Joe Biden: I Do Not Want a National Shutdown; I Just Want a National Shutdown.
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | November 20, 2020
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden declared that he would be ready and willing as president to follow the recommendation of scientists to shut down the country in the name of countering coronavirus. Then, on Thursday, Biden insisted he would not, as president, impose a national shutdown.
But, it turns out Biden, in his Thursday comments, was just playing a word game. He defined “shutdown” such that it describes something no government has undertaken in the name of countering coronavirus and something very different from what most people understand the term “shutdown” to mean in this context. Then Biden proceeded to describe the actions he wants to take that fall right in line with shutdowns governments have imposed and with what people generally understand as a coronavirus-related shutdown.
On Thursday, when a reporter had just begun asking a question by restating Biden’s earlier declaration about shutting down the country, Biden interrupted, insisting that his previous declaration was just a hypothetical. He then stated:
I am not gonna shut down the economy, period. I am gonna shut down the virus. That’s what I’m gonna shut down. I’ll say it again: No national shutdown; no national shutdown.
That sounds like a rather emphatic 360 reversal from Biden, except that talk of “gonna shut down the virus” instead of shutting down the economy sounds like the use of a euphemism to paper over an actual national shutdown. Think of it like America’s “war on drugs.” The war is really on people who are surveilled, searched, arrested, imprisoned, and otherwise acted upon harshly by government. Yet, politicians can claim the war is on drugs, not people.
Biden then proceeded, in his comments interrupting the reporter’s question, to discuss his plan for a national shutdown, all the while stating that it would not be a national shutdown:
[E]very region, every area, every community can be different and so there’s no circumstance which I can see that would require total national shutdown. I think that would be counterproductive. But, there are constraints in which the degree to which businesses can be open. For example, it’s one thing to say that you can have, in a state where the infection rate is not as high, you can have a gymnasium open. It’s another thing to say it can only be open four hours a day with X number of people. The church I go to — my Catholic church — they don’t allow more than 40 percent of the people to come into the church. Those are rational decisions. It’s not shutting down everything. It’s calibrating based on what the threat is.
Biden declares he opposes a “total” shutdown where the government shuts down “everything.” The fact is that no local, state, or national government in the world has imposed such a shutdown. While shutdowns in America and across the world have imposed major restraints on economic activities and people’s freedom of movement, they have never shut down everything. For example, people have not been required to starve to death in their homes. Grocery stores have remained open. Also remaining open, in many cases, were restaurants for drive through, take out, and delivery. In shutdowns, restrictions were placed on these and other businesses deemed “essential” by government, but they were not shut down. Similarly, shutdowns across the world have imposed extreme mandates on what people do and where people may go, but such restrictions have never been “total.”
Shutdowns in the name of countering coronavirus have been largely defined by governments taking it upon themselves to determine what businesses can be open and to dictate how businesses allowed to remain open can operate. Shutdowns also tend to come with various other government rules including prohibiting the assembling of more than a certain number of people, mandating mask wearing, and imposing limitations on people’s activities outside of home.
Biden on Thursday just said he does not intend to impose a “straw man” national shutdown — a type of action nobody is talking about and that has not been imposed by any governments — and then proceeded to describe how he desires to implement exactly what in common parlance would be called a national shutdown. When Biden says he or the United States government should decide, based on looking at coronavirus information, whether any particular gym in America may be open and, if it is decided the gym is allowed to be open, how many hours a day the gym is allowed to operate and how many people are allowed to be in it, he is saying he supports a national shutdown.
In shutdowns, some stores are closed entirely. Others have mandates placed on them, such as occupancy and hours limits. These are exactly the kind of restraints on businesses that Biden says he wants to impose while claiming he opposes a national shutdown. To us Biden’s language, though he denies it, Biden is in fact supporting a national shutdown, “period.”
Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute.
UK terrorism chief calls for ‘national debate’ on criminalizing doubts about Covid-19 vaccine
RT | November 19, 2020
The UK’s top counter-terrorism cop has suggested society stop allowing people to question the wisdom of a rapid Covid-19 vaccine rollout, regarding such skepticism to be life-threatening “misinformation.”
Met Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu has pointedly questioned whether it is “the correct thing for society to allow” the sharing of “misinformation that could cost people’s lives” — demonizing all doubts about quickly developed Covid-19 vaccines whose potential long-term effects are not yet known and tying them to extremist radicalization efforts.
While he didn’t go so far as to call for a law to be passed banning such content, his suggestion of a “national debate” will presumably light a fire under ministers already mulling such legislation.
Basu also expressed worries about a “sharp increase in extremist material online in the last few years” during Wednesday’s press conference, warning of a “new and worrying trend in the UK” of young people being radicalized. Officials told UK media that Islamic extremists and far-right groups were using “false claims about coronavirus” to radicalize their followers.
Social media users already wary of the rush to roll out the vaccine were disturbed by the attendant rush to criminalize criticism of it.
Some said that there were completely legitimate reasons to criticize the jab.
Im not anti vaccine. Im anti THiS vaccine. Experimental rushed and flawed, sold to us by the self same devious creeps and liars who stand to share trillions #WiSEUP
— Ian Brown (@ianbrown) November 18, 2020
Even some in favor of taking the jab thought the decision to do so should be a “personal choice” rather than a mandate.
I will take the vaccine but believe it’s a personal choice and debate important.The establishment have other ideas:Met Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu said that there should be a discussion about whether it is “the correct thing for society to allow” https://t.co/TIv9RYeBvi
— Darren Selkus Ex PPC Epping Forest (@DarrenSelkus) November 19, 2020
Whatever happened to, ” my body, my choice”?
