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‘Get out now or risk the consequences’: US threatens investors in Russian energy projects

RT | July 15, 2020

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has warned investors to ditch two major Russian gas pipeline projects, Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream, or face Washington’s sanctions.

Speaking at a news conference on Wednesday, Pompeo said that the State Department is set to update “CAATSA [Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act] to include the Nord Stream 2 and the second line of Turkstream 2” pipelines. The move is set to put any investments in those projects at risk of sanctions.

“It’s a clear warning to companies that aiding and abetting Russian malign influence projects will not be tolerated. Get out now or risk the consequences,” he warned.

The threat comes as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the Baltic Sea nears completion, with ships able to lay the final kilometers of the pipeline already spotted in the area. Earlier this month, the Danish energy regulator allowed the operator of the project – Nord Stream 2 AG – to use ships with anchor positioning, expanding earlier rules that allowed it to use only vessels equipped with a dynamic positioning system. The construction can be resumed next month, after the time to appeal the decision expires.

The project, set to boost Russian gas supplies to Europe, stalled at the end of last year after a similar US sanctions threat. Back then, Swiss-Dutch pipelaying firm Allseas withdrew its vessels from the area, forcing Russia to finish the remaining part on its own.

Russia and both of which heavily invested in the project along with other European nations, have repeatedly criticized the US for interfering with the project. In June, Berlin said that new sanctions against the project will amount to “a serious interference in European energy security and EU sovereignty.”

The other Russian energy project mentioned by Pompeo, TurkStream, was officially launched in January. The two-string natural gas pipeline has the total capacity of 31.5 billion cubic meters, with one line supplying Turkey and the other – the one that could fall under US restrictions – transferring gas to southern and southeastern Europe.

July 15, 2020 Posted by | Economics | , , | Leave a comment

Iran oil revenue dips but future holds bright promises

Press TV – July 15, 2020

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) says Iran’s revenue from total crude oil exports and oil products in 2019 was just over $19 billion, less than a third of the previous year.

According to the organization’s annual report, Iran’s income from selling oil and oil products amounted to 60.5 billion in 2018, while it was $110 billion in 2011.

Iran’s average daily crude oil exports last year were 651,000 barrels per day, of which about 60,000 barrels went to Turkey and the rest to Asia, it said. In 2018, the figure was 1.85, and in 2017 more than 2.1 million barrels per day.

Iran’s oil industry is at the forefront of an economic war with the United States which has pledged to bring Tehran’s crude exports down to zero. The Islamic Republic exported around one million bpd until May 2019, when the United States tightened its sanctions, banning all oil exports from Iran.

The Iranian economy has been carrying on at a relatively steady clip after a period of turmoil when the Trump administration unleashed its most ferocious economic attack on the country in November 2018 with a pledge to sink its oil exports to zero.

According to OPEC, Iran also exported about 285,000 bpd of oil products including diesel and fuel oil last year.

Barring oil products, revenues from Iran’s crude oil exports last year were less than $9 billion, government officials have said.

The OPEC report said Iran’s total oil and non-oil exports reached $69 billion last year, down about a third from 2018.

Early this year, Industry Minister Hossein Modares Khiabani, then a deputy, told an exports quality summit in Tehran that Iran had exported $32 billion of non-oil goods in the 10 months up to January, shoring up its economy amid the unprecedented US sanctions.

“This is like a miracle in the current economic situation of the country,” he said. “Non-oil exports have almost replaced oil exports, and the country is governed by the revenues of the non-oil sector,” he added.

The Trump administration is tweaking the contours of its sanctions regime to put more aspects of the Iranian economy under strain.

In recent months, the US Treasury Department has announced new sanctions against Iran’s air and maritime transport industries, construction, manufacturing, textiles, mining, aluminum, copper, iron and steel industries to hit much of Iran’s economy as well as Chinese companies that have conducted business with Iran.

Iran-China partnership

China has long been Iran’s largest trading partner and the Islamic Republic is one of its major suppliers of oil. US officials have reportedly been working behind the scenes to pressure China into halting all its oil and condensate imports from Iran.

But recent reports of an imminent finalization of a roadmap for strategic partnership have put the kibosh on those reports.

On Sunday, The New York Times said the sweeping economic and security partnership would clear the way for billions of dollars of Chinese investments in energy and other sectors, undercutting the Trump administration’s efforts to isolate the Islamic Republic.

The paper said it had obtained details of an 18-page proposed agreement that would vastly expand Chinese presence in banking, telecommunications, ports, railways and dozens of other projects. In exchange, China would receive a regular supply of Iranian oil over the next 25 years, it said.

The partnership — first proposed by China’s leader Xi Jinping, during a visit to Iran in 2016 — was approved by President Hassan Rouhani’s cabinet in June, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said last week.

The deal “represents a major blow to the Trump administration’s aggressive policy toward Iran since abandoning the nuclear deal reached in 2015 by President Obama and the leaders of six other nations after two years of grueling negotiations,” The Times said.

Renewed American sanctions, including the threat to cut off access to the international banking system for any company that does business in Iran, have prompted Tehran to turn to China, which has the technology and appetite for oil that Iran needs.

China gets about 75 percent of its oil from abroad and is the world’s largest importer, at more than 10 million barrels a day last year.

The Chinese investments in Iran would reportedly total $400 billion over 25 years. China will invest $280 billion developing Iran’s oil, gas and petrochemicals sectors. There will be another $120 billion investment in upgrading Iran’s transport and manufacturing infrastructure.

Such an infusion would certainly help to revive Iran’s economy and create more jobs, according to Shireen Hunter, an affiliate fellow at the Georgetown University Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

“A major reason for Iran’s shift towards China and other Asian countries, known locally as the ‘pivot to the East’, has been the failure of Iran’s repeated efforts, beginning with the administration of Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, to expand economic relations with the West as a prelude to better political ties,” she wrote on the Middle East Eye news website.

Hunter cited the latest of Iran’s offers after the signing of the nuclear deal in 2015, including for buying Boeing and Airbus aircraft and welcoming American and European companies such as Total into the country – to which the West responded negatively.

“If the Iran-China agreement is implemented, it would revive Iran’s economy and stabilize its politics. Such an economic and political recovery would improve Iran’s regional position and perhaps incentivize adversaries to reduce tensions with Tehran, instead of blindly following US policies. Arab states could rush to make their own special deals with China,” she wrote.

“By pursuing an entirely hostile policy towards Iran, the US has limited its strategic choices in Southwest Asia and thus been manipulated by some of its local partners, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE. China’s more pronounced interest in Iran should alert the US to review its past approach towards Tehran,” she added.

July 15, 2020 Posted by | Economics, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

India should not participate in Washington-led anti-China coalition

By Lucas Leiroz | July 13, 2020

For years, the US, Japan and India have maintained Malabar military exercises on an annual basis. As the US and Japan are absolutely aligned countries and India is a Washington regional strategic partner, the common objective of the three participants is to face the Chinese advance and to strengthen a coalition against Beijing and its presence in the Indian Ocean. Now, with the increasing of tensions between China and the United States for naval supremacy and between China and India for territorial reasons, Malabar exercises take on a new dimension, being the moment of greatest risk of war in the region in recent years.

Since 2017, Australia has asked to join Malabar naval exercises. The US and Japan have already voted in favor of the Australian participation, but India has not allowed it – the US, Japan and India are the permanent members of the tests and the adherence of a new country depends on a unanimous vote. There was a logistical disagreement between India and Australia, which prevented them from reaching a consensus on the execution of the exercises. In June, both countries signed a mutual logistical support agreement, thus removing the obstacle to Australian participation. Now, as the impasse with China increases, India can change its vote and finally approve Australian participation. The result would be an even stronger coalition scenario against China, which would certainly respond accordingly.

Beijing will not allow its oceanic region to be the target of powerful military exercises by enemy powers without offering high-level war tests in return. China has recently reached an advanced stage of naval military power, practically equaling American power by crossing the International Date Line. In addition, China has significantly increased its military campaign in the South China Sea and has built a large fleet for the Arctic. It is this adversary that the Malabar coalition is facing when promoting a siege in the Indian Ocean. So, what will happen if China invests even more in naval power, modernizing its Navy and devoting itself to a military strategy focused on maritime defense?

On the other hand, Beijing’s reaction may be different and even more effective: investing in Sino-Pakistani military cooperation to affect India. If China and Pakistan start joint naval exercises in the Indian Ocean, a coalition dispute will form, in which both groups will begin a series of regular tests and demonstrations of strength, seeking to intimidate each other.

In all scenarios, a central point is inevitable: the increase of tensions and violence in the Indian Ocean. Perhaps this is, in fact, the American desire in the region, taking into account that the increase in the crisis will inevitably forge the strengthening of the anti-China coalition and its ties with Washington, in addition to encouraging regional reactions from the Chinese Navy and delaying Beijing’s global projections – like the Chinese presence in the Arctic, for example. Having been subjected to the American naval umbrella for decades, Japanese and Australian participation is predictable and it is not surprising that Tokyo and Canberra support aggressive operations against China in the Indian Ocean. However, the same cannot be said about India.

India should not be part of a Washington-led coalition against China. The rivalry between India and China is different from the dispute between the US and China, and the mere fact that Beijing looks like a “common enemy” does not justify a coalition. China and India have an historic dispute of a territorial nature – a regional conflict over a physical, continental space. This is different from the American quest for global hegemony – to which China poses a threat today. China and India have much more in common than opposites: both are emerging Asian nations, with enormous growth potential and which aim to increase their degree of participation in the international scene, at the economic and geopolitical level. Washington, in this sense, is against both – because it seeks to preserve unipolarity and the American global dominance. Beijing and New Delhi can reach a common agreement sovereignly, with regional negotiations and bilateral diplomacy, as, in fact, they have been doing recently, resulting in the reduction of the border violence and the evacuation of troops.

