Imagine in the not too distant future your job, college ID, drivers license, passport, gun permit, health insurance etc., will depend on you passing a mandatory drug screening.
What is that you say? It could never happen in America.
It could happen sooner than you think if the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) has anything to say about it.
According to a recent Los Angeles Times article, the USPSTF wants doctors to screen everyone for drug use.
“Questions about drug use should not only cover the possibility that a patient is taking illegal street drugs like cocaine or heroin, the task force said. They should also explore whether a patient might be sneaking pills from a family member’s pain medication or getting a boost from stimulants prescribed for a child with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.”
“The USPSTF recommends screening for illicit drug use in adults age 18 years or older”, according to their draft report.
Big Brother really wants to know if you are using illegal street drugs or prescription drugs, and they have given doctors numerous drug screening tools to find out.
Primary care practices are asked to use the following drug screening tools:
Some will say that this is merely a recommendation and that doctors would never screen everyone for drug use.
But it is already happening to welfare applicants in at least 15 states.
According to the National Conference of Legislatures, at least 15 states have passed legislation regarding drug testing or screening for public assistance applicants or recipients.
When is the last time you or someone you know went to the doctor’s for an unrelated pain or bruise. Did the doctor ask you or them about drug usage? Of course they did.
But if you will not take my word for it, then perhaps you will take Dr. Gary LeRoy’s word for it,
“We’ve been doing this for almost a decade in my office,” said Dr. LeRoy, a staff physician at the East Dayton Health Clinic in Dayton, Ohio, and president-elect of the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Dr. Carol Mangione, the chief of general internal medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA told Stat News, “This is a big change that we’re really excited about. Effective treatment is where we will finally begin to move the needle on the epidemic.”
The National Institute on Drug Abuse created a “resource guide” that doctors have been using for almost a decade to ask patients about drug use.
According to the USPSTF’s “Draft Recommendation Statement,” about 50% to 86% of pediatricians report that they routinely screen patients for substance use.”
Will all hospitals and doctors adopt the USPSTF’s recommendations?
The New York Times warns “the group’s guidelines are not binding on doctors but they carry weight.”
The Los Angeles Times warns, “the task force is a group of experts who advise the federal government on disease prevention.”
And that is the key takeaway from this story. The USPSTF might claim to be an “independent, volunteer panel of national experts in prevention and evidence-based medicine. But each year, they send a graded recommendation to Congress, like this one, about mandatory drug screening.
As I mentioned earlier, most hospitals and doctors already ask their patients about their drug use. So it is really only a matter of time before the USPSTF convinces Congress to make it mandatory.
August 15, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, United States |
Leave a comment
When Washington announced a few weeks ago the formation of a maritime “international coalition” to “protect shipping” in the Persian Gulf, many observers were skeptical. Now skepticism has rightly turned to alarm, as the proposed US-led “coalition” transpires to comprise a grand total of just three nations: the US, Britain and Israel.
The term “coalition” has always been a weasel word used by Washington to give its military operations around the world a veneer of international consensus and moral authority. If the US goes ahead with deploying forces in the Persian Gulf the guise of “coalition” is threadbare. It will be seen for what it is: naked aggression.
Iran promptly warned that if the US, Britain and Israel move on their intention to deploy in the Persian Gulf, it will not hesitate to defend itself from a “clear threat”.
Britain has ordered this week another warship, HMS Kent, to the Gulf. The move, significantly, occurred as Trump’s hawkish national security advisor John Bolton was in London for two-day official meetings with PM Boris Johnson and other senior ministers. Bolton praised Britain’s decision to join the US-led Operation Sentinel mission, rather than an alternative proposed European naval mission. It’s not clear if HMS Kent is simply replacing another British warship in the Gulf, HMS Duncan, or if this is a further buildup in force. Either way, the line up of US, Britain and reportedly Israel is a foreboding potential offensive.
Israeli leaders have in the recent past repeatedly called for military attacks on Iran, claiming without evidence that the Islamic Republic is secretly building nuclear weapons, thus allegedly posing an existential threat to the Jewish state, despite the latter possessing an estimated 200-300 nuclear warheads.
Given the Trump administration’s manic hostility towards Tehran, which it labels a “terrorist regime”, and given the long history of US-British treachery against Iran, it is understandable the alarm being aroused if Washington, London and Tel Aviv proceed with their flotilla in the Gulf.
Major General Hossein Salami, commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, slammed the proposed US-led trio of forces as a “coalition of demons”.
Iranian defense minister Brigadier General Amir Hatami warned that any such US deployment involving Israel in a waterway contiguous with Iran’s southern coast would have “disastrous consequences for the region”. Tehran would view it as an act of war.
Will Washington light the fuse? President Donald Trump and his psychotic war advisor John Bolton have certainly talked tough on several occasions over recent weeks about attacking Iran and “destroying” the Persian nation with overwhelming force. Combined with the depraved Israeli prime minster Benjamin Netanyahu and the lackey British premier Boris Johnson, the “axis of insanity” is perplexing.
However, Trump’s threats have often turned out to be empty. Washington has said before it would “defend” its interests when cargo ships were sabotaged in recent weeks. Iran was blamed by the US without evidence for the sabotage incidents, but Washington’s bellicose rhetoric didn’t materialize in military action. Even when Iran shot down a US $220-million spy drone over its territory on June 20, Trump balked at ordering “retaliatory” air strikes.
Another deterring factor is Iran’s formidable anti-ship missiles and air defenses which are augmented by the latest Russian technology, as documented by John Helmer.
There is thus a fair chance that the Trump administration will back off from its plans for a maritime incursion in the Persian Gulf. Even the intellectually challenged White House must know that any such move – especially involving a blatant axis of aggression of the US, Britain and Israel – will be tantamount to declaring war. The consequences for the war-torn region, the global economy and world peace would indeed be potentially calamitous. Surely, the unhinged American, British and Israeli leaders know this?
International consensus and world opinion may also be a vital check on the US-led folly of antagonizing Iran. The refusal by Germany, France and other European nations to participate in the US maritime force dealt a significant blow to Washington’s subterfuge of forming a coalition camouflage for its aggression against Iran.
The Americans were infuriated. US officials have reportedly lobbied the Berlin government to change its mind, to no avail. One American official was reported to have complained: “German officials keep telling us that they’re on our side, but they have to side with Iran on nuclear related issues because of the nuclear deal. Iran is attacking tankers which has nothing to do with the deal. So what’s Germany’s excuse for not siding with us this time?”
Richard Grenell, the pesky US ambassador in Berlin, displayed exasperation over Germany’s rebuff to the naval coalition plan, dubbed Operation Sentinel. Employing his best double-think, Grenell said: “German participation would help deescalate the situation. The Iranians would see a united West.”
This comes against a background of various rows between the Trump administration and Berlin, including on NATO spending, trade tariffs and the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project with Russia.
Washington is peeved by the Europeans and Germany in particular for not giving its purported naval coalition in the Gulf the desired appearance of international mandate.
As Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif remarked, the US is “isolated”, apart from having the British and Israelis riding shotgun on its now-evident adventure of aggression. From political, legal and moral viewpoints, it will be difficult for the Trump administration to proceed with its plan to “protect shipping” in the Persian Gulf because it is abundantly clear that the plan is a flagrant war footing.
If the US and its allies were genuine about forming a protection arrangement for commercial shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf – where 20-30 per cent of globally shipped oil passes each day – then they would do well to take on board the Russian proposal presented at the UN on August 8.
