YouTube removes lockdown-sceptical interview with renowned immunologist Dr Mike Yeadon for ‘violating terms of service’
RT | November 20, 2020
Dr Mike Yeadon has argued that the British government is using “lethally incompetent” scientific advice in its Covid-19 response. YouTube has mysteriously taken down a video in which the immunologist explains his point.
The UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) has got many things about the Covid-19 pandemic wrong, says Dr Mike Yeadon. He is an expert in allergy, immunology, and respiratory diseases, with over three decades of experience, including working as Pfizer’s vice president and chief scientific officer. Apparently his credentials amounted to nothing, though, when digital ‘censors’ at YouTube noticed that he was criticizing the prevailing narrative on the necessity of lockdowns.
For its modelling, SAGE assumed that the entire population was susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 when it first emerged in China last year. And it now considers that only a fraction of the public has been infected so far, based on the detectable presence of antibodies in their blood. These premises are behind the harsh restrictions currently in place in the UK, which are designed to prevent a massive and deadly outbreak of Covid-19.
According to Dr Yeadon, the assumptions are totally wrong, and the worst of the disease is over, with Covid-19 falling into the background as a relatively nasty but otherwise ordinary seasonal respiratory disease. A significant part of the population was actually not susceptible to the virus, thanks in large part to cross-immunity from previously being exposed to other kinds of coronaviruses. Those range from the relatively exotic but closely related SARS-CoV-1, the pathogen behind the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak, to human coronaviruses causing the common cold.
The large number of positive Covid-19 tests is not indicative of the number of active cases, Dr Yeadon believes. The common PCR test detects RNA remnants of the coronavirus, but it cannot tell if they came from live viruses or those long conquered by the immune system. There are also false positives. Mass testing causes an increase in those, he says, as people less experienced in how to properly conduct tests are recruited to run them.
On the other hand, the percentage of people currently immune to Covid-19 is seriously underestimated because it is measured by the presence of antibodies in people’s blood, Dr Yeadon argues. Antibody levels rise when an organism reacts to an active infection, but immune response memory – which determines whether the immune system is trained to beat a disease – is stored in T-cells. So, a person perfectly capable of standing up to Covid-19 may test negative for antibodies, he concludes.
Dr Yeadon has made his case and explained why he believes SAGE’s advice to be “lethally incompetent” in a number of interviews, including a 30-minute sit in with Unlock UK, a lockdown-sceptical media outlet. The video was published on Friday and is available on Facebook, but for some reason it was banned by YouTube, which says it violated its terms of service.
Western tech giants have been relentlessly pressured by politicians and legacy media to fight against misinformation on their platforms. Their idea of what constitutes misinformation seems to be closely aligned with prevailing narratives, while complaints about censorship mount from those challenging the mainstream narrative.
This seems especially true for Covid-19 response coverage, as many people find restrictions at best controversial and at worst a government assault on liberties. Just this week, the UK’s top counter-terrorism police officer, Met Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, advocated punishing those who spread “misinformation that could cost people’s lives,” like anti-vaccination conspiracy theories.
Dr Yeadon, incidentally, argues that mass vaccination against Covid-19 would be unnecessary, because the outbreak has almost run its natural course before an efficient vaccine was even available.
View the video.
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.
Boris’s “Green Industrial Revolution” is Economic Lockdown, for ever…
The Global Warming Policy Forum | November 18, 2020
GWPF today described the Prime Minister’s 10 Point Plan for a ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ as shallow gesture politics, but a gesture with severely negative economic implications from day one into the foreseeable future.
And we know that this will happen because all previous attempts to create a viable green economy have failed.
In March 2009, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced his Labour government’s ‘industrial strategy,’ a term the Conservatives have also adopted, promising to create 400,000 jobs. Brown’s words are strangely reminiscent of today’s announcement:
“I want to create a global ‘green new deal’ that will pave the way for a low carbon recovery and to help us build tomorrow’s green economy today.”
Twelve years later Britain has green industries that are still dependent on huge handouts, now totalling £10 billion a year — and building nearly all their green equipment overseas. The recent Seagreen offshore wind farm, for example, has awarded its contracts to two countries with cheap energy, the UAE and China, bitterly disappointing BiFab and other Scottish manufacturers. Green miracles just don’t happen.
Chairman Boris’s Great Leap Forward will also fail to deliver the goods because, like all “economic planning”, it is an incoherent utopian dream unconstrained by economic and physical realities and a mess of unaffordable and incompatible goals.
