One of the most troubling aspects of the Government’s response to the pandemic was its complete disregard for ethics. It seems not to have occurred to the decision-makers that the instant removal of fundamental civil liberties required – and must always require – the most comprehensive ethical justification.
During the largely self-made crisis, the Government passed sweeping mandates with barely any serious reflection on the impacts on millions of people’s lives, and stubbornly refused to listen to a multitude of far more thoughtful, well-informed alternatives.
Inexcusably, it appears that the main reason the Government and its advisors neglected to consider ethics was brute ignorance – they didn’t think about ethics because they have no idea why it is important. To them ethics is at best a scarcely relevant adjunct to ‘following the science’.
Had they understood ethics – or bothered to ask people who do – they would have been able to approach policymaking in a properly balanced and effective manner.
There are several ways to include ethics in decision-making. Two of these are 1) to apply ethical standards and principles and 2) to deliberate holistically. Both can be undertaken simultaneously.
Ethical standards
A range of carefully considered ethical standards has been developed and fought for in the Western world over the past 70 years and more. Arguably the most fundamental of these is the principle of informed consent to interventions, established in both ethical theory and health care law. It is now regarded as essential that any health care professional – including public health professionals – must fully explain the range of possible interventions available and disclose the reasoning behind any recommendation they make. Anything less is either negligent or coercive.
Holistic deliberation
Beyond the application of fundamental principles, ethics may be seen as a thoughtful, wide-ranging decision-making approach which seeks to balance a variety of factors to reach reasonable conclusions. These conclusions will aways include both evidence and values. Taking one without the other is bound to lead to inadequate choices: the evidence cannot speak for itself and value judgements alone quickly become dogma.
The Government and its advisors failed woefully to take account of either understanding of ethics.
Any robust analysis of a personal or social problem requires the consideration of a range of ideas. However it seems that where public health is concerned, policies are routinely drawn up according to a single imperative – ‘we must reduce disease and therefore save lives’ – but of course this imperative itself requires ethical standards and ethical deliberation because, as we have tragically witnessed, trying to save lives in one way risks lives in other ways.
As soon as you start to think beyond the fear of infection to consider the bigger picture, there is a flood of specific ethical issues.
- Is it ethical to force businesses to close their doors?
- Is it ethical to cause so many people to lose their livelihoods?
- How is it acceptable to override basic human rights with so little public involvement?
- Is it ethical to close schools, particularly when the evidence that this will help control the spread of the virus is unclear? (In 2022 it is now clear that this made little or no difference to ‘stopping the spread’.)
- Do restrictions heighten social inequalities (it is easier to self-isolate in a comfortable home, it is easier to cope if you have a pleasant garden, it is easier to weather financial uncertainty if you have a secure career and savings)?
- Given that governments have borrowed many billions to weather the crisis, and this debt will have to be repaid, is it ethical to cause hardship and suffering to future generations in the interest of existing generations?
There are many other measurable harms that should have been considered. ‘Minimising death’ was only one of many possible rationales. Consequently, the Government’s stubborn failure to reflect in a professional, balanced way caused massive, avoidable damage.
Ethics is ultimately a matter of respecting thoughtful traditions grounded in compassion and human rights, and thinking as deeply as possible about the many effects your choices will have on other people. Ethics is the essence of civilised human co-existence. Over the past two years a handful of people, quite out of their depth, were able to dismiss ethics – along with previous well-documented Government pandemic planning – with what seemed like a mere wave of the hand.
We must ensure that this can never happen again.
Dr. David Seedhouse is an Honorary Professor of Deliberative Practice at Aston University.
March 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
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Shadowy UK intel figure Hamish de Bretton-Gordon was at the forefront of chemical weapons deceptions in Syria. Now in Ukraine, he’s up to his old tricks again.
With Washington and its NATO allies forced to watch from the sidelines as Russia’s military advances across Eastern Ukraine and encircles Kiev, US and British officials have resorted to a troubling tactic that could trigger a massive escalation. Following similar claims by his Secretary of State and ambassador the United Nations, US President Joseph Biden has declared that Russia will pay a “severe price” if it uses chemical weapons in Ukraine.
The warnings emanating from the Biden administration contain chilling echoes of those issued by the administration of President Barack Obama throughout the US-led dirty war on Syria.
Almost as soon as Obama implemented his ill-fated “red line” policy vowing an American military response if the Syrian army attacked the Western-backed opposition with chemical weapons, Al Qaeda-aligned opposition factions came forth with claims of mass casualty sarin and chlorine bombings of civilians. The result was a series of US-UK missile strikes on Damascus and a prolonged crisis that nearly triggered the kind of disastrous regime change war that had destabilized Iraq and Libya.
