect company – it is highly, highly secretive, targets sensitive American military agencies with foreign technology, and its known employees are apparent spooks and intelligence-linked mercenaries. Not only that, but the history of Israeli espionage in the United States – from Jonathan Pollard and PROMIS to Comverse and beyond – shows a concerted effort to target the American military and security agencies, often with bugged or “backdoored” technology.
In addition to the above, Prince has also recently engaged in efforts to market a very suspect smartphone to MAGA Republicans as being “unhackable” and “unsurveillable.” That phone was “designed in Israel” and the company that produces it is called Unplugged. According to reports, Unplugged’s “day-to-day technology operations are run by Eran Karpen, a former employee of CommuniTake, the Israeli start-up that gave rise to the now infamous hacker-for-hire firm NSO Group.” Karpen, like Leshem, is also a veteran of Unit 8200.
Notably, DarkMatter, the UAE private intelligence company that was mentioned earlier due to its association with Prince, once marketed an “ultrasecure” phone called Katim, only to be later outed for hacking dissidents and journalists. In addition, Prince debuted Unplugged’s phone on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” program. Both Prince and Bannon have controversial relationships with exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, also known as Miles Guo.
That Prince would help market this phone specifically to MAGA Republicans is disturbing given that his associate Leshem and other Israeli intelligence veterans and operatives have played a major role in developing the infrastructure for the US’ “War on Domestic Terror,” which is mainly targeted at the political right and has already utilized mass surveillance through smartphones and other technologies to justify arrests, including “pre-crime” arrests. Given the content of this investigation, Prince’s ties to foreign governments and intelligence agencies should be heavily scrutinized, especially Comframe – whose secretive activities may be drastically undermining American national security.
Destroying Ukraine with Idealism
Why Ukraine should not have the “right” to join NATO
BY GLENN DIESEN | JULY 2, 2024
Political realism is commonly and mistakenly portrayed as immoral because the principal focus is on the inescapable security competition and it thus rejects idealist efforts to transcend power politics. However, because states cannot break with security competition, morality for the realist entails acting in accordance with the balance of power logic as the foundation for stability and peace. Idealist efforts to break with power politics can then be defined as immoral by undermining the management of security competition as the foundation of peace. As Raymond Aron expressed in 1966: “The idealist, believing he has broken with power politics exaggerates its crimes”.[1]
Ukraine’s Sovereign Right to join NATO
The most appealing and dangerous idealist argument that destroyed Ukraine is that it has the right to join any military alliance it desires. It is a very attractive statement that can easily win support from the public as it affirms the freedom and sovereignty of Ukraine, and the alternative is seemingly that Russia should be allowed to dictate Ukraine’s policies.
However, arguing that Ukraine should be allowed to join any military alliance is an idealist argument as it appeals to how we would like the world to be, not how the world actually works. The principle that peace derives from expanding military alliances without taking into account the security interests of other great powers has never existed. States such as Ukraine that border a great power have every reason to express legitimate security concerns, but inviting a rival great power such as the US into its territory intensifies the security competition.
Is it moral to insist on how the world ought to be when war is the consequence of ignoring how the world actually works?
The alternative to expanding NATO is not to accept a Russian sphere of influence, which denotes a zone of exclusive influence. Peace derives from recognising a Russian sphere of interests, which is an area where Russian security interests must be recognised and incorporated rather than excluded. It did not use to be controversial to argue that Russian security interests must be taken into account when operating on its borders.
Mexico has plenty of freedoms in the international system, but it does not have the freedom to join a Chinese-led military alliance or host Chinese military bases. The idealist argument that Mexico can do as it pleases implies ignoring US security concerns, and the result would likely be the US destruction of Mexico. If Scotland secedes from the UK and then joins a Russian-led military alliance and hosts Russian missiles, would the English still champion the principle that it has no say? Idealists who sought to transcend power politics and create a more benign world would instead intensify the security competition and instigate wars.
The Morality of Opposing NATO Expansionism
To argue that NATO expansionism provoked Russia’s invasion is regularly condemned by idealists as immoral because it allegedly legitimises both power politics and the invasion. Is objective reality immoral if it contradicts the ideal world we would like to exist?
The former British ambassador to Russia, Roderic Lyne, warned in 2020 that it was a “massive mistake” to push for NATO membership for Ukraine: “If you want to start a war with Russia, that’s the best way of doing it”.[2] Angela Merkel acknowledged that Russia would interpret the possibility of Ukrainian NATO membership as a “declaration of war”.[3] CIA Director William Burns also warned against drawing Ukraine into NATO as Russia fears encirclement and will therefore be under enormous pressure to use military force: “Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face”.[4] The advisor to former French President Sarkozy argued that the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership in November 2021 “convinced Russia that they must attack or be attacked”.[5] None of the aforementioned people sought to legitimise an invasion, rather they sought to avoid a war.
When great powers do not have a soft institutional veto, they use a hard military veto. The idealists insisting that Russia should not have a veto on NATO expansion pushed for the policies that predictably resulted in the destruction of a nation, the loss of territory, and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Why do the idealists get to present themselves as moral and “pro-Ukrainian”? Why are the realists who for more than a decade warned against NATO expansion immoral and “anti-Ukrainian”? Are these labels premised on the theoretical assumption of the idealists?
NATO as a Third Party?
Suggesting that Ukraine has the sovereign right to join NATO presents the military bloc as a passive third party that merely supports the democratic aspiration of Ukrainians. This narrative neglects that NATO did not have an obligation to offer future membership to Ukraine. Indeed, the Western countries signed several agreements with Moscow after the Cold War, such as the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, to collectively construct a Europe without dividing lines and based on indivisible security. NATO broke these agreements by pushing for expansion and refusing to offer Russia security guarantees to mitigate the security competition. By offering future membership to Ukraine, the NATO-Russia conflict became a Russia-Ukraine conflict as Russia had to prevent Ukraine from joining the military bloc and hosting the US military on its territory.
NATO’s support for Ukraine’s right to choose its own foreign policy is also dishonest as Ukraine had to be pulled into the orbit of the military bloc against its will. The Western public is rarely informed that every opinion poll between 1991 and 2014 demonstrates that only a very small minority of Ukrainians ever wanted to join the alliance. NATO recognised the lack of interest by the Ukrainian government and people as a problem to be overcome in a report from 2011: “The greatest challenge for Ukrainian-NATO relations lies in the perception of NATO among the Ukrainian people. NATO membership is not widely supported in the country, with some polls suggesting that popular support of it is less than 20%”.[6]
The solution was to push for a “democratic revolution” in 2014 that toppled the democratically elected government of Ukraine in violation of its constitution and without majority support from Ukrainians. The leaked Nuland-Pyatt phone call revealed that the US was planning a regime change, including who should be in the post-coup government, who had to stay out, and how to legitimise the coup.[7] After the coup, the US openly asserted its intrusive influence over the new government it had installed in Kiev. The general prosecutor of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, complained that since 2014, “the most shocking thing is that all the [government] appointments were made in agreement with the United States” and Washington “believed that Ukraine was their fiefdom”.[8] A conflict with Russia could be manufactured that would create a demand for NATO.
What were the first decisions of the new government hand-picked by Washington? The first decree by the new Parliament was a call for repealing Russian as a regional language. The New York Times reports that on the first day following the coup, Ukraine’s new spy chief called the CIA and MI6 to establish a partnership for covert operations against Russia that eventually resulted in 12 secret CIA bases along the Russian border.[9] The conflict intensified as Russia responded by seizing Crimea and supporting a rebellion in Donbas, and NATO sabotaged the Minsk peace agreement that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians voted to have implemented. Preserving and intensifying the conflict gave Washington a dependent Ukrainian proxy that could be used against Russia. The same New York Times article mentioned above, also revealed that the covert war against Russia after the coup was a leading reason for Russia’s invasion:
“Toward the end of 2021, according to a senior European official, Mr. Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the head of one of Russia’s main spy services, who told him that the C.I.A., together with Britain’s MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow”.[10]
The Immorality of Peace vs Morality of War?
After Russia’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine, the idealists insist that Ukraine must become a member of NATO as soon as the war is over. It is intended as an appealing and moral statement to ensure that Ukraine will be protected and such a tragedy will not be repeated.
Yet, what does it communicate to Russia? Whatever territory Russia does not conquer will fall into the hands of NATO, which can then be used as a frontline against Russia. The threat of NATO expansion incentivises Russia to seize as much territory as possible and ensure what remains is a deeply dysfunctional rump state. The only thing that can bring peace to Ukraine and end the carnage is to restore its neutrality, yet the idealists denounce this as deeply immoral and thus unacceptable. To repeat Raymond Aron: “The idealist, believing he has broken with power politics exaggerates its crimes”.[11]
[1] Aron, R., 1966. Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations. Doubleday, Garden City, p.584.
