The real Russiagate scandal blows away Watergate for crimes and treason by U.S. establishment
Strategic Culture Foundation | August 1, 2025
So the hoax is finally officially acknowledged. “Russiagate” – the mainstream narrative, that is – is now described by American intelligence chiefs as a fabrication that was concocted to overturn the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
Tulsi Gabbard, the current Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and CIA director John Ratcliffe have both accused former President Barack Obama of engaging in a “treasonous conspiracy” to subvert the constitutional process. It’s not just Obama who is implicated in this high crime. Other former senior officials in his 2013-17 administration, including former DNI James Clapper, CIA director John Brennan, and head of the FBI James Comey, are also implicated. If justice is permitted, the political repercussions are truly earth-shattering.
The potential impact is not confined solely to the violation of U.S. laws and the democratic process – bad enough as that is. The Russiagate scandal that began in 2016 has had a lasting, damaging effect on U.S. and European relations with Russia. The frightfully dangerous NATO proxy war incited in Ukraine, which threatens to escalate into a full-scale world war, was fueled in large part by the hostility generated from the false claims of Russian interference in the U.S. elections.
The allegations that Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw a subversion campaign against the 2016 U.S. election and colluded with Donald Trump to get him elected were always specious. The scandal was based on shoddy intel claims to purportedly explain how Trump defeated his Democrat rival, Hillary Clinton. Subsequently, the scandal was hyped into a seemingly credible narrative by U.S. intelligence chiefs at the direction of then-President Barack Obama as a way to delegitimize Trump’s incoming first-term presidency.
Years before the recent intelligence disclosures, many independent journalists, including Aaron Maté, and former intelligence analysts like Ray MacGovern and William Binney, had cogently disproven the official Russiagate claims. Not only were these claims false, they were knowingly false. That is, lies and deliberate distortions. Russia did not hack emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee to discredit Clinton. Clinton’s corruption was exposed by a DNC internal leak to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks whistleblower site. That was partly why Assange was persecuted with years-long incarceration.
A large enough number of voters simply despised Clinton and her warmongering psychopathy, as well as her sell-out of working-class Americans for Wall Street largesse.
Furthermore, Moscow consistently denied any involvement in trying to influence the 2016 U.S. election or attempts to favor Trump. Putin has said more than once that Russia has no preference about who becomes U.S. president, implying that they’re all the same and controlled by deeper state forces. Laughably, too, while Washington accused Moscow of election interference, the actual record shows that the United States has habitually interfered in scores of foreign elections over many decades, including those of Russia. No other nation comes close to the U.S. – the self-declared “leader of the free world” – in sabotaging foreign elections.
In any case, it is instructive to compare the Russiagate farce with the Watergate scandal. Watergate involved spying by the White House of President Richard Nixon against a Democrat rival in the 1972 election. The political crisis that ensued led to Nixon’s resignation in disgrace in 1974. The U.S. nation was shocked by the dirty tricks. Several senior White House officials were later convicted and served time in jail for crimes related to the affair. Nixon was later pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, and avoided prosecution. Nevertheless, Watergate indelibly disgraced U.S. politics and, at the time, was described as “the worst political scandal of the 20th century.”
Subsequent cases of corruption and malfeasance are often dubbed with the suffix “gate” in a nod to Watergate as a momentous political downfall. Hence, “Russiagate.”
There are hugely important differences, however. While Watergate was a scandal based on factual crimes and wrongdoing, Russiagate was always a contrived propaganda deception. The real scandal behind Russiagate was not Trump’s alleged misdeeds or those of Russia, but the criminal conspiracy by Obama and his administration to sabotage the 2016 election and subsequently to overthrow the Trump presidency and the democratic will of the American people. Tulsi Gabbard, the nation’s most senior intelligence chief, has said that this amounts to “treason,” and she has called for the prosecution of Obama and other former senior aides.
Arguably, the real Russiagate scandal is far more criminal and devastating in its political implications than Watergate. The latter involved illegal spying and dirty tricks. Whereas, Russiagate involved a president and his intelligence chiefs trying to subvert the entire democratic process. Not only that, but the U.S. mainstream media are also now exposed for perpetrating a propaganda heist on the American public. All of the major U.S. media outlets amplified the politicised intelligence orchestrated by the Obama administration, claiming that Russia interfered in the election and that Trump was a “Kremlin stooge.” The hoax became an obsession in the U.S. media for years and piled up severe damage in international relations, a nefarious legacy that we are living with today.
The New York Times and Washington Post, reputedly two of the finest exponents of American journalism, jointly won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for their reporting on Russiagate, the official version, that is, which lent credibility to the hoax. In light of what we know now, these newspapers should be hanging their heads in shame for running a Goebbels-like Big Lie campaign to not only deceive the U.S. public but to subvert the democratic process and poison international relations. Their reputations are shredded, as well as those of other major media outlets, including ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC.
Ironically, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for its reporting on the Watergate scandal. The story was made into a best-selling book, All The President’s Men, and a hit Hollywood movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, playing the roles of intrepid reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein and The Washington Post were acclaimed as the finest in U.S. journalism for exposing Watergate and bringing a crooked president to book.
How shameful and absurd that an even greater assault on American democracy and international relations in the form of Russiagate is ignored and buried by “America’s finest”. That the scandal is ignored and buried should be of no surprise because to properly reveal it would shatter the foundations of the U.S. political establishment and the sinister role of the deep state and its mainstream media propaganda system.
Legacy media has a meltdown after RFK Jr fires the CDC’s vaccine panel
By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | June 10, 2025
Yesterday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired every single member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—the influential group of experts that decides which vaccines are added to the childhood schedule.
Today, he set fire to the media’s hysterical reaction.
Within 24 hours, legacy outlets and public health institutions lost their collective minds. Former CDC directors, industry-funded doctors, and conflicted public health groups lined up to denounce Kennedy’s move as reckless, anti-scientific, even deadly.
“This is a dangerous and unprecedented action that makes our families less safe,” said former CDC director Dr Tom Frieden.
“Unilaterally removing the entire panel of experts is reckless,” said paediatrician Dr Tina Tan to The New York Times.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said it was “deeply troubled and alarmed.” It claimed the move would “stoke distrust in lifesaving vaccines”—this from the same organisation that has spent decades pushing the childhood vaccine schedule while taking money from the very companies that profit from it.
Others framed it as a political purge, a blow to science, or a “coup” that would bring back measles and polio.
But within hours, Kennedy hit back—and this time, he wasn’t the outsider being easily dismissed. He was the Secretary of Health and Human Services. And he came armed with evidence, receipts, and a brutal takedown of the media’s favourite falsehoods.
In a searing post on X, Kennedy explained the decision.
He said the clean sweep was necessary because ACIP had demonstrated its “stubborn unwillingness to demand adequate safety trials before recommending new vaccines for our children.”
And despite the media’s insistence otherwise, Kennedy argued that no routine injected childhood vaccine on the CDC’s schedule had ever been approved based on a placebo-controlled trial using an inert substance.
CNN had tried to prove him wrong last week—claiming it had found “257 placebo-controlled studies” of vaccines on the schedule.
Kennedy dismantled it in forensic detail.
“CNN is wrong,” he wrote. “No routine injected vaccine on CDC’s schedule was licensed for children based on a placebo-controlled trial. That is not conjecture. It is a fact based on FDA’s clinical trial data.”
Then came the body blows.
He pointed out that most of the 257 studies used active substances like aluminium, antibiotics, or other vaccines—not inert placebos.
He linked directly to FDA definitions of “placebo” and to official clinical trial records. Of the few studies that may have used saline controls, none were relied on by the FDA to license a single routine vaccine for American children.
Some studied products that were never approved in the US. Some occurred after licensure. Others involved discontinued vaccines. “CNN’s list ironically proves the lack of adequate safety trials,” Kennedy wrote in a stinging rebuke.