— alfred setian (@spats402) November 19, 2020
And others argued Basu’s suggestion should horrify anyone who believed in free speech, “no matter what [their] beliefs.”
I mean… literally the thought police. ! I don’t care if you want to marry vaccines…no matter what your beliefs this type of censorship should make your blood run cold! Without free thought, there is no freedom. Be careful what you support! https://t.co/zfhv37v9q4
— Emma Kenny (@emmakennytv) November 18, 2020
“Am I alone in finding this more worrying than the virus itself?” one user asked.
The counter-terrorism chief’s concerns have added to the growing chorus of government entities calling for the blanket censorship – or even criminalization – of vaccine scepticism. The Labour Party earlier this week demanded the government adopt emergency legislation to impose civil and criminal penalties on social media platforms that don’t immediately remove posts that question the safety of the jab and other “false” materials.
Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth demanded government “deal with some of the dangerous nonsense, nonsensical anti-vax stuff that we’ve seen spreading on social media, which erodes trust in the vaccine” even though no vaccine has yet passed review by UK health authorities and speculation from either “side” of the debate is fully hypothetical.
Meanwhile, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has refused to rule out making vaccination mandatory, and ministers are reportedly considering issuing QR codes to people who receive the jab that will allow them to attend sports, theatre, and other events.
Will Biden Listen to the Science?
By Ron Paul | November 16, 2020
Former Vice President Joe Biden has not been officially declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, but that has not stopped him from forming a coronavirus task force. The task force is composed of supporters of increased government control.
One idea Biden and his task force are considering is a four to six weeks nationwide lockdown. However, supporting a nationwide lockdown would violate Biden’s campaign pledge to “listen to the science.” The evidence regarding lockdowns is so overwhelming that even the World Health Organization (WHO) has been forced to admit the truth: lockdowns do more harm than good.
Lockdowns result in more instances of depression, suicide, domestic violence, and alcohol and drug abuse. Lockdowns also cause people to not go to hospitals or doctors’ offices, leading to people dying because they failed to obtain medical assistance in a timely manner.
Biden also is working with governors, mayors, and other state and local officials to create a de facto national mask mandate. Biden has also declared he will mandate mask wearing in all federal buildings and for people traveling interstate. A mask mandate for interstate travel could mean you will be required to wear a mask on airplanes, trains, and even when driving in your own car if you cross state lines.
Yet again, Biden is ignoring the science. In this case the science has demonstrated that most masks are ineffective at preventing the spread of a virus. Medical science also shows that wearing a mask for extended periods of time can cause health problems. For example, mask wearing interferes with proper breathing. Long-term mask wearing may also cause serious dental problems. Ironically, major victims of mask mandates include low-wage workers Biden and his fellow progressives claim to care so much about. Many of these workers are required to wear masks on the job.
Biden has also proposed raising an army of “culturally competent” contact tracers. According to the University of California, San Francisco, which is helping train that California’s contact tracers, contract tracers “….ask questions related to topics that can be sensitive, including health, work, living arrangements and food resources” in order to identify someone who should be quarantined. These contract tracers could also be able to enforce masks or other mandates — including a potential vaccine mandate — by helping ensure that those who refuse to comply are indefinitely quarantined.
Biden is not the only politician pushing authoritarian “solutions” to coronavirus. The government of Washington, DC is considering authorizing vaccinating of children without parental consent. This ignores the science that some people will have a negative reaction even to a generally safe vaccine, so individuals should make their own decision in consultation with their physician. This is especially important these days, as we are dealing with a vaccine that is being rushed into production for political reasons and that even the manufactures admit will have serious side effects.
Lockdowns, masks, and other authoritarian measures do little or nothing to promote health. Instead, they erode freedom and create their own health problems. Those who know the truth must make Joe Biden and other authoritarians listen to the true science. While those more at risk — such as the elderly and people with certain health problems — could be encouraged to take extra precautions, all Americans should be given back the liberty to make their own healthcare decisions.
Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute.
‘Bidenism’ domestically: no free press, no lawyer, one-party state?
By Ramin Mazaheri | Press TV | November 15, 2020
For months the United States’ corporate-dominated media has terrified everyone with promises of right-wing militias taking to the streets, but here’s the thing: the pressures currently being put on 70 million Trump supporters is exponentially raising the possibility of that actually occurring, not reducing it.
It is ghastly illuminating to see just how quickly – and with such disregard for modern human rights – both the elite and the highly partisan citizens of the United States are attacking those who refuse to fall at the feet of Joe Biden, and even before all the votes are counted in a very narrow and highly-disputed election.
It is not an exaggeration, as I will list them below, but the tactics being used to push Biden into office are akin to wartime, yet the US is most emphatically not at war – all this derangement is over merely trying to vote as equals. I am not reporting from 1917 USSR, or 1949 China, or 1959 Cuba, or 1979 Iran – there are no foreign armed forces meddling in a revolution/civil war.
“Bidenism” is most emphatically not a revolutionary force. It is openly and proudly the exact opposite: a return to the “normalcy” embodied in the 2015 status quo. Nor is the US at civil war, but it seems some never-trumpets are actually hell-bent on starting one rather than do what every nation does: rely on a calm judicial review when there is a contested and very narrow vote. There is simply no other way out for the US than to follow normal democratic procedures, even if their electoral process is routinely called the worst among the Western core democracies by Harvard think-tanks.
(The US goes one step too far, as usual – other nations at least wait until the votes are actually mostly counted until a candidate declares victory, unlike Donald Trump and Joe Biden.)
If this does turn out to be the “Biden presidential(-elect) era” the world can easily grasp what a terrible, very Trumpian start it is. Americans, I think, cannot.