Dmitry Polyansky, Russia’s acting envoy to the UN, set forth a multilateral security concept. He emphasized that the partnership would be a genuine international coalition acting within the framework of the UN Security Council. The proposal, which China has backed, would include all stakeholders for the safety of shipping through the vital Persian Gulf, including Iran. This is surely the way to go towards de-escalating the dangerous tensions in the region. The key is that any such initiative must be formulated in keeping with UN principles and international law. It is not for one, two or three nations to assume the role of naval “policemen” in an area of international waterways. Even if we take Washington’s rhetoric about “protecting shipping” at face value, its deployment of force in the Gulf is an illegitimate assumption of power. It is outside UN principles and without Security Council mandate. In a word, illegal.
European and Asian nations would be advised to back the Russian initiative in order to maintain peace in the Gulf. By contrast, Washington’s plans are a reckless and reprehensible provocation for war.
August 15, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Wars for Israel | Israel, UK, United States, Zionism |
Leave a comment
Sanctions are economic warfare, pure and simple. As an alternative to a direct military attack on a country that is deemed to be misbehaving they are certainly preferable, but no one should be under any illusions regarding what they actually represent. They are war by other means and they are also illegal unless authorized by a supra-national authority like the United Nations Security Council, which was set up after World War II to create a framework that inter alia would enable putting pressure on a rogue regime without going to war. At least that was the idea, but the sanctions regimes recently put in place unilaterally and without any international authority by the United States have had a remarkable tendency to escalate several conflicts rather than providing the type of pressure that would lead to some kind of agreement.
The most dangerous bit of theater involving sanctions initiated by the Trump administration continues to focus on Iran. Last week, the White House elevated its extreme pressure on the Iranians by engaging in a completely irrational sanctioning of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. The sanctions will have no effect whatsoever and they completely contradict Donald Trump’s repeated assertion that he is seeking diplomacy to resolve the conflict with Iran. One doesn’t accomplish that by sanctioning the opposition’s Foreign Minister. Also, the Iranians have received the message loud and clear that the threats coming from Washington have nothing to do with nuclear programs. The White House began its sanctions regime over a year ago when it withdrew from the JCPOA and they have been steadily increasing since that time even though Iran has continued to be fully compliant with the agreement. Recently, the US took the unprecedented step of sanctioning the entire Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is part of the nation’s military.
American Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made clear that the sanctions on Iran are intended to cause real pain, which, in fact, they have succeeded in doing. Pompeo and his accomplice in crime National Security Advisor John Bolton believe that enough pressure will motivate the starving people to rise up in the streets and overthrow the government, an unlikely prospect as the American hostility has in fact increased popular support for the regime.
To be sure, ordinary people in Iran have found that they cannot obtain medicine and some types of food are in short supply but they are not about to rebel. The sanctioning in May of Iranian oil exports has only been partially effective but it has made the economy shrink, with workers losing jobs. The sanctions have also led to tit-for-tat seizures of oil and gas tankers, starting with the British interception of a ship carrying Iranian oil to Syria [?] in early July.
Another bizarre escalation in sanctions that has taken place lately relates to the Skripal case in Britain. On August 2nd, Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing a package of new sanctions against Moscow over the alleged poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in March 2018. The order “prohibit[s] any United States bank from making any loan or providing any credit… except for loans or credits for the purpose of purchasing food or other agricultural commodities or products.” The ban also includes “the extension of any loan or financial or technical assistance… by international financial institutions,” meaning that international lenders will also be punished if they fail to follow Washington’s lead.
The sanctions were imposed under the authority provided by the US Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act adopted in 1991, which imposes penalties for use of chemical weapons. Novichok, which was reportedly used on the Skripals, is a chemical weapon developed in the labs of the Soviet Union, though a number of states are believed to currently have supplies of the agent in their arsenals. Russia can appeal the sanctions with 90 days by providing “reliable assurance” that it will not again use chemical weapons.
Russia has strenuously denied any role in the attack on the Skripals and the evidence that has so far been produced to substantiate the Kremlin’s involvement has been less than convincing. An initial package of US-imposed sanctions against Russia that includes the export of sensitive technologies and some financial services was implemented in August 2018.
Venezuela is also under the sanctions gun and is a perfect example how sanctions can escalate into something more punitive, leading incrementally to an actual state of war. Last week Washington expanded its sanctions regime, which is already causing starvation in parts of Venezuela, to include what amounts to a complete economic embargo directed against the Maduro regime that is being enforced by a naval blockade.
The Venezuelan government announced last Wednesday that the United States Navy had seized a cargo ship bound for Venezuela while it was transiting the Panama Canal. According to a government spokesman, the ship’s cargo was soy cakes intended for the production of food. As one of Washington’s raisons d’etre for imposing sanctions on Caracas was that government incompetence was starving the Venezuelan people, the move to aggravate that starvation would appear to be somewhat capricious and revealing of the fact that the White House could care less about what happens to the Venezuelan civilians who are caught up in the conflict.
Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez condemned the move as “serious aggression,” and accused the Trump Administration of trying to impede Venezuela’s basic right to import food to feed its people.
One of the most pernicious aspects of the sanctions regimes that the United States is imposing is that they are global. When Washington puts someone on its sanctions list, other countries that do not comply with the demands being made are also subject to punishment, referred to as secondary sanctions. The sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, for example, are being globally enforced with some few exceptions, and any country that buys Iranian oil will be punished by being denied access to the US financial and banking system. That is a serious penalty as most international trade and business transactions go through the dollar denominated SWIFT banking network.
Finally, nothing illustrates the absurdity of the sanctions mania as a recent report that President Trump had sent his official hostage negotiator Robert O’Brien to Stockholm to obtain freedom for an American rap musician ASAP Rocky who was in jail after having gotten into a fight with some local boys. The Trumpster did not actually know the lad, but he was vouched for by the likes of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, both of whom have had nice things to say about the president. The negotiator was instructed to tell Sweden that if they did not release Rocky there would be “negative consequences.” Who can doubt that the consequences would undoubtedly have included sanctions?
It has reached the point where the only country that likes the United States is Israel, which is locked into a similar cycle of incessant aggression. To be sure Donald Trump’s rhetoric is part of the problem, but the indiscriminate, illegal and immoral use of sanctions, which punish whole nations for the presumed sins of those nations’ leaders, is a major contributing factor. And the real irony is that even though sanctions cause pain, they are ineffective. Cuba has been under sanctions, technically and embargo, since 1960 and its ruling regime has not collapsed, and there is no chance that Venezuela, Iran or Russia’s government will go away at any time soon either. In fact, real change would be more likely if Washington were to sit down at a negotiating table with countries that it considers enemies and work to find solutions to common concerns. But that is not likely to happen with the current White House line-up, and equally distant with a Democratic Party obsessed with the “Russian threat” and other fables employed to explain its own failings.
August 15, 2019
Posted by aletho |
War Crimes | Sanctions against Iran, United States, Venezuela |
Leave a comment
Gibraltar’s government has reportedly released an Iranian-operated supertanker, which was seized by British marines in the Strait of Gibraltar on July 4, despite pressure from the United States for the vessel’s continued detainment.
“Authorities in Gibraltar have released the Iranian supertanker Grace 1, which was seized on July 4 on suspicion it was shipping 2.1 million barrels of crude oil to Syria in breach of EU sanctions,” Reuters quoted the Gibraltar Chronicle as reporting on Thursday.
According to the report, the chief justice of Gibraltar’s supreme court, Anthony Dudley, said there was no US application currently before the court.
The Gibraltar Chronicle also claimed that the decision to release the Grace 1 tanker came after receiving formal written assurances from the Iranian government that it would not discharge its cargo in Syria.
Iran has strictly rejected claims that the vessel was ever carrying crude to the Arab country.
Spain’s Foreign Ministry reported after the incident that the UK had seized the vessel at the request of the US, which has been trying to trouble Iran’s international oil vessels as part of its campaign of economic pressure against the Islamic Republic.
Earlier on Thursday, Gibraltar said that the US had applied to seize the Iranian-operated oil tanker after British media reported that the vessel’s release was imminent following a set of diplomatic exchanges between Tehran and London.