For example, meeting the absurd offshore wind target of an additional 30 GW of capacity (giving a total of 40 GW in 2030), will have a total capital cost of £120bn–£130 billion for wind farms and offshore transmission grid, nearly all that expenditure going to overseas companies, just as it did with Seagreen.
Paying for that investment and all ancillary costs related to it will put something £27 billion a year on the UK electricity bill, roughly double the wholesale market value of the entire UK electricity sector at present, with horrific implications for electricity prices by the end of the decade.
Those high electricity prices will render utterly unaffordable the Prime Minister’s proposals for heat pumps and electric vehicles. This will cause anger, not only because UK consumers will be confined to their freezing homes, but because many will have spent a fortune on realising the PM’s green utopia.
Heat pumps cost between £10,000 and £20,000 each to install, so the Prime Minister’s aim of installing 600,000 Ground Source Heat Pumps a year by 2028 implies an annual cost of between £60 billion and £100 billion a year.
Dr John Constable, GWPF energy editor, said:
“These over-reaching proposals are technically absurd, economically deluded and politically disastrous. Does the Prime Minister have any competent advisors? One wonders?”
UK’s Labour Party suspends critic of Israel
![Left-wing Labour newly elected NEC member Gemma Bolton who was suspended for calling Israel an apartheid state [screenshot]](https://i2.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Screen-Shot-2020-11-17-at-12.00.53-e1605614513700.png?resize=505%2C336&quality=85&strip=all&zoom=1&ssl=1)
Labour newly elected NEC member Gemma Bolton was suspended for calling Israel an apartheid state
MEMO | November 17, 2020
A left-wing member of the governing body of Britain’s Labour Party is under investigation for saying that Israel is an apartheid state.
Newly-elected National Executive Committee member Gemma Bolton, who was backed by left wing group Momentum, has been placed under investigation by the party for tweeting in 2018: “If I run the risk of getting suspended for calling Israel an apartheid state then so be it. Suspend me. Because that comrades, is a hill I am perfectly happy to die on.”
An article in the Jewish Chronicle article referred to Bolton’s views on Israel as “hard line” and attempted to shame her for previous posts completely unrelated to the issue. She was accused of being fond of “sexually explicit humour”; the pro-Israel community newspaper cited a social media post from 2015 in which she said, “I’m torn between wanting to be a high class Westminster politician or a porn star.”
In 2017, a UN report said that, “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.” UN Under-Secretary-General Rima Khalaf said at the time that the report “clearly and frankly concludes that Israel is a racist state that has established an apartheid system that persecutes the Palestinian people.” Israel immediately expressed its outrage and dismissed the report as “anti-Semitic”.
The latest Labour suspension follows that of former leader Jeremy Corbyn MP, who was suspended after the publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report into alleged anti-Semitism in the party. Those opposed to such moves point out that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are not the same thing, and that legitimate criticism of the Israeli government’s policies is not anti-Semitic per se.
Labour leader Keir Starmer sacked left wing Rebecca Long-Bailey from the shadow cabinet earlier this year for sharing an interview with actress Maxine Peake speaking out about police brutality in the wake of the George Floyd murder. Peake mentioned that US police forces receive training from their Israeli counterparts.
Starmer also reportedly gave backbench MP Stephen Kinnock a “dressing down” for suggesting that the government should stop buying goods from illegal Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land. Again, the reality is that such settlements and the movement of people to live on occupied land are illegal in the eyes of international law.
Palestinian Court Holds First Session in Lawsuit against UK over Balfour Declaration
Palestine Chronicle – November 17, 2020
A Palestinian court yesterday held the first session to review a lawsuit filed against the British government over its crimes in Palestine during the British Mandate between 1917- 1948 and the Balfour Declaration which promised Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people.
The Court of First Instance in the city of Nablus, in the northern occupied West Bank, heard Palestinian witnesses who had been evicted from their villages in 1948 by Jewish militias and the crimes committed during that period.
The United Kingdom did not send a representative to attend the session.
The judge postponed the session until December 6.
One of the lawsuit initiators, Munib Al-Masri, said this is a serious and organized step to bring Britain to account for the damage caused by the Balfour Declaration, adding that after the Palestinian court issues its decision, they plan to go to the British judiciary and the international courts.
The lawsuit was filed by the International Commission to Support Palestinian Rights (ICSRP) on behalf of Palestinian families last October.