The post was devastating.
It was a clinical takedown of an industry riddled with deception—and it landed—because this time, Kennedy wasn’t being filtered through a hostile press.
He was speaking directly to the public, as a government official, with all the links to back it up. And the media couldn’t handle it.
Predictably, the media rolled out the same tired “experts” to recycle the same tired script—Paul Offit quotes, panic about “undermining trust,” warnings that children would die.
But Kennedy turned the whole thing inside out.
“We’ve gone from three routine injections by age one in 1986 to 25 in 2025,” he wrote. “And not one of them was licensed using a placebo-controlled trial.”
He said it plainly for the cameras: “That is just malpractice. So the people who are in charge of that are now gone.”
For years, the press had written Kennedy off as an anti-vaxxer and moved on. Now, they’ve thrown everything at him—and he threw it right back. Only now, he has the authority, data, and reach.
Kennedy told his followers he’d be announcing replacements in the coming days—no “ideological anti-vaxxers” just “highly credentialed physicians and scientists” committed to evidence, objectivity, and common sense.
Legacy media may still control the headlines, but they can no longer suppress the debate.
And perhaps that’s what really has them rattled.
They’re not defending science. They’re defending a regime of experts who signed off on decades of vaccine approvals without ever insisting on rigorous, inert-placebo safety trials.
When Kennedy calls them out, their only defence is to scream “danger!”—and hope no one checks the fine print.
Yesterday, he fired the gatekeepers. Today, he exposed the game.
Tulsi Gabbard labels CNN ‘propaganda arm’ of spies
The Director of National Intelligence says the network’s anonymous CIA sources are exactly the people “we need to root out”
RT | February 27, 2025
Newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard has accused CNN of acting as a “propaganda arm” for disloyal intelligence agents, calling the network’s report on potential retaliation by dismissed spies an “indirect threat” to President Donald Trump’s administration.
As part of Trump’s broader effort to downsize and restructure the federal government, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has recently offered so-called buyouts to its agents. In a report published Monday, CNN, citing unnamed sources, claimed that some senior CIA officers were “quietly discussing” how the dismissals “risk creating a group of disgruntled former employees who might be motivated to take what they know to a foreign intelligence service.”
“I am curious about how they think this is a good tactic to keep their job,” Gabbard told Fox News on Tuesday.
“They are exposing themselves, essentially, by making this indirect threat – using their propaganda arm, CNN, that they’ve used over and over again – to reveal their hand,” she continued. “Their loyalty is not to America, not to the American people or the Constitution; it is to themselves.”
The director of national intelligence stressed that such disgruntled employees are “exactly the kinds of people we need to root out, get rid of, so that the patriots who do work in this area, who are committed to our core mission, can actually focus on that.”
Gabbard also claimed that many within the intelligence community had reached out to her personally, expressing support for Trump’s efforts to “clean house” and refocus on the core mission of serving the American people.
A former US congresswoman from Hawaii, Gabbard rose to national prominence in 2016 when she resigned as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to endorse Bernie Sanders for president. She later ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, advocating against US military interventions abroad, which she argued were harmful to service members like herself and detrimental to national interests. As tensions with the Democratic Party escalated, Gabbard left the party in 2022. After two years as an independent, she joined the Republican Party and endorsed Donald Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign.
Trump’s nomination of Gabbard for the top intelligence role in November sparked criticism from establishment figures, who labeled her a security risk. Despite the backlash, she was confirmed earlier this month by a 52-48 Senate vote, with only one Republican, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, opposing her appointment.
In January, the Senate also confirmed another Trump nominee, John Ratcliffe, as director of the CIA in a 74-25 vote. Ratcliffe, a former Texas congressman and ex-director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, is known for his skepticism of intelligence agencies and his criticism of investigations into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Pharma Spends Billions on Drug Ads, Fears Trump Administration Will Try to Ban Them
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 16, 2025
Drug companies report their biggest concern with the incoming Trump administration is the fear that the government will try to ban direct-to-consumer drug ads, according to a new report from The Lever that examines the industry practice.
Companies said such a ban would “almost certainly” lead to a drop in drug sales, according to a recent report by industry research firm Intron Health, which claims the return on investment for drug ads is as high as 100%-500%, depending on the drug.
The U.S. and New Zealand are the only two countries that allow drug companies to advertise directly to consumers.
When President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.), was running as a presidential candidate, he promised to ban the ads through an executive order on his first day in office.
When he tapped Kennedy, founder and former chairman of Children’s Health Defense, to lead HHS, Trump criticized drugmakers and Big Food companies, saying they “have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation.”
If confirmed, Kennedy would oversee the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which sets policies on direct-to-consumer advertising by pharma.
“We see this as the biggest imminent threat from RFK and the new Trump administration,” the Intron report’s authors wrote.
The Lever predicted the chances the administration can successfully ban these ads are “slim,” but said Big Pharma’s reaction shows how dependent the industry — and the media conglomerates it supports — has become on advertising drugs to consumers.
Critics say the ads “misinform patients and underemphasize treatment risks,” in part because they don’t provide all the information a patient needs to make an informed decision.
The ads also lead to unnecessary drug prescriptions, which The Lever said raises healthcare costs for consumers and taxpayers.
Most heavily advertised drugs don’t provide meaningful therapeutic benefit
Direct-to-consumer marketing in the U.S. began in 1981, with limited success at first because the FDA required drugmakers to list all possible side effects in the ads, according to The Lever’s short history of the practice.
Under the Clinton administration in 1997, the FDA relaxed its policies, allowing drugmakers to list only “major risks” in their ads, paving the way for a new and massive wave of television advertising for prescription drugs.
Spending on ads shot up 330% between 1996 and 2005, reaching $4.2 billion by 2004, and continued to grow after that.
Between 2016 and 2018, drugmakers spent $17.8 billion on ads for more than 550 drugs. Most of these drugs treat chronic medical conditions like arthritis, diabetes and depression.
According to a 2021 report by the congressional watchdog Government Accountability Office, 60% of the $560 billion that Medicare and its beneficiaries spent on drugs went to the advertised drugs.
The Lever claimed there are benefits to such advertising. Citing a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, it suggested that advertising can “somewhat” educate consumers and extend drug care to “undertreated patients.”
However, the report said advertising also increases the number of patients that request an advertised medication and the likelihood their prescriber will give it to them, whether they need it or not.
The ads also lead to greater use of higher-cost drugs over generics, even when those drugs offer no greater benefit.
The Lever cites a 2023 study in JAMA Network Open that assessed the “therapeutic value” — whether a drug led to improved clinical outcomes — of the top 73 most heavily advertised drugs. The study found that only 1 in 4 advertised drugs had a high therapeutic value.
Study author Neeraj Patel told The Lever :
“Many consumers might assume that the drugs they see all the time on TV are for cutting-edge therapies that are groundbreaking advances over the other treatment options on the market …
“Our study suggests that assumption is usually wrong: Heavily advertised drugs often do not necessarily provide meaningful therapeutic benefits as opposed to other therapeutic options.”
Obstacles to ending direct-to-consumer ads
The Lever said it is “relatively unlikely” Kennedy will be able to ban the ads, partly because efforts to merely restrict drug advertising have been defeated in courts on First Amendment grounds.
The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal made similar predictions. However, The Defender reported that a wider field of experts disagree on whether such a ban is legally or constitutionally feasible.
During Trump’s first administration, a federal judge blocked an HHS rule requiring drugmakers to include prices in their TV commercials, saying it exceeded the agency’s statutory authority.
“Kennedy could continue to push for cost transparency or require FDA review of all drug ads,” The Lever noted, “but any such reform attempts would likely be slow-going and challenged by the industry.”
Big Pharma’s lobbying arm, which spent $294 million lobbying last year on issues like drug ads, is also an obstacle.