By maintaining its participation in the exercises and encouraging the growth of the coalition, India will be making a big mistake – both in its relations with China and in its relations with Pakistan. Japan and Australia are nations willing to collaborate with American hegemony – India is not. The best path to be taken by the Indians is the abdication from the Malabar exercises, or, if it is not possible, at least, to prevent the Australian entry again, avoiding the strengthening of the anti-China alliance.

Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

July 13, 2020 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

The American Empire’s Disastrous Defeat in 1942

Tales of the American Empire | January 16, 2020

The American defense of the Philippines in 1942 is remembered as a valiant effort to hold off the unstoppable Japanese Army. The conquest of the Philippines by Japan is the worst major military defeat in United States history. After just four months of fighting, over 23,000 American military personnel were killed or captured, while embedded Filipino soldiers killed or captured totaled over 100,000. The soldiers fought well, but the overall defense plan was horribly incompetent resulting in a rapid defeat by a smaller Japanese force.

_____________________________________

“The Fall of the Philippines”; Louis Morton; US Army History Center; 1953; https://history.army.mil/books/wwii/5…

“Reports of General MacArthur”; Department of the Army: 1950; https://history.army.mil/books/wwii/M…

“Malaria and the Defense of Bataan”; MEDICAL DEPARTMENT UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II; Department of the Army; concludes that malaria and malnutrition caused more casualties than Japanese invaders. https://history.amedd.army.mil/booksd…

“Douglas MacArthur Is One of America’s Most Famous Generals. He’s Also the Most Overrated”; Time; Nov. 11, 2019; https://time.com/5724009/douglas-maca…

July 12, 2020 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

US military convoy blown up in Iraq’s Diwaniyah: Reports

Press TV – July 11, 2020

A US military convoy carrying logistic supplies has been attacked in Iraq on the road between Samawah and Diwaniyah, south of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, local media reports say.

At least three vehicles of the convoy were reportedly destroyed or damaged in the attack which occurred at 10 pm (local time) on Saturday.

Some media reports say the convoy has been targeted by a remote-controlled VBIED.

The convoy was reportedly traveling between the cities of Diwaniyah in Al-Qadisiyyah province and Svehiclein Muthanna province.

The videos and images released of the incident suggest that the vehicles caught fire following the attack.

It is not immediately clear if any casualties were incurred.

The newly formed Iraqi group, Saraya Thawrat al-Eshreen al-Thaniya, has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Anti-US sentiments have been running high in Iraq since Washington assassinated top Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani and the second-in-command of the Iraqi popular mobilization units, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in January.

Following the attack, Iraqi lawmakers unanimously approved a bill on January 5, demanding the withdrawal of all foreign troops.

Baghdad and Washington are currently in talks over the withdrawal of American troops.

Iraqi resistance groups have vowed to take up arms against US forces if Washington fails to comply with the parliamentary order.

Video footage

July 11, 2020 Posted by | Illegal Occupation | , | Leave a comment

A Few Historical Frauds

Einstein, Bell & Edison, Coca-Cola and the Wright Brothers

By Larry Romanoff • Moon of Shanghai • July 11, 2020

There are only two nations in the world whose existence seems to be founded primarily on historical myths. In the US, false historical mythology permeates every nook and cranny of the American psyche, the result of more than 100 years of astonishing and unconscionable programming and propaganda, a massive crime against an entire population. This condition pertains not only to past events we think of as history, but to the extent that most items permitting Americans to “feel good by being an American” are fabricated Disney fairytales. This essay is a brief introduction to only a minor aspect of this subject.

In the introduction to my series of books (soon to be published) I wrote that “Perhaps 90%, or even 95%, of everything we know, or think that we know, or that we believe to be true about history, is wrong. To express this another way, if we were to take the history of the entire world for the past 500 years and compress it into a book of 100 pages, a full 50 of those pages would be blank. That is the extent to which our true history has been suppressed, entirely deleted from the record and from our consciousness. Of the remaining 50 pages, 45 are false in whole or in part, photoshopped, sanitised, twisted, and with critical details omitted to deliberately lead the public to the wrong conclusions.”[1]

Einstein, the Mythical Genius

One of the greatest mythical frauds in history is that of Albert Einstein, the famous physicist who invented the Theory of Relativity, E=mc² and so many other esoteric things. But this is all fabrication. The claims about Einstein inventing any theory of relativity, or light and photons, or time, are false. Almost every claim – almost everything – attributed to Einstein is simply a lie. Einstein was an inept who contributed nothing original to the field of quantum mechanics, nor any other science. Far from being a competent physicist, he once even flatly denied that the atom could be split and, much later, admitted that the idea of a chain reaction in fissile material “had never occurred to me”.[2][3]

Einstein was a third-class clerk at the government patent office in Bern, and never progressed beyond this level even with years of experience. By all contemporary reports, Einstein wasn’t even an accomplished mathematician. It has been well documented that much of the mathematical content of Einstein’s so-called theories were well beyond his ability. Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute, stated that Einstein’s first wife Mileva Marić was a “Serbian physicist who had helped him with (his) math . . .”[4] Other prominent scientists have made the claim that his wife did most of his math for him.

Henri Poincaré was the foremost expert on relativity in the late 19th century and the first person to formally present the theories, having published more than 30 books and over 500 papers on the topics. Extensive documentation exists that Einstein and his associates had studied Poincaré’s theories and mathematics for years, yet when Einstein published his almost wholly-plagiarised versions he made no reference whatever to these other works.

In the accepted historical account, Einstein is credited with having written the correct field equations for general relativity, an enormous falsehood. It is an undisputed fact that David Hilbert sent Einstein a draft of his work (which had already been submitted for publication), containing precisely these equations, evidenced by the existence of a letter from Einstein to Hilbert thanking him for doing so. Yet a few weeks later, Einstein delivered a public speech of Hilbert’s work, claiming full credit for the derivation of Hilbert’s equations. Similarly, E=mc², the famous equation relating mass, energy, and the speed of light, had been published several times by Italian physicist Olinto De Pretto, long before Einstein was suddenly given credit for it. In multiple thorough reviews of scientific literature, prominent scientists have unanimously stated that there is “absolutely nothing to connect Einstein to the derivation of this formula.”[5]

Einstein’s papers, theories, mathematics, documentation, were almost 100% plagiarised from others. He combined the prior published works of several people into one paper and claimed ownership of all of it. His so-called theories were nothing more than a composition encompassing the prior work of men like James Maxwell, Hendrik Lorentz, Joseph Larmor, Olinto De Pretto, Robert Brown, Ludwig Boltzmann, Friedrich Hasenöhrl, and many more.

In a paper he wrote in 1907, in part responding to (already-virulent) accusations of plagiarism, Einstein declared that plagiarism was perfectly acceptable as a form of ethical research, stating “… the nature [of physics is] that what follows has already been partly solved by other authors. I am [therefore] entitled to leave out a thoroughly pedantic survey of the literature…”[6][7][8] In other words, scientists all build on each others’ work, so Einstein could freely compile the work of everyone before him and re-present it as his own, with no obligation to even mention them or their work. His view of ethical science was like building a tower where each person adds one stone and, if I add the last stone, I not only take credit for the entire design and construction of the tower, but I own the building.

Perhaps the most damning evidence was when in 1953 Sir Edmund Whittaker published a very detailed account of the origin and development of all these theories and equations of physics, with extensive reference to the primary sources, documenting beyond doubt that Einstein had no priority in any of it, and clearly stating so. Einstein was alive and well when Whittaker published his book, yet he offered no dispute to the conclusions, no refutation of Whittaker’s claim that he (Einstein) had been irrelevant to the entire process. Einstein made no attempts in his own defense but simply hid in the bushes and refused to make any public comment whatever.[9]

Einstein was almost certainly the greatest fraud and plagiarist in modern science, an unashamed intellectual thief but, according to sources like Wikipedia, this is all just a minor “priority dispute” about who said what first in the realm of relativity physics. These sources misleadingly imply that several people made a discovery independently and more or less simultaneously, and we are simply debating who went public first. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Wikipedia is renowned as being virtually useless as an information source due to widespread ideological bias and censorship.

Einstein was Jewish and had the support of the Jewish-controlled media who conspired to create yet another historical myth. His fame and popularity today, his status as a hero of the scientific world, are due only to decades of a well-planned force-feeding of the Einstein myth to the masses by the media. The propaganda machine simply airbrushed out of the history books all the physicists who formulated these theories, and credited everything to Einstein. Without the extravagant generations-long PR and propaganda campaign, Einstein would have remained in the dustbin of obscurity where he belongs.

There are many Einstein apologists who produce reams of heavily-documented irrelevancies masquerading as proof, items such as a schoolmate who claimed “the flight of his mathematical genius was so high that I could no longer follow.” Many scientists and scientific historians know the truth of all this, and the accurate historical record is readily available, but many appear afraid to speak out for fear of damaging their careers. I have put the question to several prominent physicists in different countries, eliciting similar responses, namely that “it will not further one’s career to open a debate which will inevitably produce a tsunami of invective and slander, to say nothing of accusations of anti-Semitism.”