The lawsuit holds “the UK legally responsible for the consequences arising from violating rules, morals and international law and for the crimes it committed during the colonization of Palestine, including the Balfour Declaration.”
The Balfour Declaration refers to the letter sent by then British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in 1917 to Jewish Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, favoring a Jewish national homeland in Palestine.
How the British government secretly funded Syrian cartoons and comic books as anti-Assad propaganda aimed at children
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | November 16, 2020
Leaked documents show how the Foreign & Commonwealth Office spent millions setting up a clandestine network to churn out pro-rebel material, much of it aimed at winning the hearts and minds of kids.
A swath of internal UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) files have exposed a number of covert ways in which London sought to both propagandize Syrian children and turn them into weapons, in a vast, long-running information warfare campaign at home and abroad.
The documents are just some of the bombshell papers released by hacktivist collective Anonymous, outlining a variety of cloak-and-dagger actions undertaken by the UK government against the Syrian state over many years.
The overriding objective behind them all was to destabilize the government of Bashar Assad, convince Syrians, Western citizens, foreign governments, and international bodies that the Free Syrian Army (FSA) was a legitimate alternative, and flood media the world over with pro-opposition propaganda.
Children figured prominently in a number of the plans, in more ways than one. ARK, a shadowy firm headed by veteran FCO operative Alistair Harris, was central to many of these covert efforts, which may have cost the FCO many millions in total.
Undermining government legitimacy
In one file, the company outlines pricing for runs of propaganda material including “public service announcement animations” (£4,570), “political cartoons” (£1,200), and “comic books (24 colored pages)” (£30,200).
A separate proposal submitted to the FCO by communications firm Albany details ways of offering clandestine support to “oppositionist grassroots media activism.” The company conducted numerous psyops in Syria – including managing the Syrian National Coalition’s communications during the 2014 Geneva II peace conference – and collaborated extensively with ARK in the process.
Creating “fictional material” such as radio dramas and “digital comic strips for internet deployment” was listed one of the key ways the firm would “bolster the values and reputation of the Syrian opposition,” and undermine the government’s “core narrative and legitimacy.”
Precisely which projects emerged from these pitches, if any, isn’t clear from the files themselves, but in May journalist Ian Cobain revealed Hentawi, a comic aimed at 9-to-15 year-old Syrians, was a clandestine creation of the FCO, and its founder Naji Jerf was an employee of a firm contracted by the department.
The files released by Anonymous indicate that the company in question was ARK, who provided Jerf’s CV – it reveals that from 2006 to 2007, he was Editor of a UAE-based magazine, Attfal Al Yaom (Children of Today).
Such experience undoubtedly assisted in the production of Hentawi, which featured very slick comic strips slyly extolling equality and democracy and other values, quizzes and games, and inspiring stories of athletes, celebrities and the like.
Cobain also exposed how FCO contractors produced animated films for Syrian children, such as Goal to Syria, about a young footballer who scores the winning goal in the 2027 Asia Cup final, leading the Syrian team to victory.
As the player prepares to attempt a deciding penalty, his mind flashes back to Aleppo in 2014. In the wake of a bombing raid, the White Helmets rush in an ambulance to rescue him from rubble – en-route they pass a local man who screams, “first they bombed us with chemicals, and now barrel bombs!”
After prising the boy free and carrying him to safety, a White Helmet shoots him the peace sign. Back in 2027, he shoots and scores, with the commentators praising the “lion of Damascus” for his heroic victory. As the screen fades to black, viewers are presented with text hailing the White Helmets’ achievements during the conflict, claiming the group “represent the humanity and spirit of the Syrian people.”
Other leaked FCO files make clear ARK played a pivotal role in constructing and promoting the White Helmets’ benevolent image worldwide, developing “an internationally-focused communications campaign to raise global awareness” of the group in order to “keep Syria in the news.” Goal to Syria was shown at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and can thus be considered another example of this effort in practice, on top of the clip’s domestic purpose.
Somebody think of the children
The same file listing Naji Jerf’s resumé indicates that ARK worked with civil society organizations “to develop products for children” in Syria, including “mobile cinema screenings.”
The company’s expansive network of freelancers in the country, which ARK itself extensively trained at quite some cost to the FCO, were said to “frequently cover such events.” These reports would then be fed to ARK’s “well-established contacts” at major news outlets including Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Guardian, New York Times, and Reuters, “further amplifying their effect.”