[2] R. Lyne, ‘The UC Interview Series: Sir Roderic Lyne by Nikita Gryazin’, Oxford University Consortium, 18 December 2020.
[3] A. Walsh, ‘Angela Merkel opens up on Ukraine, Putin and her legacy’, Deutsche Welle, 7 June 2022.
[4] W.J. Burns, ‘Nyet means nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines’, Wikileaks, 1 February 2008.
[5] C. Caldwell, ‘The War in Ukraine May Be Impossible to Stop. And the U.S. Deserves Much of the Blame’, The New York Times, 31 May 2022.
[6] NATO, ‘‘Post-Orange Ukraine’: Internal dynamics and foreign policy priorities’, NATO Parliamentary Assembly, October 2011, p.11.
[7] BBC, ‘Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call’, BBC, 7 February 2014.
[8] M.M. Abrahms, ‘Does Ukraine Have Kompromat on Joe Biden?’, Newsweek, 8 August 2023.
[9] A. Entous and M. Schwirtz, 2024. ‘The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin’, The New York Times, 25 February 2024.
[10] A. Entous and M. Schwirtz, 2024. ‘The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin’, The New York Times, 25 February 2024.
[11] Aron, R., 1966. Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations. Doubleday, Garden City, p.584.
Don’t Let The Elite Get Away With Gaslighting That They Didn’t Know About Biden’s Senility
By Andrew Korybko | June 29, 2024
Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week made it impossible to deny his senility, yet the Western elite is gaslighting they were supposedly oblivious to this until now. Time Magazine published a piece titled “Inside Biden’s Debate Disaster and the Scramble to Quell Democratic Panic”, which was complemented by CNN’s about how “Foreign diplomats react with horror to Biden’s dismal debate performance”. Both make it seem like Biden’s senility is a surprise for everyone who knew him.
The reality is that they knew about this all along but covered it up by lying that any claims to this effect were “Russian propaganda” and/or a “conspiracy theory”, all because they actually approved of the Democrats installing a literal placeholder in the White House who the liberal–globalist elite could control. It was a refreshing change of pace from Trump, who was much too independent for their liking despite his occasional capitulations to their demands, and it also reassured America’s allies who disliked him too.
They both went along with the lie that Biden is in tip-top mental condition for reasons of political convenience, but now it’s impossible to keep up the charade any longer, hence why they’re all feigning surprise and shock. The elite shouldn’t be allowed to get away with their latest gaslighting and should be exposed for one of the greatest cover-ups in American history. The country is being ruled by a shadowy network of transnational and domestic elites that are united by their radical liberal-globalist ideology.
Biden was chosen as the Democrats’ candidate in 2020 precisely because he was already senile and therefore completely controllable. That party, which functions as the public face of the abovementioned elite network, wanted someone who’d do whatever they demanded on the home and foreign policy fronts. In particular, they sought to turn America into a liberal-globalist hellhole while ramping up NATO’s containment of Russia in Ukraine, but the second policy backfired after the special operation began.
Nevertheless, they’ll never have another chance to install someone like Biden since 2020 was an exceptional election year due to it being a referendum on Trump – who a significant share of the public was preconditioned to falsely believe is the new Hitler – and mail-in voting due to COVID-19. These conditions can never be replicated in the same way again no matter how hard the elite try, which is why they decided to keep Biden as their candidate instead of replace him early on.
Although there’s now a push by some for him to be replaced during the party’s upcoming national convention, Politico and NBC News among others both pointed out that this would be a difficult process, so there’s no guarantee that they’ll seriously attempt it. That said, he might also suffer some sort of emergency that incapacitates him more than he already is, so the scenario can’t be ruled out. In that case, they’ll still do everything they can to gaslight that they had no idea that he was so unhealthy.
Any acknowledgement that they were aware of this would expose their role in 2020’s de facto coup, which was the elite’s latest after the ones in 2001, 1974, and 1963. Back then, 9/11 was exploited as the pretext for taking the national security state to its next level, while Nixon’s resignation in the face of the CIA’s Watergate scandal was meant to remove a truly independent and popular visionary leader. As for Kennedy’s assassination, many believe that it was aimed to stop his planned withdrawal from Vietnam.
The elite’s latest coup was meant to turbocharge the US’ preexisting liberal-globalist trajectory after Trump partially offset it with his comparatively more conservative-nationalist policies, which necessitated provoking a proxy war with Russia in order to unify the West around this ideological cause. The damage has already been dealt and a lot of it is irreparable, but Trump’s return to power would still be better for Americans and the rest of the world, which is why the elite are dead-set against it.
Irrespective of whether the decision is made to replace Biden, which has its pros such as putting a more publicly appealing candidate on the ballot but also its cons like stoking panic about the party’s electoral prospects, the elite will do everything to cover up for their knowledge of his senility. Acknowledging that they knew about this would leave little doubt in the minds of many that the 2020 election was actually the elite’s latest coup, which his why they’re going overboard gaslighting about how they’re surprised.
If the war expands, will western facilities become the new target banks?
The Cradle | June 28, 2024
Israel’s brutal, nine-month military assault on Gaza has full support from several western-allied states, not only in supplying the occupation army’s war machine with a broad range of armaments and ammunition but also through direct military participation. The United States and Britain, for example, have provided vital reconnaissance and intelligence data and have sent their special forces to assist Israel in military operations.
An 8 June New York Times report revealed that US forces assisted the Israelis in retrieving four Israeli captives from Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least 274 Palestinian civilians and three additional captives and leaving over 698 wounded. According to the paper’s Israeli sources, the US and UK provided intelligence from the air and cyberspace that Israel could not obtain on its own.
On 29 May, the Declassified UK media project reported that London authorized an unprecedented 60 Israel-bound flights using cargo planes that took off from the UK’s RAF Akrotiri air base in Cyprus, a facility covertly used by the US Air Force to move weapons to Israel.
The British government has not revealed the content of the air cargo transported – and maintains that no “lethal aid” is included. London instead claims that RAF flights to the occupation state are used to support its “diplomatic engagement” with Tel Aviv and repatriate British subjects – an odd use of military aircraft when Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport is still operational for regular passenger travel.
London has vigorously invoked its D-Notice since just after the war’s onset, a military and security directive aimed at preventing media outlets from publishing information that could harm national security, specifically relating to British airborne Special Forces (SAS) operations in Gaza. No further information has been revealed since the directive was issued on 28 October 2023.
How western intel penetrates West Asia
But all those concealment efforts were cracked open during Israel’s disproportionate military operation to secure the release of captives during the recent Nuseirat camp fiasco. Trending videos appeared of an Israeli helicopter landing next to the recently-installed $320 million US’ aid pier’ and of ‘aid trucks’ carrying special ops teams that were flanked by armored vehicles during the operation.
Media then reported that dozens of US and UK drones assisted in the Nuseirat camp assault, ostensibly by providing reconnaissance services to the Israeli military.
These incidents highlight not only direct western military participation in the war on Gaza but also the brazen exploitation of diplomatic cover or humanitarian work to prepare and carry out military actions that have led to mass civilian casualties and war crimes, as described by many United Nations institutions.
The question now is whether western facilities and troops will come under target as the war expands, potentially to Lebanon, given the evident collusion of western states in Israel’s aggressions – especially those in flagrant violation of international norms and law.
Although the use of embassies and civilian institutions – in the modern sense – as bases for intelligence gathering and launching special missions is not a new practice and dates back to at least the nineteenth century, current developments in technology and computing have enabled these facilities to act as spying and eavesdropping centers, monitoring and storing information for an entire country.
What was previously impossible has become reality through wireless communication and the Internet. Signal intelligence formerly gained by planting eavesdropping and listening devices can now be accessed via the common smartphone – with data funneled to these centers inside sovereign states.
Aerial view of the US embassy complex, northern Beirut.
‘Second-biggest US Embassy in the world’
Spawling approximately 174 thousand square meters, around 13 kilometers from the Lebanese capital of Beirut, lies the second largest embassy in West Asia – and the world. The new US Embassy in Beirut is surpassed in size only by its counterpart in Baghdad’s “Green Zone.”
Subtracting from the massive size of the embassy and its cost of nearly a billion dollars, there are many questions about the need for such facilities and what they contain.