It’s just very unclear what Americans in 2020 truly believe in anymore?
We know that many American elite don’t truly believe in free press or free speech:
Part 1 of this article, “CNN’s Jake Tapper: The foreman/overseer keeping all journalists in line” discussed how one of the nation’s top news anchors threatened lesser-privileged journalists with blacklisting if they don’t side with Biden immediately. His intimidation went uncommented upon/tacitly condoned by his top colleagues, when his pathetic careerism amid social instability should cost him at least some of his privileges.
Censorship is one way to prevent dissenting journalism, but informal censorship is another: The US doesn’t need formal government censors when their own journalists enforce such obvious suppression informally.
The goal of censorship is conformity. The US media which is corporate dominated – from the (fake) left New York Times to right-wing Fox News – is producing coverage which seemingly exclusively conforms to the false idea that it’s good journalism to exclude the massive number of Americans who feel the vote was not “fair and free”.
Since this troubled election began that number includes a stunning 70% of Republicans, per recent polls, but also independents and leftists. Since the election I interviewed both the Party for Socialism & Liberation and the Socialist Alternative Party (you have never heard of them because of the duopoly which strangles American elections) and both of them said the same thing: this is a terribly antiquated system in America, but in any democracy you count all the votes and litigate any contentious problems.
We know that many Americans don’t believe in the right to an attorney:
The anti-Trump and totally mainstream PAC/think tank The Republican Project has been lauded from the (fake) left to the far-right Washington Post for successfully harassing Trump’s Pennsylvania election lawyers into abandoning their client. The tactics used were not rhetorical and moral but mere intimidation, harassment and doxxing (releasing private information about people into public).
Trump is appalling, but does he not even deserve a lawyer?
Do people who associate with Trump, such as his lawyers, deserve such treatment? How far does this go – that’s the question those engaged in a witch-hunt are too fanatical to ask themselves.
Trump’s legal grievance is obviously supported by too large a democratic minority to ignore without causing lasting damage to the integrity of the American system.
By denying the right to an attorney these rabid anti-Trumpers do not technically betray the letter of their 1776 Revolution, that anti-imperialist event, but they certainly do seem to betray the spirit. It seems to violate the spirit if not the letter of the 6th amendment (ratified in 1791), which guarantees a lawyer in all criminal prosecutions, as well as the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th amendment (ratified in 1868).
Congratulations to rabid anti-Trumpers for being so very progressive that they have made it to just past the slavery era?
1868 is a good place mark for the mentality of US Democrats, who remain obsessed with race and totally untouched by any of the anti-imperialist and class-based analyses which began to prevail worldwide since 1917.
We know that some American lawmakers don’t believe in open elections:
Earlier this month I reported on the blacklist of Iranian media by the Bernie Sanders-affiliated Democratic Socialists of America, so we shouldn’t have expected much from this fake-leftist faction openly committed to working within the Democratic Party.
But many Americans were shocked that DSA’s most powerful member, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, actually doubled down when a tweet of hers suggested that lists should be compiled of pro-Trumpers who have committed no crime other than supporting not her party.
When top elected officials vaguely threaten citizens with “the idea of being responsible for their behavior over last four years” and their behaviour is just working for a democratically-elected candidate, what else is this but massively undemocratic intimidation? That would make free elections in the future impossible.
AOC is seemingly advocating for a one-party state, without knowing it, perhaps, but incompetence is no excuse. It’s certainly another sign of the widespread hysteria of rabid anti-Trumpers.
Directly after AOC’s call sprang up the “Trump Accountability Project”, headed by former Democratic National Committee press secretary Hari Sevugan, which is seemingly looking to blacklist all those that worked for the (possibly) outgoing administration. Would Mr. Sevugan approve of a “Biden Accountability Project” in 2024 for Biden’s staff? Or is that a superfluous question because Democrats are preordained to rule in an unbroken, 1,000-year dynasty?
Why would anybody of merit want to go into public service anymore if they are just going to get blacklisted for doing so?
All the above: This is all wartime-era stuff.
And Chicago, where I am currently based, has been boarded up like it was wartime since the election. (And in August/September. And in May/June.)
It’s as if America can’t help but inexorably draw itself to conflict, because this is all totally self-imposed. This is not the 1960s – there is no peace movement here anymore.
America is acting like what it is: half-full of rabid imperialists
Of course, “neo-imperialism” means colonising your own nation for an international 1%, as the European Union – that supremely US-guided project; that project which is more American than even America – proves.
Of course America is in a state of xenophobia (hostility or fear towards different cultures or strangers) and witch-hunting: this is exactly what the Democratic Party has normalised via their failed Russophobia campaign since 2016.
Did they think they could just turn that off?
Many current Biden supporters failed to stand up against this phony campaign designed to deflect from the Democrats 2016 election failures (2020 saw an even bigger “Blue Wave” failure, but isn’t this anti-Trump supporter hysteria deflecting attention from that for now?), and the most vociferous of them are now aiming their pitchforks at the people who dared to vote differently. The problem is that there are so very many of such persons.
We should add that for four years on US social media this hate mongering has to be multiplied by millions, maybe even billions of time-wasting, venomous posts and spiteful “likes” about veritable political nonsense. It’s practically a justification for state-sponsored censorship, because what kind of society can be healthy towards their neighbors, much less foreigners, when there have these been daily witch-hunts in the phony online world?!
So these lists can go on and on, but our tolerance of such intimidation should not.
(And, yes, before Russophobia there was Islamophobia, and before that it was socialism-phobia, Blackphobia, Indianphobia, etc.)
What’s going on in America is that the most Trump-hating Democrats are acting exactly like what they are: not fascists, as is so often alleged of the other side in Western discourse, but imperialists, which is so rarely discussed in Western discourse.