“The US Department of Justice has applied to seize the Grace 1 on a number of allegations which are now being considered,” the Gibraltar government said in a statement.
It added that the “matter will return to the Supreme Court of Gibraltar at 4 p.m. (1400 GMT) today.”
A diplomatic dispute broke out between Iran and the UK on July 4, when Britain’s naval forces unlawfully seized Grace 1 and its cargo of 2.1 million barrels of oil in the Strait of Gibraltar under the pretext that the supertanker had been suspected of carrying crude to Syria in violation of the European Union’s unilateral sanctions against the Arab country.
However, reports show the confiscation took place upon a call by the US.
Tehran rejected London’s claim that the tanker was heading to Syria, slamming the seizure as “maritime piracy.”
Iran’s Ports and Maritime Organization said Tuesday that Britain was expected to soon free Grace 1, after the two sides exchanged certain documents to pave the way for the supertanker’s release.
August 15, 2019
Posted by aletho |
War Crimes | Iran, UK, United States |
Leave a comment
The mainstream narrative is shaping up – a story of suicide, neglect and tragic victims
In two different opinion pieces The Guardian has made its position on the alleged death of Jeffrey Epstein clear – he “probably” committed suicide.
The first, titled Epstein conspiracy theories are farfetched – but can you blame people?, takes the position that although “conspiracy theories” about Epstein’s apparent suicide are “understandable”, there’s no evidence to support them.
Rather, the author endorses the slowly coalescing official narrative. Namely that of complete, systemic incompetence:
The official explanation for Epstein’s death comes down to rank incompetence. And it’s probably true.
A short-sighted attitude to take, which totally ignores a cardinal rule when dealing with state agencies: They will only admit to incompetence if the truth is worse.
The author also attempts to undermine the “conspiracy theories” by pointing out that Epstein was a potential threat to important figures on both sides of the political divide:
Online, conspiracy theories now abound. Observers suggest Epstein was killed by one of the men who may have been implicated in his crimes – maybe Bill Clinton, according to the fringe right, or maybe Donald Trump, according to the fringe left.
An argument rather akin to saying “he can’t possibly have been murdered, because there were too many people who wanted him dead. There are SO MANY plausible suspects, that the only reasonable explanation is that…none of them did it.”
(Also, note the word “fringe”, a manipulative use of language designed to discredit an idea without engaging with it rationally)
However, this article – although laced through with traditional mainstream rhetoric about “conspiracy theories” – at least leaves them room to exist. The Guardian’s other Epstein piece is rather less understanding:
Epstein’s death is a victory for misogyny: it denies accusers the justice they deserve
Blares the headline (further evidence that very few people at the Guardian seem to know what “misogyny” really means), before continuing by taking aim at conspiracy theories several times in the text.
Firstly, in an almost word-for-word quote from the previous column:
Commentators on the right speculated that he had been murdered by powerful liberals; those on the left speculated that he had been murdered by powerful conservatives. These theories were not responses to evidence, of which there is little
And then later claiming conspiracy theories not only “factually wrong” (something no one can know at this stage)…
The speculations may well be factually wrong – criminal justice experts have pointed out that inmate suicides are common, and that those detained in federal jails often face startling neglect
… but also attempting to Mrs Lovejoy the public by claiming “conspiracy theories” are actually harmful:
the positing of these conspiracy theories is unhelpful, distracting from the important injustice that has been done to Epstein’s victims.
Declaring seeking the truth to be somehow unfair to the victims is a classic trope, deployed most famously against 9/11 Truthers, but common after many such incidents.
There’s also this sentence…
The conspiracy theorists also risk undermining efforts to bring Epstein’s co-conspirators to account: their suggestions that the financier was killed to cover up the rapes and assaults of powerful men who would rather he be shut up could lend suspicion to anyone pointing out the breadth of his alleged pedophilia ring, giving those who want continued investigations of men such as Dershowitz, Pritzker and Dubin the aura of a maniac in a tinfoil hat.
Which, I’ll be honest, I simply don’t understand.
I think she’s arguing that “conspiracy theorists” talking about “conspiracy theories” might discredit the very real possibility there was an actual conspiracy.
If that’s what she means – because I honestly do not understand the words – well, that’s obviously just crazy. You can’t argue we shouldn’t talk about conspiracy theories, just in case there’s a conspiracy fact.
That’s the attitude of a person so brainwashed by the idea that “conspiracy theorist = crazy person” that they can no longer think in a straight line. Total cognitive dissonance.
The articles are different in tone, but they are united in purpose, and they each hit the same three key points:
- Epstein “probably” killed himself. After all, inmates commit suicide all the time.
- Conspiracy theories might look reasonable, but they are factually incorrect and morally harmful.
- The real tragedy here is the poor victims who will go unavenged. We should all focus on that, not investigating the potential murder.
All this serves to demonstrate – for about the millionth time – the entire purpose of outrage culture and identity politics. Fear of being offensive used to control a conversation and dictate narrative: Don’t talk about Epstein being murdered, don’t even think about it. If you do, you’re a misogynist.
Kit Knightly is co-editor of OffGuardian. The Guardian banned him from commenting. Twice. He used to write for fun, but now he’s forced to out of a near-permanent sense of outrage.
August 14, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | United States |
Leave a comment
On Thursday August 8th, an explosion at the Nenoksa Missile test site in northern Russia during testing of a new type of nuclear propelled cruise missile resulted in the death of at least seven people, including scientists and was followed by a spike in radiation in the atmosphere.
Analysts in Washington and Europe are of the belief that the explosion may offer a glimpse of technological weaknesses in Russia’s new arms program.
The deeper concern, however, should be of the perilous consequences of the new Cold War and arms race that is developing between the United States and Russia.
In February, the Trump administration pulled out of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), an arms control treaty considered to be among the most successful in history by former U.S. ambassador to Russia John Huntsman, which banned land-based ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and missile launchers with ranges of 500–1500 kilometers.
The United States accused Russia of violating the treaty, though did not wait for this accusation to be verified by international inspectors.
Russia previously accused the United States of violating the treaty through its adoption of drone warfare, and by stationing missile launchers in Deveselu Romania.
This summer, the Trump administration has given indications that it will not ratify the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which is set to expire in 2021.
Signed by the Obama administration as part of its “reset policy” with Russia in 2010, the New START treaty limits the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 and number of deployed and non-deployed inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) launchers, submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments to 800.
On Friday, August 9, The New York Times ran an op-ed piece by columnist Brett Stephens entitled “The U.S. Needs More Nukes,” which mimicked the position of Trump’s National Security Council advisor John Bolton, a serial arms control killer.
Stephens wrote that “the problem with arms control treaties is that the bad guys cheat, the good guys don’t, and the world often finds out too late.” And now Russia, he says, is cheating again, although Stephens does not present any evidence in his article that would confirm this.
According to Stephens, U.S. presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan set the standard for effective government policy by responding to the Soviet Union’s deployment of the SS-20, a medium-range nuclear missile that threatened military installations in Western Europe in the late 1970s by deploying hundreds of intermediate-range Pershing II and cruise missiles to Europe.
Stephens in turn believes that the Trump administration and its successor should respond to Russian and Chinese provocations today through similar arms buildups and deployments.
Besides painting a Manichean view of the world as divided between good and evil, one of the major problems with Stephens’ article is that he fails to provide adequate historical context to validate his main argument.
In the case of Cold War I, the Soviet Union only embarked on a large scale arms buildup after the United States had developed a massive nuclear stockpile of 22,229 warheads (or 10,948 megatons of TNT) by the early 1960s, which dwarfed that of the Soviet Union who felt they had to catch up.