These outlets similarly “amplified” the impactful propaganda of other FCO contractors working in Syria. In July 2019, an image of two young Syrian girls trapped in rubble in Idlib attempting to haul their sister to safety as she dangled off the precipice of a dilapidated building, their father looking on in horror above, spread far and wide on social media.
The photo, snapped by a photographer for popular Syrian news service SY24, was reported the world over. Unbeknownst to readers, SY24 was created and funded by The Global Strategy Network (TGSN), founded by Richard Barrett, a former MI6 counter-terrorism director.
In a file submitted to the FCO, TGSN boasted of how “campaigns” it broadcast via SY24 generated “huge global coverage,” having been seen by “many hundreds of millions of people,” and “attracting comment as far as the UN Security Council.”
SY24 content was produced by a network of stringers TGSN both trained and provided with equipment, including “cameras and video editing software.” The firm drew particular attention to a team of female stringers it tutored, “who provide about 40 percent of all SY content,” and were part of “a broad ‘network of networks’” enabling TGSN “to drive stories into the mainstream.”
As with Albany and ARK, TGSN engaged in activities to propagandize Syria’s youth, offering to bring projectors to refugee camps and “rural areas” to screen material to young residents, including “prosocial cartoons for children, films chosen with regard to conflict sensitivity and gender, and popular football events to drive participation.”
The company also conspired with ARK on several surreptitious endeavors, including a campaign dubbed ‘Back to School.’ As its name implies, under its auspices young Syrians in opposition-occupied Idlib returned to school – the two FCO accomplices promised to ensure it was a major media event.
In conjunction with Idlib City Council, opposition commanders, and other elements on the ground, ARK and TGSN planned a comprehensive, “unified” communications campaign using “shared slogans, hashtags and branding.” Rebel fighters were to be engaged in order to “clear roads” and “enable children and teachers to get to schools,” all the while filmed by the pair’s voluminous stringer network, footage which would be “disseminated online and on broadcast channels.”
Junior war propagandists
It is in the context of such cynical, heartstring-tugging child exploitation by the FCO that the phenomenon of Bana Alabed gains an even more suspicious, sinister dimension.
In 2016, at the age of just seven, Bana briefly became a celebrated figure among advocates of Western military intervention in Syria, for tweets she allegedly posted documenting the siege of Aleppo.
Within days of her account being registered in September that year, she amassed a sizeable following, firing messages at Assad, Vladimir Putin, and Barack Obama, using hashtags such as #StandWithAleppo, #HolocaustAleppo, #MassacreInAleppo and #StopAleppoMassacre. She also gained a prominent media profile, was dubbed by more than one pundit the “Anne Frank” of the Syrian crisis, and was invited on to major news networks to denounce Assad and the Syrian Arab Army.
Nonetheless, critics were puzzled as to how such a young girl in a city subject to frequent power cuts could have acquired such an apparent mastery of the English language, and tweet so frequently. Concerns were also raised about the interventionist nature of some of the tweets ostensibly posted by Bana, including an apparent endorsement of the prospect of World War III.
Even mainstream journalists acknowledged her video statements were almost undoubtedly scripted, The New Yorker stating Bana was clearly “being coached… to communicate her thoughts in a language she is only beginning to learn.”
Bana went on to ink a lucrative deal with publishing giant Simon & Schuster, after signing up with talent and marketing agency The Blair Partnership, founded by Neil Blair, board member of the UK branch of the Abraham Fund, a group sponsored by Israeli bank Hapoalim, which finances the construction of Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Bana had largely disappeared by July the next year, when Syrian journalist Khaled Iskef visited the Alabeds’ abandoned home. He found it was situated round the corner from an al-Nusra headquarters, and less than 400 meters from Al-Qaeda’s Aleppo nerve-center. Inside, he discovered a notebook documenting her father Ghassan’s work with extremist elements, as a result of his position as military trainer for Islamic Sawfa Brigade.
During that period, he worked in the Shariah Council in the Aleppo state Eye Hospital, which was under the control of al-Nusra. The notebook indicated the Council passed decisions on imprisonment and assassination of captured civilians to the terorrist group.
Since-deleted social media posts reveal Bana’s grandfather Mohammed was an arms dealer and had a weapons maintenance shop in Sha’ar, at which he serviced killing apparatuses for terrorist factions, situated opposite a school-turned-base for al-Nusra.