Like Jake Tapper, they are not just careerists who aspire to outdo everyone in extremism in order to rule from atop the pyramid, they also want to believe they also have the moral high ground despite that. It is arrogance combined with a lust for power and a hysterical, unreasoning rage which comes from we know not where?
Half of the US is so hysterical about being doubted that they can’t recognise themselves in the mirror, but many of those they have colonised, blockaded, sanctioned, brutalised and impoverished sure can.
It’s absolutely appalling and the solution is not simply, “Say that Biden is the president.”
Any nation which has a culture willing to go to such lengths to get others to accept their view – rather than relying on reasoned, secure reflection and some sort of litigation or vetting process – is deeply messed up.
But, as the US proved with their murderous meddling in Iran’s 2009 election: many in the US don’t just not care about anyone’s else’s rules, judges or systems of conflict resolution – the 2020 election proves that many Americans don’t even care about their own.
They are the law-giver and the life-taker and the president-maker, because they say so. Better side with “they”, or else.
UK undercover cops foiled ISM activists using deceit & abuse… were there shady deals with Mossad?
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | November 13, 2020
Evidence presented to an ongoing inquiry into UK police operations that infiltrated ‘extremist’ activist groups fuels questions over whether the intelligence they garnered was passed on to Israel.
Founded in 2001, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a pro-Palestinian political campaign group, dedicated to the use of nonviolent protest.
ISM has chapters around the world, which regularly train and dispatch volunteers to Palestine, to assist locals with activities such as protests, chaperoning and olive-picking. Despite the movement’s peaceful nature, two volunteers – Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall – died after coming into contact with occupation forces, both in 2003. Corrie was crushed by a bulldozer, Hurndall shot in the head by an Israeli military sniper.
In December 2018, the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI), which investigates numerous controversies surrounding the British state’s use of clandestine operatives, revealed ISM’s London branch was infiltrated by Special Branch spy ‘Rob Harrison’ (a pseudonym).
He penetrated the group 2004-2006, and was concurrently involved in a number of left-wing and anarchist movements in the UK capital, his activities even taking him overseas, and resulting in his arrest by uniformed officers under his cover name.
The DJ detective
Harrison’s undercover identity was extensive and colourful, a key strand of his ‘legend’ being his moonlighting as a professional DJ, under the moniker ‘Boogie Knight’. He also posted on the popular left-wing online forum urban75 as ‘Boogie Boy’, typically on the subject of music, but occasionally about politics.
On the forum, he was involved in a regular music sharing scheme whereby members would create CD compilations and send them to other users. Through this scheme he would have learned posters’ identities and addresses.
In any event, as a consequence of this background, he frequently performed DJ sets at ISM London fundraising events, and also parties convened by activists and their friends.
His generally affable, sociable nature, and readiness to buy others drinks down the pub, also meant he was frequently invited into private homes for gatherings and social events large and small. Many were disarmed by his ready admissions of being politically under-educated relative to those around him, and this avowed lack of assurance led them to open up in confidence to Harrison.
Three of the London ISM activists he spied on – Asa Winstanley, Atif Chodhury, and the pseudonymous ‘MCD’ – are all core participants in the ongoing UCPI. Two years after Harrison’s unmasking, Asa still finds the subject difficult to talk about.
“It’s the worst feeling in the world,” he recalls. “A person you trusted, you spent time with, a friend, was actually the complete opposite of everything you thought they were. He joined ISM London before I did and some people now say they were wary of him, but to my mind he was the absolute last guy you’d suspect of being an infiltrator. He was quiet but friendly, helpful and enthusiastic, always willing to go the extra mile.”
Still, despite Asa’s contemporary confidence, reviewing old emails sent by the undercover cop to members of the group, he now sees clearly that Harrison was trying to sabotage the group, subtly stirring up internal trouble. His email address also remained on ISM London’s internal mailing lists until 2013, meaning police could have retained covert access to the group’s private discussions years after his deployment ended.
Asa also says Harrison was largely a silent, passive presence at meetings, although he was highly proactive when it came to mailing the group’s merchandise, offering to drive activists to the airport when they left for Palestine, and other hands-on assistance.
Such activities would have provided him with extensive intelligence on ISM London activists and supporters, their names, addresses and more – information particularly valued by the authorities, as, due to security concerns, ISM members rarely revealed their surnames, or when they were planning to leave.
Passing on secrets to Mossad?
There are indications that the information Harrison collected on ISM may have been passed by British security services to the Israeli government. By 2008, Tel Aviv had managed to obtain such good intelligence on Palestinian solidarity activists that many who attempted to visit Palestine from the UK were quickly deported after arrival or blocked from entering altogether. As ISM London’s primary raison d’etre was to get people into the occupied territories, its value and impact was significantly curtailed.
In 2005, four ISM London activists visited Palestine – one was let in, the others weren’t. Subsequently, the volunteer who gained entry was told by an Israeli human rights lawyer, Gaby Lasky, that the authorities had “international security” records on at least one of the three denied entry.
Whatever the truth of the matter, after the UCPI released Harrison’s cover name, researchers set about tracking down members of the groups he infiltrated. While several echoed Asa’s characterisation, others recalled him behaving in a predatory, creepy manner around female activists, being excessively flirtatious and suggestive to an extent that made them feel extremely uncomfortable.
Such behaviour, which extended to accusations that he groped someone at a party, exacerbated distrust of Harrison in certain circles. Still, the only documented instance of widespread suspicion that he was an undercover officer occurred while he was infiltrating State of Emergency Collective, a direct action group which sought to push anti-war protests beyond mere demonstrations.