Time Magazine published more than a dozen issues on Einstein, including a special Collector’s Edition, and even ran an issue naming Einstein the “Person of the Century”. As with all other American heroes, the PR machine has worked for decades to embellish the myth with a collection of possibly hundreds of wise sayings attributed to this man where there is absolutely no historical evidence he ever said any of those things. The NYT published an article on a small cleverly-selected scientific dispute, in which it claimed “Findings Back Einstein in a Plagiarism Dispute”.[10] And thus is history spun by those who control the microphone. This is why so many pages in our history book consist of misrepresentations and omitted facts, painting a picture so considerably at odds with the truth. As with Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers and so many others, the false historical myths have been so deeply entwined in American and world history that they cannot be unraveled.

Einstein, the “Man of Peace”

Similarly, there has been a great campaign by Einstein’s revisionist apologists to disavow his strong support for the development of the atomic bomb, claiming him to be “a man of peace”. I have copies of correspondence from Einstein where he stated his conviction that the United States should “demonstrate” the atomic bomb to disfavored foreign countries. In one letter to then-US President Roosevelt, he wrote, “… extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. I am convinced as to the wisdom and the urgency of creating the conditions under which that and related work can be carried out with greater speed and on a larger scale than hitherto”.[11]

That statement is part of one of Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt, suggesting he (Einstein) be “entrusted with the task” of managing the project. Roosevelt refused Einstein’s fervent requests to manage, or even to participate in, the project, because it was an open secret that nobody trusted him and the FBI had conducted extensive investigations against him. One FBI file labeled “Secret”, stated that Einstein was affiliated with 33 organisations which had been cited by the Attorney-General and/or Congress, as being politically suspect.

It is interesting that the respected National Geographic is one of the world’s worst publications for spinning historical fact and truth. In 2017, this magazine ran an article on Einstein claiming that Hoover and the FBI despised Einstein and built a 1,400-page file on him because “the world-famous physicist was outspoken against nuclear bombs”.[12][13]

The second portion of the same letter is rather more disturbing, and has to my knowledge never been publicly referenced anywhere. It clearly reveals that Einstein had had detailed discussions with some wealthy acquaintances in Europe who were eager to personally finance the US development of atomic bombs from their own pockets. Einstein was informing the President he had access to these individuals with whom he had already confirmed available funding, baiting Roosevelt with an offer that, should he be ‘entrusted’ with management of the bomb project, he could bring the necessary financing with him. He states that, as project manager, one of his tasks would be: “providing funds … through his contacts with private persons who are willing to make contributions for this cause.”

It would be appropriate for us to ask who were these “private persons” who had the money to finance the development of the world’s first atomic bombs, and why they would want to personally fund such a project. Einstein does not mention these individuals by name, but they would surely have been Jewish and who in Europe (in the 1930s) had the kind of money to offer open-ended funding for a scientific project the cost of which was unknown and unknowable, but clearly massive.[15] This offer was not spurred by patriotism but by the prospect of financial gain and control of both the technology and the application of this ‘science’. We can therefore further question who would have taken ownership of the technology, and who would have been the intended victims of this large personal investment.

One plausible theory; I would add here that many of Einstein’s propagandists and apologists have made repeated efforts to pass the blame for the development of the atomic bomb onto Enrico Fermi, another monstrous falsehood. The US government offered Fermi a cash payment of US$100,000[16] to lead the research and development of the atom bomb, but Fermi refused. I have seen a copy of a letter from Fermi to the US President claiming that something so evil had “no right to exist”. In fact, it was Oppenheimer and Szilard who led the development of what was almost in totality a Jewish project, so much so that for many years in scientific circles the atomic bomb was widely known as “The Jewish hell-bomb”.[17] I believe it was Eustace Mullins who first coined the phrase, and I believe it was he who first suggested there was “circumstantial but compelling evidence” that the Jewish motivation for offering to finance the A-bomb’s development was to take control of the technology and use it for Germany’s total destruction.”[18] The theory is more than plausible if you are familiar with the heavily-evidenced proposition that the underlying purpose of both world wars was the total destruction of Germany). You can understand why items like this are restricted to the blank pages in our history book.

Alexander Graham Bell – The Man Who Didn’t Invent the Telephone

History books tell us the famous American, Alexander Graham Bell, invented the telephone. This claim has only two flaws; Bell was Canadian, not American, and he did not invent the telephone.

An Italian named Antonio Meucci patented a working telephone many years before Bell did anything.[19] Bell had obtained copies of Meuci’s drawings and patents and had attempted to obtain US patents on Meuci’s phone. Meucci discovered Bell’s attempted patent of his invention and filed a lawsuit against Bell, in support of which he brought from Italy all his documents, working models, original sketches and his patent, to present to the court as evidence of his prior invention. The delivery company – Western Union – was charged with the responsibility as trustee to hold this evidence for delivery to the court, but all of it “amazingly disappeared without a trace immediately prior to the court hearing, leaving Meucci with no proof of anything and thus losing his lawsuit against Bell.” It is worth noting that at the time Bell was employed at the Western Union lab where Meucci’s evidence was being stored.

The Italians are still angry about this. The Italian Historical Association informed us that their investigation produced evidence of illegal relationships between employees of the patent office and Bell’s company. And later, during a lawsuit between Bell and Western Union, it was revealed Bell had agreed to pay Western Union 20% of all profits from ‘his’ telephone, for 17 years, representing millions of dollars, sufficient temptation for Western Union to justify “losing” Meucci’s invention. US media have fabricated at least dozens of tales excusing Bell, a common one that “due to hardships, Meucci could not renew his patent” and therefore Bell could take it, but in fact the US government filed charges against Bell for fraud because of his telephone patent, but powerful friends had the lawsuit delayed year after year until Meucci died.[20] American history books and sources like Wikipedia omit these critical facts and twist the remaining information, and thus Americans grow up believing yet one more false myth about their country and their innovative ability.

I would make a note here that when doing historical research we sometimes discover that the landscape has been so badly polluted by countless individuals amending details to conform to opinion or ideology (or patriotism) that it becomes nearly impossible to ferret out the actual facts without an extraordinary amount of work. In this case, some have claimed (without evidence) that Meucci lost his patent because he hadn’t the funds to renew it. Others ignore Meucci’s lawsuit against Bell and claim Bell delivered his phone patent and samples to Western Union for evaluation and who later claimed to have lost all of it. And so on. Here are several articles purporting to tell “the real truth”[21][22][23][24]

Thomas Edison – The Man Who Didn’t Invent Anything

Every American child is taught in school that the famous American Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, Wikipedia claiming that Edison was “the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the UK, France, and Germany”. Edison is given full credit for inventing the light bulb, electricity transmission, electric power utilities, sound recording and motion pictures. All these claims are completely false.[25] Not only was Edison not one of the most prolific inventors in history, he never invented anything. Edison himself made the statement: “patents 1047 – inventions 0”, in recognition of his situation.

The inventions for which Edison is credited by the Americans were all achieved by others, and his “1,093 US patents” were all either stolen, bullied, extorted or purchased from those same inventors. As another author pointed out, “a man who kidnaps or adopts 1,000 children can hardly be deemed the world’s most prolific father, and a man who steals 1,000 inventions and patents can hardly be deemed the world’s most prolific inventor”. Thomas Edison was unquestionably one of the world’s most prolific thieves, and widely known as a con-man and common thug who often resorted to threats and extortion, but he was no inventor. Edison was mostly just a thieving opportunist who extorted or stole everything that is listed to his credit, but in US history books Edison is revered in totally fabricated myths as the father of the light bulb and America’s most prolific inventor.

The light bulb had been invented by several people in Europe, one of whom, Heinrich Goebel, unsuccessfully tried selling it to Edison who claimed to see no value in it though he was more than happy to purchase the patent from Goebel’s estate when the man died, cheating his widow out of a substantial sum of money. In any case, another man, Joseph Wilson Swan developed and patented a working incandescent light bulb using a carbon filament 20 years before Edison made any such claim.[26][27] Edison first tried to steal Swan’s invention and, when that proved legally dangerous, he made Swan a minor partner in the Ediswan United Company, buying both Swan and his patented light bulb and claiming the invention for himself. Swan also invented sound recording and other items which are today credited to Edison.[28]

Every American is taught from birth that Edison labored for years, trying at least 1,000 different substances (some say 2,000) before he discovered that twisted carbon would function acceptably as the filament in a light bulb. The story is entirely false, a myth fabricated after the fact, a little religious morality play to support faith in the American Dream – that persistence and hard work will lead to unlimited fame and riches in the end. Edison did indeed try – and repeatedly failed – to create a light bulb, and he may well have attempted some of those filament trials. But all that is irrelevant because Swan had already proven the effectiveness of a carbon filament when Edison took ownership of his invention and patent.

Edison is given credit for the device which made x-rays possible, but the actual inventor was German scientist Wilhelm Roentgen who publicly displayed x-rays of his wife’s hand years prior to Edison’s fluoroscope. Similarly, Edison is given credit for inventing electrical transmission in various forms, but Nicola Tesla brought this invention to the US and offered it to Edison who took ownership of the process and patents under a promise of $50,000, then refused to pay Tesla and spent years in attempts to destroy his name and reputation.

The US-based Science website dismisses the entire truth about Edison in one cute sentence: “Even though many of his “inventions” were not unique – and he engaged in some well-publicized court battles with other inventors whose ideas he “borrowed” – Edison’s skill at marketing and using his [political] influence often got him the credit.”[29] And that means Edison patented items that already existed, created by others, and that had sometimes already been patented. Plus, he had a habit of stealing and patenting any ideas brought to him by other inventors. Hence, the lawsuits. But his marketing ability and some powerful political and judicial contacts kept him out of jail. Nevertheless, the myth has been so thoroughly weaved into American history, it could never be recalled.