TV and radio broadcasters are also expected to fight a drug ad ban because Big Pharma is one of the top advertising spenders. Last year, the National Association of Broadcaster industry lobbying group spent $8.8 million lobbying on issues including direct-to-consumer advertising, according to lobbying records.
Prescription drugs accounted for 30.7% of ad minutes across evening news programs on ABC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and NBC last year through Dec. 15, according to the WSJ.
The Lever proposed less drastic measures to “mitigate” some of the negative impacts of this advertising rather than banning it altogether.
For example, the FDA could require pharmaceutical companies to include disclaimers about the effectiveness of the drugs versus other drugs already on the market. Or drug companies could offer a “Drug Facts Box” label, that would provide one-page summaries of the risks and benefits of new drugs.
The agency could also extend its requirement, instituted in 2023, that TV and radio drug ads use “consumer-friendly” and “understandable” language to disclose potential side effects, applying it to over-the-counter medicines, dietary supplements or other products, which also account for hundreds of millions of advertising dollars.
“Even if all of those drug ads filling the TV and computer screens aren’t likely to go away soon, advocates hold out hope that regulators could at least require them to be more informative and comprehensible,” The Lever reported.
Related articles in The Defender:
- Can the Trump Administration Ban Big Pharma Advertising? Experts Weigh In
- ‘Ask Your Doctor’: Can’t Someone in Congress Make These Endless Drug Ads Disappear?
- ‘Dangerous’: Global PR Giant Launches Provocative HPV Vaccine Ads Targeting Gen Zers
- ‘Brought to You by Pfizer’: Pharma Giant Spends More on Ads, News Sponsorships, Than Research
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Scandal deepens around CNN’s Clarissa Ward staging Syria prison scene
By Wyatt Reed · The Grayzone · December 16, 2024
Footage showing CNN’s regime change-crazed correspondent supposedly freeing a forgotten prisoner from a Syrian jail has been exposed as a scandalous fraud, yet the network continues to re-air it, while defending its correspondent.
“In nearly twenty years as a journalist, this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed.”
That’s how veteran CNN journalist Clarissa Ward described her foray into a Syrian prison on December 12, where she promptly claimed to have rescued a forgotten inmate after three months in jail. But there was just one problem with the “extraordinary moment”: a review of a dramatic story depicted by CNN reveals a number of glaring inconsistencies, the greatest of which is that the man stands accused of being an impostor.
After countless social media users shredded CNN’s story, a fact-checking organization with ties to the US government has exposed the prisoner seemingly liberated in Ward’s theatrical performance turns out to have been a low level Syrian intelligence official jailed for corruption and abuse charges.
CNN finally addressed the deepening scandal on December 15, declaring that it would investigate the subject of Ward’s piece. However, the network continues to protect the correspondent responsible for the journalistic flim-flam, while rebroadcasting the staged report for its viewers day after day.
With Ward still stationed in jihadist-held Damascus, it appears that her bosses are refusing to allow any editorial standards or professional ethics get in the way of a successful Western-backed regime change operation.
“It moved! Is there someone there?”
In CNN’s original Dec. 11 video report, Ward enters a jail she says was previously operated by Syrian Air Force intelligence, which she claims was “one of many secret prisons across [Damascus]” – and was “specifically tasked with surveillance, arrest, and killing of all regime critics.” Ward was apparently searching for signs of Austin Tice, an American journalist who the US government claims was being held by the Assad government prior to its fall.
“We don’t find any hints of Tice,” Ward insists in a voiceover, “but [we] come across something extraordinary.” At this point, “the guard makes us turn the camera off while he shoots the lock off the cell door,” she says. Viewers are not shown their entrance. Afterwards, Ward and her entourage appear in a clean but windowless cell, where a blanket lies heaped on the ground.
“It moved!” Ward exclaims, before asking the blanket, in English: “Is there someone there?”
Upon being prodded by her armed rebel guide, a man crawls out from under the blanket, revealing himself to the CNN crew. Eyes widened, he raises his arms. “‘I’m a civilian,’ he says, ‘I’m a civilian,’” Ward translates. “He tells the fighter he is from the city of Homs and has been in the cell for three months.” Ward is shown pacing in the background, hand clasped dramatically to her chest.
“He clutches my arm tightly with both hands,” she intones, her voice quivering with emotion. She then asks breathlessly: “Does anyone have any water?” Someone off-screen produces a bottle, which the man drinks quickly. As he walks outside, he looks up. “My God, the light,” he says, while staring directly and unflinchingly at the sky. “Left alone for days without food, water or light, the man was unaware Bashar al-Assad’s regime had fallen,” Ward declares gravely.
By her stated estimation, he had been left for dead and deprived of all food and water for at least four days. A 2022 study published in Science determined that “despite adaptations to minimize dehydration, humans can survive for only ~3 days without consuming water.” The Mezzeh Air Force intelligence prison in question was reportedly overtaken by anti-government militants on Dec. 6, a full five days before the report was published.
Yet rather than immediately seeking medical care for the man after his release, a rebel fighter pulls up a chair, and the CNN crew elects to conduct an interview with the supposed former prisoner. At some point, someone hands him a plate of food, and he collapses into Ward’s arms after taking a bite. “He can barely lift it to his mouth. But his body can’t handle it,” Ward declares mournfully.
The segment ends as the man, who Ward identifies as “Adil Gharbal,” is guided into an ambulance by men wearing Red Crescent jackets. “It is the end of a very dark chapter for him and for all of Syria,” Ward concludes.
And perhaps it would be – if it actually happened. But it now appears the man rescued by CNN’s Clarissa Ward was a corrupt Syrian government official, not an innocent political prisoner.
US government aligned site exposes CNN’s Syria prison theater
According to a Western-backed fact-checking organization known as Verify, “Adil Gharbal” is actually Salama Mohammad Salama, who they identified as “a first lieutenant in Syrian Air Force Intelligence,” a figure they claim was “notorious for his activities in Homs.”
Verify, which describes itself as “a verified signatory of the International Fact-Checker Network (IFCN) and a trusted partner of Facebook in the MENA region since 2019,” writes that “residents of the Al-Bayyada neighborhood identified him as frequently stationed at a checkpoint in the area’s western entrance, infamous for its abuses.”
Per Verify, Salama was imprisoned due to his involvement in “theft [and] extortion,” and “his recent incarceration—lasting less than a month—was due to a dispute over profit-sharing” of “extorted funds.”
The IFCN’s parent group, the “Poynter Institute,” has taken huge sums from organizations including George Soros’ Open Society Foundation (OSF) and the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy. In 2017, Poynter took in a whopping $1.3 million from OSF and Omidyar Foundation, the main vessel for spending by Democratic Party-aligned billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Given its US-aligned financial ties, Verify has very little incentive to undercut CNN’s regime change narratives.
Alongside hundreds of social media users, Verify has also pointed out that the timeline described by CNN simply defies belief. As geopolitical analyst Arnaud Bertrand noted, “most humans cannot survive without water for 4-5 days, especially if it’s without food either and in stressful prison conditions. At the very minimum, they would have extremely dry, cracked lips and mouth, severely sunken eyes, a very tight grayish skin and they wouldn’t be able to speak coherently.”
The man CNN claims to have liberated shows no signs of long-term incarceration, however, and instead appears well-fed, neat, and relatively clean-shaven. Another popular post drew attention to “the manicured nails of a man who was in a Syrian dungeon without light for 3 months until CNN rescued him.”
Anti-imperialist commentators weren’t the only ones to push back on CNN’s gratuitous propaganda. One Kurdish activist wrote that the incident “raises some serious serious questions about journalistic integrity” because “the air force intelligence prison was entered by the Syrian rebels and all cells [were already] opened” two days before CNN showed up. “The prison has been liberated for days now; several Syrian reporters were there already – families have come to look for the remains of their family members – prisons were searched by search teams [sent] by the Turkish government; yet somehow all of them ignored this 1 prison cell? – with exactly 1 prisoner inside despite this being a prison cell for multiple prisoners?”