Harrison, among other things, helped transport its members to numerous actions by car, including the paint-bombing of election offices. One group scheduled to take part in the attack was eventually unable to attend, and he was said to have gotten very angry at their failure to take part, causing friction between members.
General misgivings about this and other disruptive tendencies on the part of Harrison led to numerous people abandoning the group, and in August 2007, he was asked to leave. Its membership eviscerated, State of Emergency Collective disbanded not long after – it’s an open question whether the movement would have endured were it not for his presence.
Deception & abuse
Like many other undercover officers, Harrison deceived a woman into a long-term romantic relationship during his deployment – somewhat uniquely though, she wasn’t an activist.
His courtship with ‘Maya’ (a pseudonym), nonetheless furthered his covert objectives, as she was the friend and neighbour of Atif Chodhury. This gave him legitimate reason to frequently be in the same area as Atif, and to become close friends with him in the process. Atif divulged much intimate personal information to the police spy. It’s the first example to emerge from the UCPI so far of an operative deceiving a non-activist into a relationship in order to surveil a target.
In a statement to the UCPI on November 9, Phillippa Kaufmann QC laid out in shocking detail the exploitation, manipulation and abuse Maya was subjected to by Harrison, not merely over the course of their relationship, but for many years afterwards.
The pair met through the sprawling social scene surrounding ISM London, with Harrison frequently visiting a housing cooperative where she lived with other activists. Their relationship began in May 2006, following an encounter at a fundraising event at which he was DJing.
Maya was initially reluctant for their connection to progress further, but Harrison subjected her to intense pressure, responding angrily to her not wanting to rush into things.
Harrison’s harassment was only just beginning, however. Kaufmann stated that throughout the relationship, he subjected Maya to significant emotional abuse and coercion, engaging in highly controlling behaviour, some of which was clearly calculated to cause Maya to suffer feelings of guilt and low self-esteem.
He regularly accused her of infidelity or promiscuity, bombarding her with texts accusing her of sleeping with other men, and becoming aggressively furious whenever she spent time with other men. Such was Harrison’s bullying, Maya began self-harming, which he was well-aware of, and isolating herself from male friends. Today, she believes his controlling conduct was a means of coercing her into proving her commitment to him.
Harrison would never take her on dates, and rarely see her anywhere other than her flat. Moreover, despite his obsessive, paranoid nature, he would frequently disappear for long periods, not responding to messages or answering his phone, occasionally blocking her number.
Self-harm & suicidal thoughts
He ended the relationship abruptly around Easter 2007, claiming his mother was dying of cancer, and disappeared without trace. Devastated by Harrison’s abrupt departure, Kaufmann said Maya began using hard drugs as a way of coping with the loss, and to suppress memories of his abuse. Eventually, she had to travel abroad and stay with family to recover from the shock of the break up, and to kick her drug habit.
Upon returning to the UK, the trauma Harrison inflicted continued to impact her psychologically and emotionally. A Master’s degree that she began in 2006 would take five years to complete – throughout, he continued to intermittently send Maya emails and text messages, and leaving comments on her blog, only ceasing contact in 2011.
Out of the blue, he got in touch with her again in August 2014, asking to meet, which they did. They communicated online regularly thereafter and met several times over the next few months, Harrison frequently speaking about the future, expressing a desire to resume their relationship and one day marry, even discussing what names to give their children.
As a result of his reappearance, Maya broke up with her partner of five years, whom she was living with at the time, and in February 2015, she and Harrison slept together for the first time since their separation almost eight years earlier.
“They had unprotected sex and Maya had to take emergency contraception the following day. The same day Rob disappeared and with the exception of one email he sent to her in 2016, he has never contacted Maya since,” Kaufmann revealed.
Maya learned Harrison was an undercover officer only in March 2019, when a friend informed her. She has struggled to come to terms with how such an important part of her life was based on lies and exploitation, and how such an important person in her life didn’t actually exist. Her mental health deteriorated sharply; she experienced suicidal feelings, and began self-harming again.
In common with all other undercover officers being probed by the UCPI, Harrison initially applied for blanket anonymity, meaning not even his victims could learn his real name. Inquiry chair John Mitting was initially “minded to” accept it, however, upon Maya gaining core participant status in June 2019, the former High Court judge reversed his decision.
Harrison, via his solicitors, acquiesced to her being provided his real name, but only on the understanding that she and her lawyers weren’t permitted to release it publicly. The request was robustly denied, with Mitting stating Maya was “entitled to make such use as she thinks right of personal information which she is entitled to know.”
It was a rare example of the chair appearing to favour the needs of undercover officers’ victims over the officers themselves. Overwhelmingly, real names haven’t been released, despite legitimate and clear grounds for doing so, and in some cases not even cover names have been disclosed.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow Kit on Twitter @KitKlarenberg
Less Than Half Of Americans Likely To Comply With New COVID Lockdown: Gallup
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 11/12/2020
Earlier we featured the worrisome prospect of a second national coronavirus lockdown under a future Biden administration, considering the latest scientist to join Joe Biden’s “special coronavirus transition advisory team” is calling for just that.
Dr. Michael Osterholm, who serves as director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, now one of Biden’s coronavirus task force doctors told Yahoo News the following on Wednesday: “We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the lost wages for individual workers… if we did that, then we could lockdown for 4 to 6 weeks.”
But we know that’s unlikely to go well based on the latest polling data, as it appears the majority of Americans would not conform to such new stay-at-home orders and travel restrictions:
Americans are less likely to comply with another coronavirus lockdown than they were in the spring, with fewer than half saying in a new poll that they’re very likely to stay home this time around, according to a new Gallup Poll released as record numbers of cases skyrocket nationwide.