Bana’s Twitter account frequently complained of her inability to go ‘back to school’ – in a perverse irony, Iskef found al-Nusra used a former school near her home as a headquarters.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow Kit on Twitter @KitKlarenberg
UK Labour Party demands online crackdown on ‘anti-vax disinformation’ ahead of Covid-19 vaccine rollout
RT | November 15, 2020
With the UK preparing for a Covid-19 vaccine rollout, the Labour Party is calling for emergency censorship legislation to punish social-media companies if they allow posting of what it considers to be “anti-vax disinformation.”
“Social-media companies have a pitiful record of tackling disinformation,” shadow culture secretary Jo Stevens said Sunday on Twitter.
“The government needs to stop dragging its heels and force companies to remove this dangerous content ahead of the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine.”
Stevens and Labour’s shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, have co-authored a letter demanding that the government impose financial and criminal penalties on social-media platforms that fail to censor anti-vaccine posts.
The government must “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,” Ashworth said. He added that the government will need “strong public-health messaging” to ensure that legitimate questions are answered and fears are allayed.
Facebook, Twitter and Google agreed last week to help the UK’s government blunt the spread of vaccine misinformation and disinformation. The companies promised to help spread government-promoted messaging about vaccine safety and to ensure quick response to content that has been flagged by health officials. They also agreed to block people from profiting on anti-vaccine content. But Stevens and Ashworth said that anti-vax groups that were flagged months ago to social-media platforms remain active.
The UK has ordered 40 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, and it aims to get emergency approval to start distribution by next month. But Labour’s push to censor discussion that it deems false is raising concern that proper scrutiny of the vaccine won’t be allowed in a country that was forced to pay settlements to patients who suffered brain damage resulting from the H1N1 vaccine in 2009.
“This is scary,” writer Sue Cook tweeted. “Censorship? If we objectively want to investigate issues around the safety of a particular vaccination before rolling it out, surely that’s good. It is not a matter of being ‘anti-vax.’”
Former Labour MP Ruth Smeeth, who now heads a free-speech group called the Index on Censorship, argued that “rational argument will be lost” if anti-vaccine discussion is pushed underground. “Surely the answer isn’t to ban the anti-vaxxers but to explain why they are wrong on every available platform,” she said.
Trump, COVID-19, UK Lockdowns, And The Great Reset
By Andrew Korbyko | One World | November 14, 2020
COVID-19 And Lockdown
[…] the onus is on Johnson and his government to prove that lockdowns and social distancing measures work. And we are now 8 months down the line and the picture is clearer.
The statistics show that this virus has a mortality rate comparable with the flu. There has been no evidence which shows that lockdown measures such as social distancing or masks have had any effect. And numerous scientists confirm that the pandemic ended in late spring and there is no ‘second wave’. The government is conducting huge numbers of PCR tests with false positive rates which cast doubt over their use.
These tests are identifying more ’cases’, the majority of which have no symptoms or are picking up other remnants of virus in our bodies.
My judgement is that Johnson and his government have not discharged the onus of proof at any level since the virus took hold in early spring. In fact, the sheer volume of evidence which has been produced since has made a mockery of the government’s data, its interpretation, the ‘science’, and perhaps most crucially in terms of the totally disproportionate effect on physical and mental health, education, and the economy.
In summary, the government hasn’t produced a bare morsel of evidence and at times their arguments have been akin to saying the moon is made of cheese and expecting everyone to believe it, this illusion sustained by the fear and panic they’ve created. Even if their figures stood up to proper scrutiny, the effects of the measures in terms of collateral damage far outweigh any benefits the measures have had. Put simply, it is a scandal on a scale never seen before.
The Great Reset
The Great Reset is an agenda which promotes a social and economic ‘reset’ in countries around the world. It’s a not a new agenda and this is not meant to be some new revelation. The question is, does the evidence now suggest this agenda is currently being implemented under the guise of a pandemic?
Following a more recent look at the so-called ‘reset’ agenda, for me the puzzle pieces have now slotted in place.
Earlier on, I believed that gross stupidity, incompetence, and trying to find an exit strategy without exposure were the most logical reasons behind the COVID-19 decision making.
Initially, I couldn’t reconcile the differences in states in the world and measures taken by each government towards even a loosely co-ordinated agenda of economic and social reset.
The first reason I believe we are heading towards some type of economic and social reset promoted by unelected billionaires and other technocrats is because after 8 months it is now too much of a stretch to accept repeated stupidity and incompetence as reasons. The decision-making at every turn has been the opposite of what would have made the most sense when dealing with a pandemic.