The computer-generated images published by the embassy show a complex featuring multi-story buildings with tall glass windows, entertainment areas, a swimming pool surrounded by greenery, and views of the Lebanese capital. According to the project website, the complex includes an office, representative housing for employees, community facilities, and associated support facilities.
In May 2023, the Intelligence Online website reported that the massive billion-dollar complex will include a data collection facility, preparing the site as the new regional headquarters for US intelligence. The report says that because of its proximity to Syria, “Lebanon is considered a safe and strategic location for the deployment of intelligence agents already in the region as well as new personnel, who are selected directly from Washington-based agencies.”
Construction of the new US embassy, 13 kilometers north of the Lebanese capital of Beirut.
Although it is not possible to obtain precise information about the design of this embassy, the excavations below surface level, the use of reinforced concrete in the structure, and its fortified location on top of a hill suggest that there is more to its operations, especially since several precedents of the US Beirut diplomatic mission being implicated in the work of intelligence services exist.
The 1983 bombing of the American Embassy revealed a high CIA death toll, with eight killed, including the CIA’s chief West Asia analyst and Near East director, Robert Ames, station chief Kenneth Haass, James Lewis, and most of the CIA’s Beirut employees.
The embassy was not only used as a CIA hub but also as a key regional intelligence base due to Lebanon’s proximity to both the sea and two British NATO bases in southern Cyprus, Dhekelia and Akrotiri, from which reinforcements or helicopter transfers can arrive rapidly onto Lebanese soil. A recent example, in 2020, is Washington’s smuggling of its agent Amer al-Fakhouri from the US embassy using an Osprey helicopter.
British Watchtowers on Lebanon’s borders
On 3 May, Lebanon announced the visit of an official delegation and a senior British intelligence officer the previous month to discuss the construction of new UK-built watchtowers. These are in addition to the more than three dozen watchtowers built by Britain during the Syrian war along the sensitive border between Lebanon and Syria.
According to leaks reported by Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar newspaper, the British delegation had asked the Lebanese army “to approve a plan to establish watchtowers along the border with occupied Palestine, similar to those existing on the eastern and northern borders with Syria.”
Following the low-profile visit, Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati disclosed: “Establishing the towers and taking measures along the border are Israel’s conditions for stopping the war with Lebanon.”
Last February, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry received an official Syrian protest note classifying the British watchtowers as a threat to Syrian national security on several levels. The main threat is the tower systems’ sensitive intelligence and espionage equipment, which “shines deep into Syrian territory and collects information about the Syrian interior.”
According to Al-Akhbar’s report, “the information output from this equipment reaches the hands of the British, and the Israeli enemy benefits from the output to target Syrian territory and carry out strikes deep inside Syria.” The Syrian memorandum also refers to “the presence of some British officers at the towers.”
A 30-foot British watchtower near the Lebanese-Syrian border
Security cameras monitor the surrounding area at a border point on Lebanon’s border with Syria (Photo by the Lebanese Army Command, Orientation Directorate)
The 38 British watchtowers that claim to assist Lebanese authorities in “combating smuggling” raise many questions instead, among them the reasoning behind the erection of such a large number of these structures. Why, too, do the towers contain thermal monitoring, eavesdropping, signal intelligence, and communications equipment – especially in light of the close relationship between Tel Aviv and London and the periodic presence of British officers in these towers under the pretext of training the Lebanese army?
A commanding officer of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), interviewed at length by The Cradle in August 2021, contradicts London’s public claims about the towers, saying: “The aim of the towers today is to monitor the movements of Hezbollah and the Syrians.”
Dutch special forces in Dahiyeh
In March, Hezbollah captured several Dutch military forces operating covertly in Dahiyeh, the southern suburb of Beirut, which hosts several offices of the Lebanese Resistance. The detainees claimed they were operating under cover of the Dutch Embassy in Lebanon and were found with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of military equipment and advanced communications devices on their persons and in their vehicles.
During investigations, the Dutchmen claimed they had entered the southern suburb as part of a training exercise for evacuating Dutch citizens and diplomats in the event of a war. However, no Dutch nationals of the embassy resided in that area. It was also found that the servicemen had not communicated about their mission with the Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Lebanese security services, or their country’s embassy.
That same month, a Spanish citizen was arrested for filming inside the same southern suburb of Beirut, only to discover later that he had a diplomatic passport and that his phone contained advanced software that prevented access to its data.
These events and a myriad of other examples show that some western governments continuously use western diplomatic and civilian facilities to gather intelligence or conduct special missions training in sovereign Lebanon.
These actions constitute a clear violation of the Vienna Convention on International Relations and the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, which prohibit embassy diplomats from carrying out espionage activities. These actions don’t only place civilian populations in danger but also the thousands of professional diplomats in the country, all diplomatic missions, and the civilian facilities used as cover for illicit operations. They also drag otherwise immune diplomatic facilities into the legal framework of “hostilities,” intentionally or accidentally.
This danger is reinforced by Israel’s repeated violations of diplomatic and international norms, which are either ignored or protected by western allied states. Israel’s unprecedented military strikes against Iran’s consulate building in Damascus in April, for instance, did not receive the deserved condemnation from most western capitals, which helped it avoid the requisite UN Security Council censure.
Since the basic value of international norms is the precedent and event on which this law is built, the possibility increases that such western-supported attacks will backfire wildly and lead to the retaliatory targeting of western facilities and embassies – all in the context of new legal precedents and customs created that no longer prohibit strikes on suspect non-military facilities.
It is yet unknown to what extent western governments can expect to maintain their double standards in the application of international law and customs, especially if the Gaza war they are materially supporting expands to Lebanon or other West Asian regions.
The Resistance Axis, which has, in the past nine months, normalized military strikes on Israel, missile attacks on Israel-destined shipping vessels, and weekly strikes on US and UK naval fleets, are but one escalation away – as in, a declared war on Lebanon – to create a new set of target banks that surpass their last ones.
Does that then include the US embassy in Baghdad, the largest in the region – and the world – hosting 10 thousand American employees and troops, or, closer to home, the second largest embassy in West Asia, the US embassy in Beirut?
It is difficult to imagine that such facilities will remain immune if western involvement remains apparent, which we already know to be a constant, daily flow of armaments to fuel Israel’s war machinery and provide Tel Aviv with military intelligence and target banks.
It will be even harder to protect diplomatic missions if they reveal themselves to essentially act as military command centers or intelligence hubs during the conduct of war. Targeting these facilities – which are already in breach of the Vienna Convention – can easily fall within the framework of self-defense and reciprocity as long as western states and Israel continue to normalize these illicit activities.
If the Gaza war established entirely new rules of engagement throughout the region, do Israel’s western allies expect to escape unscathed in an expanded war? How do they think they can arm military aggression against a country and yet remain safely in its capital city?
Does Biden’s Degraded Mental State Matter?
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | June 28, 2024
Most everyone, especially Democrats, is expressing alarm over President Biden’s mental state after his debate performance last night. Biden, who later said that he was suffering from a cold, displayed attributes of severe mental decline. Many Democrats are even saying that Biden needs to drop out of the presidential race now so that the Democrats have plenty of time to promote a new candidate before the November election.
While critics are focusing on the political ramifications of Biden’s apparent mental decline, the real issue is the fact that he will still be president for the next five months. This is especially important given the proxy war that the U.S. is waging against Russia in Ukraine. That’s a war that could easily turn nuclear, especially if Biden inadvertently engages in actions that trigger a severe Russian response.
However, it isn’t Biden who is in charge of running the U.S. proxy war against Russia. That’s the good news. As I have long argued, the people who are in charge of that operation are the ones inside the U.S. national-security establishment — the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. That’s the bad news.
Longtime readers of my work know that I have long recommended an excellent book by a man named Michael J. Glennon entitled National Security and Double Government. Glennon’s thesis, to which I subscribe, is that it is the U.S. national-security part of the federal government that is actually running the show, especially in foreign affairs. They permit the president, the Congress, and the Supreme Court to maintain the veneer of being in charge, so as to keep people tranquil and pacified. What matters is that they wield the real power over the federal government.
Glennon is not some sort of crackpot. He is a professor of law at Tufts University and a former counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Read his bio here. His thesis deserves to be taken seriously. If every American were to read Glennon’s book, I have no doubts that most of them would end up agreeing with his thesis.
The big problem we have with the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA is that we are dealing with people with military mindsets. It’s all black and white with these people. Russia, bad. China, bad. Iran, bad. North Korea, bad. Syria, bad. Gaza, bad. Cuba, bad. Vietnam, bad, now good. In their minds, the purpose of a massive military establishment is to put bad regimes down by whatever means possible.