The same activist pointed out that even journalists affiliated with Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, the US-designated terrorist group which largely oversaw the overthrow of the Syrian government, were mocking CNN’s coverage in a post on Telegram: “if it wasn’t a play to achieve a scoop for CNN and laugh at the West’s stupidity, it is more likely that one of the detainees has no place to go and prefers to stay in prison and sleep there.”
Others, who claim to have been jailed by the former Syrian government also questioned the report, with one commenting: “I was detained twice in Syria. I think this is staged. CNN should investigate. Happy to be proven wrong.” Another suggested the video piece did a disservice to those who had actually been jailed: “CNN journalist Clarissa Ward fabricated a scene showing a prisoner inside Syria’s notoriously brutal prisons. This is demeaning and exploitative to Syrian detainees. As a former Syrian detainee, I call for boycotting her and exposing her actions.”
Ward’s history of shameless regime change cheerleading, collaboration with AQ figures
It’s certainly not the first time Ward has been accused of fabricating a story and staging a scene to boost her ratings. While covering Israel’s post-October 7 assault on Gaza, Ward earned widespread mockery when she fell to the ground and took cover from a Hamas rocket attack, when, in fact, no munitions were falling anywhere in her vicinity.
Two weeks later, Ward’s lopsided coverage of the Israeli genocide in Gaza provoked a viral confrontation by Egyptian journalist Rahma Zein, who lambasted the CNN correspondent in a viral video: “Cover this! Say the truth! We understand… You’re just a puppet, you’re just a mouthpiece,” she proclaimed, but in many ways, “you represent your government.”
“We’re watching an occupation” and it’s “the result of your silence,” Zein concluded.
Ward’s presence in Damascus, where jihadist militias have taken control while Israeli forces seize Syrian territory without a fight, represents the culmination of over a decade of propagandizing for regime change.
Back in 2012, Ward claimed to have “sort of slipped off into an alleyway in the [Damascus] old city, put a headscarf on, and went and lived with some activists for a week.” She returned with a de facto commercial for the Free Syrian Army, the Contra-style militia created with CIA arms and support.
CNN’s Clarissa Ward, then of CBS, with the FSA in 2011
In 2017, Ward was granted special entry to Idlib, the Al Qaeda carveout in Northwestern Syria protected by the Turkish military. To gain access to jihadist leaders, Ward hired Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American who joined the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda in 2012 and subsequently served as its top English language propagandist, as her fixer. When Ward won a Peabody Award for her report inside Idlib, Kareem took to Twitter to complain that CNN “barely mentioned my name! I’m telling you, somehow CNN must have forgotten that I was the one that filmed it, I guess they forgot that.”
Ward appeared soon after at the UN Security Council as a guest of the United States delegation. There, she described “the Islamist factions” in the Idlib province as “heroes on the ground” who have “filled the void” in the war to overthrow the Syrian government.
In 2019, when The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal posted a Twitter thread containing non-staged photos and videos documenting his visit to Damascus, including his interviews with Syrians who had been wounded or tortured by Western-backed opposition forces, Ward flew into a petulant frenzy, claiming she was “getting palpitations” that graduated to “spasms of rage,” even wondering if Blumenthal’s critical reporting was driven by drug addiction.
Sober or not, when Ward participated in a clearly staged prisoner rescue – what she called “one of the most extraordinary moments” in her media career – she was clearly drunk on her own entitlement and obsession with advancing the priorities of the US regime change machine. And though her network appears to be protecting her, it seems the morning after has finally arrived.
Revealed: The Israeli Spies Writing America’s News
By Alan MacLeod | MintPress News | October 16, 2024
One year after Oct. 7 attacks, Netanyahu is on a winning streak.” So reads the title of a recent Axios article describing the Israeli prime minister riding on an unbeatable wave of triumphs. These stunning military “successes,” its author Barak Ravid notes, include the bombing of Yemen, the assassinations of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the pager attack against Lebanon.
The same author recently went viral for an article that claimed that Israeli attacks against Hezbollah are “not intended to lead to war but are an attempt to reach ‘de-escalation through escalation.’” Users on social media mocked Ravid for this bizarre, Orwellian reasoning. But what almost everybody missed is that Barak Ravid is an Israeli spy – or at least he was until recently. Ravid is a former analyst with Israeli spying agency Unit 8200, and as recently as last year, was still a reservist with the Israeli Defense Forces group.
Unit 8200 is Israel’s largest and perhaps most controversial spying organization. It has been responsible for many high-profile espionage and terror operations, including the recent pager attack that injured thousands of Lebanese civilians. As this investigation will reveal, Ravid is far from the only Israeli ex-spook working at top U.S. media outlets, working hard to manufacture Western support for his country’s actions.
White House Insider
Ravid has quickly become one of the most influential individuals in the Capitol Hill press corps. In April, he won the prestigious White House Press Correspondents’ Award “for overall excellence in White House coverage”—one of the highest awards in American journalism. Judges were impressed by what they described as his “deep, almost intimate levels of sourcing in the U.S. and abroad” and picked out six articles as exemplary pieces of journalism.
Most of these stories consisted of simply printing anonymous White House or Israeli government sources, making them look good, and distancing President Biden from the horrors of the Israeli attack on Palestine. As such, there was functionally no difference between these and White House press releases. For example, one story the judges picked out was titled “Scoop: Biden tells Bibi 3-day fighting pause could help secure release of some hostages,” and presented the 46th President of the United States as a dedicated humanitarian hellbent on reducing suffering. Another described how “frustrated” Biden was becoming with Netanyahu and the Israeli government.
Protestors had called on reporters to snub the event in solidarity with their fallen counterparts in Gaza (which, at the time of writing, comes to at least 128 journalists). Not only was there no boycott of the event, but organizers gave their highest award to an Israeli intelligence official-turned-reporter who has earned a reputation as perhaps the most dutiful stenographer of power in Washington.
Ravid was personally presented with the award by President Biden, who embraced him like a brother. That a known (former) Israeli spy could hug Biden in such a manner speaks volumes about not only the intimate relationship between the United States and Israel but about the extent to which establishment media holds power to account.
Ravid has made a name for himself by uncritically printing flattering information given to him by either the U.S. or Israeli government and passing it off as a scoop. In April, he wrote that “President Biden laid out an ultimatum to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their call on Thursday: If Israel doesn’t change course in Gaza, ‘we won’t be able to support you,’” and that he was “making his strongest push for an end to the fighting in Gaza in six months of war, and warning for the first time that U.S. policy on the war will depend on Israel’s adherence to his demands,” which included “an immediate ceasefire.” In July, he repeated anonymous sources that told him that Netanyahu and Israel are striving for “a diplomatic solution” – another highly dubious claim.
Other articles by Ravid following the same pattern include:
- Scoop: Biden tells Bibi he’s not in it for a year of war in Gaza
- Scoop: White House cancels meeting, scolds Netanyahu in protest over video
- Biden “running out” of patience with Bibi as Gaza war hits 100 days
- Biden-Bibi clash escalates as U.S. accused of undermining Israeli government
- Biden and Bibi “red lines” for Rafah put them on a collision course
- Biden on hot mic: Told Bibi we needed “come to Jesus” meeting on Gaza
- Scoop: White House loses trust in Israeli government as Middle East spirals
- Israeli minister lambasted at White House about Gaza and war strategy
- Scoop: Biden told Bibi U.S. won’t support an Israeli counterattack on Iran
This relentless whitewashing of the Biden administration has drawn widespread mockery online.
“AXIOS EXCLUSIVE: After selling Netanyahu millions of dollars worth of weapons, Biden played —loudly — Taylor Swift’s ‘Bad Blood.’ ‘Everyone could hear it,’ a source close to Biden says,” tweeted X user David Grossman. “Continuing to hand over big piles of cash and weapons, but shaking my head so everyone knows i sort of disagree with it,” quipped comedian Hussein Kesvani, in response to Ravid’s latest article suggesting that Biden has become “increasingly distrustful” of the Israeli government.