My view is that they have used COVID-19 as a convenient vehicle to push through the reset agenda.
The mainly circumstantial but I think strong evidence concerns the agenda of the World Economic Forum (WEF), particularly (Klaus Schwab, who resembles a James Bond villain. This organisation makes no secret of the reset and the discussions it held at previous events attended by world leaders.
Biden and Johnson have adopted the same slogans of this organisation, such as ‘build back better’. The agenda is presented as dealing with climate change and other challenges such as sustainability, wealth distribution, and social justice. But it is all very sinister when you realise who might be involved and what the likely details are.
The World Health Organisation, the United Nations, and unelected billionaires like Bill Gates and Prince Charles seem to be driving this agenda.
As many of us will be aware, the state-affiliated giants Twitter and Facebook are censoring and banning people, including scientists who dispute the COVID-19 narrative and question lockdowns.
The BBC and mainstream media have taken it upon themselves to ‘fact-check’ the more outlandish theories about COVID-19 while ignoring valid concerns over the accuracy of government data and proportion. Therefore, the impression is created that all people who oppose lockdowns are anti-vaccine or conspiracy theorists. This coverage is now very noticeable for its bias, suggesting co-ordination between state and media.
The many references to COVID-19 by the WEF and administering vaccines and talk of issuing health passports are probably one of the most disturbing aspects and resemble China’s social credit system, a system which operates on social control, compliance, and sanctions.
This so-called ‘New World Order’ seems to be geared towards transferring wealth to the elites running it in exchange for debt relief and eventually to a society where individuals don’t own property.
In order to create this new world and get people’s acceptance, I believe a climate of fear, control, and dependence on the state is their early goal. Small businesses have been destroyed and health ruined under the cloak of a false ‘second wave’ pandemic. The constant exaggeration and misrepresentation of the data and science by the government is to keep the fraud going towards implementation of these plans.
The global elites haven’t yet fully declared their hand. But the subtle messages appearing all around us and collective material about the reset are there in plain sight for those who care to look. The circumstantial evidence, including how the COVID-19 pandemic has played out to fit in with this agenda, is too substantial to ignore.
In summary, if this is the agenda, then it is nothing less than a global coup.
Conclusion
In my previous article, I suggested that the general public should take time to calmly reflect on the evidence. Since then, there has been an awakening with more people calling out the faulty science and destructive measures.
But as we move into a worrying new phase, I think we need to put the message out that a sinister agenda seems to be playing out in the shadows. Our economy, health, and lives have been deliberately wrecked in its pursuit. I don’t believe this is about COVID-19, if it ever was.
The questions which remain for me are how far developed is this plan, how powerful are those behind it, and how far have their tentacles spread within the corridors of power and state institutions?
Once these plans become more obvious to us through awakening and realisation or through implementation, the question will then be whether it can be stopped in its tracks or if mass civil unrest be the scenario?
I believe the US election is tied into the COVID-19 pandemic. If Biden steps into power, then the reset could be a reality. With Trump, there’s perhaps a chance it can be stopped.
It wouldn’t surprise me with this going on that the forces which have been trying to remove Trump for 4 years have massively rigged the election.
No matter what political side you are on, it’s important not to dismiss the likelihood that there has been an assault on democracy in the US and certainly a high probability that it’s already well underway here and elsewhere. – Full article
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
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.
Ongoing legal battle over 2005 UK police killing brings to light covert op to smear victim justice campaigns
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | November 10, 2020
On July 22, 2005, Jean Charles de Menezes was executed by armed police on a London Underground train. He was quickly found innocent, but his family’s fight for justice goes on, exposing police efforts to dodge responsibility.
Due to a litany of catastrophic blunders and miscommunications by senior officials and officers on-the-ground, he’d been wrongly identified as one of the fugitives involved in a string of failed suicide bombings the previous day.
Followed by a team of plainclothes police from his home to nearby Stockwell Underground station, despite clear orders from Metropolitan Police ‘Gold Command’ he be apprehended, Jean Charles was shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder at close range in an underground train carriage. His body was said to be “unrecognizable” afterwards.
Lying squad
In the immediate aftermath, confusion and hysteria abounded, thanks largely to contradictory witness accounts and numerous “off-record” briefings from police being eagerly and uncritically amplified and speculated upon over and again by the mainstream media.