Stephens similarly presents Russia and China as bad actors menacing the United States today, when the United States has at least 15 times more overseas military bases, and spends more on the military than Russia and China combined along with at least six other major countries.
A new mobilization is now urgently needed in favor of arms control which can be modeled on the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s.
General Lee Butler, commander of U.S. nuclear forces in the 1990s, issued a mea culpa upon his retirement in which he rebuked the “grotesquely destructive war plans” and “terror induced anesthesia which suspended rational thought, made nuclear war thinkable and grossly excessive arsenals possible during the Cold War.” Butler added that “mankind escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of diplomatic skill, blind luck and divine intervention, probably the latter in greater proportion.”
Whether the same luck will prevail in the 2nd Cold War is not worth leaving to chance.
Jeremy Kuzmarov is the author of The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (Monthly Review Press, 2018).
August 14, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | New York Times, Russia, United States |
Leave a comment
Marissa Brostoff and Noah Kulwin wrote an opinion piece about the Epstein scandal in the self-described leftist outlet Jewish Currents. Entitled “The Right Kind of Continuity,” the article is a ‘who is to blame’ piece. Is Epstein’s scandal peculiarly Jewish? If so, which Jews are to blame? Not surprisingly, their analysis finds a few very rich and generally right wing Jews guilty. First the authors point to the number of Jews seemingly involved with Epstein, even noting that Woody Allen was the first name in Epstein’s little Black Book. But they dismiss the significance of the disproportionate number of Jews friendly with Epstein, concluding that since “[a]fter all, Epstein’s friends also included plenty of prominent non-Jews (Donald Trump, for instance),” Jews were not particularly to blame.
Instead, the authors find that Epstein presents a ‘Jewish’ scandal because most of the men alleged to have financed his operation are Jewish. Epstein was not, as this article and many others describe him, a ‘financier,’ a term Oxford defines as “[a] person concerned in the management of large amounts of money on behalf of [others].” As of now it is unclear if and how much money Epstein was ever authorized to invest. Epstein was a taker of money, and was long tied to billionaire Leslie Wexner and with a number of other wealthy Jews including Leon Black of Apollo Global Management and Glenn Dubion of Highbridge Capital.
Why did these wealthy men finance Epstein? Most have speculated that Epstein ran an intelligence operation or that he was blackmailing his benefactors. The authors take a different approach. They point out that Wexner, along with other Jewish billionaires such as Adelson and Bronfman (neither of whom are connected to Epstein), have given hundreds of millions of dollars to Jewish charities that fight assimilation. Apparently these men believe that ‘Jewish continuity’ is declining among American Jews as evidenced by statistics that “synagogue membership and affinity for Israel were in decline, interfaith marriage was up, and Jewish fertility rates were down.”
This claim is dubious, The Jerusalem Post recently noted that the rate of participation in Jewish Life by American Jews has been “remarkably stable”, and that the children of intermarried couples identify as Jews at the incredible rate of 80%.
But Steven M. Cohen, academic and demographer for Jewish charities, produced countless statistical reports of assimilation for wealthy donors emphasizing that “if they wanted American Jewish life to continue, they would have to prioritize the goals of “creating more Jewish marriages and filling more Jewish baby carriages.” (Cohen was himself dismissed from Hebrew Union College last year following accusations of serial sexual harassment.)
Reproduction, the article claims, both biological and social, is at the heart of ‘Jewish continuity’ programming.
In the weirdest story to emerge from the Epstein scandal, the New York Times wrote that Epstein was desperate to replicate himself and planned to use his New Mexico compound to fulfill his desire “to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating [large numbers of] women…” The article claims Epstein’s desire for clones was different only in degree from the ‘Jewish continuity project, finding little difference between Epstein reproducing himself and the Jewish establishment that “poured millions of dollars into [reproducing] its own image.” After all, the authors ask, “Which is the greater narcissism?”
After finding the financial backers of ‘Jewish continuity’ guilty of self love, the authors present an extraordinary argument. They claim that since Jewish continuity requires women to gestate reproductions of Jewish men, all women are reduced to reproductive units, and that “the focus on reproductive project ha[s] continued … to enable the abuses that come along with it.” That is; all that money focused on replicating themselves had the effect of viewing women as baby making machines and that this characterization of Jewish women accounts for the sexual atrocities perpetrated by Epstein and his cohorts. This is, I think, too large a leap. How is it that the desire for more Jewish babies leads to abuse of women?
Where is the connection between fighting assimilation and having sexual encounters with underage non Jewish girls? Further, how do they explain the wealthy Jews involved with Epstein who have no connection to the Jewish continuity project ?
Why do the authors make this peculiar claim based on so little evidence? My guess is that the authors identify as Jewish, but they do not want to bear any responsibility for the behavior of some other Jews. They establish their innocence and that of most other Jews by sectioning off just a small number of very wealthy Jews and, finding them peculiarly focused on reproduction, claim they are prone to acts of sexual abuse. This makes the Epstein scandal not a Jewish problem, but a narcissistic fault in just a few Jews.
More likely, Epstein and many others operated with a sense of impunity. Some of these people were, as the article points out, enamored with reproducing themselves. The only connection I can see between Jewish continuity and Epstein is that the focus on Judaism might have contributed to the apparent belief among some Jews that non Jews are not important and that mistreatment of them is not a problem.
When I wrote this article, Epstein was alive and well in the hands of MCC. Now we have been informed that Epstein committed suicide, and we have no information on whether he left behind any little Epsteins.
August 14, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | United States |
Leave a comment
South Korea’s National Assembly hosted a press briefing Wednesday outlining intense opposition to the potential deployment of naval forces to the Strait of Hormuz, off the coast of Iran. Civic leaders argue that participation of South Korea in the US venture violates the country’s constitution.
South Korea on Tuesday sent a destroyer carrying 300 troops to the Gulf of Aden, off the coast of Somalia, to continue the country’s anti-piracy mission there. Legal experts say the potential redeployment to the Strait of Hormuz requires parliamentary oversight. The Justice Party’s Kim Jong-dae believes in freedom of navigation but argues against joining the provocative US mission in the vital energy and shipping corridor.
The Strait of Hormuz has been a flashpoint in recent months following the increase of American naval forces in the region. The US is seeking to create a coalition there. Some voices in South Korea argue Seoul must participate due to its alliance with Washington.
South Korea and Iran have had warm relations for decades, establishing official diplomatic ties in 1962. Recently trade between the two states has been hampered by on again – off again US led sanctions. Tehran’s foreign ministry has said it hopes South Korea can remain neutral – and not participate in the US coalition.
August 14, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Wars for Israel | Iran, Korea, United States |
Leave a comment
Israel’s man in the House of Representatives
It is astonishing that in the wake of the two mass killings in Dayton and El Paso that have been attributed both by the media and the Democrats to “racism,” a senior U.S. Congressman has led a delegation of 41 of his Democratic Party colleagues plus spouses on a week-long luxury all-expenses-paid trip to Israel, which is one of the few countries in the world that defines its full citizenship as a matter of race and religion. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland is, however, apparently tone deaf to some critics of the annual excursion, having made the pilgrimage to Israel more than fifteen times. “I am pleased to join so many House Democrats in traveling to Israel to reaffirm our support for a critical U.S. ally and to continue learning about the opportunities and the challenges facing Israel and the Middle East,” he said shortly before departing for Tel Aviv.