As most everyone now realizes, the national-security establishment’s goal since 1945 has been to bring Russia to heel — and make it a full-fledged loyal lapdog of the U.S. Empire, much like Great Britain is. That necessarily means regime change, just like the regime changes that the Pentagon and the CIA have brought to so many other nations.
For a while, it appeared that the quest to bring down Russia ended with the end of the Cold War. Not so. That was just a temporary interlude. Almost immediately the Pentagon and the CIA embarked on a quest to use NATO, an old Cold War bureaucratic dinosaur, to begin absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact, with the ultimate aim of absorbing Ukraine, which would enable U.S. officials to place their nuclear missiles, troops, armaments, planes, and tanks right on Russia’s border, all of which, it was hoped, would end up bringing the goal of regime change in Russia closer to fruition.
Throughout this process, and knowing that Russia would never permit Ukraine to join NATO, U.S. officials were training the Ukrainian military to fight a defensive war, once NATO succeeded in provoking Russia into invading Ukraine. The idea was that a Ukrainian victory would almost certainly result in the ouster of Russian President Vladimir Putin, at which point he would, it was hoped, be replaced with a loyal U.S. lapdog.
The scheme has not worked, and it has become painfully clear that the United States cannot win this war. The only real question is what a Russian victory will ultimately look like.
And that’s where the danger of the military mindset comes into play. The national-security establishment cannot bear the thought of the U.S. losing to Russia, even if it’s a proxy war with Russia rather than a direct war.
Rather than simply acknowledging that they should never have started this war and simply withdraw from the conflict, the military and the CIA are doubling down. The risk is that they will do whatever is necessary to prevent a Russian defeat of the United States in Ukraine. That’s why they are now talking about putting NATO troops and armaments into Ukraine in the hopes of staving off defeat. And that’s where the very real prospect of nuclear war comes into play.
Would the United States be better off with a president who suffers from a severe downgrade in mental faculties being in charge rather than with generals and CIA officials being in charge? The question is irrelevant because the reality is that it’s the military-intelligence establishment that is actually in charge. And that’s why we are getting ever closer to the prospect of a life-ending nuclear war.
“Human Rights NGOs” and the Corruption of Civil Society
BY GLENN DIESEN | JUNE 10, 2024
The organisations operating under the banner of “human rights non-governmental organisations” (NGOs) have become key actors in disseminating war propaganda, intimidating academics, and corrupting civil society. The NGOs act as gatekeepers determining which voices should be elevated and which should be censored and cancelled.
Civil society is imperative to balance the power of the state, yet the state is increasingly seeking to hijack the representation of civil society through NGOs. The NGOs can be problematic on their own as they can enable a loud minority to override a silent majority. Yet, the Reagan doctrine exacerbated the problem as these “human rights NGOs” were financed by the government and staffed by people with ties to intelligence agencies to ensure civil society does not deviate significantly from government policies.
The ability of academics to speak openly and honestly is restricted by these gatekeepers. Case in point, the NGOs limit dissent in academic debates about the great power rivalry in Ukraine. Well-documented and proven facts that are imperative to understanding the conflict are simply not reported in the media, and any efforts to address these facts are confronted with vague accusations of being “controversial” or “pro-Russian”, a transgression that must be punished with intimidation, censorship, and cancellation.
I will outline here first my personal experiences with one of these NGOs, and second how the NGOs are hijacking civil society.
My Encounter with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee
The Norwegian Helsinki Committee is one of these “NGOs” financed by the government and the CIA-cutout National Endowment for Democracy (NED). They regularly publish hit pieces about me and rarely miss their weekly tweets that label me a propagandist for Russia. It is always name-calling and smearing rather than anything that can be considered a coherent argument.
The standard formula for cancellation is to shame my university in every article and tweet for allowing academic freedom, with the implicit offer of redemption by terminating my employment as a professor. Peak absurdity occurred with a 7-page article in a newspaper in which it was argued I violated international law by spreading war propaganda. They grudgingly had to admit that I have opposed the war from day one, although for a professor in Russian politics to engage with Russian media allegedly made me complicit in spreading war propaganda.
Every single time I am invited to give a speech at any event, this NGO will appear to publicly shame and pressure the organisers to cancel my invitation. The NGO also openly attempt to incite academics to rally against me to strengthen their case for censorship in a trial of public opinion. Besides whipping up hatred in the media by labelling me a propagandist for Russia, they incite online troll armies such as NAFO to cancel me online and in the real world. After subsequent intimidations through social media, emails, SMS and phone calls, the police advised me to remove my home address and phone number from public access. One of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee recently responded by posting a sale ad for my house, which included photos of my home with my address for their social media followers.
The Norwegian Helsinki Committee also infiltrates and corrupts other institutions. One of the more eager Helsinki Committee employees is also a board member at the Norwegian organisation for non-fictional authors and translators (NFFO) and used his position there to cancel the organisation’s co-hosting of an event as I had been invited to speak. The Norwegian Helsinki Committee is also overrepresented in the Nobel Committee to ensure the right candidates are picked.
Why would a humanitarian NGO act like modern Brownshirts by limiting academic freedom? One could similarly ask why a human rights NGO spends more effort to demonise Julian Assange rather than exploring the human rights abuses he exposed.
This “human rights NGO” is devoted primarily to addressing human rights abuses in the East. Subsequently, all great power politics is framed as a competition between good values versus bad values. Constructing stereotypes for the in-group versus the out-groups as a conflict between good and evil is a key component of political propaganda. The complexity of security competition between the great powers is dumbed down and propagandised as a mere struggle between liberal democracy versus authoritarianism. Furthermore, they rest on the source credibility of being “non-governmental” and merely devoted to human rights, which increases the effectiveness of their messaging.
By framing the world as a conflict between good and evil, mutual understanding and compromise are tantamount to appeasement while peace is achieved by defeating enemies. Thus, these “human rights NGOs” call for confrontation and escalation against whoever is the most recent reincarnation of Hitler, while the people calling for diplomacy are denounced and censored as traitors.
NGOs Hijacking Civil Society
After the Second World War, American intelligence agencies took on a profound role in manipulating civil society in Europe. The intelligence agencies were embarrassed when they were caught, and the solution was to hide in plain sight.
The Reagan Doctrine entailed setting up NGOs that would openly interfere in the civil society of other states under the guise of supporting human rights. The well-documented objective was to conceal influence operations by US intelligence as work on democracy and human rights. The “non-governmental” aspect of the NGOs is fraudulent as they are almost completely funded by the government and staffed with people connected to the intelligence community. Case in point, during Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” in 2004, an anti-corruption protest was transformed into a pro-NATO/anti-Russian government. The head of the influential NGO Freedom House in Ukraine was the former Director of the CIA.
Reagan himself gave the inauguration speech when he established the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983. The Washington Post wrote that NED has been the “sugar daddy of overt operations” and “what used to be called ‘propaganda’ and can now simply be called ‘information'”.[1] Documents released reveal that NED cooperated closely with CIA propaganda initiatives. Allen Weinstein, a cofounder of NED, acknowledged: “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”.[2] Philip Agee, a CIA whistle-blower, explained that NED was established as a “propaganda and inducement program” to subvert foreign nations and style it as a democracy promotion initiative. NED also finances the Norwegian Helsinki Committee.
The NGOs enable a loud Western-backed minority to marginalise a silent majority, and then sell it as “democracy”. Protests can therefore legitimise the overthrow of elected governments. The Guardian referred to the Ukrainian Orange Revolution in 2004 as “an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass marketing” for the purpose of “winning other people’s elections”.[3] Another article by the Guardian labelled the Orange Revolution as a “postmodern coup d’état” and a “CIA-sponsored third world uprising of cold war days, adapted to post-Soviet conditions”.[4] A similar regime change operation was repeated in Ukraine in 2014 to mobilise Ukrainian civil society against their government, resulting in overthrowing the democratically elected government against the will of the majority of Ukrainians. The NGOs branded it a “democratic revolution” and was followed by Washington asserting its dominance over key levers of power in Kiev.
Similar NGO operations were also launched against Georgia. The NGOs staged Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” in 2003 which eventually resulted in war with Russia after the new authorities in Georgia attacked South Ossetia. Recently, the Prime Minister of Georgia cautioned that the US was yet again using NGOs in an effort to topple the government to use his country as a second front against Russia.[5] Georgia’s democratically elected parliament passed a law with an overwhelming majority (83 in favour vs 23 against), for greater transparency over the funding of NGOs. Unsurprisingly, the Western NGOs decided that transparency over funding of NGOs was undemocratic, and it was labelled a “Russian law”. The Western public was fed footage of protests for democratic credibility, and they were reassured that the Georgian Prime Minister was merely a Russian puppet. The US and EU subsequently responded by threatening Georgia with sanctions in the name of “supporting” Georgia’s civil society.