Throughout this supposed split between the U.S. and Israel, the Biden administration has continued to voice enthusiastic support for Israeli offensives, block ceasefire resolutions and Palestinian statehood at the U.N., and has sent $18 billion worth of weapons to Israel in the past 12 months. Thus, no matter how questionable these Axios reports are, they serve a vital role for Washington, allowing the Biden administration to distance itself from what international bodies have labeled a genocide. Ravid’s function has been to manufacture consent for the government among elite liberal audiences who read Axios, allowing them to continue to believe that the U.S. is an honest broker for peace in West Asia rather than a key enabler of Israel.
Ravid does not hide his open disdain for Palestinians. In September, he retweeted a post that stated:
That’s the PaliNazi way… they pocket concessions without giving anything in return and then use those concessions as the baseline for the next round of negotiations. PaliNazis don’t know how to tell the truth.”
Less than one week later, he promoted Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s highly dubious claim that Israeli Defense Forces had found a picture of the children al-Qassam Brigades leader Mohammed Sinwar celebrating in front of a huge picture of planes hitting the World Trade Center. Gallant stated that they had found this picture – clearly trying to falsely associate Palestinians with 9/11 – in a tunnel “where the Sinwar brothers were hiding like rats.”
An Infamous Spy Agency
Founded in 1952, Unit 8200 is the Israeli military’s largest and most controversial division.
Responsible for covert operations, spying, surveillance and cyberwarfare, since October 7, 2023, the group has been at the forefront of the world’s attention. It is widely identified as the organization behind the infamous pager attack on Lebanon, which left at least nine dead and around 3,000 people injured. While many in Israel (and Ravid himself) hailed the operation as a success, it was condemned worldwide as an egregious act of terrorism, including by ex-CIA director Leon Panetta.
Unit 8200 has also constructed an artificial intelligence-powered kill list for Gaza, suggesting tens of thousands of individuals (including women and children) for assassination. This software was the primary targeting mechanism the IDF used in the early months of its attack on the densely populated strip.
Described as Israel’s Harvard, Unit 8200 is one of the most prestigious institutions in the country. The selection process is highly competitive; parents spend fortunes on science and math classes for their children, hoping they will be picked for service there, unlocking a lucrative career in Israel’s burgeoning hi-tech sector.
It also serves as the centerpiece of Israel’s futuristic repressive state apparatus. Using gigantic amounts of data compiled on Palestinians by tracking their every move through face recognition cameras monitoring their calls, messages, emails and personal data, Unit 8200 has created a dystopian dragnet that it uses to surveil, harass and suppress Palestinians.
Unit 8200 compiles dossiers on every Palestinian, including their medical history, sex lives and search histories, so that this information can be used for extortion or blackmail later. If, for example, an individual is cheating on their spouse, desperately needs a medical operation, or is secretly homosexual, this can be used as leverage to turn civilians into informants and spies for Israel. One former Unit 8200 operative said that as part of his training, he was assigned to memorize different Arabic words for “gay” so that he could listen out for them in conversations.
Unit 8200 operatives have gone on to create some of the world’s most downloaded apps and many of the most infamous spying programs, including Pegasus. Pegasus was used to surveil dozens of political leaders around the world, including France’s Emmanuel Macron, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, and Pakistan’s Imran Khan.
The Israeli government authorized the sale of Pegasus to the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as some of the most authoritarian governments on the planet. This included Saudi Arabia, who used the software to surveil Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was assassinated by Saudi agents in Türkiye.
A recent MintPress News investigation found that a large proportion of the worldwide VPN market is owned and operated by an Israeli company headed and co-founded by a Unit 8200 alumnus.
In 2014, 43 Unit 8200 reservists penned a joint statement declaring that they were no longer willing to serve in the unit on account of its unethical practices, which included making no distinction between ordinary Palestinian citizens and terrorists. The letter also noted that their intelligence was passed on to powerful local politicians, who used it as they saw fit.
This public statement left Ravid bristling with anger at his co-workers. In the wake of the scandal, Ravid went on Israeli Army radio to attack the whistleblowers. Ravid said that to oppose the occupation of Palestine was to oppose Israel itself, as the occupation is a fundamental “part” of Israel. “If the problem is really the occupation,” he said, “then your taxes are also a problem — they fund the soldier at the checkpoint, the education system… and 8200 is a great spin.”
Leaving aside Ravid’s comments, the question arises: is it really acceptable that members from a group designed to infiltrate, surveil and target foreign populations, that has produced many of the planet’s most dangerous and invasive spying technology, and is widely to be behind sophisticated international terror attacks, are writing Americans’ news about Israel and Palestine? What would the reaction be if senior figures in U.S. media were outed as intelligence officers for Hezbollah, Hamas, or Russia’s F.S.B.?
News About Israel, Brought to You by Israel
Ravid is far from the only influential journalist in America with deep ties to the Israeli state, however. Shachar Peled spent three years as an officer in Unit 8200, leading a team of analysts in surveillance, intelligence and cyberwarfare. She also served as a technology analyst for the Israeli intelligence service, Shin Bet. In 2017, she was hired as a producer and writer by CNN and spent three years putting together segments for Fareed Zakaria and Christiane Amanpour’s shows. Google later hired her to become their Senior Media Specialist.
Another Unit 8200 agent who went on to work for CNN is Tal Heinrich. Heinrich spent three years as a Unit 8200 agent. Between 2014 and 2017, she was the field and news desk producer for CNN’s notoriously pro-Israel Jerusalem Bureau, where she was one of the principal journalists shaping America’s understanding of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza that killed more than 2,000 people and left hundreds of thousands displaced. Heinrich later left CNN and is now the official spokesperson of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
CNN’s penchant for hiring Israeli state figures continues to this day. Tamar Michaelis, for example, currently works for the network, producing much of its Israel/Palestine content. This is despite having previously served as an official IDF spokesperson in the Israeli Defense Forces.
The New York Times, meanwhile, hired Anat Schwartz, an ex-Israeli Air Force Intelligence officer with zero journalistic experience. Schwartz co-wrote the infamous and now discredited “Screams Without Words” expose, which claimed that Hamas fighters systematically sexually violated Israelis on October 7. Times staff themselves revolted over the lack of evidence and fact-checking in the piece.
Multiple New York Times employees, including star columnist David Brooks, have had children serving in the IDF; even as they report or offer opinions on the region, the Times never disclosed these glaring conflicts of interest to its readers. Nor has it disclosed that it purchased a Jerusalem house for its bureau chief that was stolen from the family of Palestinian intellectual Ghada Karmi in 1948.
MintPress News interviewed Karmi last year about her latest book and Israeli attempts to silence her. Former New York Times Magazine writer and current editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg (an American) dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to volunteer as an IDF prison guard during the first Palestinian Intifada (uprising). In his memoirs, Goldberg revealed that, while serving in the IDF., he helped cover up the abuse of Palestinian prisoners.
Social media companies, too, are filled with former Unit 8200 agents. A 2022 MintPress study found no fewer than 99 former Unit 8200 operatives working for Google.
Facebook also employs dozens of ex-spooks from the controversial unit. This includes Emi Palmor, who sits on Meta’s oversight board. This 21-person panel ultimately decides the direction of Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s other offerings, adjudicating on what content to allow, promote, and what to suppress. Meta has been formally condemned for its systematic suppression of Palestinian voices across its platforms by Human Rights Watch, which documented over 1,000 instances of overt anti-Palestinian censorship in October and November 2023 alone. A measure of this bias is highlighted by the fact that, at one point, Instagram automatically inserted the word “terrorist” into the profiles of users who called themselves Palestinian.