Hoyer did not mention how he had managed to pull together such a large group of co-conspirators in spite of critical issues that need to be confronted at home during recess in town hall meetings, which, due to the trip, will operate on a short schedule if at all. As Majority Leader, he is reported to be skilled at strong-arming new colleagues to compel them to make the trip to demonstrate the loyalty of the U.S. Congress and the Democratic Party to the Jewish state, which is his top priority. According to The Intercept, “Hoyer… uses his power over the House floor agenda to coerce participation. A member who refuses an invitation can find it difficult to have their bills brought to the floor for a vote. ‘His senior staff lock down cooperating members by getting their bills to the floor and punishing non-cooperators,’ said one former representative who rejected the invitation. ‘I was tortured for a decade because I refused to go on that trip…’”
Of course, the Israelis are themselves seasoned professionals when it comes to mass shooting, something that they do every Friday across the fence into Gaza, but they are unlikely to demonstrate their marksmanship to the visiting congressmen. They in any event know that Israel will never be condemned in fora like the United Nations Security Council because of the exercise of Washington’s veto. Hoyer and company are the reason that there is such a veto even though Israel is a serial war criminal and human rights violator, so in a sense he and his Democratic Party friends are the reason why the Jewish state believes itself empowered to behave so badly. And, lest anyone is worried about bipartisanship, the Republicans too have a delegation in Israel headed by House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy consisting of 31 congressmen. The 72 congressmen from both parties constitute one of the largest delegations ever to travel to to the Jewish state.
Hoyer is a bought and paid for Israeli puppet and a big part of his job is to make sure that new Congressmen and women are adequately brainwashed regarding what is going on in the Middle East. Maryland’s Democratic Party has long been dominated by Jews from Baltimore and Montgomery County and Hoyer has successfully cultivated Jewish congressmen to advance his career. He has benefited directly from $320,025 pro-Israel PAC donations to fund his reelection campaigns and has undoubtedly also received generous donations from individual Jews and from organizations not organized as PACs.
Steny Hoyer’s foreign policy votes in Congress have not surprisingly mirrored positions taken by the Israeli government. He supported the attack on Iraq and was in fact very possibly the most prominent promoter of the war among Democrats. When the war became a foreign policy disaster, he muted his approval of it but has continued to vote for funding of U.S. military involvement in both Iraq and neighboring Syria.
Hoyer’s support of Israel is unshakable and he has often appeared and spoken before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual summit. At his most recent appearance this past spring his keynote speech included “I stand with Israel, proudly and unapologetically. So, when someone accuses American supporters of Israel of dual loyalty, I say: accuse me. I am part of a large, bipartisan coalition in Congress supporting Israel. I tell Israel’s detractors: accuse us.” Well, he got that right. He and many other congressmen do suffer from dual or even singular loyalty when it comes to Israel.
In 2007 Hoyer notably called out fellow Democrat Representative Jim Moran for stating correctly that AIPAC “has pushed (the Iraq) war from the beginning.” Hoyer called the statement “factually inaccurate,” which was not the case. He is a supporter of the Israeli illegal settlements, which up until recently was contrary to both U.S. official policy and a number of United Nations resolutions. In January 2017, he was a leading advocate of a House of Representatives resolution condemning the U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, which called both the settlements and the continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian land as a “flagrant violation of international law and a major obstacle to peace.” Hoyer also has supported President Donald Trump’s move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing the city as the Jewish state’s capital.
Israel’s enemies are also Hoyer’s enemies whether or not they threaten the United States. He has declared that an Iran with nuclear weapons is “unacceptable” and supports the use of American military force to deter such a development, ignoring the fact that Israel already has a nuclear arsenal which President John F. Kennedy tried to prevent before he was assassinated. Hoyer also supports keeping a U.S. military presence in Syria in spite of the lack of any threat to the United States from that direction, part of an Israeli plan to divide that country into its constituent tribal and religious parts.
Hoyer’s trip is paid for by the “educational” affiliate of AIPAC called the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF). One might reasonably ask why an organization connected to AIPAC, which describes itself on its website as having the “mission” to “… strengthen, protect and promote the U.S.-Israel relationship in ways that enhance the security of the United States and Israel,” should be able to fund the annual mass migration of congress-critters to promote Israeli interests without having to register as an agent of the Jewish state’s government? The answer is actually quite simple. Congress and the Justice Department have been so corrupted by pro-Israel money and other manifestations of Jewish power that they do not enforce the law when it comes to Israel. Steny Hoyer and venal creatures like him are a large part of why that is so.
Nevertheless, analysis provided by Josh Ruebner at Mondoweiss cites “Dr. Craig Holman, Government Affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, who drafted the 2007 Honest Leadership and Open Government Act (HLOGA), designed to curb the influence of lobbyist money in congressional travel” as saying that it ‘… is unequivocal that the arrangement between AIEF and AIPAC ‘defies the spirit as well as the letter of the law’.” The law itself prohibits Members of Congress from accepting from any organization with income of at least $13,000 per quarter “that retains or employs 1 or more registered lobbyists… funds earmarked directly or indirectly for the purpose of financing” travel by congressmen or women for longer than one day.
According to Holman, AIPAC, which spent $700,000 in lobbying during the second quarter of 2019 alone, gets around the prohibition by having AIEF, which is a 501(c)3 educational foundation that does no lobbying, do the funding. The loophole to permit congressional junkets beyond the one day is referred to as “the AIPAC loophole,” as its intent was clearly to permit congressional paid-for-by-lobbyists travel to Israel to continue. That the arrangement is essentially fraudulent is revealed by examination of the two entities’ tax returns, which reveals that AIPAC pays the AIEF employees.
The solution to the problem remains simple. Tighten up the Congressional travel rules to eliminate the “AIPAC exemption” while at the same time requiring AIPAC and the other prominent organizations that are part of the Israel Lobby to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would open up their finances and lobbying to more intense scrutiny. But, of course, Steny Hoyer and his friends will never allow that to happen.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
August 14, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | AIPAC, American Israel Education Foundation, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
Leave a comment
By Padraig McGrath | August 14, 2019
The lady’s name was Jill. Her husband’s name was Randolph. They were in their forties. She was English. He was American. Baptist missionaries, or so they said. They rented a building in Simferopol and another one in Sevastopol, and floated between them. On Thursday nights in Simferopol, they gave English-lessons to groups of local kids. Or more precisely, the first hour was an English language lesson, and the second hour was Bible-stuff.
There are about a dozen or more small Baptist congregations in Crimea. Most of them were started during the 1990’s, and cater to people who are now middle-aged or older. Jill and Randolph’s groups were different. The age-range of their groups was not the only thing which made them highly atypical for people claiming to be Baptist missionaries. Of the dozen or so Baptist churches which are currently active in Crimea, most are led by sincere people.
Typically, an American couple during the 1990’s decided that they had been called, managed to scrape $30,000 or $40,000 together, bought a little house in some Crimean village, converted it into a simple church, and stayed for the next 25 years. In most cases, it’s just a story of sincere working-class Evangelism. Their variant of Christianity is hardly the cultural epitome of Russianness, but they essentially do no harm. Within reason, Russian people tend to have respect for any sincere profession of faith, as long as it’s not toxic.
There were lots of little telltale signs that Jill and Randolph were characters in another opera.
For a start, neither of them seemed to be even remotely as religiously literate as you’d expect a garden-variety Baptist missionary to be. I had tested them both, separately, by casually inserting a few lines from St. Paul into our conversation – some line from Galatians or Philippians or Romans, whatever was opportune in the context of the discussion which we were momentarily having.
I already had my suspicions. So I’d buzz them with some line from St. Paul, just as an acid-test, and they wouldn’t recognize the line. Major red flag. An actual Baptist missionary would know the line.
Secondly, both Jill and Randolph seemed extremely reticent about discussing the exact nature of their mission. Again, this would be highly atypical for somebody claiming to be a Baptist missionary. In fact, it would be an outright contradiction. For an actual Baptist missionary, explaining the nature of their mission would be part and parcel of the mission itself. They’d want to shout it from the rooftops. They’d want to explain the exact purpose of their mission to anybody who would listen.
Jill and Randolph were also completely unprepared to discuss anything relating to their organizational structure, partner-organizations or parent-organizations, or their sources of finance.