In each major chemical weapons event, signs of staging and deception by the armed Syrian opposition were present. As a former US ambassador in the Middle East told journalist Charles Glass, “The ‘red line’ was an open invitation to a false-flag operation.”
Elements of deception were especially clear in the April 7, 2018 incident in the city of Douma, when an anti-government militia on the brink of defeat claimed civilians had been massacred in a chlorine attack by the Syrian army.
Veteran inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) found no evidence that the Syrian army had carried out any such attack, however, suggesting the entire incident had been staged to trigger Western intervention. Their report was subsequently censored by organization management, and the inspectors were subjected to a campaign of smears and intimidation.
Throughout the Syrian conflict, a self-proclaimed “chemical warrior” named Hamish de Bretton-Gordon was intimately involved in numerous chemical weapons deceptions that sustained the war and ratcheted up pressure for Western military intervention.
This February 24, just moments after Russia’s military entered Ukraine, de Bretton-Gordon surfaced again in British media to claim that Russia was preparing a chemical attack on Ukrainian civilians. He has since demanded that Ukrainians be provided with a guide he wrote called, “How To Survive A Chemical Attack.”
So who is de Bretton-Gordon, and does his sudden reappearance as an expert voice on the Russia-Ukraine war signal a return to the dangerous US-UK red line policy?
Hours after war erupts, a “chemical warrior” demands Western escalation
Following months of fevered speculation about an impending Russian invasion of Ukraine, when it finally came to pass on the early morning of February 24th, most were caught entirely by surprise. Media outlets and pundits scrambled to get their stories straight, while Western leaders rushed to construct a cohesive ‘response’.
By contrast, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a British army veteran identified by UK media as a “former spy,” was in no such muddle. Within just three hours, he had a fiery op-ed prepared for The Guardian, demanding the US and Europe “show their steel in the face of Putin’s aggression.” Warning that Vladimir Putin was “much more willing to face off with NATO” than before, de Bretton-Gordon charged that the West “stood back and watched in Syria,” and “it must not do the same in Ukraine.”
“Syria shows what happens when you turn a blind eye and are too heavily influenced by peaceniks,” de Bretton-Gordon fulminated. “Those of us involved in interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 30 years…we look at Syria and know we should have done better. That knowledge should inform our response to Putin’s aggression now.”
In reality, Washington and its allies did not stand back and watch in Syria; it waged a decade-long proxy war employing jihadist paramilitaries and airstrikes on Damascus, then occupied oil-producing portions of the country and subjected its citizens to crippling sanctions, which to this day deprive them of food, electricity and vital medical supplies.
Of all people, de Bretton-Gordon – whose Twitter profile once identified him as a member of 77th Brigade, the British Army’s official psychological warfare division – is uniquely placed to know of these horrors. After all, he played a pivotal role in promoting and extending the dirty war through the management of information surrounding chemical weapons incidents.
Manipulation, absurdities and obvious fraud
As The Grayzone has revealed, the involvement of de Bretton-Gordon in the Syrian conflict dates back to at least 2013, when by his own admission he was engaged in a covert effort to smuggle soil samples out of the opposition-occupied areas. This work would have inevitably placed him in extremely close quarters with jihadist elements raking in Western funding while benefiting from NATO training and weapons.
Contemporary media reports reveal the UK’s MI6 was engaged in a sample-gathering effort in the country at the very time time de Bretton-Gordon was inside Syria, strongly suggesting his linkage to the foreign intelligence agency. One article makes abundantly clear the purpose of the soil-sample exercise was to push the US into intervening by proving government culpability for alleged chemical weapons attacks.
Other forms of evidence were also collected on-the-ground by de Bretton-Gordon, and provided to a number of official investigations into chemical attacks. In at least one instance – an OPCW/UN Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) probe into a purported chemical strike in Talmenes, April 2014 – videos submitted by CBRN Taskforce, a shady organization he founded in Aleppo, were found to show clear signs of falsification.
De Bretton-Gordon threw his chemical weapons expertise into further doubt when he told British media that any common refrigerator could be transformed into a chemical weapon, falsely claiming that R22 refrigerant cylinders contained material for improvised chlorine bombs. “Somebody could go to a waste site where people chuck away fridges [in the UK] and get a whole bunch of those things and blow them up,” the supposed arms specialist claimed.
De Bretton Gordon has gone as far as claiming to a British tabloid that Russia could deploy missiles and hand grenades containing the highly deadly Soviet-era chemical agent Novichok “in any future war with the West.”