Here’s the data, according to Gallup, based on the poll taken between Oct.19 and Nov.1:
- 49% say they’re “very likely” to stay home for a month if mandated, down from 67% who said they would in the spring.
- 18% said they were “somewhat likely” to comply.
- One-third said they would be “unlikely” to comply with new lockdown orders.
- This despite 61% saying they believe the situation is getting worse.
- The number of respondents who said they’d be unlikely to comply is double the rate seen from polls in the spring.
However, it appears more Americans are intentional about social distancing measures, including wearing masks, compared to in the spring.
As Newsmax summarizes of the numbers: “Meanwhile, the number of people who are wearing masks has gone up sharply.”
The report states “Only about half of Americans reported in April that they were wearing masks, just after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested wearing them. Now, 88% reported they wear masks, after the number went up to 92% in July.”
Israeli occupation forces steal herd of camels in Bethlehem
Palestine Information Center | November 12, 2020
BETHLEHEM – Israeli occupation forces (IOF) on Wednesday confiscated a herd of camels, belonging to Palestinian citizens, from the eastern slopes of Bethlehem province.
Chief of al-Rashayida village Fawwaz al-Rashayida reported that the IOF chased a number of camels in the area and seized nine of them belonging to two local residents called Salama Yunus and Mohamed Mustafa.
Rashayida also said that the IOF held the camels in al-Jiftlik village in Jericho province and justified the confiscation measure by claiming the animals were grazing in an area classified by Israel as a nature reserve.
He added that the IOF also demanded the owners of the camels to pay financial penalties if they wanted to get back their animals.
US – UK Intel Agencies Declare Cyber War on Independent Media
By Whitney Webb |
Unlimited Hangout| November 11, 2020
In just the past week, the national-security states of the United States and United Kingdom have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 “war on terror” are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting “vaccine hesitancy” and information related to Covid-19 that runs counter to their state narratives.
A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the UK’s signal intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which seeks to target websites that publish content deemed to be “propaganda” that raises concerns regarding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccine development and the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations involved.
Similar efforts are underway in the United States, with the US military recently funding a CIA-backed firm—stuffed with former counterterrorism officials who were behind the occupation of Iraq and the rise of the so-called Islamic State—to develop an AI algorithm aimed specifically at new websites promoting “suspected” disinformation related to the Covid-19 crisis and the US military–led Covid-19 vaccination effort known as Operation Warp Speed.
Both countries are preparing to silence independent journalists who raise legitimate concerns over pharmaceutical industry corruption or the extreme secrecy surrounding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccination efforts, now that Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is slated to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by month’s end.
Pfizer’s history of being fined billions for illegal marketing and for bribing government officials to help them cover up an illegal drug trial that killed eleven children (among other crimes) has gone unmentioned by most mass media outlets, which instead have celebrated the apparently imminent approval of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine without questioning the company’s history or that the mRNA technology used in the vaccine has sped through normal safety trial protocols and has never been approved for human use. Also unmentioned is that the head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Patrizia Cavazzoni, is the former Pfizer vice president for product safety who covered up the connection of one of its products to birth defects.
Essentially, the power of the state is being wielded like never before to police online speech and to deplatform news websites to protect the interests of powerful corporations like Pfizer and other scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giants as well as the interests of the US and UK national-security states, which themselves are intimately involved in the Covid-19 vaccination endeavor.
UK Intelligence’s New Cyberwar Targeting “Anti-Vaccine Propaganda”
On Monday, the UK newspaper The Times reported that the UK’s GCHQ “has begun an offensive cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by hostile states” and “is using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State” to do so. In addition, the UK government has ordered the British military’s 77th Brigade, which specializes in “information warfare,” to launch an online campaign to counter “deceptive narratives” about Covid-19 vaccine candidates.
The newly announced GCHQ “cyber war” will not only take down “anti-vaccine propaganda” but will also seek to “disrupt the operations of the cyberactors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.” The effort will also involve GCHQ reaching out to other countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance (US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) to alert their partner agencies in those countries to target such “propaganda” sites hosted within their borders.
The Times stated that “the government regards tackling false information about inoculation as a rising priority as the prospect of a reliable vaccine against the coronavirus draws closer,” suggesting that efforts will continue to ramp up as a vaccine candidate gets closer to approval.
It seems that, from the perspective of the UK national-security state, those who question corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and its possible impact on the leading experimental Covid-19 vaccine candidates (all of which use experimental vaccine technologies that have never before been approved for human use) should be targeted with tools originally designed to combat terrorist propaganda.
While The Times asserted that the effort would target content “that originated only from state adversaries” and would not target the sites of “ordinary citizens,” the newspaper suggested that the effort would rely on the US government for determining whether or not a site is part of a “foreign disinformation” operation.
This is highly troubling given that the US recently seized the domains of many sites, including the American Herald Tribune, which it erroneously labeled as “Iranian propaganda,” despite its editor in chief, Anthony Hall, being based in Canada. The US government made this claim about the American Herald Tribune after the cybersecurity firm FireEye, a US government contractor, stated that it had “moderate confidence” that the site had been “founded in Iran.”
In addition, the fact that GCHQ has alleged that most of the sites it plans to target are “linked to Moscow” gives further cause for concern given that the UK government was caught funding the Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative, which falsely labeled critics of the UK government’s actions as well as its narratives with respect to the Syria conflict as being related to “Russian disinformation” campaigns.