The US government even issued a special silver dollar coin to commemorate Edison’s non-achievements. And we have an Edison museum complete with the requisite US flag, providing Americans with the unique opportunity to experience delusion and patriotism simultaneously. But the man did invent one thing the history books seem to have quietly deleted. Edison was a believer in spirits and regularly attended séances where mediums would receive and transmit messages from the dead. To more easily conduct these affairs, Edison invented a telephone that he claimed could talk to people in the spirit world, though he didn’t specify what numbers to dial. In a conversation with B.C. Forbes, the founder of Forbes magazine, Edison claimed, “I have been at work for some time building an apparatus … for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us”. No idea what the spirits said to him, and no idea why his promoters deleted this important item from the history of the world’s greatest inventor.[30]

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola, originally called Kola Coca, was invented more than 140 years ago in a small town in Spain, the creators of the formula for the world’s best-selling soft drink having been cheated of its ownership and billions of dollars. The process was a well-kept secret at the time and quickly became a world-famous product, winning dozens of international gold medals and other awards. Unfortunately, Bautista Aparici, one of the company’s founders, attended a trade fair in Philadelphia and made the mistake of giving a sample and a brief description of the process to an American he happened to meet, and a short time later US pharmacist John Pemberton changed the name to Coca-Cola and patented the product and process, the US government refusing to recognise the original Spanish patent.[31][32][33]

The official story is that this drink was “invented by Dr. John Smith Pemberton on May 8, 1886, at Atlanta, Georgia”, in the USA, and was named Coca-Cola because at that time it contained extracts of Coca leaves and Kola nuts, and that the company’s book-keeper renamed the drink because he thought the two ‘C’s’ would look better in advertising. None of that is true. The drink was indeed made from kola nuts and coca leaves, but the new name was a cheap attempt to differentiate itself after Pemberton stole and patented the original formula. All the stories about Pemberton inventing Coke’s secret formula in his laboratory are fabricated nonsense, with the company’s website cleverly designed to airbrush out the drink’s early history and avoid the truth becoming known. Beverage World magazine produced a special issue to commemorate the one-hundredth (American) anniversary of Coca-Cola, claiming Coke was:

“A totally American product born of a solid idea, nurtured throughout the past century with creative thinking and bold decision-making, and always plenty of good old-fashioned hard work. That is as it should be; it is the American way”.

Not by a long shot. Coca-Cola is just one of hundreds of products the Americans have stolen and patented with the full protection of their courts operating under the peculiarly American definition of ‘rule of law’. It isn’t widely-known, though well-documented, that for decades surrounding the turn of the last century, the US government offered between $20,000 and $50,000 to anyone who could steal a foreign patent or product, that amount representing a lifetime’s earnings for an average person.

To add insult to injury, Coca-Cola moved into Spain in 1953, sued the original Spanish owners, then bullied, extorted and bought the rights for a pittance, permitting the firm to continue producing only a single alcoholic beverage under their name. USA Today reported on this without even a hint of regret or shame about the rule of law or fair play or the evils of IP theft. Their only comment: “The Spanish factory has just four employees left and probably won’t last another generation.” Even more insultingly, ABC News dismisses this story as “The Spanish firm that inspired Coke”, although they do state correctly the claim: “Locals believe that the Spanish town of Aielo de Malferit is where Coca-Cola originated — and that the factory which developed the formula that inspired the world’s best-selling soda has been cheated of its rightful place in history. Not to mention profits.”[34]

The Wright Brothers

For more than 100 years, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington has had on display an aircraft that was piloted by Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1903 in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in man’s first powered, manned aircraft flight, Americans therefore having created “The Age of Flight”.

But that was never true, and the Smithsonian was in on the fraud from the very beginning. In an agreement with the Wright family to donate the aircraft to the Institution, its officials signed a pledge to perpetuate the story that the Wrights had made the first flight, when all present were fully aware the claim was false. And for more than 100 years the Smithsonian Institution of Historical Mythology, with the full support of the US government and the media, has done everything in its power to dismiss, contradict, and just ignore, extensive documentation of other prior flights in an effort to prevent the dethroning of America in the public mind.[35][36]

Several people have thoroughly researched the matter and have written authoritative books on other prior flights but these have been “denounced by leading aeronautic agencies” (like the Smithsonian Institution), with the authors dismissed as “unqualified” and their books “unreliable”. In fact, there were many prior flights, some in Europe, Canada, South America, and others in the US itself, and the Smithsonian was fully aware of this. Recently, the editors of the authoritative Jane’s Aircraft firmly declared that Gustave Whitehead had flown years before the Wright Brothers. Alberto Santos-Dumont had done the same in Paris, as had another group in Alberta, Canada.

Moreover, there exists sufficient evidence the Wrights had access to all that prior knowledge in building their own aircraft, then claimed it as their own. In addition to other design features, the Wright brothers claimed ownership of the curved airfoil – without which no aircraft would ever have gotten off the ground anywhere, but, as one historian noted, “the Wrights stole both the concept and the actual design from an Australian who had recorded it years before, and who had himself deduced the concept from the boomerang of the Australian aboriginals.” The Wright Brothers stole the idea to build their aircraft, then patented it and sued others for using it.

Rumors had been circulating for decades that the Smithsonian had signed what was essentially a contract of fraud with the Wright family, agreeing to perpetuate the myth of the first manned flight, in exchange for having the aircraft on permanent display. But the Directors of the Smithsonian repeatedly denied the existence of such an agreement, stating that would be “tampering with history” and that they “would never agree to such a thing.” But then one day a US Senator collected a few lawyers and descended on the Smithsonian in a kind of political raid. And they did indeed locate the document, which reads in part: “Neither the Smithsonian Institution nor its successors nor any museum or other agency, bureau or facilities administered by the United States of America, shall publish or permit to be displayed a statement … in respect of any aircraft model … of earlier date than the Wright Aeroplane of 1903, claiming … that such aircraft was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight …”[37]

And now you know how the Wright Brothers became famous as the first men to fly. One historian wrote that the Smithsonian had no authority “to engage in political engineering of this sort”, noting that this “compromises history”. But compromising history is an American specialty. And this children’s tale will never end. Scientific American wrote a long, biased, and foolish article, claiming the other stories as myths and their myth as the truth.[38] Other eminent publications have done the same. This is how history is spun.

To give you an idea of the enormous influence of the US media and book publishers in maintaining these myths, in 2015 David McCullough ignored the judgment by Janes (and the world outside the US), and wrote a new book for Americans that not only perpetuates the myth but enhances it, with the major US media immediately writing glowing book reviews to help push sales and get the propaganda back into the public mind. The Washington Post modestly tells us how “two [American] boys taught the world to fly.” The publishers, Simon and Schuster, tell us the Wright brothers had “exceptional courage and determination”, and “ceaseless curiosity”.[39]

Daniel Okrent, in a review of McCullough’s book in the NYT,[40] adds that their progress was achieved through “excruciating patience and obsessive attention to detail” and with “an elegant demonstration of the creativity of their thinking”. They were “possessed by genius”. Their discovery of the necessity of a curved airfoil was not copied from Australia, but was the result of “endless calculation, application and recalculation”, every concoction being “a dazzling piece of reasoning” pursued with a “grandness of vision”, with the end result being “the most astonishing feat mankind has ever accomplished”. Yes. Except that it wasn’t.

Notes

[1] Jim Quinn: A Nation Built On Lies; https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-10/jim-quinn-nation-built-lies-part-2

[2] Einstein’s Plagiarism of the General Theory of Relativity 1st Edition; by Christopher Jon Bjerknes; https://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Plagiarism-General-Theory-Relativity/dp/1544900872

[3] Einstein A Plagiarist Special Relativity; https://educheer.com/term-paper/einstein-a-plagiarist-special-relativity

[4] Time magazine, July 2006; http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1211594,00.htm

[5] The Guardian, November 11, 1999; “Einstein’s E=mc² was Italian’s idea”; Clark, R. W. [1984], Einstein: The Life and Times, Avon Books, New York. De Pretto, O. [1904], ‘Ipo tesi dell ” et ere nell a vita dell ” universe’, Reale Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Feb.

[6] http://www.cartesio-episteme.net/episteme/epi6/ep6-bjerk-rec.htm

[7] https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_einstein.htm

[8] https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/02/was-einstein-a-wife-beater-womanizer-plagiarizer-and-eugenicist/

[9] A history of the theories of aether and electricity: https://archive.org/details/historyoftheorie00whitrich

[10] Findings Back Einstein In a Plagiarism Dispute; https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/18/science/findings-back-einstein-in-a-plagiarism-dispute.html

[11] Photo included:

[12] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/04/science-march-einstein-fbi-genius-science/

[13] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/09/eins-s03.html

[14] Photo included:

[15] In the end, the Manhattan Project cost the US military between US$2 and US$3 billion, in dollars of the day.

[16] The average annual income in the US in 1935 was about $1,500, thus this represents about 65 years of average income.