Such absurd commentary and subterfuge has done nothing to dent de Bretton-Gordon’s credibility, however. His mainstream profile has only grown over time, with outlets invariably presenting him as a courageous human rights defender risking his life to train local doctors and rescue workers.
On more than one occasion, however, de Bretton-Gordon has directly involved Western journalists in MI6’s soil gathering efforts. For instance, during a 2014 podcast interview with Wilton Park, an NGO funded by the UK Foreign Office, de Bretton-Gordon boasted of his responsibility for a story in the Times of London alleging a Syrian chemical attack in the town of Sheikh al-Maqsood.
“In March last year there was a reported sarin attack in Sheikh al-Maqsood and I helped the Times – chap called Anthony Lloyd who very sadly got shot two weeks ago – to cover this story and tried to get samples to the UK for analysis … I won’t go into the details of that,” he recalled.
Then-Prime Minister David Cameron invoked the Sheikh al-Maqsood incident to increase pressure on Damascus, citing “the picture as described to me by the Joint Intelligence Committee” as the basis for his assertion of a chemical attack against the town by the Syrian army.
Throughout the dirty war on Syria, de Bretton-Gordon routinely cropped up in the media attributing gas attacks and war crimes to Syrian and Russian forces, and fear-mongered about their implications for future conflicts with the West.
The latter role is one de Bretton-Gordon has enthusiastically resumed throughout the war in Ukraine, aggressively hyping the threat to Western countries. His messaging has tracked seamlessly with that of the US government, which initiated a program months before Russia’s military operation to prepare Ukraine’s security sector for an impending weapons of mass destruction attack.
Months before war, US trains Ukrainians in the threat of “targeted weapons of mass destruction attacks”
Back in May 2021, the State Department announced that Washington had conducted a “virtual training exercise” with “partners” in Kiev, including domestic security services, law enforcement, and first responders, to “identify, respond to, and investigate assassinations involving weapons of mass destruction,” due to “recent events in Europe” highlighting “the real threat of government-sanctioned, targeted weapons of mass destruction attacks.”
Along the way, Ukrainians were tutored in “[identifying] the medical symptoms that indicate WMD material use, the attack cycle involved in WMD assassination attempts, and the specific measures that enable safe and secure detection and response to WMD incidents.”
Quite why this instruction was given at this particular time is unclear, as was the “recent events in Europe” to which the press release referred. Perhaps the State Department was alluding to the alleged novichok poisoning of the Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny in August 2020. On what grounds that failed assassination necessitated a grand, multi-agency training exercise in dealing with “targeted WMD attacks” is anyone’s guess.
Whatever the purpose of the US training program was, Ukrainian security personnel can now claim they have the training to identify the precise “medical symptoms that indicate WMD material.”
This is significant, because ever since the conflict began, Kiev has exhibited an endless enthusiasm for lying, having distorted or even outright concocted events and facts whole-cloth to advance its objectives on countless occasions.
The most dangerous claims advanced by Ukrainian propagandists have been reinforced by the supposed authority of de Bretton-Gordon, who has argued that Russian chemical strikes were absolutely inevitable, based his prediction on his opinion that Moscow “has no morals or scruples.”
The self-styled chemical weapons expert has even cautioned that Putin could deploy nuclear weapons or create a pandemic “more deadly than Covid” with an Ebola weapon. He has further speculated that Russian forces may unleash a deadly virus seized from one of several Pentagon-funded biolabs in Ukraine, then blame it on the US.
From Syria to Ukraine, it is happening again
In a typical media appearance, on March 10th, de Bretton Gordon told London’s LBC radio show that “nothing is off the table at this stage.” Among the horrors he forecast was the use of white phosphorous “to set towns and cities on fire.”
Justifying his certainty, de Bretton-Gordon forcefully asserted, “the only way to take a large city or town ultimately is to use chemical weapons.” He pointed to Syria to prove his point – but without referencing his own pivotal role in escalating that conflict through the manipulation of evidence and scientifically bereft fear-mongering in the media.
Now, de Bretton-Gordon has resurfaced at the center of the aggressive push for escalation with a nuclear armed Russia. If his role in Syria is any guide, a series of cynical deceptions could be on the way.
March 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Syria, UK, Ukraine |
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Certain commentators are claiming ZeroCovid was a purely pre-vaccine measure
The past two days have seen sorties from scientists desperate to shore up the lockdown version of history. Lockdowns were necessary, and anyone who disagrees does not care about society or equality. This version of history is so fraudulent that it cannot be allowed to triumph.