Thirdly, Jill and Randolph had shown up in Crimea only a couple of months after the State Duma had passed new legislation which significantly expanded the official blacklist of NGO’s which were classified as undesirable or subversive organizations in Russia.
You see where this is going.
They can’t operate openly as NGO-activists, so they start showing up posing as religious missionaries to circumvent the new legislation. The timing of their arrival was just too convenient.
As an alternative to pretending to be religious missionaries, NGO-provocateurs in Crimea also often pose as musicians. Musicians are cool. Sheltered, impressionable kids like cool. It’s always about targeting the most naïve segment of the population, ergo….
The NGO’s tend to use recruitment-techniques very similar to those of religious cults – non-stop validation, love-bombing, basic manipulation-techniques like that. Woundedly narcissistic middle-class kids eat it up.
Crimeans sometimes seem to be bizarrely relaxed about the social presence of provocateurs such as these, but then again, that’s at least partially because Crimea has been a mark for western ideological provocateurs of all shades ever since the early 1990’s. Most Crimeans just shrug their shoulders and politely dismiss these people. Some Crimeans even argue that encountering these kinds of foreign ideological provocateurs helps to “immunize” the kids, as the NGO-operatives in question are almost never well educated, and therefore lack the argumentation-skills to be persuasive, even to kids. For the most part, they are simply purveyors of slogans and clichés – their discourse rarely goes deeper than that. So, in that sense, their presence is seen by locals more as an “inoculation” than an “immunization” – give the kids just a light dose of western liberal NGO nonsense, just enough to immunize them against it.
Personally, I’ve always thought that relaxed attitude was an error of judgment, considering that the most naïve or sheltered or intellectually limited kids don’t get “immunized” or “inoculated” through this exposure, and they are the sub-set of the population which is specifically targeted by foreign NGO’s. The NGO-kids are almost invariably middle-class, “teplichny” as Russians themselves say (“sheltered,” “cloistered,” “coddled” or “hothoused”), but also almost invariably have low IQ and limited academic potential. No historical erudition whatsoever. They’ll be offered opportunities to “study abroad,” postgraduate opportunities which their limitations wouldn’t otherwise give them a chance of earning within the normal academic system at home.
You’re a middle-class kid. You want to go to university, if only to superficially justify your class-status, but you’re not smart enough. You want to travel, but that’s expensive. You received far too much maternal love to cope with the competitive social environment outside your front door, and you want “a career” because it’s expected of you. Just sell out to an NGO. Let them dangle their juicy carrots in front of you. Learn to repeat their mantras.
With the State Duma scheduled on August 19th to discuss the recent unauthorized anti-government protests in Moscow, and those unauthorized protests having been almost exclusively participated in by sheltered middle-class kids, it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that I had seen it all before.
Padraig McGrath is a political analyst with the BRICS Tink-tank.
August 14, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Deception | Russia, United States |
Leave a comment
Infamous pedophile and likely intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein was reportedly found dead in his jail cell this past weekend. An autopsy has allegedly been done, but its results are “pending,” leaving the curious with only the initial reports claiming he hanged himself and was pronounced dead of cardiac arrest in the hospital shortly thereafter. The 72 hours following his death have done little to clear up the matter of what actually occurred in Epstein’s cell on Saturday morning, though law enforcement sources on Monday told the New York Post he had hung himself with a bedsheet from the bunkbed frame in his cell – no mean feat for a six-foot, 200-pound man supposedly being checked on by guards twice an hour, and a physical impossibility owing to the paper-thin sheets, according to a former inmate of that prison.
What we do know is that he was officially alone in his cell when he died, having been taken off suicide watch at his lawyers’ urging less than a week after he was found unconscious with marks on his neck last month. Epstein reportedly claimed someone tried to kill him during that incident, though others speculated he had “choked” himself in order to convince a judge to allow him bail or secure a transfer to a nicer facility. Did “someone” come back to finish the job, merely paying the guards to look the other way? An assassin would have had to spread his money around handsomely – like most areas of Manhattan, the Metropolitan Correctional Center where Epstein was confined is heavily surveilled – but that’s not difficult for the caliber of person who had reasons to want Epstein dead. So who killed him?
The convicted sex offender had blackmail material on dozens if not hundreds of powerful people. Epstein’s homes and aircraft were monitored with cameras and microphones, and his private island was completely wired for video, according to a friend of his alleged procuress, Ghislaine Maxwell. Safes found on his property contained piles of video discs marked young (name of girl) + (name of VIP) – alongside the diamonds, piles of cash and Saudi passport. Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of his victims, says she was “debriefed” after sex sessions with Epstein’s famous friends, supplying him with the intimate details of their encounters in order to potentially weaponize the information. Even New York Times columnist James Stewart reports Epstein boasted to him about the trove of “potentially damaging or embarrassing” information he had on the “supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use” of the rich and famous. Epstein had mountains of dirt on presidents, princes, prime minsters, and lesser politicians. Any one of these (and probably more than one of these) could have taken out a contract on him, concerned that he might give away their little secret. If Epstein was not an intelligence asset, with connections high up in the Israeli and US governments, he would have been disposed of long ago, but it’s possible that one of the reasons he was not “suicided” earlier is because those who did want him dead had clashed with another faction concerned he had a “dead man’s switch” that would release even more incriminating material to the press.
Comparisons to the JFK assassination are apt. While Epstein was even more loathed by the American public than Kennedy was beloved, he had as many powerful enemies, and those speculating about his murder are already being smeared as irresponsible conspiracy theorists for demanding answers on the year’s most unlikely “suicide.” When the forces of the media establishment are so quickly marshaled against any attempts at investigating a full-of-holes “official story,” even declaring that such malignant conspiracy-mongering “hurts kids” (Epstein’s own child-trafficking apparently pales in comparison), it’s safe to assume that official story is a pack of lies. So without further ado, let the (responsible, well-sourced) speculation begin. Coincidence theorists need not apply.
SUSPECTS
As soon as Epstein’s death was announced, the hashtag #ClintonBodyCount started trending on Twitter along with #Arkancide and other names for the phenomenon that has seen dozens of Clinton enemies, witnesses, and other liabilities die under mysterious circumstances since the early days of the former president’s political career. As a frequent flyer on the Lolita Express (26 times, according to flight logs, at least five of those without his Secret Service retinue), Bill Clinton had good reason to be concerned about Epstein’s continued existence. Certainly, the couple were an early favorite for Epstein’s killer – even Donald Trump retweeted a Clinton Body Count meme.
However, Epstein is currently under investigation for sex trafficking. In court documents unsealed earlier this week from Giuffre’s lawsuit against alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell, Giuffre testifies that Clinton was not involved in the actual trafficking of girls – though there seems to be little doubt he enjoyed the fruits of Epstein’s evil deeds. Epstein even had a hand in the founding of the Clinton Global Initiative, according to his lawyers. That Clinton has been accused of rape by too many women to count and is known for being unable to keep it in his pants is not exactly a secret, in Washington or anywhere else, but he is unlikely to be placed at legal risk by the current Epstein probe. Unless Epstein had dirt on Hillary as well – who is rumored to be plotting a move to insinuate herself back into national politics, most likely through her daughter – the family accomplishes little by icing Epstein except calling more attention to the #ClintonBodyCount. One guerrilla commentator even chalked “XOXO Hillary + Bill” on the sidewalk outside Epstein’s New York home.