Civil Society Corrupted
Society rests on three legs – the government, the market and civil society. Initially, the free market was seen as the main instrument to elevate the freedom of the individual from government. Yet, as immense power concentrated in large industries in the late 19th century, some liberals looked to the government as an ally to limit the power of large businesses. The challenge of our time is that government and corporate interests go increasingly hand-in-hand, which only intensifies with the rise of the tech giants. This makes it much more difficult for civil society to operate independently. The universities should be a bastion of freedom and not policed by fake NGOs.
[1] D. Ignatius, ‘Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups’, Washington Post, 22 September 1991.
[2] Ibid.
[3] I. Traynor, ‘US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev’, The Guardian, 26 November 2004.
[4] J. Steele, ‘Ukraine’s postmodern coup d’état’, The Guardian, 26 November 2004.
[5] L Kelly, ‘Georgian prime minister accuses US of fueling ‘revolution attempts’’, The Hill, 3 May 2024.
Stanford’s Censorship Operation finally shut down by the University, but only after the chutzpah became unbearable
BY MERYL NASS | JUNE 14, 2024
Stanford’s Internet Observatory was a surveillance-censorship operation (discussed previously) that spit on the First Amendment, worked closely with fed intelligence agents and trained students to break the law. God only knows what techniques were developed here in the heart of Silicon Valley to mind control the citizenry.
And they were so brazen! The spooks pretended they were academics doing “research.” But where are their advanced degrees? Where are their courses? Why isn’t Renee DiResta listed in the faculty directory?
The Observatory’s main figurehead, Renee DiResta, “ex” CIA asset, just published a book about her wondrous exploits saving the world from TRUTH.
And Stanford itself was so brazen, it filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court to complain about how it was unjustly cited for its criminal collusion with the USG to censor political, intellectual, scientific, medical etc. opponents in the Missouri v Biden censorship case. It was just “research.”
Finally, Stanford could not stand the heat, and is getting out of the kitchen. Bye-bye.
Syria on the brink of recovery as Qatar and Turkey change their policies
By Steven Sahiounie | Mideast Discourse | June 3, 2024
The Emir of Qatar, Tamim al Thani, recently said that he supports the street protests in Idlib, where people are protesting the dictatorial rule of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) terrorist group.
This marks a monumental change in policy for Qatar, and maybe the first step toward restoring diplomatic ties with Syria.
Beginning in 2011, and the Obama administration’s US-NATO war on Syria for regime change, Qatar has been a close and loyal ally to the US, and was used as a financial backer of the various terrorist groups brought into Turkey, and trucked across the border to Idlib.
Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber bin Mohammed bin Thani Al Thani, former Prime Minister of Qatar, and foreign minister until 2013, gave an interview in which he admitted Qatar provided the money to bankroll the terrorists in Syria as they attacked the Syrian people and state. He made it clear that the cash delivered was sanctioned, and administered by the US in Turkey. Qatar was not working alone, but under a strictly controlled partnership with the US government.
In 2017, President Trump shut down the CIA operation Timber Sycamore which ran the failed project to overthrow the Syrian government.
Qatar is now turning their back on the terrorists who occupy Idlib. Mohamed al-Julani is the leader of HTS. He is Syrian, raised in Saudi Arabia, fought with Al Qaeda in Iraq against the US, aligned with ISIS founder Baghdadi, came to Syria from Iraq to develop Jibhat al-Nusra, the Al Qaeda branch in Syria.
Once Jibhat al-Nusra became an outlawed terrorist group, Julani switched the name to HTS in order to preserve his support from Washington, DC. Even though the US has a $10 million bounty on his head issued by the US Treasury Department, he is safe and secure in Idlib, where American journalists have visited him for interviews, in which he has sported a suit and tie, wishing to present himself as a western-leaning terrorist that the US can count on.
When the Syrian Arab Army and the Russian military would fire a bullet towards the terrorists in Idlib, the US would denounce it as an attack on innocent civilians. This kept Julani safe and secure, and in charge of humanitarian aid coming across the border from Turkey. The aid was from the UN and various international charities. While the 3 million people living in Idlib are not all terrorists, all the aid passes through the hands of Julani and his henchmen. If you bow down to Julani, you get your share of rations, but if you have complained, you are denied. Those who are cut off from the aid can buy their supplies from Julani at his Hamra Shopping Mall, which he built in Idlib, where he sells all the surplus aid sent to Idlib.
The civilians in Idlib have taken to the streets protesting the rule of HTS. Many people have been arrested by HTS, some tortured, and others killed. The people are demanding that Julani leave.
They are asking for freedom and a fair administration. The various aid agencies have complained that HTS will not allow any free programs for women, such as learning employable skills. Women there are not allowed to seek employment, except in places which are only female. HTS rules with a strict form of Islamic law, which they interpret to their benefit.
Saudi Arabia and Syria have established full normal relations, with an exchange of ambassadors. At the Arab League Summit in May in Bahrain, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohamed bin Salman (MBS) met personally with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. They also met at the previous Arab League Summit in Saudi Arabia.
MBS recently announced a humanitarian grant to the UN to repair 17 hospitals in Syria which had been damaged in the 7.8 earthquake which killed 10 thousand in Syria.
MBS also sent spare parts for the Syrian Air commercial planes, which had suffered under US sanctions and were prevented from maintaining their safety by Washington. Recently, the very first planes of Syrians began flying to Saudi Arabia for the first time in 12 years, to perform the Haj pilgrimage.
On May 30, the leader of Iraq said he hopes to announce a Turkey-Syria normalization soon. Turkey, like Qatar, had been supporting the various terrorist groups in Syria in cooperation with the US.
Turkey also has made a turn-around in their position, and has been looking for a way to exit Idlib and the other areas it occupies in Syria, in preparation of a re-set with Damascus.
The relationship between the US and Ankara has remained tense after the US partnered with the Syrian Defense Forces (SDF). Turkey considers the SDF as a branch of the PKK, the outlawed international terrorists group who has killed 30,000 people over three decades, while wanting to establish a Kurdish State.
The SDF are planning to have elections on June 11 in an effort to gain western support for a Kurdish State. Erdogan has stated Turkey will never allow this to happen.
If the SDF were to lay down their arms, they could repair their relationship with Damascus, and at the same time Turkey could then withdraw their occupation forces from Syria. With Turkey out of Syria, their normalization process could begin.
When the SDF have repaired their broken relationship with Damascus, and the Turkish threat no longer exists, then the US military can withdraw their 900 occupation force from Syria.
Recently, General Mazloum, the leader of the SDF, said that the problems between the Kurds and Damascus are internal problems, and cautioned against any foreign interference, especially from Turkey.
The situation is changing rapidly in Syria. The economy is collapsed, with the inflation rate over 100% in the last year due to crippling US sanctions. Because the US military is occupying the largest oil and gas field in Syria, this prevents the production of electricity for the national grid, and Syrians are living with three hours of electricity per day.
US sanctions prevent some of the most vital medicines from being imported, as western medical companies are fearful of running afoul of the US sanctions, and have produced a culture of over-compliance, which deprives Syrian citizens’ life-saving medicines and medical supplies.
The battlefields have been silent for years, and the silence grew into a status-quo, where the American and Turkish foreign policy prevented a resolution to the conflict that has destroyed lives and prompted the largest human migration in recent history as Syrians have sought work abroad.
Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar all played significant roles assigned to them by the US State Department under the Obama administration. There is a light at the end of the tunnel with the reversal of policies toward Syria, and Qatar and Turkey are set to play major roles in the recovery process in Syria. These reversals are also significant as they mark a change in the relationship between the US and several regional countries. This is part of the ‘New Middle East’ that Washington called for, but the role the US played has left them the loser.
The Closing of the Internet Mind
The definition of online freedom has been depressingly constricted over the last thirty years
By Aaron Kheriaty, Debbie Lerman, Andrew Lowenthal, and Jeffrey Tucker | The American Mind | May 22, 2024
You have surely heard that your search results on Google (with 92 percent share of the search market) reflect not your curiosities and needs but someone or something else’s views on what you need to know. That’s hardly a secret.
And on Facebook, you are likely inundated by links to official sources to correct any errors you might carry in your head, as well as links to corrections to posts as made by any number of fact-checking organizations.