Despite the widespread claims by U.S. politicians that it is a hotbed of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic racism, TikTok also employs many former Unit 8200 agents in key positions in its organization. For example, in 2021, it hired Asaf Hochman as its global head of product strategy and operations. Before joining TikTok, Hochman spent over five years as an Israeli spook. He now works for Meta.
Top Down Pro-Israel Censorship
When it comes to the Israeli attack on its neighbors, corporate media has consistently displayed a pro-Israel bias. The New York Times, for example, regularly refrains from identifying the perpetrator of violence when that perpetrator is the Israeli military and described the 1948 genocide of around 750,000 Palestinians as a mere “migration.” A study of the paper’s coverage found that words like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” appear 22 times more frequently when discussing Israeli deaths than Palestinian ones, despite the gigantic disparity in the number of people killed on both sides.
Meanwhile, in a story about how Israeli soldiers shot 335 bullets at a car containing a Palestinian child and then shot the rescue workers who came to save her, CNN printed the headline “Five-year-old Palestinian girl found dead after being trapped in car with dead relatives” – a title that could be interpreted that her death was a tragic accident.
This sort of reporting does not happen by accident. In fact, it comes straight from the top. A leaked New York Times memo from November revealed that company management explicitly instructed its reporters not to use words such as “genocide,” “slaughter,” and “ethnic cleansing” when discussing Israel’s actions. Times’ staff must refrain from using words like “refugee camp,” “occupied territory,” or even “Palestine” in their reporting, making it almost impossible to convey some of the most basic facts to their audience.
CNN staff are under similar pressure. Last October, new C.E.O. Mark Thompson sent out a memo to all staff instructing them to make sure that Hamas (and not Israel) is presented as responsible for the violence, that they must always use the moniker “Hamas-controlled” when discussing the Gaza Health Ministry and their civilian death figures, and barring them from any reporting of Hamas’ viewpoint, which its senior director of news standards and practices told staff was “not newsworthy” and amounted to “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda.”
Both the Times and CNN have fired multiple journalists over their opposition to Israeli actions or support for Palestinian liberation. In November, the Times’ Jazmine Hughes was forced out after she signed an open letter opposing genocide in Palestine. The newspaper terminated Hosam Salem’s contract the previous year after a pressure campaign from pro-Israel group Honest Reporting. And CNN anchor Marc Lamont Hill was abruptly fired in 2018 for calling for Palestinian liberation in a speech at the United Nations.
Large organizations like Axios, CNN and the New York Times obviously know who they are hiring. These are some of the most sought-after jobs in journalism, and hundreds of applicants are likely applying for each position. The fact that these organizations choose to select Israeli spies above everybody else raises serious questions about their journalistic credibility and their purpose.
Hiring agents from Unit 8200 to produce American news should be as unthinkable as employing Hamas or Hezbollah fighters as reporters. Yet former Israeli spooks are entrusted with informing the American public about their country’s ongoing offensives against Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and Syria. What does this say about the credibility and biases of our media?
Since Israel could not continue to prosecute this war without American aid, the battle for the American mind is as important as actions on the ground. And as the propaganda war wages, the lines between journalist and fighter blur. The fact that many of the top journalists supplying us with news about Israel/Palestine are literally former Israeli intelligence agents only underlines this.
Mainstream media fails again
The botched assassination attempt of former US president Donald Trump has shone a light on the failing mainstream news media.
Maryanne Demasi, reports | July 14, 2024
If you’ve been off grid, former president Donald Trump narrowly escaped death at his rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday July 13, 2024, at approximately 6:15 p.m.
Trump’s speech was being live streamed, so video footage of the attempted assassination went viral across social media.
Several mainstream media outlets, however, delayed coverage or reported inaccurately on the events, frustrating the public and inflaming criticism of the legacy media.
When the first bullet clipped Trump’s right ear, narrowly missing his skull, he ducked down at the podium before secret service jumped to his aid.
Onlookers say Trump was calm. The podium microphones picked up his audio. “Get my shoes” he said to one of his secret service agents.
Trump then stood up and turned to his supporters with a bloodied face and fist in the air, mouthing the words “fight, fight, fight” before being rushed off the stage.
The crowd erupted.
Iconic moment: Trump acknowledges his supporters after the botched assassination attempt.
Regardless of your politics, the attempt on Trump’s life was morally bankrupt and an attack on democracy. Any sort of violence, political or otherwise, should be condemned.
Trump released a statement soon after the assassination attempt, confirming that he’d been shot, and that one bullet had “pierced” his right ear.
“I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin,” wrote Trump on his Truth Social platform.
The suspected gunman, who was positioned on a rooftop 150 yards away, managed to fire multiple shots at the stage where Trump was standing, before he was neutralised by a secret service sniper.
One person who attended the rally was killed and two other spectators were critically wounded.
Alleged shooter on a nearby rooftop shot dead moments after the failed assassination attempt.
No doubt there will be a lot of speculation about the incident over the coming days and weeks, but it was the coverage by mainstream media that left many fuming.
Left leaning news outlets began downplaying the seriousness of the situation.
USA Today and The Washington Post, for example, both reported that Trump was escorted off stage after hearing “loud noises” at the rally, as if it was something innocuous like balloons popping.
CNN published a headline claiming that Trump had to be rushed off stage after a “fall” as if to imply that he had tripped over.
Another CNN headline claimed that Trump’s speech was “interrupted by secret service” instead of describing it as an assassination attempt.
CNN even criticised Trump for his display of defiance on stage, attacking him for not urging calm.
“That’s not the message that we want to be sending right now,” remarked one CNN commentator.
In my own country, Australia’s free-to-air broadcaster Channel 10 was slammed for taking more than an hour to cover the attempted assassination.
Instead of immediately cutting their regular programming to cover the unfolding attack, Channel 10 continued to air cooking shows.
People jumped on social media to get the latest information, and express their frustration with how politicised and biased mainstream media had become.
One X user mocked CNN’s coverage. “‘Loud noises’ made Trump ‘fall’ which ‘interrupted’ the rally. Thank you mainstream media for never failing to fail.”
Another posted, “Trump gets shot at on live television and this is the headline the mainstream media goes with?! This is what the mainstream media has become – a propaganda machine. They don’t want you to believe what you see with your own eyes.”
A different X user wrote, “Mainstream media is the cancer of society.”
People were glued to X, one of the few social media platforms that provided immediate and transparent access to video, photographic and audio recordings of the attack.
As someone who worked in mainstream media for over a decade, this comes as no surprise as I’ve watched the industry slowly rot.
People are cancelling subscriptions to newspapers and cable providers in droves. Mass layoffs, job cuts and hiring freezes have all precipitated the substantial contraction of small and large media outlets and seen massive declines in ratings and audience engagement.
Last year, media companies slashed over 20,000 jobs in the sector, and the culling of journalists has continued into 2024. In January, the Los Angeles Times axed 20% of its newsroom and laid off its entire Washington DC bureau in an election year.
Many people have watched as journalism – once a frank and fearless pursuit for truth – has become a running commentary of consensus statements and government propaganda.
I think legacy media is slowly dying and the coverage of Trump’s assassination attempt has only emboldened my view.
Now, more than ever, independent journalists (like me) need to be funded because we are not constrained by politics, official narratives or advertising revenue.
Brewing truth: Climate doomsayers’ cooked up coffee crisis
By Vijay Jayaraj | American Thinker | December 7, 2023
Every day, people across the world wake up to news about climate change affecting their lives. With the seeming randomness of a roulette wheel, the doomsday clique of the climate world daily selects a fresh topic to sow seeds of anxiety among the populace.
Popular things easily recognized — even cherished — by people are continually identified as being at risk of being damaged or destroyed by climate change. Coffee, for example, is a commodity experiencing a surge in popularity, and there are no prizes for guessing what climate doomsayers are saying now.