Writing in the Guardian yesterday, Devi Sridhar asks: ‘Why can’t some scientists just admit they were wrong about Covid?’ Why indeed? Sridhar notes that scientists have divided into opposing camps, taking ‘particular pandemic positions… eventually building a base of followers that organise around that position and defend it viciously.’ She just doesn’t seem to recognise that this neatly describes her own approach.
Sridhar’s piece is a craven attempt to rewrite history by claiming that the Zero Covid position was only ever intended for the pre-vaccine era. Can this be the same Sridhar who said in a New Statesman interview in January 2021 that ‘the better option is to eliminate the virus’ – even after vaccines had started to be rolled out? Or who tweeted in June 2020 that ‘the fastest way to get economy & normal life back is to push for a ZERO Covid Britain. Clear virus, build domestic economy’? Still, as far as Sridhar’s concerned, if anyone got anything wrong, it wasn’t her.
Sridhar’s efforts to rewrite history were joined by a prominent member of Independent SAGE, Kit Yates. Writing in the British Medical Journal on Wednesday, Yates penned an op-ed on the theme “Was lockdown necessary?” Lockdowns, according to Yates, were necessary to protect the NHS and the vulnerable members of society — and yet at the same time ‘no one is in favour of lockdowns’. This sleight of hand followed his tweet in February that ‘everyone is lockdown sceptic’.
Have we all been dreaming about the vituperative onslaught on sceptical voices in the last two years? The answer becomes clearer in the last paragraph of the BMJ piece, where Yates concludes:
Whether you view [lockdowns] as necessary depends on your value system. Many people would place the lives of the most vulnerable high on their list of priorities. Many people would value a functioning NHS with equal access for all at the point of need. Many would place a high worth on the long term health of their population. But not everyone. – KIT YATES, BMJ
Sadly for Yates, his article was published on the very day that Sir Chris Whitty admitted that the long-term health of children had suffered and their life expectancies were lower through increasing obesity brought on by lockdowns. With NHS cancer backlogs projected to last for a decade, it doesn’t seem that this “long-term health of the population” and “protecting the NHS” works out very well for Yates and his ilk.
This is why the strongest advocates of lockdowns such as Sridhar and Yates cannot be allowed to set the tone of the debate as we move away from the pandemic. Strong lockdowns promoted policies that were utterly uncaring of the young, the elderly in care homes, women in abusive situations, the poor whose work disappeared, let alone the hundreds of millions of people whose livelihoods have been destroyed in the Global South.
Meanwhile, 40% of Covid deaths in the West took place in care homes. Far from protecting the vulnerable, lockdown policies did not even protect the most vulnerable. Meanwhile, they have rendered hundreds of millions of people newly vulnerable. That is their legacy, and those who advocated hardest for them must not be allowed to escape it.
March 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, UK |
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UNLESS there is a change of policy, from April 1 the public will have to pay for the testing still required to visit loved ones in care homes, hospitals and other regulated healthcare settings.
It is incredible that neither the mainstream media nor the public are discussing this injustice in any depth, let alone being up in arms about it. Most have likely yet to comprehend how ruinous a policy this will prove for so many people. Again.
For a citizen of England to have to pay to visit a sick, dying, or lonely relative in a care home or hospital – even if both are triple-jabbed (and whilst unvaccinated health workers may come and go) – is an inhumane policy.
That one’s visit might not even be permitted in the first place is another story – an ‘exclusive’ the Telegraph claimed to have broken on February 18, despite TCW having written about it as far back as December 7, 2021 ( see here and here, for example).
What are the real-life consequences of having to fork out to visit vulnerable loved ones? Let’s begin with the obvious: the mounting financial cost to the individual.
The high street price of a single lateral flow test is currently predicted to be from £2 to £5, depending on how many are bought at once. Better deals will doubtless be found online, but for simplicity let’s run with £2 per test.
That’s £14 a week straight off the bat (working on the assumption that consecutive daily visits are permitted: check with your local NHS Trust) but potentially much, much more for someone such as an elderly person not able either to shop confidently online, or trawl the high street for the best deal.
Throw in the cost of fuel for a 15-to-20-mile round trip at today’s wartime prices (or public transport), plus hospital parking charges which hover around £2.50 for two hours (one hour is often free, but would not suffice), then even in a best-case scenario, visiting a dearly beloved could end up costing from £7.50 to well over £10 a time.
Suppose one were unemployed and on Jobseeker’s Allowance – visiting a gravely ill loved one in hospital every day for a week could easily use up half of one’s weekly benefit. Food and energy stability, or being at a loved one’s bedside: some of the many new decisions to be faced by the less affluent in post-Covid England.
But no matter what the expense, it is the dehumanising ideology behind the imminent change in rules that displays how far England has sunk ethically since this rotten new era of hypochondriacal public health despotism began.