[17] The Secret History Of The Atomic Bomb by Eustace C. Mullins; http://whale.to/b/mullins8.html

[18] http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/2013/08/the-jewish-bomb-that-ended-world-war-ii/

[19] Antonio Meucci – Biography, Facts and Pictures; https://www.famousscientists.org/antonio-meucci

[20] The United States Government vs. Alexander Graham Bell; www.chezbasilio.org/us_bell.htm

[21] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jun/17/humanities.internationaleducationnews

[22] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/aug/06/bellvwestern

[23] http://wondermark.com/true-stuff-western-union-bell/

[24] https://sciencetechworld.com/10-famous-stolen-inventions/

[25] http://newsreeling.com/about-thomas-edisons-lies-and-19-stolen-inventions

[26] Joseph Swan – Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swan

[27] Joseph Swan | Biography, Lightbulb, & Facts; https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Wilson-Swan

[28] Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company is Established; https://worldhistoryproject.org/1883/edison-swan-united-electric-light-company-is-established

[29] Thomas A. Edison and the Founding of Science: science.sciencemag.org/content/105/2719/142

[30] Thomas Edison, B.C. Forbes And The Mystery Of The Spirit Phone; https://www.forbes.com/…/2019/10/25/thomas-edison-bc-forbes-mystery-spirit-phone

[31] Spanish town claims origins of Coca-Cola; https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/10/newser-spanish-town-coca-cola/2638515/

[32] https://www.spiegel.de/thema/coca_cola/

[33] https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/locals-say-coca-cola-originated-in-aielo-de-malferit-in-spain-a-915371.html

[34] Fizzing Out: The Spanish Firm that Inspired Coke – ABC News; https://abcnews.go.com/International/fizzing-spanish-firm-inspired-coke/story?id=19918738

[35] https://www.foxnews.com/science/smithsonian-releases-wright-brothers-contract-detailing-first-in-flight-claims

[36] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/5/130503-wright-brothers-first-flight-gustave-whitehead-aviation-smithsonian-institution-adventure-world/

[37] http://historybycontract.org/?tag=smithsonian-wright-agreement-1948

[38] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/myths-about-the-wright-br/

[39] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Wright-Brothers/David-McCullough/9781476728759

[40] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/books/review/the-wright-brothers-by-david-mccullough.html

July 11, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Another Slice of Pizzagate

By Alan Smithee | Counter-Currents | December 8, 2016

Any discussion of the plausibility of conspiracies has to start with MK Ultra—one of the most bizarre “conspiracy theories” that turned out, by all official accounts, to be completely and entirely true. MK Ultra was a CIA program that began in the early 1950s and operated at full scale from then until around 1964. The program was reduced in scope in 1964 and then again in 1967 and wasn’t officially put to an end until 1973 [1]—although 14-year CIA veteran Victor Marchetti claimed in 1977 that the CIA’s assurances that it had stopped the program were nothing more than a “cover story.”

It is unambiguously acknowledged that the MK Ultra program was extremely illegal, as it involved performing covert tests and experiments altering the mental state and brain functioning of unwitting, non-consenting, oblivious U.S. citizens. These tests involved everything from hypnosis and sensory deprivation, to verbal and sexual abuse and other forms of psychological torture,[2][3] to giving potent psychoactive drugs like LSD to unsuspecting U.S. citizens. On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy explained that the Deputy Director of the CIA had revealed to the Church Committee (the arm of Congress tasked with investigating the scandal in 1975) that these kinds of tests had been performed “at all social levels, high and low, [to] native Americans and foreign.”

Again, all of this is universally acknowledged in the public record: the U.S. General Accounting Office reported in 1984 that “the program consisted of . . . drug testing and other studies on unwitting human subjects.” Forty-four colleges and universities, fifteen pharmaceutical companies, twelve hospitals, and three prisons are also known to have participated, and yet despite how many people were involved in these severe abuses of the public trust, it took more than twenty years for any information to actually surface about what was happening.[5] These institutions are also known to have collaborated in abusive and nonconsensual experimentation with drugs like LSD on children, including children with schizophrenia and autism. As Dr. Jeffrey Kaye’s article notes, “[R]eading the professional papers of such scientists and researchers . . . [n]ot once do any of these papers express concern for the subjects at hand or denote any pangs of conscience at violating any oaths, codes and statutes regarding patient rights, human rights or human dignity.”

And yet, even now, we still don’t have anything close to the full story. What we know about MK Ultra is disturbing enough. But most of the records describing what MK Ultra entailed were destroyed before they could even be accessed by Congressional investigation. A cache of 20,000 documents incorrectly stored in a financial records building is all that survived destruction by CIA Director Richard Helms after the Watergate scandal broke. These documents allowed the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission to uncover what it did.

Thus, to this day, we only know about some 150 individually funded sub-projects of MK Ultra.[4] The official records of the investigation, once again, acknowledge that only a fraction of what the project actually entailed is known: Chapter 3, part 4: “Supreme Court Dissents Invoke the Nuremberg Code: CIA and DOD Human Subjects Research Scandals” of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments Final Report acknowledges clearly that “. . . most of the MK–ULTRA records were deliberately destroyed . . .”

Furthermore, the established record even strongly suggests that murder was used as a means to keep the record clean.

One of several deaths universally known to have been associated with Project MK Ultra was that of Frank Olson, a U.S. Army biochemist and biological weapons researcher. According to the earliest account, Olson supposedly committed suicide by jumping from a window on the thirteenth story of a New York City hotel as a result of a psychotic episode. The CIA doctor assigned to monitor Olson claimed to have been asleep in another bed in the hotel when Olson’s suicide occurred. However, the CIA’s own internal investigation found that CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, head of the MK Ultra project, had experimented on Olson with LSD without Olson’s prior knowledge and that this had directly led to his death; and in 1975 the Olson family received a $750,000 settlement along with apologies from President Ford and CIA Director Colby over the irresponsible administration of LSD.

But the Olson family disputes that even this is the full story. They claim that Olson was murdered because, especially after his own experience of being given LSD without foreknowledge, he became a security risk because he might reveal information about what MK Ultra had involved. Just a few days before his death, he had quit his position as acting chief of the Special Operations Division at Detrick, Maryland, claiming a growing crisis of conscience over his work. And forensic analysis of Olson’s body after it was exhumed in 1994 revealed cranial injuries which indicated that Olson had in fact been knocked unconscious before exiting that window on the thirteenth floor[4]; in 2012, the Olson family filed suit for the wrongful death of Frank Olson again.

The Church Committee’s 1976 “Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operation with Respect to Intelligence Activities” states that:

Drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but MKUltra/MKDelta materials were also used for harassment, discrediting, or disabling purposes.

So why do I bring all of this up? Am I just trying to make the argument that if one conspiracy theory is true, all the others must be, too?

Not at all. Of course, case histories of bizarre government crimes and coverups makes our suspicions about Pizzagate more plausible. But there is a much more relevant reason for discussing MK Ultra here. People are asking where are the victims of the sort of high-level sex trafficking that #Pizzagate alleges. This is part of the answer.

Cathy O’Brien has claimed to have been a childhood victim of MK Ultra experiments for years.

And you can hear her testimony to The Granada Forum in 1996 right here:

At that time, it was 1978, and it was determined that I had endured sufficient trauma to carry out my first trial run operation. An enormous quantity of cocaine had been flown in on one of these operations and I was to deliver it into the neighboring state of Arkansas. By that time, Bill Clinton’s drug operation was in full swing. He was governor of Arkansas.

I delivered this cocaine to a remote airport on Ouachita Forest, which I have since identified as Mena Airport. I also delivered a little packet of information and a small quantity of cocaine, a personal stash from J. Bennett Johnston to Bill Clinton. I delivered it to Bill Clinton and he cut out two lines of the coke, and he did inhale . . .

That certainly wasn’t the only time I saw Bill Clinton using cocaine.

My sexual experience with Bill Clinton was extremely limited . . . my experience was much more prevalent with Hillary Clinton because Hillary is also bisexual, leaning more towards a homosexual. It was she who accessed my sex programming to fulfill her perversions.

While some are skeptical of her account on the grounds that most of her claims can’t be verified independently,

  1. We know for a fact that children were exploited by high-ranking officials, doctors, etc. during the era of MK Ultra.
  2. We know that most of the documents revealing the full depths of what MK Ultra programs involved were permanently destroyed.
  3. We also know that childhood abuse of a nature this extreme leaves people emotionally and psychologically unstable.

Thus, were any of the children abused by these programs to come forward, an emotionally disturbed individual making unverifiable claims is exactly what it would look like. Whether you find her claims plausible enough to deserve investigation or not, they do refute the suggestion that there hasn’t been anyone claiming to have been the victim of a sex ring of the sort alleged in Pizzagate.

And again, I think when we look at things lying in plain sight, right in the official public record, the possibility doesn’t sound so implausible. Many have now heard that Hillary Clinton laughed gleefully over securing the acquittal of a 41-year-old man who she thought was guilty of raping a 12-year-old girl before sending her to the hospital in a coma. The victim is still clearly emotionally scarred by the experience: “Hillary Clinton put me through Hell . . . You lied on me, and you’re supposed to be for women? You call that ‘for women,’ what you did to me? I hear you on tape, laughing!”

The only defense I’ve ever heard for this behavior is that it’s “normal for a lawyer.” I doubt that. But it is definitely normal for a sociopath. I think many lawyers, no matter how much pride they take in their ability, would at least feel conflicted if they truly knew they’d helped secure a guilty individual’s freedom. Only a sociopath would express unmitigated glee over it without the slightest pang of conscience shining through.

But even if this is “normal for a lawyer,” maybe that’s because the legal profession attracts sociopaths, which is why we keep finding so many lawyers in high-level sex rings, like this one just uncovered in Norway last month.