Yes, coffee is now said to be under threat from man-made climate change. CNN, in a recent article, made this statement: “climate change poses a huge threat to the coffee business and to farmers.” Keeping with its customary approach of presenting climate change as a threat to all manner of things, CNN quotes the Inter-American Development Bank as warning that “rising temperatures will reduce the area suitable for growing coffee by up to 50%.”
Is this claim true? If so, plenty of people would be affected, because coffee is selling like hot cakes.
The brew is a staple in nearly 98% of households in Brazil. According to the 2023 National Coffee Data Trends Report, coffee consumption in the U.S. has hit a 20-year peak, with over 50% of consumers gravitating toward specialty coffee.
Even in my home country, India, there is a sudden deluge of boutique coffee shops. Some chains have opened as many as 50 branches within a span of five years, and that is not an easy task in a country of 1.3 billion tea-lovers. India is now the eighth largest producer of coffee beans.
More than 99% of global coffee production comprises the arabica and robusta species, which are just two of over 140 different species in the Coffea genus. Coffea, especially arabica, depends highly on soil fertility and temperature.
The purveyors of climate apocalypse are particularly interested in the temperature aspect, as it provides a legitimate pathway for indulging in climate scaremongering. Despite widespread concern about increasing warmth, satellite temperature data collected from 1979 to 2023 indicate that there has not been a significant rise in temperatures.
Despite widespread concern about increasing warmth, global satellite temperature data collected from 1979 to 2023 indicates that there has only been a modest rise of less than one-degree C in temperature.
Besides, it is widely acknowledged that warming since the Little Ice Age and increased atmospheric CO2 since the Industrial Revolution have boosted agricultural production and the general greening of ecosystems.
Scientists in Brazil have discovered that “carbon dioxide fertilization offsets negative impacts of climate change on arabica coffee yield.” They say that the CO2 fertilization effect will cause a net increase of the average Brazilian arabica coffee harvest by the years 2040–2070.
CO2 enrichment studies in Latin America show that elevated CO2 increased photosynthesis by 40% and increased the efficiency plants’ water use by approximately 60%. Higher CO2 eventually caused a 7–14% increase in plant height and a 12–14% increase in yield. Another study showed that there were significant increases in all leaf area and biomass markers in response to increased CO2.
The research indicates that we might already be reaping the rewards of increased productivity rates in both arabica and robusta coffee varieties thanks to the recent rise in atmospheric CO2. This reality is reflected in the plantations across the globe. Production in South America and Southeast Asia have shown increases in yield during the past two decades.
Brazil and Vietnam are the top two coffee bean producers. Both countries have seen remarkable increases in their yield, with Vietnam’s production climbing from 0.54 tons per acre in 2002 to 1.11 tons per acre in 2021. Meanwhile, Brazil’s yield has also shown significant growth, rising from 0.49 tons per acre in 2002 to 0.87 tons per acre in 2020.
Even if the temperatures were to increase dramatically, experts say that coffee cultivation would be possible in cooler regions at latitudes away from equator or at higher altitudes.
So sit back and drink that morning cup of Joe. Climate is not going to steal your coffee, and thank CO2 for keeping the plantations productive.
Vijay Jayaraj is a research associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a Master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, U.K.
Guardian Pushes Alarmist Claim That Climate Change Threatens Coffee Production as Yields Soar
BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | MARCH 14, 2023
There is no animal or plant in the natural world that cannot be used to promote climate Armageddon and its collectivist Net Zero political solution. On Sunday, the WWF, also known as the World Wildlife Fund, started running a series of Wild Isles co-produced propaganda films narrated by Sir David Attenborough on the BBC. These include finely-crafted messages of improbable extinctions culled from computer models.
From the absurd to the ridiculous, we had National Margarita Day recently hijacked by CNN running a story about the ‘climate crisis’ affecting tequila production – a story easily debunked by the news that since 1995, tequila production had increased six-fold, and in four years it had doubled. Now the increasingly unhinged Guardian is giving us its ‘Net Zero, or else the coffee gets it’ story.
According to the newspaper, new research suggests that climate conditions that reduce coffee yields have become more frequent over the past four decades, with rising temperatures from “global heating” likely to lead to ongoing systemic shocks to coffee production globally.
Note the use of the phrase “climate conditions” for what in effect is weather, and the suggestion that it reduces coffee yields. These climate conditions are said to have become more frequent over the last four decades. But one can only read the Guardian for so long. Let us look at actual coffee yields over the last four decades.
Far from declining due to all this weather, yields have shown dramatic improvement since at least 1960. Over this period, particularly between 1980-98, temperatures have risen, but there is no sign of “ongoing systemic shocks” to coffee production globally.
Global coffee yields have been a great agricultural success story, along with actual bean production. Like yields, tonnes produced have soared in the last 40 years.
The key Guardian get-out phrase of course is “new research suggests”. The Guardian story was taken from an academic study led by Dr. Doug Richardson, published in PLOS Climate. He told the newspaper that a shift from cool and wet to hot and dry conditions “we’re pretty confident is a result of climate change”.
In fact if the Richardson paper is read, a more nuanced view on coffee and weather over the last 40 years is discovered.
Our results suggest that ENSO [El Niño Southern Oscillation] is the primary mode in explaining annual compound event variability, both globally and regionally. El Niño-like sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean are associated with decreased precipitation and increased temperatures in most coffee regions, and with spatially compounding warm and dry events. This relationship is reversed for La Niña-like signatures.
As it happens, the last 40 years saw three very powerful El Niños occurring in 1982, 1998 and 2016. These pushed temperatures up around the planet, a natural weather oscillation that had nothing to do with any human-caused increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The current eight-year pause in the satellite temperature record is partly explained by three recent La Niña events.
The vast majority of the world’s coffee is grown with just two species – Arabica and Robusta. Arabica is more sensitive to growing conditions, and requires temperatures around 18-22°C. In the tropics, these are more common in higher elevations. Robusta is less highly prized, has a wider geographical spread and grows between 22°C and 28°C. Richardson claims that human-caused climate change is “expected” to alter the geographical suitability for growing coffee. The area of land suitable for coffee cultivation “may” be reduced by up to 50%.
This is unlikely. For a start, it assumes temperatures will rise significantly, but with global warming running out of steam over the last two decades, this seems unlikely. This is particularly so in the tropics. Historical records show that during periods of global warming, the tropics warm less and temperatures are more stable. In addition, coffee is a versatile crop, and selective breeding has produced varieties that can adapt to lowland conditions with temperatures outside normal growing ranges. If climate should change in any significant way, new coffee farming could switch to more propitious areas.
But where is the fun in explaining all that when Net Zero propagandising is afoot. MIT Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen is fond of noting that the current climate narrative is absurd, but trillions of dollars paid to many, including “grant-dependent” academics, says it is not absurd. This money pays for a constant drip, drip, nudge, nudge wave of climate scaremongering eagerly promoted by controlling elites seeking to take away personal and economic freedoms under cover of saving the planet.
Investigation: At least 54 high-profile media personalities are connected to Soros-funded organizations
RT | January 20, 2023
Billionaire George Soros has links to dozens of prominent media figures in the US and beyond via organizations he funded, a conservative US watchdog claims.
In the last report of a three-part investigation, published on Tuesday, MRC Business examined the ties of the Budapest-born liberal mogul, coming to the conclusion that he “cemented himself as one of the most powerful influencers in global politics through his incredible influence in the media.”
MRC Business said that it had uncovered at least “54 major figures in journalism and activist media who are connected to Soros-funded organizations.” The list includes CNN’s chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour, NBC News anchor Lester Holt, and Cesar Conde, the NBCUniversal News Group chairman, who oversees the outlets NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC.
Many of the 54 individuals play prominent roles in institutions funded by Soros. For instance, Amanpour is a senior adviser at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which received $2.75 million from the mogul between 2018 and 2020, while Holt is listed as a board member in the same organization. Conde is a trustee at the Aspen Institute, which received over $1 million from the billionaire between 2016 and 2020.