You have likely also heard of YouTube videos being taken down, apps deleted from stores, and accounts being canceled across a variety of platforms.
You might have even adjusted your behavior in light of all of this. It is part of the new culture of Internet engagement. The line you cannot cross is invisible. You are like a dog with an electric shock collar. You have to figure it out on your own, which means exercising caution when you post, pulling back on hard claims that might shock, paying attention to media culture to discern what is sayable and what is not, and generally trying to avoid controversy as best you can in order to earn the privilege of not being canceled.
Despite all the revelations regarding the Censorship Industrial Complex, and the wide involvement of government in these efforts, plus the resulting lawsuits that claim that this is all censorship, the walls are clearly closing in further by the day.
Users are growing accustomed to it, for fear of losing their accounts. For example, YouTube (which feeds 55 percent of all video content online) allows three strikes before your account is deleted permanently. One strike is devastating and two existential. You are frozen in place and forced to relinquish everything–including your ability to earn a living if your content is monetized–if you make one or two wrong moves.
No one needs to censor you at that point. You censor yourself.
It was not always this way. It was not even supposed to be this way.
It’s possible to trace the dramatic change from the past to present by following the trajectory of various Declarations that have been issued over the years. The tone was set at the dawn of the World Wide Web in 1996 by digital guru, Grateful Dead lyricist, and Harvard University fellow John Perry Barlow, who died in 2018.
Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, somewhat ironically written in Davos, Switzerland, is still hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that he founded. The manifesto waxes lyrical about the liberatory, open future of internet freedom:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
And so on it went with a heady, expansive vision–tinged perhaps with a dash of sixties utopian anarchism–that shaped the ethos which drove the building of the Internet in the early days. It appeared to a whole generation of coders and content providers that a new world of freedom had been born that would shepherd in a new era of freedom more generally, with growing knowledge, human rights, creative freedom, and borderless connection of everyone to literature, facts, and truth emerging organically from a crowd-sourced process of engagement.
Nearly a decade and a half later, by 2012, that idea was fully embraced by the main architects of the emergent app economy and the explosion of smartphone use across the world. The result was the Declaration of Internet Freedom that went live in July of 2012 and garnered a great deal of press attention at the time. Signed by the EFF, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, and other liberty-focused organizations, it read:
To be sure, it was not quite as sweeping and visionary as the Barlow original but maintained the essence, putting free expression as the first principle with the lapidary phrase: “Don’t censor the Internet.” It might have stopped there, but given the existing threats coming from growing industrial cartels and the stored-data marketplace, it also pushed openness, innovation, and privacy as first principles.
Again, this outlook defined an era and elicited broad agreement. “Information freedom supports the peace and security that provides a foundation for global progress,” said Hillary Clinton in an endorsement of the freedom principle in 2010. The 2012 Declaration was neither right-wing nor left-wing. It encapsulated the core of what it meant to favor freedom on the Internet, exactly as the title suggests.
If you go to the site internetdeclaration.org now, your browser will not reveal any of its contents. The secure certificate is dead. If you bypass the warning, you will find yourself forbidden from accessing any of the contents. The tour through Archive.org shows that the last living presentation of the site was February 2018.
This occurred three years after Donald Trump publicly advocated that “in some places” we have to talk about “closing up the Internet.” He got his wish, but it came after him personally following his election in 2016. The very free speech about which he made fun turned out to be rather important to him and his cause.
Two years into the Trump presidency, precisely as the censorship industry started coalescing into full operation, the site of the Declaration site broke down and eventually disappeared.
Fast forward a decade from the writing of the Internet Declaration of Freedom. The year is 2022 and we had been through a rough two years of account takedowns, particularly against those who doubted the wisdom of lockdowns or vaccine mandates. The White House revealed on April 22, 2022 a Declaration for the Future of the Internet. It comes complete with a parchment-style presentation and a large capital letter in old-fashioned script. The word “freedom” is removed from the title and added only as a part of the word salad that follows in the text.
Signed by 60 nations, the new Declaration was released to great fanfare, including a White House press release. The signatory nations were all NATO-aligned while excluding others. The signatories are: Albania, Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cabo Verde, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Estonia, the European Commission, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Maldives, Malta, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Moldova, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger, North Macedonia, Palau, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and Uruguay.
The core of the new declaration is very clear and represents a good encapsulation of the essence of the structures that govern content today: “The Internet should operate as a single, decentralized network of networks – with global reach and governed through the multistakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.”
The term “stakeholder” (as in “stakeholder capitalism”) became popular in the nineties as distinct from “shareholder” meaning a partial owner. A stakeholder is not an owner or even a consumer but a party or institution with a strong interest in the outcome of the decision-making by the owners, whose rights might need to be overridden in the broader interests of everyone. In this way, the term came to describe an amorphous group of influential third parties that deserve a say in the management of institutions and systems. A “multistakeholder” approach is how civil society is brought inside the tent, with financing and seeming influence, and told that they matter as an incentive to woke-wash their outlooks and operations.
Using that linguistic fulcrum, part of the goal of the new Declaration is explicitly political: “Refrain from using the Internet to undermine the electoral infrastructure, elections and political processes, including through covert information manipulation campaigns.” From this admonition we can conclude that the new Internet is structured to discourage “manipulation campaigns” and even goes so far as to “foster greater social and digital inclusion within society, bolster resilience to disinformation and misinformation, and increase participation in democratic processes.”
Following the latest in censorship language, every form of top-down blockage and suppression is now justified in the name of fostering inclusion (that is, “DEI,” as in Diversity [three mentions], Equity [two mentions], and Inclusion [five mentions]) and stopping dis- and mis-information, language identical to that invoked by the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the rest of the industrial complex that operates to stop information spread.
This agency was created in the waning days of the Obama administration and approved by Congress in 2018, supposedly to protect our digital infrastructure against cyberattacks from computer viruses and nefarious foreign actors. But less than one year into its existence, CISA decided that our election infrastructure was part of our critical infrastructure (thereby asserting Federal control over elections, which are typically handled by the states). Furthermore, part of protecting our election infrastructure included protecting what CISA director Jen Easterly called our “cognitive infrastructure.”
Easterly, who formerly worked at Tailored Access Operations, a top secret cyber warfare unit at the National Security Agency, coined the queen of all Orwellian euphemisms: “cognitive infrastructure,” which refers to the thoughts inside your head. This is precisely what the government’s counter-disinformation apparatus, headed by people like Easterly, are attempting to control. True to this stated aim, CISA pivoted by 2020 to become the nerve center of the government’s censorship apparatus–the agency through which all government and “stakeholder” censorship demands are funneled to social media companies.
Now consider what we’ve learned about Wikipedia, which is owned by Wikimedia, the former CEO of which was Katherine Maher, now slated to be the head CEO of National Public Radio. She has been a consistent and public defender of censorship, even suggesting that the First Amendment is “the number one challenge.”
The co-founder of Wikipedia, Joseph Sanger, has said he suspects that she turned Wikipedia into an intelligence-operated platform. “We know that there is a lot of backchannel communication,” he said in an interview. “I think it has to be the case that the Wikimedia Foundation now, probably governments, probably the CIA, have accounts that they control, in which they actually exert their influence. And it’s fantastic, in a bad way, that she actually comes out against the system for being ‘free and open.’ When she says that she’s worked with government to shut down what they consider ‘misinformation,’ that, in itself, means that it’s no longer free and open.”
What happened to Wikipedia, which all search engines privilege among all results, has befallen nearly every prominent venue on the Internet. The Elon Musk takeover of Twitter has proven to be aberrant and highly costly in terms of advertising dollars, and hence elicits vast opposition from the venues that are on the other side. That his renamed platform X even exists at all seems to run contrary to every wish of the controlled and controlling establishment today.
We have traveled a very long way from the vision of John Perry Barlow in 1996, who imagined a cyberworld in which governments were not involved to one in which governments and their “multi stakeholder partners” are in charge of “a rules-based global digital economy.” In the course of this complete reversal, the Declaration of Internet Freedom became the Declaration for the Future of the Internet, with the word freedom consigned to little more than a passing reference.
The transition from one to the other was–like bankruptcy–gradual at first and then all at once. We’ve traveled rather quickly from “you [governments and corporate interests] are not welcome among us” to a “single, decentralized network of networks” managed by “governments and relevant authorities” including “academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others” to create a “rules-based digital economy.”
And that is the core of the Great Reset affecting the main tool by which today’s information channels have been colonized by the corporatist complex.
Peter Daszak Gets DOD and CIA Funding. Why Don’t They Ask About That?