Given this precedent, it is certainly plausible that GCHQ could take the word of either an allied government, a government contractor, or perhaps even an allied media organization such as Bellingcat or the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab that a given site is “foreign propaganda” in order to launch a cyber offensive against it. Such concerns are only amplified when one of the main government sources for The Times article bluntly stated that “GCHQ has been told to take out antivaxers [sic] online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda,” which suggests that the targets of GCHQ’s new cyber war will, in fact, be determined by the content itself rather than their suspected “foreign” origin. The “foreign” aspect instead appears to be a means of evading the prohibition in GCHQ’s operational mandate on targeting the speech or websites of ordinary citizens.
This larger pivot toward treating alleged “anti-vaxxers” as “national security threats” has been ongoing for much of this year, spearheaded in part by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the UK government’s Steering Committee on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force, which is part of the UK government’s Commission for Countering Extremism.
Ahmed told the UK newspaper The Independent in July that “I would go beyond calling anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists to say they are an extremist group that pose a national security risk.” He then stated that “once someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy it’s easy to lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world views that can lead to violent extremism,” thereby implying that “anti-vaxxers” might engage in acts of violent extremism. Among the websites cited by Ahmed’s organization as promoting such “extremism” that poses a “national security risk” were Children’s Health Defense, the National Vaccine Information Center, Informed Consent Action Network, and Mercola.com, among others.
Similarly, a think tank tied to US intelligence—whose GCHQ equivalent, the National Security Agency, will take part in the newly announced “cyber war”—argued in a research paper published just months before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis that “the US ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement would pose a threat to national security in the event of a ‘pandemic with a novel organism.’”
InfraGard, “a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and members of the private sector,” warned in the paper published last June that “the US anti-vaccine movement would also be connected with ‘social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns’ orchestrated by the Russian government,” as cited by The Guardian. The InfraGard paper further claimed that prominent “anti-vaxxers” are aligned “with other conspiracy movements including the far right . . . and social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns by many foreign and domestic actors. Included among these actors is the Internet Research Agency, the Russian government–aligned organization.”
An article published just last month by the Washington Post argued that “vaccine hesitancy is mixing with coronavirus denial and merging with far-right American conspiracy theories, including Qanon,” which the FBI named a potential domestic terror threat last year. The article quoted Peter Hotez, dean of the School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, as saying “The US anti-vaccination movement is globalizing and it’s going toward more-extremist tendencies.”
Simone Warstat attends a rally against a legislative bill to make it more difficult for parents to opt out for non-medical reasons to immunize their children, June 7, 2020, in Denver Colorado.
It is worth pointing out that many so-called “anti-vaxxers” are actually critics of the pharmaceutical industry and are not necessarily opposed to vaccines in and of themselves, making the labels “anti-vaxxer” and “anti-vaccine” misleading. Given that many pharmaceutical giants involved in making Covid-19 vaccines donate heavily to politicians in both countries and have been involved in numerous safety scandals, using state intelligence agencies to wage cyber war against sites that investigate such concerns is not only troubling for the future of journalism but it suggests that the UK is taking a dangerous leap toward becoming a country that uses its state powers to treat the enemies of corporations as enemies of the state.
The CIA-Backed Firm “Weaponizing Truth” with AI
In early October, the US Air Force and US Special Operations Command announced that they had awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to the US-based “machine intelligence” company Primer. Per the press release, “Primer will develop the first-ever machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation [emphasis added]. Primer will also enhance its natural language processing platform to automatically analyze tactical events to provide commanders with unprecedented insight as events unfold in near real-time.”
According to Primer, the company “builds software machines that read and write in English, Russian, and Chinese to automatically unearth trends and patterns across large volumes of data,” and their work “supports the mission of the intelligence community and broader DOD by automating reading and research tasks to enhance the speed and quality of decision-making.” In other words, Primer is developing an algorithm that would allow the national-security state to outsource many military and intelligence analyst positions to AI. In fact, the company openly admits this, stating that their current effort “will automate the work typically done by dozens of analysts in a security operations center to ingest all of the data relevant to an event as it happens and funnel it into a unified user interface.”
Primer’s ultimate goal is to use their AI to entirely automate the shaping of public perceptions and become the arbiter of “truth,” as defined by the state. Primer’s founder, Sean Gourley, who previously created AI programs for the military to track “insurgency” in post-invasion Iraq, asserted in an April blog post that “computational warfare and disinformation campaigns will, in 2020, become a more serious threat than physical war, and we will have to rethink the weapons we deploy to fight them.”
In that same post, Gourley argued for the creation of a “Manhattan Project for truth” that would create a publicly available Wikipedia-style database built off of “knowledge bases [that] already exist inside many countries’ intelligence agencies for national security purposes.” Gourley then wrote that “this effort would be ultimately about building and enhancing our collective intelligence and establishing a baseline for what’s true or not” as established by intelligence agencies. He concludes his blog post by stating that “in 2020, we will begin to weaponize truth.”
Notably, on November 9, the same day that GCHQ announced its plans to target “anti-vaccine propaganda,” the US website NextGov reported that Primer’s Pentagon-funded effort had turned its attention specifically to “Covid-19 related disinformation.” According to Primer’s director of science, John Bohannon, “Primer will be integrating bot detection, synthetic text detection and unstructured textual claims analysis capabilities into our existing artificial intelligence platform currently in use with DOD. . . . This will create the first unified mission-ready platform to effectively counter Covid-19-related disinformation in near-real time.”
Bohannon, who previously worked as a mainstream journalist embedded with NATO forces in Afghanistan, also told NextGov that Primer’s new Covid-19–focused effort “automatically classifies documents into one of 10 categories to enable the detection of the impact of COVID” on areas such as “business, science and technology, employment, the global economy, and elections.” The final product is expected to be delivered to the Pentagon in the second quarter of next year.