How on earth can paying to visit the sick and dying be said to be ‘living with Covid’? And with cases purportedly on the rise, who foresees any loosening of visiting protocols this year?
What of the elderly in care homes – the pandemic’s original totems for mass hysteria? For two years now they have had to endure a level of enforced solitude unthinkable in pre-Covid England, and yet even though Johnson has finally swapped playing public health-Connect Four for the chess game of war, the elderly have now to navigate their relatives’ financial concerns over visiting, set against the backdrop of a sharp rise in energy prices precipitated by the Prime Minister’s latest, and totally unrelated, geopolitical switcheroo.
It boggles the mind, boils the blood and cracks the heart to imagine any of the citizens of this country either being totally denied access to their loved ones, or having to pay for the privilege if granted. Lay aside how England compares with other countries: what on earth have WE become?!
As previously touched upon, compounding this grotesque unfairness is the fact that health workers will not only retain their access to free testing, but regardless of vaccination status may continue touching, breathing upon, bathing, feeding, and dressing those in need – for remuneration – whilst triple-vaccinated relatives have nonsensically either to pay to sit quietly at the bedside of the very same needy, or be left out in the cold entirely. Riddle us that one, Covid Inquiry: we’re all ears!
As usual, with each mutation of the narrative the public are left with nothing but a list of worrisome questions:
· Will we have to pay for lateral flow tests for ever? After all, we are being told with great confidence that the virus is not going anywhere. If not, then at some point will testing be eradicated completely? How low must case numbers get before we REALLY start living with Covid?
· Will tests become free again in the event of another Delta variant-style wave?
· Will Ukrainian refugees also have to pay?
The majority of this nation went along with the Covid narrative – supposedly entirely out of fear, pressure from peers, family or employers; a sense of patriotism or moral duty; as a means by which to virtue-signal, or perhaps even just for kicks – either directly or indirectly succumbing to public health propaganda.
I don’t buy this wholesale. Not one bit.
My overriding impression is that most were simply too uninterested, too analytically inept or lazy, or too lacking in courage – imagination even – to rock the narrative-boat for fear of creating for themselves a modestly taxing degree of both mental gymnastics and personal sacrifices.
And so who do we ultimately have to blame for Government’s impending, exploitative and divisive ‘pay-to-love’ scheme: that of having to grovel for permission to shell out hard-earned money on visiting a perhaps dying loved one? Ourselves, unfortunately.
That’s what we get for two years of slavish obedience to the hyper-romanticised, brainless mainstream trash of the age.
In more ways than one it is not unreasonable to say that we have done this all to ourselves, and that the crippling costs of both our torpor and cowardice, as predicted, continue to be borne by all and sundry, but predominantly the weak and vulnerable.
Please don’t get seriously ill any time soon, Mum. You’ll likely have to go it mostly alone, cause I ain’t exactly flush these days.
March 24, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | Covid-19, Human rights, UK |
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Sadiq Khan has urged Londoners not to exercise outside because warm weather in Europe is leading to high pollution levels in the capital. According to The Telegraph :
As temperatures reached 20C in the capital on Wednesday, older people and those with heart and lung problems were told to limit “strenuous physical exertion” due to high pollution levels.
Anyone else “suffering discomfort” should also consider reducing their activity, official advice said.
A forecast from Imperial College London said that levels of fine particulate pollution, or PM2.5, would reach “high” levels on Wednesday and Thursday, causing health problems for vulnerable people.
The alert was the first issued by the Met Office since August 2020. Alerts were also broadcast in London train stations and to travellers at bus stops around the capital.
Despite the health warning, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, also urged people to walk or cycle to limit the air pollution from vehicles…
Mr Khan said: “I’m urging Londoners to look after each other by choosing to walk, cycle or take public transport, avoiding unnecessary car journeys, stopping engine idling and not burning wood or garden waste, all of which contributes to high levels of pollution.
“This is particularly important in order to protect those who are more vulnerable to high pollution.
“While this alert is in place people with heart and lung problems should avoid physical exertion.”
Did you note the use of the term “vulnerable people” by Imperial College? Did you note the language used by Sadiq Khan?
The Mayor said that he’s urging Londoners “to look after each other by choosing to walk, cycle, take public transport and avoid unnecessary car journeys.” Londoners should do this, said Khan, to “protect those who are more vulnerable to high pollution.”
The message is a stark one.
“Citizens! Driving your car is affecting the most vulnerable in society! Walking or cycling saves lives and protects the NHS!” Exercising indoors protects you and protects the NHS!”