“Suspending” HHS funding to EcoHealth is pure theater. No real oversight is happening.
BY DEBBIE LERMAN | MAY 17, 2024
Peter Daszak is the President of EcoHealth Alliance, the organization most closely associated with the potential lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) that may have started the Covid crisis.
The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability has recently done a lot of “research” on Daszak and EcoHealth, resulting in a published report on May 1, 2024 with the earth-shattering finding that there exist “serious and systemic weaknesses in the federal government’s—particularly NIH’s—grant making processes.” Furthermore, these very bad weaknesses “not only place United States taxpayer dollars at risk of waste, fraud, and abuse but also risk the national security of the United States.”
This sounds pretty serious: Our taxpayer dollars and our national security are at risk. Some very bad things are happening, apparently. What are those bad things? “Weaknesses in the NIH’s grant making process.” Is that really all the Committee could come up with? If those grant-making weaknesses are so terrible, what does it recommend we do about them?
Based on its findings, the Committee recommended some very broad, but not very specific, actions:
- To Congress: “Reign in [they used “reign” instead of “rein” – a noteworthy Freudian slip] the unelected bureaucracy, especially within government funded public health.
- To the Administration: Recognize EcoHealth and its President, Dr. Daszak, as bad actors…and ensure neither EcoHealth nor Dr. Daszak are awarded another cent, especially for dangerous and poorly monitored research.
The Administration must have taken heed, because a mere two weeks later, on May 15, 2024, the Subcommittee made this triumphant announcement:
“HHS has begun efforts to cut off all U.S. funding to this corrupt organization. EcoHealth facilitated gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China without proper oversight, willingly violated multiple requirements of its multimillion-dollar National Institutes of Health grant, and apparently made false statements to the NIH. These actions are wholly abhorrent, indefensible, and must be addressed with swift action.”
Note the bizarre disconnect between the description of “this corrupt organization” and its “abhorrent, indefensible” actions, and the accusations leading to such extreme claims, which include conducting research without proper oversight (nobody ever does that!), violating requirements of its NIH grant (a bureaucratic infraction) and “apparently” making false statements to the NIH (not even for sure).
In any event, “swift action” must be taken. What exactly is that action?
“HHS has begun efforts to cut off all U.S. funding” to EcoHealth. “Begun efforts” – sounds like concrete results are imminent. Not just imminent but consequential. Like “future debarment” and “funding suspension.” (sarcasm intended)
But wait. Didn’t they already do that? Yes, they did.
2020 funding suspension
Quick reminder: On April 24, 2020, the NIH canceled funding for Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) gain-of-function research led by EcoHealth Alliance, because the Trump Administration suspected (or knew) such research may have had something to do with the Covid pandemic.
The scientific world was outraged. Seventy-seven U.S. Nobel Laureates and 31 scientific societies wrote to NIH leadership requesting review of the decision. Gain-of-function research must continue! In August 2020 the NIH reversed the cancellation and started funding EcoHealth and WIV again. [ref]
The Nobel Laureates and scientific societies won the day: Humanity-saving research to develop deadly pathogens not found in nature could continue unhindered by radical NIH funding cuts.
And yet: NIH grants are a mere fraction of EcoHealth Alliance’s overall government funding.
So which funds are being “suspended” this time around?
Actually, none.
The very threatening “notice of suspension and proposed debarment” sent to EcoHealth Alliance by HHS on May 15, 2024, reassures the organization (whose behavior has been abhorrent and indefensible) that “suspension and debarment actions are not punitive.”
We’re not trying to punish you for your bad behavior, the letter says. We just want to make sure there are non-punitive “consequences” for that behavior. For example:
Offers will not be solicited from, contracts will not be awarded to, existing contracts will not be renewed or otherwise extended for, and subcontracts requiring United States Federal Government approval will not be approved for EHA [EcoHealth Alliance] by any agency in the executive branch of the United States Federal Government, unless the head of the agency taking the contracting action determines that there is a compelling reason for such action.
[BOLDFACE ADDED]
In other words, if the head of the “agency taking the contracting action” determines there is “a compelling reason” to contract with Ecohealth, then this whole suspension and debarment thing is moot. So not punitive. And, pretty much, no consequences. And, also, no funds “suspended.”
Nevertheless, given the horrendous behavior of EcoHealth, as detailed in the announcement of the non-punitive consequences – how could any government agencies possibly have compelling reasons to engage in “contracting action” with “this corrupt organization”?
EcoHealth is mostly funded by the State Department and Pentagon
In an extensive expose on Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance, The Intercept reported in December 2021:
EcoHealth Alliance’s funding from the U.S. government, which Daszak has said makes up some 80 percent of its budget, has also grown in recent years. Since 2002, according to an Intercept analysis of public records, the organization has received more than $118 million in grants and contracts from federal agencies, $42 million of which comes from the Department of Defense. Much of that money has been awarded through programs focused not on health or ecology, however, but on the prevention of biowarfare, bioterrorism, and other misuses of pathogens.
[BOLDFACE ADDED]
Here’s what nearly two decades of government funding for EcoHealth Alliance looks like (graph from Intercept article):
As RFK Jr. wrote, based on this information, in The Wuhan Cover-Up:
By far, Daszak’s largest funding pool was the CIA surrogate, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Through USAID, the CIA funneled nearly $65 million in PREDICT funding to EcoHealth between 2009 and 2020.
(p. 228, Kindle Edition)
Yet another article examining Daszak’s military/biodefense ties appeared in Independent Scientist News in December 2020, reporting that most of EcoHealth Alliance’s Pentagon funding “was from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which is a branch of the DOD which states it is tasked to “counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.”
Furthermore,
The military links of the EcoHealth Alliance are not limited to money and mindset. One noteworthy ‘policy advisor’ to the EcoHealth Alliance is David Franz. Franz is former commander of Fort Detrick, which is the principal U.S. government biowarfare/biodefense facility.
The ISN article also provides a handy spreadsheet detailing EcoHealth funding.
So what is the Oversight Committee overlooking – and why?
There is no mention of DoD, DTRA or USAID funding in the Committee’s announcement or in the utterly performative, 100% toothless notice of suspension and debarment they sent to Peter Daszak. Does the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability not know who the major government funders of EcoHealth Alliance are?
If any agency can bypass the suspension and debarment by “determining that there is compelling reason” to fund EcoHealth, what is the point of those non-punitive consequences?
Why this charade of accountability when, in fact, the supposed overseers are willfully ignoring what’s actually going on?
Clearly, the Committee is not interested in investigating Daszak’s role in the biodefense industry that was responsible not just for the gain-of-function research that may have created SARS-CoV-2, but for the entire Covid pandemic response – which was most definitely not about public health and was, in fact, all about creating and administering the medical countermeasures which were the monomaniacal focus of the biodefense responders.
What to ask Peter Daszak if we had actual oversight
If the Committee were serious about investigating Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance, here are some questions they would ask:
Non-public health funding sources and projects
- Most of the government funding for EcoHealth Alliance comes not from public health agencies but from USAID (State Department/CIA) and the Pentagon. What projects are these non-public health agencies funding? Are these projects related to biodefense/biowarfare research?
- Is the USAID and Pentagon-funded virus research conducted by EcoHealth and/or its partners intended primarily to prepare for naturally occurring pandemics or for potential biowarfare/bioterrorism attacks?
- Do the USAID and Pentagon-funded projects conducted by EcoHealth and/or its partners involve creating pandemic potential pathogens as part of biodefense/biowarfare research?
- Do you know or suspect that SARS-CoV-2 was an engineered virus created as part of a USAID and Pentagon-funded biowarfare/biodefense project?
- Do the USAID and Pentagon-funded projects conducted by EcoHealth and/or its partners involve work on medical countermeasures against potential biowarfare/bioterrorism agents?
Disease X op-ed
- On February 27, 2020, before the Covid pandemic had been declared and before anyone in the U.S. had died of Covid-19, you wrote an op-ed for The New York Times stating that the novel coronavirus was “Disease X.” You explained that the term Disease X was coined by you and a bunch of experts at the World Health Organization in 2018. In your report from 2018, it says:
“Disease X represents the awareness that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently not recognized to cause human disease. Disease X may also be a known pathogen that has changed its epidemiological characteristics, for example by increasing its transmissibility or severity.”
Why were you so sure, so early on, even before we knew there was a pandemic, that this was Disease X? What was it about SARS-CoV-2 (which, after all, was named as a direct successor of the original SARS, to which it was said to be very similar) that made it seem so uniquely dangerous to you? Why did you feel you had to warn the whole world about it on the pages of the NYT?