According to MRC, in total Soros has funneled over $32 billion into his organizations in a bid “to spread his radical ‘open society’ agenda on abortion, Marxist economics, anti-Americanism, defunding the police, environmental extremism and LGBT fanaticism.” These efforts have paid off, allowing him to “help indoctrinate millions with his views on a day-to-day basis”, the group claims.
MRC has previously claimed that Soros has financial ties to at least 253 media organizations globally, funding them through his non-profit groups and enabling him to reach viewers and listeners in virtually every corner of the world.
Commenting on the report, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova noted on Thursday that such revelations could be compared to a “nuclear bombshell.” Should it be proven that the leading US media outlets “received money for adjusting their coverage, all US democracy could be wrapped up in their Constitution and thrown out into the garbage heap of history,” she said.
Western media’s anti-Iran reporting waives journalistic integrity to manufacture hate
By Robert Inlakesh | RT | January 5, 2023
Since the eruption of civil unrest in the Islamic Republic back in September, Western media has not shied away from spreading uncorroborated or outright false stories about Iran’s government. The implications of the constant stream of disinformation is the justification of sanctions that kill Iranians.
Following the death in Iranian custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, back in mid-September, civil unrest in Iran spread far and wide, with protests sparked over foreign media reports that had indicated that the young woman was beaten to death by Iran’s morality police. Later, CCTV footage was released, which contradicted some reports on how the young woman had died, followed by a coroner report which indicated her death came due to cerebral hypoxia as a result of underlying issues. Despite this, the demonstrations that started on September 16 continued.
What started initially as a number of demonstrations, primarily in Kurdish-predominant areas of Iran, turned into a nationwide dis-united movement that took the form of violent riots, online social media campaigns, symbolic hijab burning protests and even deadly terrorist attacks against sites of worship. As Iran accused the United States and Israel of attempting to spark a Syria-style civil war, US President Joe Biden vowed to “free Iran” during a speech in California. Amongst the chaos and the media reporting that aimed to portray the Iranian government as a distinct kind of evil, the Biden administration began to tighten its ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions campaign. The current US sanctions campaign, first enacted under the former Trump administration, has been condemned by the International Court of Justice due to its impact on humanitarian goods, such as medicine, entering Iran.
Outright lies, anonymous sources and distortions
Perhaps the most prominent piece of disinformation that has been disseminated about Iran during the past few months was the assertion, by Newsweek, that 15,000 Iranian demonstrators were sentenced to death. According to the initial claims, the Iranian parliament had supposedly voted to approve this move, implying that the country’s judiciary took no part in such a massive decision. The story was spread by leading online personas and even Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau, who later deleted his post on Twitter about the matter.
However, since then the outlandish claims have not stopped coming. Prior to the Iranian national team’s game against the US in the FIFA World Cup, CNN released a report that no other major news outlet, save for a few tabloid news sites in the UK, touched. CNN quoted an unnamed “security source” that according to the report had managed to find out that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had infiltrated Qatar in order to threaten the Iranian team’s players.
The CNN story states that the source somehow found out that the players were offered luxury gifts, such as vehicles, prior to the beginning of the World Cup, which would imply that the source had intel on the Iranian team when they were in Tehran before the tournament. The report goes on to say that IRGC officials threatened the Iranian players’ families with torture in the event that they may protest their government during the World Cup. CNN’s source also claims that the coach of the Iranian team, a Portuguese national, was also interviewed by the IRGC, although they weren’t able to hear what was discussed like they did with the players.
The same article makes the additional claim that the Iranian government was flying out pro-government supporters to watch the team play, in essence creating artificial fans. None of the claims have been corroborated, and it didn’t gain purchase with major news outlets, which is strange considering the severity of the allegations being made that the IRGC, an official branch of Iran’s armed forces, had violated Qatar’s sovereignty in order to threaten their own football team. The difference between the CNN and Newsweek piece is that with the “security source”, there is no way to determine with certainty whether the whole thing is made up or not.
In the advent of news that Iran had abolished its morality police unit, responsible for the arrest of Mahsa Amini, another false story emerged from a number of little-known crypto-currency outlets online, claiming that Iran was set to freeze the bank account of women who weren’t wearing the appropriate Islamic covering. The origins of the story came from an interview that was conducted with an ultra-conservative member of Iran’s parliament, Hossein Jalali, who allegedly proposed a three-warning system via SMS, with the end penalty being the freezing of bank accounts. This has never come close to being implemented or even been discussed in parliament. Despite this, tweets claiming that Iran was implementing this strategy went viral.
Posts on social media from influencers have claimed that the Iranian security forces “are raping children”, and that young women are being murdered for showing their hair in a “horrific” and “medieval” crackdown. These reactions naturally come as a result of the factual inaccuracies of the reporting about Iran and we continue to see more and more as the weeks go on.
The most recent misrepresentation of the facts has come in the coverage and reaction to a number of executions in Iran. Earlier this month, the second death sentence connected to the recent civil unrest was carried out. This led to headlines from the likes of the Associated Press (AP), that read ‘Iran execution: Man publicly hanged from crane amid protests‘, which is how we saw the sentencing of Majidreza Rahnavard to death, by the Iranian judiciary, framed throughout Western media. The AP piece opens with the following paragraph:
“Iran executed a second prisoner on Monday convicted over crimes committed during the nationwide protests challenging the country’s theocracy, publicly hanging him from a construction crane as a gruesome warning to others.”
Whilst the AP article did explain, further down in the piece, that the young Iranian man had stabbed to death two Iranian security officials, injuring 4 others, what is written works to present Tehran as a monstrous regime that is unjustly killing Iranian protesters as a warning to others. The reality is, Iran does have a death sentence and does carry it out, but since some States in the US do the same, the story has to be twisted so that Iran is singled out as a special kind of evil. Iran’s death sentence is handed out through a judicial process, during which Majidreza Rahnavard admitted to killing two security officials. The incident was even filmed. No country on earth would allow such a crime to go unpunished.
In total, roughly 400 Iranians have allegedly been sentenced to prison terms for their involvement in various criminal activities during the latest round of civil unrest. Two Iranians have been executed, after admitting to carrying out attacks against the nation’s security forces.
Whilst there are others who may receive the death penalty, the Western media took it upon themselves to whip up a frenzy about an execution that was not even ruled. Earlier this month, several outlets ran headlines with allegations that an Iranian football player from Isfahan was next in line for execution. Reports claimed that a small-time football player, Nasr Azadani, had been sentenced to death and despite the Iranian judiciary denying this, the claims took hold on social media. 26-year-old Nasr Azadani was arrested in connection with the murder of several members of Iran’s security services. It has been reported that an indictment carrying the charge of “accessory to moharebeh” had been communicated with Azadani. The charge of “moharebeh” (“war against God” in Islamic law) can carry with it a death sentence, however, it is not clear whether being an accessory would be ruled this way.
The problem here is that Western media outlets jump on unsubstantiated claims, and repeat half truths, in an attempt to extract a predetermined anti-Iran narrative. From trusted outlets like the AP, to CNN, all the way to the tabloids, there is little care for fact checking and journalistic integrity. The goal is to delegitimize the Iranian government, to encourage outrage. Factual information is only important for nit-picking in a way that supports this biased narrative. At the same time, it is somewhat ironic that none of these media outlets, or Western politicians that repeat their claims and feign concern over Iranian prisoners, care one bit for journalist Julian Assange, who the US is attempting to extradite from the United Kingdom.
The outcomes of this kind of reporting are the encouragement of prejudiced hate against Iranian culture, the justification of sanctions that kill Iranians and the peddling of new-Orientalism talking points, all whilst claiming to be in support of human rights and feminism. There are various ways to make good faith criticisms of the Iranian government, but this is not what we are seeing, this is the Western media machine piling in on a regime change agenda, and everything they say needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’.
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The lies about the 1967 war are still more powerful than the truth
By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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