The FBI immediately declared a probe into the suspicious circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death. Regardless of whether this makes them dangerous domestic extremists by their own reasoning – since any foul play would have had to be accomplished through conspiring with the guards to sneak into the jail and do away with the pedophile, and the FBI has unilaterally declared ‘conspiracy theorists’ to be dangerous extremists in need of heavy surveillance – the FBI’s interest does not rule out a US intelligence role in his murder. As 9/11 proved, the government’s right hand rarely knows what the left is doing even within a single agency, let alone where rival agencies are concerned. And Attorney General William Barr, the former CIA general counsel who specialized in helping intelligence assets caught with their hands in the cookie jar get off scot-free, has already made it clear he is treating the death as a terrible miscarriage of justice by the prison, one which might even prove financially remunerative for Epstein’s relatives (he has a brother).
When former Florida prosecutor Alex Acosta was asked why he OK’d the appalling 2007 non-prosecution agreement with Epstein’s lawyers which saw the wealthy sex fiend spend just 13 months on work-release in a Palm Beach jail after pleading guilty to a lesser charge of soliciting underage prostitutes despite a 53-page federal indictment including 36 alleged victims hanging over his head, Acosta told the Trump transition team he was ordered to leave Epstein alone because “he belonged to intelligence.” That was sufficient reason for the Trump team to give him the green light for appointment as Secretary of Labor. While Epstein provided information to the FBI in 2008, according to their own documentation, individuals involved with the case who spoke to the Palm Beach Post don’t recall any cooperation.
“The Palm Beach State Attorney’s Office was willing to let Epstein walk free. No jail time. Nothing,” Acosta claimed by way of explanation during a press conference last month after he was forced to resign as Labor Secretary for his (mis)handling of the 2007 case. He insisted the sweetheart deal the wealthy pedophile’s lawyers crafted was the lesser of two evils – that a slap on the wrist was better than nothing. And Palm Beach police told the Miami Herald they were hounded, harassed, and otherwise pressured in the service of getting Epstein’s case downgraded to a misdemeanor during the original 2007 investigation, with State Attorney Barry Krischer ultimately ignoring their recommendation to prosecute Epstein on high level child sex charges.
In the days preceding Epstein’s death, Florida governor Ron DeSantis ordered the state to take over a probe into Epstein’s non-prosecution deal and the terms of his work release, an investigation that would presumably lead to the Palm Beach State Attorney’s office, which was conspicuously handed to Fort Pierce State Attorney Bruce Colton. While Krischer is no longer in that position – in a nauseating irony, he trains law enforcement in prosecuting crimes of sexual violence and oversees placement of children in foster care – his apparent collusion with Epstein’s attorneys will likely come to light, as well as the forces higher up that dictated the terms of the plea deal. Whatever US “intelligence” shared Epstein with the Mossad could have been motivated to take him out to prevent him from talking. While DeSantis – who has promised to be the most pro-Israel governor in the country – would likely pull the plug on that investigation before it got out of hand, the Justice Department opened its own investigation in February into whether prosecutors committed professional misconduct during the 2007 case. If Trump were to lose the 2020 election, Barr – the man who arguably saved the CIA from much-deserved extinction and an expert memory-holer of inconvenient inquiries – would be powerless to fix any federal probe, replaced by a Democratic appointee.
And what of Trump himself? For every three “ClintonBodyCount” hashtags, there was a “TrumpBodyCount” hashtag (which isn’t a thing, but don’t tell the #Resistance), insisting Trump was up to his neck in trafficked children and had good reason to ice the molest-happy millionaire. This is as doubtful as the Clinton hypothesis. If Epstein is being wielded as a weapon by Netanyahu against Barak, Netanyahu would not kill the golden goose that is Trump, who has obeyed his foreign policy dictates magnificently. And the documents unsealed from Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s lawsuit suggest that Trump did not physically engage with Epstein’s retinue of underage sex slaves. The president’s reported germ phobia is somewhat incompatible with girls who were being passed around from blackmail target to blackmail target like party favors, and he allegedly had Epstein booted from Mar-a-Lago for sexually assaulting a girl, suggesting that despite the chummy pictures of Epstein and Trump that surface on googling “Jeffrey Epstein Bill Clinton” (!), the real estate magnate realized early on that Epstein was a honeypot and kept his distance. Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn, whose own record as a blackmailer is legendary; if he wasn’t involved in the Epstein ring himself, he certainly would have recognized its nature early on.
Epstein is extremely well-connected to the Israeli intelligence apparatus, and these are people with both means and motive to remove him from the chessboard. Former Israeli PM Ehud Barak has been photographed entering and exiting Epstein’s East 71st St residence in Manhattan, hiding under a jumble of hats and scarves, and has admitted to visiting the pedophile’s private island, though insists he never went to parties or met girls with Epstein despite photographic evidence to the contrary. Barak and Epstein have been friends for over a decade, the Israeli having been introduced to the wealthy sex offender by his fellow former PM Shimon Peres. Barak has thrown his hat into the ring to challenge Bibi Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader, who has made it clear he considers the PM post to be his by divine right and won’t give it up easily. Speculation has swirled that the reopening of the Epstein case is tied to the battle of the Israeli titans – that Netanyahu is sacrificing a Mossad asset to destroy his rival.
Barak, then, has plenty of reasons to want Epstein out of the way. Having formed a company with the mysterious financier as a vehicle to invest in Carbyne911, a company founded by high-level veterans of Israeli intelligence that allows a remote operator to surveil a person not only through the target’s own phone but also through all the internet-connected devices around them, Barak has put other dubious financial dealings at risk of coming under the Epstein probe’s microscope. Worse, Carbyne911 – which its opportunistic owners have marketed as the solution to mass shootings – has been exposed as a horrifying surveillance tool. Similar software has already been weaponized by the Chinese government to spy on its citizens, and Carbyne’s advisory board includes former Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, the Patriot Act co-author who reliably surfaces on the boards of every Orwellian initiative from the Atlantic Council to CyberDome to NewsGuard, ready to leverage his unique blend of experience and sociopathy to strip Americans of their privacy and civil liberties. Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder whose company Palantir openly “uses war on terror tools to track American citizens” on behalf of anyone with the funds to pay for their own private intelligence agency, is also an investor in Carbyne911. The idea that a company run by Israeli intelligence, advised and funded by a who’s-who of police-state cheerleaders, that sells a powerful surveillance tool isn’t using it to spy on Americans is too absurd to seriously consider, and such a program is too valuable to be sacrificed merely because Epstein’s stink suffuses it (and it does suffuse it – he and Barak are the company’s largest investors, and most of Barak’s stake was in fact put up by Epstein).
The electoral face-off between Barak and Netanyahu is scheduled for next month, by which time the frenzy over the Epstein case will have ebbed significantly, especially with no defendant as the focus of click-driving salacious speculation. While Netanyahu has demanded an investigation of his rival, it’s not clear that Barak did anything financially illegal in accepting millions of dollars of Epstein’s money. Investigators may still pursue other loose ends – that Maxwell has remained unindicted for so long beggars belief, for example, and victims’ lawyers have promised to go after Epstein’s “enablers” – but the sensationalistic coverage from mainstream news will peter out absent a body in the courtroom. Barak can thus get back to the business of attacking Netanyahu, who is currently facing indictment in multiple corruption probes, and potentially wresting Israel from his grasp. He has much to gain from snuffing Epstein and little to lose – unless Epstein’s dead man’s switch would unleash enough compromising material to end his political career for good. Certainly, Barak has a bad track record of associating with sexual predators – his president, Moshe Katsav, spent five years in prison on rape charges, and the vice-consul to Brazil during his tenure, Arie Scher, fled to Israel to avoid prosecution on child pornography charges.