I said it two years ago didn’t I? Climate lockdowns featuring initiatives like personal driving allowances are coming soon. I predicted that at some point the government would attempt to place legal limits on driving.
I imagined a day when people would be told that they could only take their cars out on the first and third Sunday’s of the month depending on their postcode. Others would be permitted to drive on the second and fourth Sunday’s.
SKY News ran a hit-piece on me for predicting climate lockdowns.
I’ve emailed the journalist to ask her if she still thinks the notion is preposterous.
Silence.
March 24, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | Human rights, UK |
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Britain’s Defense Secretary Ben Wallace © Luka Dakskobler / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
Samizdat | March 23, 2022
London has asked YouTube on Wednesday to censor any videos of the call between pranksters Vovan and Lexus – pretending to be the Ukrainian PM – and Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, claiming they are propaganda by the Russian state that was manipulated to show falsehoods and undermine British reputation and Kiev’s morale.
“We are calling on YouTube to help us support Ukraine by taking down videos doctored by the Russian state and disseminated to try and sap the morale of a people fighting for their freedom,” said the defense ministry (MoD) in London.
In the attached letter – which lacks the name of both the sender and the recipient – the ministry claims “the Russian State was responsible for the hoax call” and that “Russian disinformation presented in this video creates a substantial risk to UK national security” as well as “risk to international unity working to support Ukraine.”
The MoD claims the videos were “modified and edited” to show Wallace saying things that are not true, such as that the UK is “running out of our own” NLAW anti-tank missiles.
This is “factually incorrect,” the MoD said in the letter. “We have no supply shortages.” Another claim the MoD labeled false – presumably made by the pranksters – was that the NLAWS sent to Ukraine “often failed.”
“Any perceived failure of our lethal aid supplied to support Ukraine will provide an immediate detrimental effect upon the morale of Ukrainian forces,” the MoD letter said.
“I am confident you would not wish to be a conduit for Russian propaganda or be in any way associated with the potential consequences of this type of media manipulation,” the unnamed MoD official tells YouTube, demanding that the platform “remove (or at least block) access” to any videos of the call.
Wallace raised a stink over the call last Thursday, claiming he hung up on the person pretending to be Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Shmygal after getting suspicious about the “misleading” questions. It later emerged that the Microsoft Teams call lasted for almost 10 minutes, and came while Wallace was visiting Poland.
Blaming the government in Moscow, the minister denounced the call as an example of “Russian disinformation, distortion and dirty tricks” and launched an internal security investigation into how the pranksters were able to contact him in the first place.
On Tuesday, the notorious pranksters Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov – going by the monikers Vovan and Lexus – confirmed they had been behind the call and posted several teasers, saying the full video would be up soon. The duo has a long history of pranking celebrities and public figures, including Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They have denied being agents of the government.
March 23, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism | Ben Wallace, UK, Ukraine |
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Samizdat | March 22, 2022
University of Edinburgh professor Tim Hayward is being hammered in the media for sharing an article suggesting the bombing of a theater in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol may have been staged by Ukrainian nationalists. Hayward’s skepticism has already led Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi to promise a “crackdown” on such wrongthink.
Hayward shared an article on Sunday from the Grayzone, a left-wing news outlet. Citing eyewitnesses in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, the article claims that Ukrainian ‘Azov’ fighters – once described by western outlets and lawmakers as “neo-Nazis” – sheltered behind civilians in a theater in Mariupol, before blowing the building up as Russian forces entered the Ukrainian city.
Azov forces and journalists linked to the extremist unit accused Russia of bombing the building, and used the incident to call for western intervention against Russia. US President Joe Biden declared Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” in response, and American politicians from both parties and from Europe renewed their calls for military aid – including fighter jets – for Ukraine.
However, no video exists showing the theater being bombed and Russia denies attacking the building, stating that it had “never been considered as a strike target.” Conflicting reports of the weapons supposedly used and the civilian casualties or lack thereof only muddy the picture further.
Yet Hayward was condemned by his colleagues for raising the issue. In a Times article on Tuesday accusing him of “spreading propaganda,” Dr. Aliaksandr Herasimenka, a ‘misinformation’ researcher at Oxford University, said that “we must be very careful” when reading reports critical of the official narrative in Ukraine, and that outlets like the Grayzone “are currently engaged in a massive disinformation campaign.” He did not provide any evidence that would support such allegations against the media outlet.
Hayward has been singled out by the Scottish government too. Having shared articles questioning the alleged bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol and claiming that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad did not gas his own citizens as Western sources insist, the professor was accused in Westminster last week by Tory MP Robert Halfon as being a “useful idiot for President Putin’s atrocities.”
Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi said that academics like Hayward were already being investigated, and that their universities would be contacted.
“Putin and his cronies are a malign influence on anyone in this country buying their false narrative, and I have to repeat it is a false and dangerous narrative, and we will crack down on it hard,” Zahawi said, without elaborating on how.
Speaking to Edinburgh Live, Hayward said that he is concerned about restrictions to free speech, and considers hearing both points of view important in wartime.
“In war, miscalculations can have terrible consequences. We also know that misinformation can sometimes even slip through on our own side, as when the UK went to war in Iraq, mistakenly believing it had weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “As for the people of Ukraine, their need is for peace – not to become the epicenter of World War III,” he added, referring to the widely-held belief that were Western powers to intervene in Ukraine, the consequence would be a third world war.
March 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, UK, Ukraine |
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A reader was disturbed this week by a visit from an official from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). What the official said appears to bode ill for the idea that the U.K. is ‘living with Covid’ insofar as that means moving away from all the Covid theatre and regulations of the past two years.
I work in a London hospitality business. This week an official from the HSE came in to do a Covid compliance spot check. Despite the Government making noises about Covid regulations being binned, the HSE person informed us that from April businesses with more than five employees will still be required to adhere to general ‘Covid safe’ practices, under the threat of enforcement proceedings (and fines) by the HSE.
Overhearing what the HSE official told the General Manager, it sounded to me as though it will involve keeping a Covid risk management plan in place and ensuring ventilation, access to sanitiser for customers and so on.
Most of it was asking questions about Covid management actions we have taken and are still taking. It implied that, so far as the HSE is concerned, Covid is a now a ‘standard’ risk which needs to continue to be managed alongside others.
So briefly, it appears:
– they are doing Covid spot checks insofar as they apply to employees;
– they will be increasing spot checks from April.
This suggests the perpetuation of Covid regulations will be enforced under the guise of general health and safety law. Not as advertised by the Government at all if so, and hardly reflects ‘living with Covid’ like we live with other mostly mild respiratory viruses.
Runs counter to the official narrative of a bonfire of Covid restrictions.
If the Government is serious about moving on from the pandemic then it needs to rein in the HSE and withdraw its guidance that treats COVID-19 as a special threat.
March 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, UK |
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Town Halls all over the UK are flying the Ukraine flag, as mainstream journalists encourage everyone to think about the war in Ukraine.
Looking at the news you’d think that Ukraine was the only trouble spot in the world.
But you’d be wrong.
Here are some facts that no other journalist in the UK appears to know.
Fact 1
According to the United Nations, the number of civilian deaths in Ukraine is 760. According to the Ukraine President, the number of soldiers who have died in Ukraine is 1,300.
Fact 2
According to the United Nations, the seven-year-old war in Yemen had killed an estimated 377,000 people by the end of 2021 – and is now killing more people than the fighting in Ukraine. The Yemen war has been described as the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. The Saudis have interfered in what was basically a civil war.
Fact 3
The war in Syria has now been going on for ten years and the number of people killed is believed to be 610,000
Why isn’t your town hall flying flags in support of the people of Yemen and Syria?
The answer, of course, is that the invasion of Ukraine was organised and manipulated by the conspirators in the West to help push the energy and food shortages required for the Great Reset and the New World Order that they have planned for us.
I am banned from Twitter, Facebook and so on, and so I am not allowed to share this information on social media.
So, I’d be grateful if readers would share this information on their social media channels.
Maybe a mainstream journalist will read it.
And wonder what the hell is going on.
***
Vernon Coleman’s book Endgame explains our past, our present and our future in 281 pages. Endgame is available as a paperback, a hardback and an eBook.
Read more of Vernon Coleman’s writings at www.vernoncoleman.org
March 21, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | UK, Ukraine, Yemen |
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The book The Year the World Went Mad by SAGE-member Mark Woolhouse, has now been published as an audiobook and will be available in hard cover on April 12th. This is an important book, for here the author, a key player in the pandemic response in the UK, admits that more or less everything he and his colleagues suggested and the government did was wrong.
In this interview with Spiked-online, Woolhouse admits that focused protection, as suggested by the proponents of the Great Barrington Declaration, would have been the right approach, and that he and his associates knew it. He even claims they suggested it, but nobody listened. However, even if they did, why didn’t they speak up? The scientists who wrote and published the Great Barrington Declaration were denounced as pseudo-scientists – and by whom? Among others, by the very people who knew they were right all along.
In the author‘s own words:
“So how do you protect those people? First of all, since they have to have contact with certain people, you make it as Covid-safe as possible for them to have those interactions. Take all the precautions we know to take now, about wearing masks, ventilation and physical distancing. But that alone is not enough. You need to make sure that the contact themselves does not have an infection and is not going to pass it on to the vulnerable people they’re interacting with. We were talking about this in April and May 2020 to many people in government. But we never implemented it. It never took off. And yet it’s quite clear from our work that this would have had a very significant impact. It would not be enough by itself “You still need to suppress the virus to a degree, but you would not need lockdown.”
The lockdowns, travel bans, school closures and all the rest were useless and extremely harmful to society. But still the scientists in charge of the pandemic response, including Mark Woolhouse, promoted those methods and justified them. They derided those who criticised their methods, cancelled them, claimed they didn’t respect science. But it was the other way around. This, we must never forget.
This book is a good step. But I wonder if the author has apologised to those who were right all along, to Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, Jay Bhattacharya and all the other honest, real scientists who had the courage and moral standard to tell the truth. If he hasn’t, I urge him to do so.
March 20, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Audio program, Book Review, Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, UK |
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Ofcom has revoked the licence of Russian state News channel RT, saying that the channel was not “fit and proper to hold a UK broadcast licence.”
According to The BBC:
RT’s coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been under investigation by Ofcom, and the channel had already disappeared from UK screens.
RT called Ofcom “a tool of the government”.
The channel became unavailable on all UK broadcast platforms earlier this month as a result of a ban imposed by the European Union.
Although the UK is no longer in the EU, the bloc applied sanctions to satellite companies in Luxembourg and France, which provided the RT feed to Sky, Freesat and Freeview in the UK.
UK Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, who has described the channel as “Putin’s polluting propaganda machine”, said at the time she hoped it would not return to UK screens.
In recent weeks, Ofcom has launched 29 investigations into the “due impartiality of RT’s news and current affairs coverage” of the invasion of Ukraine.
RT deputy editor-in-chief Anna Belkina said Ofcom had “robbed the UK public of access to information”.
“What we have witnessed over the last few days, be it comments from the President of the EU Commission or from PM Boris Johnson, is that none of them had pointed to a single grain of evidence that what RT has reported over these days, and continues to report, is not true.
“Instead, what they have said is that what RT brings to its audience is not allowed in their supposedly free media environment. When it comes to the Russian voice, or just a different perspective from theirs, it is simply not allowed to exist.”
I’ve been watching RT closely since Russia invaded Ukraine. Over the course of the last few weeks, the TV channel and its website has published claims made against the Russian government by NATO countries, right alongside the Kremlin narrative.
In fact, I’ve been astonished at how balanced the content has been. The same cannot be said for the BBC or SKY News.
It’s a sickening blow for free speech, but it’s only the beginning.
March 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | Ofcom, UK |
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Following our recent article highlighting isolation and neglect in care homes, we are appalled to report that the situation is only slowly improving. What is more, many NHS sites are still imposing draconian and vindictive policies. Children are being separated from parents and dying relatives are being abandoned to a lonely end.
It is beyond comprehension that this situation persists. Three weeks to flatten the curve? More like 24 months to bulldoze the social contract. Here is one quote from a UK hospital this week:
“We know that continuing to extend restrictions on visiting will be disappointing and it is not a decision we have taken lightly. We understand how important the support of family and friends can be for patients in their recovery while they are in hospital, however, our number one priority is to keep everyone safe”.
These silken, virtue-signalling words – keeping “everyone safe” – are not only utterly simplistic, they disguise blanket policies that encourage multiple Milgram-esque acts of cruel depravity. We are hearing horrific stories of desperate children being denied access to their dying parents.
“Everyone” is not safe when a nonagenarian, now in declining health, has to spend their remaining weeks – or even days – in soulless incarceration. These individuals spent their entire working lives rebuilding this country after WW2 and then brought up a subsequent generation of taxpayers. Surely we owe these bastions of society the dignity of choice in their final days.
If this situation was not depressing enough, HART has also been made aware of the most cruel of indignities: patients in their final days of life are being denied palliative care if they refuse a covid injection. It is hard to comprehend the wickedness of foisting this particular medical intervention – with all the known short-term adverse effects – on someone with a severely weakened immune system who is already in their final days. It is hard to see this as anything other than battery.
There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of people involved in the healthcare services want the best for their patients, so how can these things still be happening? Two years into this depressing saga, perhaps it is too late for those who promote these injustices to take responsibility for the harm caused. However, those that have been ‘going with the flow’, perhaps hoping for an easy life, might want to reconsider whether their consciences can bear any more of this, and whether they want to align themselves with faceless and sadistic despotism.
After all, you cannot comply your way out of tyranny.
March 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
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