- Did you think SARS-CoV-2 was a known pathogen that had “changed its epidemiological characteristics” by “increasing its transmissibility or severity”? If yes, what made you think that?
- Did you think SARS-CoV-2 was a potential bioweapon that had been developed using funds from USAID and DOD by EcoHealth Alliance and/or its research partners in China or elsewhere?
- The New York Times has subsequently erased your Disease X op-ed from their online 2/27/2020 issue. You can only find it through the direct link. Why do you think they have made it all but impossible for anyone who doesn’t already know about the article to find it? Do you regret having written it?
Linking Disease X to genetic vaccine platforms
- In the NYT op-ed, you provided a link from the term “Disease X” to a 2018 CNN article in which Dr. Anthony Fauci says that, in order to combat such dangerous as-yet-nonexistent pathogens, “the WHO recognizes that it must “nimbly move” and that this involves creating “platform technologies.”
Fauci goes on to say that “scientists develop customizable recipes for creating vaccines. Then, when an outbreak happens, they can sequence the unique genetics of the virus causing the disease, and plug the correct sequence into the already-developed platform to create a new vaccine.”
That sounds an awful lot like the mRNA platform used for the Covid countermeasures that came to be known as the “mRNA vaccines.”
Why did you link to that particular article from your op-ed about disease X? Were you suggesting that the solution to the pandemic that you appeared to be predicting would be a genetic platform in which the “correct sequence” could be plugged to create vaccines?
- Were you already aware of the Covid mRNA vaccines being developed at the time of your op-ed (February 27, 2020) by Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer, long before the official launch of Operation Warp Speed (May 2020)?
- Is it true that the Pentagon considered the mRNA platforms to be the preferred countermeasures against Covid-19, and that these were always intended to reach full funding and development, starting all the way back in January 2020?
- Was the USAID and Pentagon-funded research conducted EcoHealth and/or its partners related to the development of such mRNA vaccines? If so, how?
The need for a crisis to justify funding and development of genetic vaccine platforms
- In 2016, you participated in an Institute of Medicine working group on Rapid Medical Countermeasure Response to Infectious Diseases. The report quotes you as saying:
“Until an infectious disease crisis is very real, present, and at an emergency threshold, it is often largely ignored. To sustain the funding base beyond the crisis, we need to increase public understanding of the need for MCMs such as a pan-influenza or pan-coronavirus vaccine. A key driver is the media, and the economics follow the hype. We need to use that hype to our advantage to get to the real issues. Investors will respond if they see profit at the end of the process.”
It sounds like you’re saying we need the media to hype up a crisis so that investors will want to fund the type of pan-coronavirus vaccine that is exactly the genetic platform you highlighted in your op-ed, and also exactly the platform that emerged into public awareness shortly after your op-ed, and became known as the Covid mRNA vaccines.
Can you explain this uncanny overlap between your description of what was needed to get such platforms developed in 2016 and what actually happened in 2020?
- Did the USAID and Pentagon-funded research on coronaviruses conducted by EcoHealth Alliance and/or its partners support the development of such platforms? If so, how?
- Were you aware of a plan to use the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 as a trigger for the media hype, public-private funding, and massive mRNA vaccine development and deployment in early 2020 – exactly as you described them in 2016?
- If you were aware of such a plan, who was involved in it, and what was your role?
CONCLUSION
The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability has made a big show of publicly chastising Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance for terrible behavior in the way they managed their funding from the NIH. The Committee has also highlighted very bad weaknesses in the grant making process of the NIH that need to be corrected.
As a result of the Committee’s recommendations, the HHS (parent agency of NIH) has issued a non-punitive notice to Peter Daszak, stating that EcoHealth cannot receive another penny of government funding… unless a government agency decides there is a compelling reason to provide such funding.
Clearly, all of the Committee’s investigations, reports, recommendations and notices in this matter are purely performative, considering 1) they actually impose no consequences, and 2) they ignore the fact that most of Daszak and EcoHealth’s funding come from military and state department sources for work on biodefense/biowarfare-related projects.
Is the Committee’s work just another example of bureaucratic incompetence and “waste, fraud and abuse” of our precious taxpayer dollars?
Or is it an intentional diversion, to distract us from the work the U.S. government was/is actually funding at bioweapons labs like the one in Wuhan, engineering pandemic potential pathogens and then deploying global public-private partnerships to develop medical countermeasures against those pathogens – all of which came together to create the catastrophe known as the Covid pandemic?
Featured Video
The Great DIABETES DECEPTION – Why Treatment FAILS, While $$ MADE
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Is Israel Uniquely Evil?
By Irfan Chowdhury | Palestine Chronicle | July 18, 2020
… Israel has been carrying out the longest-running military occupation in modern history and the longest-running siege in modern history. These two facts alone render Israel unique in terms of the scope of its brutality and criminality.
There are other respects in which Israel stands out from other countries in its use of terror and violence; for example, it is one of the most aggressive countries in the world, having waged wars of aggression against Lebanon in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006, and against Gaza in 2004, 2006, 2008/9, 2012 and 2014, killing huge numbers of civilians in the process (all while issuing threats and carrying out various covert attacks against Iran, which are all in violation of the UN Charter). … continue
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
Richard Ong on Israeli forces arrest writer a… Bill Francis on How reporting facts can now la… Gemma on Israel’s diamond industr… Bill Francis on Victoria Moves to Force Online… papasha408 on The Empire of Lies: How the BB… loongtip on US Weighs Port Restrictions on… Bill Francis on Chris Minns Defends NSW “Hate… Sheree Sheree on I was canceled by three newspa… Richard Ong on Czech–Slovak alignment signals… John Edward Kendrick on Colonel Jacques Baud & Nat… eddieb on Villains of Judea: Ronald Laud… rezjiekc on Substack Imposes Digital ID Ch…
Aletho News- NSW Premier Admits New “Security” Bill Restricts Civil Liberties, Promises More “Hate Speech” Laws Ahead
- US Under Secretary of State Slams UK and EU Over Online Speech Regulation, Announces Release of Files on Past Censorship Efforts
- Head of EU Parliament’s biggest faction wants German soldiers in Ukraine
- What Is Actually Behind Israel’s Recognition Of Somaliland?
- Hamas condemns ‘Israel’-Somaliland recognition
- The Great DIABETES DECEPTION – Why Treatment FAILS, While $$ MADE
- Israeli forces arrest writer and political researcher Sari Orabi
- Hamas calls for ‘impartial international probe’ into Al-Aqsa Flood operation
- The architecture of extermination: Why the Gaza genocide is premeditated and repeatable
- Israeli-UAE Aggression In Yemen Could Backfire Enormously
- If Americans Knew
- When will Israel’s crimes (and US complicity) end? – Not a ceasefire Day 78
- Christmas in the grip of genocide, occupation – Not a Ceasefire Day 77
- Palestinian Christians offer “Kairos,” an alternative Christmas Day sermon – Not a Ceasefire Day 76
- The Faces of AIPAC: the largest pro-Israel lobbying org in the US
- Gazan Christians mark 3rd Christmas under genocide – Not a Ceasefire Day 75
- Israeli scams children with cancer out of millions fundraised for their treatment, BBC finds
- Casey Kennedy Fired from AG Scientific Amid Zionist Troll Campaign Over Track AIPAC Work
- The Hasmoneans: The Jewish Dynasty That Gave Us Hanukkah Is a Symbol of Murder, Not Heroism and Hope
- Int’l NGOs may be blocked from Gaza starting Jan. 1 – Not a Ceasefire Day 74
- From Churches to ChatGPT: Israeli Contracts Worth Millions Aim to Influence U.S. Public Opinion
- No Tricks Zone
- Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue Warns “Germany Won’t Make It” If Winter Turns Severe
- Merry Christmas Everybody!
- Two More New Studies Show The Southern Ocean And Antarctica Were Warmer In The 1970s
- Der Spiegel Caught Making Up Reports About Conservative America (Again)
- New Study: 8000 Years Ago Relative Sea Level Was 30 Meters Higher Than Today Across East Antarctica
- The Wind Energy Paradox: “Why More Wind Turbines Don’t Always Mean More Power”
- New Study Reopens Questions About Our Ability To Meaningfully Assess Global Mean Temperature
- Dialing Back The Panic: German Physics Prof Sees No Evidence Of Climate Tipping Points!
- Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon Challenges The Climate Consensus … It’s The Sun, Not CO2
- Regional Cooling Since The 1980s Has Driven Glacier Advance In The Karakoram Mountains
Aletho News 