WHAT DIDN’T HAPPEN
The only certainty is that Epstein did not “commit suicide” without significant outside help. He had been taken off suicide watch less than a week after the previous month’s “suicide attempt,” contrary to standard procedure, which would require authorization (and documentation thereof). One source told the New York Post the suspicious marks discovered on his neck after he was found unconscious curled up in his cell last month appeared more like evidence he had been choked than evidence that he had attempted to hang himself, but his beefy ex-cop cellmate, an accused quadruple-murderer charged with shooting and then burying four men in his backyard after a coke deal gone wrong, insisted he had not only not harmed his notorious roommate and not heard anything, but that he had saved Epstein’s life by discovering him unconscious and alerting a guard. How this happened if they shared a cell is unclear, and Tartaglione’s lawyer has only said they shared the unit – two other sources told NBC they shared the same cell. Epstein spent just six days on suicide watch, receiving daily psychiatric examinations, according to a law enforcement source who spoke to the New York Times. Thanks in part to the strenuous lobbying of his defense attorneys, whom he met with for up to 12 hours a day while under suicide watch, Epstein was soon moved back to his protective housing unit with a new cellmate where he was supposed to be checked every 30 minutes by guards instead – a procedure which was not followed the night of his alleged death – and that cellmate was mysteriously transferred just hours before the “suicide,” according to a source who spoke to Fox News.
Despite rumors of a “camera malfunction” that surfaced immediately following the announcement of Epstein’s death – traced back to a “social media entrepreneur” specializing in “information warfare” whose clients include American politicians – a corrections union representative has confirmed there were no cameras inside the individual cells in Epstein’s unit, creating perfect conditions for whatever happened the morning of August 10th. A former Brooklyn jail warden has confirmed that for Epstein to “commit suicide,” a cascade of errors would have been necessary – starting with removing him from suicide watch. While the officers staffing MCC are supposedly the cream of the crop, at least one of the officers tasked with watching Epstein was not “a regular guard,” according to corrections union head Serene Gregg. Epstein’s ‘guards,’ both working overtime, falsified records of the half-hour checks they had failed to conduct, an anonymous source told the AP – because they were asleep, the New York Times added. Those two at the very least would have to be paid off for any operation to go smoothly, and any investigation interested in finding out – as opposed to covering up – what really happened to Epstein should interview and monitor all of those working on the unit for financial changes, especially the guards who would normally have been working that night but opted not to, allowing the drowsy duo to step in and claim their overtime. Those two have reportedly been placed on administrative leave as of Tuesday, while the presiding warden has been reassigned to Philadelphia.
Epstein’s suspicious demise has several parallels with the “suicide” of Maxwell’s father, British newspaper baron (and Israeli spy) Robert Maxwell. Despite years of valuable service to the Mossad, Maxwell died after falling off his boat, allegedly committing suicide, as his newspaper empire was collapsing, and after attempting to pressure his Mossad connections to bail him out of the financial hole he’d dug himself into. Two of Maxwell’s biographers claim he was killed, three months after demanding the bailout and threatening to expose certain Mossad operations if he didn’t get it, because he simply became too much trouble; ex-Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky has explained how this was accomplished. The dead man was then feted with a star-studded funeral in Israel, attended by six Israeli intelligence chiefs and complete with eulogies by then-PM Yitzhak Shamir boasting he had “done more for Israel than can today be said,” and future PMs Ehud Olmert and Shimon Peres, who also praised his “services” for Israel. Those “services” included peddling an Israeli-backdoored version of the software program Promis to government agencies, a Trojan horse purporting to improve government efficiency which instead funneled information on government activities back to Tel Aviv – a 1980s equivalent of Carbyne911.
EPSTEIN IS DEAD; LONG LIVE EPSTEIN?
The possibility exists that Epstein isn’t actually dead. A 4chan post purporting to be from an MCC employee, posted before news of Epstein’s alleged demise was made public, claims the disgraced financier was taken to the jail’s medical unit just hours before his alleged suicide and points to a suspicious van coming and going, undocumented per the prison’s usual procedures, at the same time as his potential route of escape. Comparisons of “Epstein”’s corpse to images of the living Epstein appear to show completely different ears, a unique and difficult-to-fake body part. Others have questioned why there was a photographer on hand to snap photos of the body leaving the prison in the first place and pointed out the article accompanying the photo referred to a “body believed to be Epstein’s.” Epstein’s brother allegedly identified his body, but if there was a plot, he’d be in on it, ready to milk the jail for millions in a wrongful death suit – a possibility Barr seems to be setting in motion by attacking MCC for “failing to adequately secure” their famous charge. The “celebrity pathologist” who observed the autopsy on behalf of Epstein’s lawyers also “helped investigate” the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. There is no smoking gun, but there is an Epstein-sized plausible-deniability gap to slip through.
What would be the purpose of keeping Epstein alive? He’s too high-profile to use as an asset any further, and could be a liability if he becomes resentful for having lost his privileged position as the Mega Group’s #1 Honeypot and being left to rot in jail – a particularly nasty jail, at that (“Guantanamo was nicer,” said an inmate who’d stayed in both). But any good blackmailer worth his salt has a dead-man’s switch with reams of sensitive material ready to go in event of death or accident. Epstein hasn’t actually betrayed his intelligence backers, at least not publicly – though he has been disavowed by everyone from Trump to Clinton to Barak, even to his one-time mentor, Les Wexner, who after setting Epstein up with his Manhattan den of iniquity now claims the disgraced “money manager” for whom he has been the sole client since 1987 ripped him off. Even Alan “I kept my underwear on” Dershowitz has backed away from the radioactive pedophile. Epstein, on the surface, has no friends left. Yet he appears to have had advance knowledge of his own arrest, selling the evidence-laden “Lolita Express” jet just a few weeks before he was apprehended at Teterboro Airport. Why did he conveniently fly home to do the time the public so desperately wanted him to do – a situation that could have been avoided if he wasn’t certain of having an escape route? Epstein was said to be in unusually good spirits before he “suicided.”
But according to Ostrovsky, Robert Maxwell went to his death believing he’d get what he wanted, as well. And if Epstein was the raging sex addict his victims say – one girl claimed he told her he required three orgasms a day, that it was biological “like eating,” while another confirmed that even if she brought him new girls “at breakfast, lunch, and dinner… it was never enough” – keeping him alive, even with a new face in a new country, would be highly risky. Meanwhile, Ghislaine Maxwell has reportedly vanished, suggesting she’s either worried about her “loose end” status making her a target for whoever killed Epstein or she’s concerned Epstein’s victims will finally have their revenge on her in the courtroom. Certainly, the media are turning against her, and with prosecutors vowing to go after Epstein’s “enablers,” she’s number one on the list. Will justice prevail? Has it ever?
August 14, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception | Hillary Clinton, Israel, United States |
Leave a comment
The US army has formally signed a contract to purchase two Iron Dome missile systems from Israel, according to a report.
America’s military magazine, Defense News, said in a report on Tuesday that the US Defense Department had finalized a deal to buy two batteries of the Israeli-made Iron Dome missile system for its interim cruise missile defense capability.
The report said the contract was signed in the last few weeks and that Israel and the US are currently in talks on transferring the systems to America.
“Now that the contract is set in stone, the Army will be able to figure out delivery schedules and details in terms of taking receipt of the systems,” the military magazine said.
Defense News added that the Israeli-made Iron Dome is meant as an interim missile defense solution for the US but it could turn into a permanent one depending on its performance in the field.
The purchase deal, initially announced earlier in the year, has been hailed as historic, marking the first time Israel has sold a standalone weapons system to Washington.
“A great achievement for Israel, this is yet another expression of the strengthening of our strong alliance with the US,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in February.
The Iron Dome has been co-developed by American company Raytheon and Israeli defense firm Rafael. It is partly manufactured in the United States.
The Iron Dome is claimed to be capable of detecting, assessing and intercepting a variety of shorter-range targets such as rockets, artillery and mortars.
The system was originally developed to counter small rockets that Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups fired into Israeli occupied territories in retaliation for the regime’s crimes against Palestinians.
The Iron Dome has proven largely ineffective in serving that purpose.
August 13, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Corruption | Israel, United States |
Leave a comment