The day after his killing, it was fully established that Jean Charles hadn’t been a bombing suspect, and was in fact entirely innocent. Yet news outlets seemed oddly determined to imply he wasn’t entirely guiltless.
It was widely reported that he’d been an illegal immigrant, wires had been trailing from his rucksack, he’d been acting dubiously, fled from police after being challenged, vaulted the station ticket barriers, and refused to stop running despite shouted demands from officers.
All of these stories were entirely untrue, and widely acknowledged to be false over the course of subsequent months, but these impressions endure to this day in the minds of many. Suspiciously, the stories all seemed purpose-built to cast doubt on Jean Charles’ actions and character, and in the process mitigate the seriousness of the police’s fatal errors.
A subsequent investigation of Jean Charles’ killing by the then-Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) specifically examined the question of how these lies entered the public domain.
It determined that no officer had knowingly fed disinformation to the press, but somewhat contradictorily, concluded that once officials knew Jean Charles was innocent the morning of July 23, 2005, “they should have refrained from publicly discussing the shooting until… the facts had been fully established.”
“Whilst [police] admitted to having made a tragic mistake they continued to try to justify the shooting by referring to de Menezes’ own actions and clothing,” the IPCC added.
The same probe concluded none of the officers involved would face disciplinary charges, while criticising the Metropolitan Police’s command structure. As of November 2020, no one has ever been criminally prosecuted for their actions on that fateful day.
Without knowledge or consent
Jean Charles’ family have never given up their quest for British police to be held accountable for his killing. In August 2005, they launched a campaign, Justice4Jean, calling for a public inquiry into his “unlawful killing.”
Shockingly, in 2014 they were contacted by representatives of Operation Herne, which was investigating the activities of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a now-defunct covert unit of Special Branch, Britain’s elite national security police force. They were told information about them and their campaign had been inappropriately gathered by undercover operatives.
Among them was Patricia Armani Da Silva, Jean Charles’ first cousin and flatmate, who’d played a prominent role in Justice4Jean since its foundation. At a subsequent meeting with Herne investigators, she and other family members were shown five heavily redacted intelligence reports. The documents recorded covertly obtained information about individuals connected with the campaign and its meetings. For reasons unclear, the details gathered included the family’s political views.
In October 2015, Patricia was granted core participant status in the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI), established by then-home secretary Theresa May to investigate numerous controversies surrounding the British state’s use of clandestine operatives.
Despite offering to actively participate with the investigation and two judicial reviews into her surveillance, in 2020 Patricia remains entirely in the dark as to why she, her relatives, and their campaign, were spied on by police. Now the UCPI has finally begun hearing evidence, and an opening statement on her behalf was read to the Inquiry on November 9 by Phillipa Kaufmann QC.
She outlined the immensely distressing impact mendacious media allegations had on Jean Charles’ family at the time, as they knew it highly unlikely their law-abiding, respectable son could have done anything wrong. She also noted they often relive the pain of the dark, harrowing period following his death, as they still encounter those bogus allegations, and are frequently forced to counter erroneous perceptions that Jean Charles in some way contributed to his own killing.
Moreover though, Kaufmann made it clear that the family are adamant police were fundamental to the dissemination of these stories, and continued to perfidiously pump discrediting disinformation about Jean Charles into the public domain long after he was so brutally slain.
For example, at the start of 2006, it was widely reported that a woman had approached police and claimed a man bearing a “striking resemblance” to Jean Charles had sexually assaulted her in a hotel room on New Year’s Eve 2002 in West London. After initially refusing, his family consented to a blood sample being taken from Jean Charles’ autopsy for forensic tests, and in April that year, Scotland Yard announced he’d been fully exonerated.
Strikingly, Kaufmann revealed that in March 2006, Patricia’s solicitor Harriet Wistrich received a telephone call from DI Paul Settle informing her that an article detailing the woman’s allegations would soon be published by the Sunday Mirror. Moreover, Wistrich clearly recalls that Settle “gave the unambiguous impression” the article was a result of a police leak.
The matter was investigated by the Metropolitan Police Service’s Directorate of Professional Standards, under the supervision of the IPCC. Settle denied having suggested the information was leaked by police, and the probe halted after concluding the number of people who knew of the allegations, including those outside the police, meant further investigation was unlikely to identify its source.
Undermining campaigning efforts
To say the least, Jean Charles’ relatives well understand the critical role that information and disinformation play in shaping public narratives about police action.