Either way . . . add that to Hillary calling Gennifer Flowers (with whom Bill Clinton later admitted to having an affair) a “trailer trash failed cabaret singer” in attempt to discredit her true story, or the story of Hillary allegedly intimidating Juanita Broaddrick, Bill’s alleged rape victim, or any of the many other well-established stories of Hillary’s enabling Bill’s abuse of women (as this article notes, the Clinton campaign reportedly spent $100,000 on private detective work in 1992 to try to discredit often true stories brought forward by women who’d had sexual encounters with Bill).

I’ll close with a few notes related to discussions I’ve seen following the last #Pizzagate article.

First, in my “Pizzagate” article, I noted that Reddit shut down the r/pizzagate subreddit while keeping r/pedofriends. Since then, I’ve discovered that there is documented evidence http://archive.is/lJKGJ :

  1. That Reddit was pressured by Twitter to shut down the r/pizzagate and r/Operation_Berenstain subreddits;
  2. That Twitter has been taking no action to shut down accounts sharing child pornography https://archive.is/XlM7B ,
  3. even as it has censored not only conservative figures and people within the Alternative Right, but
  4. in fact, has even banned the accounts of people who have called attention to the existence of that very child pornography on Twitter.

In other words, in response to child pornography being called out, Twitter has banned the people calling attention to it rather than banning the child pornography itself.

Second, some readers wondered how we know that the photos taken from James Alefantis’ Instagram account are real. The answer is that, although they’ve been scrubbed, people following this story archived the images on archive.is, a site that keeps a permanent record of web pages in their current status. As you can see there, that page links straight to Alefantis’ account at https://www.instagram.com/jimmycomet/, and that isn’t something that the archiving website allows you to fake: the links contained in that archive are the links that were present on the original page at the time that it was archived, so there is no question that this is the image posted on Alefantis’ account. You can even find the other original records by simply searching archive.is for terms like “Alefantis.”

Third, here’s another interesting detail on Alefantis’ account. Take a look at Alefantis’ profile picture. It just so happens to be a bust of Antinous. Specifically, you can verify here that it is a picture of the bust held at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, next to the same exact window).

Who was Antinous?

Antinous was a Greek boy who was involved in a pederastic relationship with the Roman Emperor Hadrian. As the author Royston Lambert describes it, “The way that Hadrian took the boy on his travels, kept close to him at moments of spiritual, moral or physical exaltation, and, after his death, surrounded himself with his images, shows an obsessive craving for his presence, a mystical-religious need for his companionship.” The remaining sculptures of Antinous, Lambert tells us, are “without doubt one of the most elevated and ideal monuments to pederastic love of the whole ancient world.”

Fourth, if you search “Podesta Madeleine McCann,” there are a number of coincidences suggesting the possibility the brothers could have had a role in her disappearance. The key point is that Clement Freud, the convicted pedophile with whom the brothers remained close friends, has a mansion less than half a mile away from where the young girl disappeared in Portugal. We know that the Podesta brothers traveled there on occasion, there’s reason to think they may have been there during the month she disappeared, and the police sketches look disturbingly identical to both John and Tony Podesta—see here for a side-by-side comparison. While the police put out these two images on the assumption that they were two different people, it is entirely possible that two different witnesses could have separately only seen one man, although more than one man was involved. Also see this article, which demonstrates that it’s public knowledge that Clement Freud had contact with Madeleine McCann’s parents and again shows that while some of the evidence people are collecting in Pizzagate is Jesus-in-toast pareidolia and coincidence, at least some of it really is genuinely disturbing.

Fifth, some readers accused my opening article of partisanship for its focus on the Democratic Party, noting that Donald Trump has connections to Epstein as well.

Now, I want to say that I am in no way averse to discovering the possibility that Trump or individuals associated with him could be linked to events of this nature, and I would have no inclination to defend them if credible evidence should emerge. Furthermore, it has been claimed that the Trump campaign fired the son of his transition team’s national security adviser Michael Flynn for tweeting “Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it’ll remain a story,” and if that was indeed the real reason for the firing, I’m not sure what to make of it.

However, it bears noting that Donald Trump did in fact ban Jeffrey Epstein from his Mar a Lago club before Epstein was ever even convicted of soliciting a child prostitute, over an incident where Epstein was claimed to have made inappropriate comments to an attendant’s daughter; meanwhile, after Virginia Roberts (a woman who claims to have spent years as Epstein’s sex slave and is the only such claimant to have taken her defense public) admitted she didn’t recognize the woman who alleged she had been raped by Trump and Epstein, evidence emerged that the accusation was orchestrated by Norm Lubow, anti-Trump campaigner and former producer of the Jerry Springer TV show. Also interestingly enough, Trump has openly and publicly discussed Bill Clinton’s rides on Epstein’s Lolita Express, which at least suggests to me that Trump isn’t afraid of the story getting out. If I’m wrong, then I’m wrong. But I think it’s clear that I’m justified to put more focus on the far greater amount of circumstantial (and direct) evidence surrounding the Clintons.

Finally, as far as whether the previous article was “partisan” on the whole, note that Lawrence King who I discussed for his involvement in the Franklin Scandal in the 1980s, was the man chosen to sing the national anthem in the 1984 Republican convention, and was the leader of the Black Republican Congress. In the next entry to this series, I plan to discuss some historical cases, including the Franklin Scandal that King was at the center of, that once again demonstrate just how surprising the scale at which “cover-ups” of abuses of this nature really can take place. Events collected in the public record, just like Rotherham, that show how wrong assumptions like “Wouldn’t we expect their wives to come forward?” (I’m afraid not) or “Wouldn’t we expect X number of victims to have come forward by now?” can be.

Notes

1. Jo Thomas (3 Sep 1977). “C.I.A. Says It Found More Secret Papers on Behavior Control: Senate Panel Puts Off Hearing to Study Data Dozen Witnesses Said to Have Misled Inquiry C.I.A. Tells Of Finding Secret Data.” New York Times.

2. Otterman, Michael (2007). American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond. Melbourne University Publishing. p. 24.

3. McCoy, Alfred (2007). A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Macmillan. p. 29. ISBN 1429900687.

4. John D. Marks (1979), The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences, Penguin Books Ltd.

5. Mills, Ami Chen (1991). CIA Off Campus: Building the Movement Against Agency Recruitment and Research (2nd ed.). Boston: South End Press. p. 38.

July 11, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

The US Government Is Stealing A Significant Part Of Its Own Aid To Afghanistan

By Grigory Trofimchuk | One World | July 6, 2020

Despite the statements of the US President D. Trump on the need for an early withdrawal of the US military from Afghanistan, the interest of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the industrial complex in maintaining a military presence in this country is obvious. We are talking about the use of American financial aid flows to Afghanistan for selfish purposes.

For almost two decades of the Afghan campaign and the presence of the NATO and US contingent, Washington formally allocated large-scale funds not only for security assistance, but also for the civil reconstruction and development of this country.

Since 2001, approximately $130 billion was sent to Afghanistan. However, not all the money reached the country in need.

A significant part of the “aid” remained in the United States in the form of kickbacks, as evidenced, in particular, by the numerous reports of the US Inspector General for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan, J.Sopko. This is also confirmed by an article about US corruption in Afghanistan on the Turkish “Aydinlik”.

As a result, corruption schemes for appropriating funds allocated to Afghanistan by the Americans themselves only worsened the already difficult economic situation in the country, which is trying to recover from military and political turmoil.

The question arises as to how those involved in the contract manage to retain a significant share of all tranches. The fact is that for the distribution of financial assistance to Afghanistan, there is a multi-level system of contracts, with the participation of American contractors and subcontractors.

To assign financial aid to Afghanistan, first of all, USAID is used, through which corrupt officials take about 50% of financial flows. For example, in the case of the program for the advancement of women in Badakhshan and Khost provinces, the share of appropriated funds reached 90-95%.

As a standard scheme, USAID transfers funds for the project to an Afghan agency that justifies its deliberately inflated cost to the local Ministry of Finance. After the contract is cashed out, half of this amount is given to USAID-related individuals. Grants from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are probably used in the same way, but in smaller amounts due to the greater number of witnesses in international organizations.

The very scale of American financial assistance, the feasibility of which is ambiguously assessed within the United States, also raises questions. In a report to the US Congress in February 2020, the above-mentioned J.Sopko noted that the amount of aid allocated significantly exceeds the capabilities of the Afghan economy.

According to the Inspector General, the amount of funds should be from 15 to 45% of the country’s GDP, while in 2007 and 2010, US grants to Afghanistan amounted to more than 100% of Afghanistan’s GDP. Obviously, such spending is not effective, but creates opportunities for plunder. At the same time, attempts by American politicians to reduce spending on Afghanistan are met with resistance from the military, who are interested in maintaining a significant source of income, as well as contractors involved in this area.

On March 23, 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a $1 billion reduction in aid to Kabul due to the inability of two presidential contenders (A. Ghani and A. Abdul) to agree on power-sharing over highly questionable election dates. However, there is no confirmation that Washington is fulfilling the promises of the head of the Department of State. Recently, Democrat Senators even asked US Secretary of Defense M. Esper to report on cost reduction.

However, the report was not provided. Apparently, the Pentagon leaves this issue open, and the military clearly does not want to cut aid by reducing its articles.

The American defense industry has a special interest in the funds allocated to Afghanistan. Purchases and deliveries of goods to US and NATO contingents, as well as to Afghan security forces, are often carried out without regard to economic expediency and at inflated prices that are favorable to American manufacturers.