Though a so-called private company, Primer is deeply linked to the national-security state it is designed to protect by “weaponizing truth.” Primer proudly promotes itself as having more than 15 percent of its staff hailing from the US intelligence community or military. The director of the company’s National Security Group is Brian Raymond, a former CIA intelligence officer who served as the Director for Iraq on the US National Security Council after leaving the agency.
The company also recently added several prominent national-security officials to its board including:
- Gen. Raymond Thomas (ret.), who led the command of all US and NATO Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan and is the former commander of both US Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
- Lt. Gen. VeraLinn Jamieson (ret.), the former deputy chief of staff for Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance who led the Air Force’s intelligence and cyber forces. She also personally developed “strategic partnerships” between the Air Force and Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and IBM in order “to accelerate the Air Force’s digital transformation.”
- Brett McGurk, one of the “chief architects” of the Iraq War “surge,” alongside the notorious Kagan family, as NSC Director for Iraq, and then as special assistant to the president and senior Director for Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration. Under Obama and during part of the Trump administration, McGurk was the special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS at the State Department, helping to manage the “dirty war” waged by the US, the UK, and other allies against Syria.
In addition to those recent board hires, Primer brought on Sue Gordon, the former principal deputy director of National Intelligence, as a strategic adviser. Gordon previously “drove partnerships within the US Intelligence Community and provided advice to the National Security Council in her role as deputy director of national intelligence” and had a twenty-seven-year career at the CIA. The deep links are unsurprising, given that Primer is financially backed by the CIA’s venture-capital arm In-Q-Tel and the venture-capital arm of billionaire Mike Bloomberg, Bloomberg Beta.
Operation Warp Speed’s Disinformation Blitzkrieg
The rapid increase in interest by the US and UK national-security states toward Covid-19 “disinformation,” particularly as it relates to upcoming Covid-19 vaccination campaigns, is intimately related to the media-engagement strategy of the US government’s Operation Warp Speed.
Officially a “public-private partnership,” Operation Warp Speed, which has the goal of vaccinating 300 million Americans by next January, is dominated by the US military and also involves several US intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as intelligence-linked tech giants Google, Oracle, and Palantir. Several reports published in The Last American Vagabond by this author and journalist Derrick Broze have revealed the extreme secrecy of the operation, its numerous conflicts of interest, and its deep ties to Silicon Valley and Orwellian technocratic initiatives.
Warp Speed’s official guidance discusses at length its phased plan for engaging the public and addressing issues of “vaccine hesitancy.” According to the Warp Speed document entitled “From the Factory to the Frontlines,” “strategic communications and public messaging are critical to ensure maximum acceptance of vaccines, requiring a saturation of messaging across the national media.” It also states that “working with established partners—especially those that are trusted sources for target audiences—is critical to advancing public understanding of, access to, and acceptance of eventual vaccines” and that “identifying the right messages to promote vaccine confidence, countering misinformation, and targeting outreach to vulnerable and at-risk populations will be necessary to achieve high coverage.”
The document also notes that Warp Speed will employ the CDC’s three-pronged strategic framework for its communications effort. The third pillar of that strategy is entitled “Stop Myths” and has as a main focus “establish[ing] partnerships to contain the spread of misinformation” as well as “work[ing] with local partners and trusted messengers to improve confidence in vaccines.”
Though that particular Warp Speed document is short on specifics, the CDC’s Covid-19 Vaccination Program Interim Playbook contains additional information. It states that Operation Warp Speed will “engage and use a wide range of partners, collaborations, and communication and news media channels to achieve communication goals, understanding that channel preferences and credible sources vary among audiences and people at higher risk for severe illness and critical populations, and channels vary in their capacity to achieve different communication objectives.” It states that it will focus its efforts in this regard on “traditional media channels” (print, radio, and TV) as well as “digital media” (internet, social media, and text messaging).
The CDC document further reveals that the “public messaging” campaign to “promote vaccine uptake” and address “vaccine hesitancy” is divided into four phases and adds that the overall communication strategy of Warp Speed “should be timely and applicable for the current phase of the Covid-19 Vaccination program.”
Those phases are:
- Before a vaccine is available
- The vaccine is available in limited supply for certain populations of early focus
- The vaccine is increasingly available for other critical populations and the general public
- The vaccine is widely available
Given that the Covid-19 vaccine candidate produced by Pfizer is expected to be approved by the end of November, it appears that the US national-security state, which is essentially running Operation Warp Speed, along with “trusted messengers” in mass media, is preparing to enter the second phase of its communications strategy, one in which news organizations and journalists who raise legitimate concerns about Warp Speed will be de-platformed to make way for the “required” saturation of pro-vaccine messaging across the English-speaking media landscape.
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From the Archives
The Crusades – colliding narratives
Ashes of Pompeii | June 13, 2026
They say history is written by the victors, but the Crusades offer an interesting historical contrast: a two-century collision that produced not one history, but two parallel, irreconcilable realities. The dates and the battles are identical in both accounts, but the moral axis is entirely flipped.
In the traditional Western narrative, the Crusades are framed as a heroic, if tragic, epic. The First Crusade is a pious pilgrimage; the knights are romanticized figures of chivalry in shining armor, bravely holding the line in a hostile, exotic land. The eventual loss of the Holy Land is mourned as the “fall of Outremer,” a tragic retreat of European civilization. In this telling, the East is often reduced to a passive backdrop, its inhabitants viewed through a lens of mystique or backwardness, mere obstacles to a divine mandate.
But cross the Mediterranean, and the exact same timeline reads like a chronicle of foreign invasion and eventual, hard-won restoration against the barbarous northerners. The dates do not change, but the adjectives do. Here is the history as it is remembered in the Levant… continue
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