It’s in this context that undercover surveillance of the family justice campaign gains an even more sinister dimension. Illicitly obtained private information about them could easily be weaponised to discredit them and undermine their battle, in the same way disinformation served to discredit Jean Charles and by implication exonerate police.
In all, undercover officers spied on at least 18 family justice campaigns between 1968 and 2011. Such a profusion suggests a clear pattern of behaviour, a pattern in turn plausibly influenced by established internal policy. However, police consistently seek to characterise surveillance of justice campaigns as mere ‘collateral intrusion’ – inadvertent and unintentional intelligence gathering by covert operatives investigating individuals involved, rather than direct and deliberate targeting of grieving relatives themselves.
Families are deeply sceptical of this explanation, particularly in light of the revelations of former undercover officer Peter Francis, who as ‘Pete Black’ infiltrated 12 separate justice campaigns between 1993 and 1997. In 2010, under the alias ‘Officer A’, he said his presence in these groups was specifically intended to make the truth they sought “harder to obtain,” as part of a wider wrecking tendency on the part of SDS. Once the unit infiltrated an organisation, it was “effectively finished,” he claims.
In later years, Francis identified himself publicly, and shed further light on his undercover activities, particularly in regard to the Stephen Lawrence justice campaign, set up after the South London teenager was murdered in a cold-blooded racist attack. He alleged he was specifically tasked with unearthing incriminating information on Stephen’s parents and friends, which could halt their crusade in its tracks.
“Had I… found anything detrimental, the police using the media would’ve used that information to smear the family. My superiors were after any intelligence of that order. That was made clear to me. The Lawrences weren’t unique in this. I suggest journalists read some of the information leaked to the press at the time about these campaigns and seriously question where they came from and why,” he has claimed.
Kaufmann said that for Patricia, there was a “chilling parallel” between the disinformation about her cousin perpetuated in public, and Francis’ accounts of seeking out dishonouring dirt at his superiors’ behest.
While an individual spied-upon campaign may not be able to prove particular information was disseminated as part of a deliberate police strategy to smear them, if this is provably a common experience across many such groups, then defences of accidental error, or denial of attribution, on the part of the police by definition become very difficult to maintain.
“The inquiry is asked to scrutinise very carefully, with a penetrating sceptical gaze, the purported explanation advanced by the [police] for undercover reporting on justice campaigns… Patricia asks the inquiry to seek out the evidence of those involved in the campaigns and consider whether there are common aspects of their experiences which call into question those denials,” Kauffman concluded.
Isolated examples of disinformation about victims of police misconduct circulated by news outlets may be dismissed as perverse mishaps, the result of misunderstandings, breakdowns in communication, overzealous officials carelessly hypothesising beyond available evidence. Repeated instances of information on these groups and their members being secretly obtained and committed to internal police documents raise obvious questions over ulterior motives and ultimate objectives.
Patricia has waited over 15 years for justice in respect of Jean Charles’ killing, and over six to learn the truth about the police surveillance of her and her family. She’s now forced to wait even longer to see whether the UCPI delivers the answers she so deserves. Inquiry hearings related to police undercover activities between 1993 and 2007 are only expected to commence in the first half of 2023.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow Kit on Twitter @KitKlarenberg
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From the Archives
Neocons confess: “We did 9/11-anthrax”
By Kevin Barrett | Press TV | September 6, 2014
As the 13th anniversary of the crimes of September, 2001 approaches, the neoconservatives are shrieking from the rooftops – and effectively confessing that they were the real perpetrators of the 9/11-Anthrax false flag operation. (The neocons, you may recall, openly called for a “new Pearl Harbor” in September, 2000 – and got one exactly one year later.)
Every year at this time, the neocons orchestrate and hype a series of public relations stunts designed to magnify fears of “radical Islam” and reinforce their crumbling 9/11-Anthrax cover story. But this year’s propaganda campaign is so extreme that it represents a tacit confession: The neocons know that the truth about the 9/11-Anthrax operation is slowly closing in on them; so they are over-reacting by desperately trying to stoke the dying embers of the so-called War on Terror, in order to maintain the myth that Muslims (rather than neoconservative Zionists) attacked America in the autumn of 2001.
When a hysterical person exhibits guilty demeanor by trying too hard to blame a crime on someone else, that person is almost certainly the real perpetrator. As the neocons try much too hard to blame Islam for 9/11 and “terrorism” in general, their hysteria inadvertently reveals their own culpability. Like Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth, the neoconservative movement has blood on its hands and “doth protest too much.” … continue
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