So, instead of building a factory in Afghanistan that would produce cartridges for M-4 and M-16 rifles at 12 cents apiece, Washington continues to buy cartridges from its suppliers for the needs of the Afghan security forces at the price of 57 cents apiece. In addition, the US military refused Russian kerosene at 94 cents per litre, buying it in Greece at $1.4 per litre. In order to maintain control, the United States provides financial assistance to the Afghan security forces through its own fund, not international structures.

American contractors on civil projects use the same principle with overstating the real cost of goods and services, including those supplied through USAID. For example, recently, not without their participation, the Ministry of Health of Afghanistan sold about 10,000 tests for coronavirus at a price of $48 each when their real cost is no more than $5.

The most “tasty” contracts are the supply of oil products and the supply of the Afghan army and the NATO contingent with weapons, military equipment and uniforms, which are lobbied by American congressmen whose wives get good positions on the boards of directors of the respective companies. At the same time, the real recipients of kickbacks are engaged in dirty work and are not “advertised”.

It is not surprising that American aid to Afghanistan, despite its astronomical size (the amount of aid exceeded the funds allocated under the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of post-war Europe), only allows the American military and contractors involved in its distribution to enrich themselves, while in Afghanistan the result of such assistance is not felt and its effectiveness, in general, is almost zero.

Recently, the media reported on the attempt of the top leadership of Afghanistan to redirect the flow of foreign financial assistance to themselves.

In April 2020, President Ghani bypassed the Parliament and announced the reform of the Ministry of Finance and the re-subordination of a number of its departments responsible for budget issues, state duties, and customs duties to the presidential administration.

However, the Department of State criticized Ghani’s decision as “corrupt”. It is noteworthy that immediately after such comments, the Afghan President withdrew his initiative. The political dependence of Kabul on Washington plays into the hands of US corruption schemes. The Americans clearly do not want to lose control over external financial flows to Afghanistan and do not allow even their wards to distribute them.

July 11, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

The ADL’s useful ‘Task Force on Middle East Minorities’

By David Boyajian | Intrepid Report | July 6, 2020

Hardly anyone—Jewish or otherwise—believes that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) genuinely cares about the welfare of Christian, Muslim, and other non-Jewish minorities in the Middle East.

After all, contrary to its claim to be a civil/human rights champion and “secure … fair treatment for all,” the ADL is essentially a political organization.

So when it launched its so-called “Task Force on Middle East Minorities” (TFOMEM) in late 2018, I suspected a political con job.

TFOMEM says it will spotlight “human rights offenses committed against minority communities in the Middle East.”

That sounds bizarre given that the ADL has itself committed human rights offenses against minorities and others right here in America.

Spying on minorities

In 1992-3, police raided ADL offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The ADL had a “private spy operation that authorities alleged crossed the line into illegal territory,” reported the L.A. Times.

ADL operatives were surveilling hundreds of minority, civil rights, labor, and media organizations and associated individuals.  Among the targeted minority groups: NAACP, Asian Law Caucus, Latin American Support Committee, Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, Filipino Organization Committee, and Young Koreans United.

ADL spy Tom Gerard was a rogue San Francisco police officer linked to Latin American death squads. His undercover ADL sidekick, Roy Bullock, called themselves “the kings of garbage” for scouring people’s trash for private material.

ADL agents spied on American opponents of Apartheid in South Africa and passed information to its government—hardly the conduct of a civil/human rights organization.

Narrowly escaping indictment by the San Francisco D.A.—who was reportedly under political pressure—the ADL still had to pay $50,000 to the city.

The ADL also settled civil rights lawsuits brought by victims of its snooping.

ADL genocide hypocrisy

In friendlier days, Israel and Turkey recruited the ADL and organizations such as the American Jewish Committee to deny/diminish the Armenian Genocide committed by Turkey from 1915-23.

These Jewish organizations and Israel also colluded with Turkey to defeat Armenian Genocide resolutions in the U.S. Congress.

Disgusted by the ADL’s genocide/Holocaust hypocrisy, in 2007-8 a dozen Massachusetts cities and the umbrella Massachusetts Municipal Association expelled the ADL’s sanctimoniously-named No Place for Hate program. This made national and international headlines.

The ADL has never apologized to Armenians. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s 2016 acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide came in a mere blog post and only after decades of deceit.

The ADL, promised Greenblatt, “would support” (not will support) an Armenian Genocide resolution in Congress. That alleged “support” apparently came only in a belated letter three years later, one day before the resolution was already assured of passage.

Just as No Place for Hate is a fig leaf for the ADL’s domestic political agenda, TFOMEM appears to be a smokescreen for the ADL and Israel’s Middle East political agenda.

That agenda: Weaken Israeli adversaries such as Iran, Syria, Shiite Muslims, and Turkish President Erdogan by any means possible.

TFOMEM will help by telling Americans that Israel’s adversaries, among their other wrongdoings, mistreat minorities.

Revealing press releases

TFOMEM’s three press releases since its launch are revealing.

Two welcomed congressional resolutions on the plight of minorities in war-ravaged Syria and Iraq. That aligns with Israeli policy. Tel Aviv seeks to topple Syrian President Assad who is aligned with Iran and Hezbollah, the anti-Israeli Shiite militant organization. Majority-Shiite Iraq is an Israeli target too.

TFOMEM’s third press release tried to bewitch American Christians by condemning Iran’s “arrest of over 100 Christians.” Fewer Christians will be fooled, however, after the ADL’s attack on Christian Armenians.

Tel Aviv seeks, of course, to destabilize Iran by stirring its minorities, which include Arabs, Azeris, Bahais, Kurds, and others.

An awkward event

I attended a TFOMEM panel presentation at Tufts University, “Restoring Armenian Heritage in Turkey: Displaced Stakeholders of Sacred Heritage Sites,” on September 25 of last year. It focused on three renovated Armenian churches in eastern Turkey—Armenians call it Western Armenia—and a Greek monastery.

Tufts was probably chosen because of its longtime relationship with Greater Boston’s Armenian American community and Armenia.

Also discussed was the 2007 assassination by a Turkish extremist of Hrant Dink, an ethnic Armenian journalist and Turkish citizen.

The presentation contained little new for the Armenian Americans who comprised half of the some thirty attendees.

The panelists were Tugba Tanyeri Erdemir, PhD, an archeologist/historian and TFOMEM’s Coordinator; Cly Wallace Aramian, MA, a communications/public affairs specialist and Tufts graduate; and Elizabeth H. Prodromou, PhD, a Greek American political scientist at Tufts and human rights advocate.

Despite her last name, Aramian is not even a token Armenian. Her former husband is Armenian.

Erdemir is an ethnic Turk and Turkish citizen, like her husband and fellow TFOMEM member Aykan Erdemir, PhD. A noted author on Turkey’s mistreatment of minorities and indigenous non-Turks, he’s a senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a pro-Israel think tank.

He served in Turkey’s parliament from 2011-15 as a member of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) founded by Kemal Ataturk, who continued the Armenian Genocide after 1918.

Israel and CHP despise President Erdogan and want to topple him and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). Israel hopes a post-Erdogan/AKP Turkey would restore the countries’ warm relations.

Might hostility to Erdogan/AKP, rather than human rights considerations, partly explain why the ADL invited the Erdemirs into TFOMEM?

Other members

TFOMEM members change but include two Iranian Jews, undoubtedly because Iran is an Israeli target.

One is Sharon Nazarian, PhD, Senior ADL VP for International Relations. She reportedly opposes “racial hatred.” Perhaps she’ll look into the ADL’s record on Armenians.

The other is Marjan Keypour Greenblatt, MA, wife of Jonathan Greenblatt who authored the ADL’s half-baked blog post referenced above.

Other members include a Christian Egyptian Copt and several Muslims. But no Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds, or Palestinians.

The other Christian is Rev. Johnnie Moore, a public relations guru, Trump campaign manager, and member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. When the latter recommended the State Dept. put autocratic Azerbaijan on its “Special Watch List” for religious repression, Moore was Azerbaijan’s lone defender. He has visited Azerbaijan, an Israeli ally, twice.

Israel sells the latter billions in advanced weapons while Azerbaijan sells oil to Israel.

Might these facts, rather than human rights considerations, partly explain why the ADL invited Rev. Johnnie into TFOMEM?

Fatally flawed

TFOMEM members are surely aware of the ADL’s appalling record on minorities.

TFOMEM’s non-Jews probably hope, nonetheless, that the ADL’s money and muscle can somehow help their ethno-religious compatriots.

Exposing a country’s mistreatment of its minorities is certainly noble.

But TFOMEM will ultimately be of little or no benefit to minorities anywhere as long as it’s a tool of the  ADL.

Much of the author’s work can be found at Armeniapedia.org/wiki/David_Boyajian.

July 10, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Analysis: Dominant Hypothesis Among Reporters on 9/11 Was that Explosions Brought Down Twin Towers

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth | July 8, 2020

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth today published a groundbreaking paper by researchers Ted Walter and Graeme MacQueen documenting the findings from their review of 70 hours of 9/11 news footage.

In total, Walter and MacQueen identified 36 news reporters across 11 different channels who either reported the occurrence of explosions during the Twin Towers’ destruction or who afterward referred to the destruction as an explosion-based event or who reported the possible use of explosives based on information from government sources.

The 36 reporters include, by network, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and Cynthia McFadden; CBS’s Harold Dow, Tom Flynn, Mika Brzezinski, and Carol Marin (appearing on WCBS); NBC’s Pat Dawson and Anne Thompson; CNN’s Aaron Brown, Rose Arce, Patty Sabga, and Alan Dodds Frank; Fox News’ David Lee Miller and Rick Leventhal; MSNBC’s Ashleigh Banfield and Rick Sanchez; CNBC’s John Bussey, Ron Insana, and Bob Pisani; WABC’s N.J. Burkett, Michelle Charlesworth, Nina Pineda, Cheryl Fiandaca, and Joe Torres; WCBS’s John Slattery, Marcella Palmer, Vince DeMentri, and Marcia Kramer; WNBC’s Walter Perez; New York 1’s Kristen Shaughnessy, Andrew Siff, John Schiumo, and Andrew Kirtzman; USA Today’s Jack Kelley; and two unidentified reporters (1 and 2) who attended a press conference with Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki.

The paper, titled “How 36 Reporters Brought Us the Twin Towers’ Explosive Demolition on 9/11,” includes extensive appendices where every news clip can be viewed.

Walter and MacQueen conclude that the hypothesis of explosions bringing down the Twin Towers was not only prevalent among reporters but was, in fact, the dominant hypothesis. Next, they plan to publish a follow-up paper examining how the hypothesis of fire-induced collapse so quickly supplanted the originally dominant explosion hypothesis.

Read “How 36 Reporters Brought Us the Twin Towers’ Explosive Demolition on 9/11.”

July 10, 2020 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

New evidence shows the FBI knew General Flynn was not ‘agent of Russia’ but prosecuted him anyway

RT | July 10, 2020

President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser Michael Flynn was “not acting as an agent of Russia” by the FBI’s own determination, yet the Mueller probe was based on that claim and his legal odyssey still continues.

New evidence provided by the Justice Department to Flynn’s legal team this week, and made public on Friday as part of a court filing, shows that the FBI determined Flynn wasn’t a Russian agent, and believed he did not deliberately lie to agents during his January 2017 interview.

A handwritten document shows the officials believed there were no reasonable grounds for prosecution under the Logan Act, an arcane old law prohibiting US citizens from engaging in foreign policy.

After the Washington Post published fragments of leaked information from the FBI suggesting the opposite, however, Flynn was forced to resign in February 2017, and later that year faced perjury charges from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ‘Russian collusion’ by the Trump campaign.

What makes these revelations particularly egregious is the fact that the scope memo for Mueller’s probe, written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May 2017 and kept classified for years, cited the Logan Act as one of the predicates for going after Flynn.

The fourteen pages of additional evidence provided by the government on July 7 demonstrate Flynn’s innocence, the “absence of any crime,” as well as “government misconduct” in investigating Flynn and “prosecutorial misconduct in the suppression of evidence favorable to the defense,” his legal team said in a statement.

Flynn initially pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI, but later changed legal counsel and claimed prosecutorial misconduct. A steady drip of evidence from the DOJ ever since has revealed the plot to catch him in a perjury trap, the role of disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok in keeping the case improperly open, and that Flynn did nothing wrong in his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak – among other things.

Despite the overwhelming evidence against the prosecutors, US District Judge Emmet Sullivan has refused to approve the DOJ motion to drop the case. Instead, he appointed a retired judge who had just denounced the DOJ in the Washington Post to help him challenge it as amicus curiae.

Flynn’s lawyers took their case to the appeals court, which ruled on June 24 that Sullivan had to dismiss the charges. He refused, asking for a full-bench (en banc) review, with Flynn and the government now given ten days to respond.

The entire process is without precedent in Washington, but is hardly surprising given the political implications of the trial. Mueller’s probe was supposed to get Trump impeached and invalidate the 2016 presidential election, and though it failed the mainstream media and Democrats continue to insist on ‘Russiagate collusion.’ As the new documents show, all of it rests on the prosecution of Flynn, and falls apart entirely if he walks.

July 10, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

Iran explosions: Did Israel and the US just start a cyber war?

By Scott Ritter | RT | July 10, 2020

Explosions rocked a pair of Iranian factories involved in the manufacture of centrifuges for its nuclear program, and the development of advanced ballistic missiles. Iran suspects a cyberattack by either the US, Israel or both.
A series of explosions hit various locations throughout Iran in late June and early July, killing scores of people and causing extensive damage. Two of these locations stand out in particular because of their importance to Iran’s national security, and their involvement in technology related to nuclear enrichment programs and ballistic missile production, which have been singled out by both the US and Israel as representing a threat to regional and international peace and security.

Early on Friday, a series of explosions reportedly hit the outskirts of Tehran, as well as the cities of Garmdareh and Qods, with speculation that missile depots were the intended target of the blasts.

The precise cause of the two explosions has not yet been determined. One, at a centrifuge production hall located in the Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant, remains under investigation. The other, at the Hemma Missile Industries Complex, has been linked to an explosion in a gas tank.

The Natanz facility, believed to have been involved in assembling advanced centrifuges used in the enrichment of nuclear fuel, was heavily damaged, setting back efforts by months, if not longer. The Hemmat facility, believed to be involved in the production of advanced Shahib-3 ballistic missiles, also suffered serious damage, but the precise extent remains unknown.

Israel’s non-denial

In typical fashion, Israel denied having any involvement in the Iranian explosions, while at the same time indicating that it was concerned about the Islamic Republic’s activities. Israeli Minister of Defense Benny Gantz noted that “not every incident that transpires in Iran necessarily has something to do with us.”

Gantz then threw in a hint about what might have happened. “All those systems,” he said, referring to Iran’s nuclear and missile activities, “are complex. They have very high safety constraints, and I’m not sure [the Iranians] always know how to maintain them.”

Israel’s Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi – who himself was once head of the Israeli Defense Force – was more circumspect. “We have a long-term policy over the course of many administrations not to allow Iran to have nuclear abilities,” Ashkenazi noted. “This [Iranian] regime with those abilities is an existential threat to Israel, and Israel cannot allow it to establish itself on our northern border.” As to what Israel may have done to prevent this, he said: “We take actions that are better left unsaid.”

History of sabotage

Both Israel and the US have a history of collaboration when it comes to covert action designed to retard Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities. Perhaps the best known of these was the Stuxnet virus, which struck the Natanz facility in the summer of 2010 and was responsible for the destruction of a large number of centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Less known, but as or more effective, is a long-term CIA program to sabotage Iranian missiles and rockets, including those involved in Iran’s space launch program.

Perhaps the most public face of this program came in the form of a tweet from President Trump in August 2019, following the explosion of an Iranian space vehicle on its launch pad during final preparations for blast-off. “The United States of America,” Trump tweeted, “was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safir SLV Launch at Semnan Launch Site One in Iran. I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at Site One.” As non-denials go, this one was crude and transparent.

The heart of the CIA sabotage effort lies in its ability to infiltrate the illicit black-market supply chains used by Iran to support its programs, and infiltrate defective materials which, once installed, would cause catastrophic failure. Gantz’s allusion to the complexity of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile endeavors, and the “safety” issues involved (and Iran’s inability to maintain these systems), provides strong circumstantial evidence that Israel, most likely in collaboration with the CIA, was able to gain access to suppliers involved in the construction of both the Natanz and Hemmat sites. This probably involved the distribution of natural gas for industrial purposes. Defective sensors and/or valves could lead to catastrophic failure, and result in massive, highly destructive events.

Iran’s silence as evidence

The official Iranian position is that while it has identified the precise cause of the explosions in question, it is not releasing this information on the grounds of national security. This delay would make sense in the case of any sabotage derived from defective sensors and valves – Iran would need to reverse-engineer its acquisition efforts, identify all materials acquired together with the failed components, and safely remove them from wherever they had been installed. Iran would also need to try and find out how and where their counterintelligence and security systems failed, before implementing new procedures.

The lack of a specific explanation, however, has not prevented senior Iranians from speculating about either the cause of the explosions, or the perpetrators. “Responding to cyberattacks is part of the country’s defense might,” the head of Iran’s civil defense, Gholamreza Jalili, noted. “If it is proven that our country has been targeted by a cyberattack, we will respond.”

The Iranian News Agency, IRNA, hinted at the potential for a larger crisis emerging in the aftermath of the Natanz and Hemmat explosions. “So far, Iran has tried to prevent intensifying crises and the formation of unpredictable conditions and situations,” IRNA observed. “But the crossing of red lines of the Islamic Republic of Iran by hostile countries, especially the Zionist regime (Israel) and the US, means that strategy… should be revised.”

Potential chaos

It is unlikely that Iran would seek to respond to any destructive cyberattack in a disproportionate manner – don’t expect missiles to fly against either Israel or US bases in the region. Instead, Iran will probably deploy its own very capable offensive cyberweapons in targeted retaliation, either against facilities in Israel and/or the US, or against regional targets affiliated with either of those countries.

Cyber warfare is a new phenomenon, one which can inflict significant collateral damage on civilian infrastructure both in the targeted nation, as well as third parties not directly involved in the conflict at hand. If Israel and/or the US were, in fact, to have conducted a destructive cyberattack on Iran, there will almost certainly be retaliation. Where this cycle of cyber warfare will end, however, is unknown. Given the complex realities of cyber warfare, where computer viruses are released in a manner conducive to causing a global cyber pandemic, the question must be asked if the outcome achieved at Natanz and Hemmat was worth the potential risk accrued. If history is any lesson, the answer is – and will be – a resounding ‘No.’

July 10, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment