From Clinton Fraud to Trump-Zelensky Call: Recalling CrowdStrike’s Shady Politics Amid IT Outage
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 20.07.2024
A sloppy update to software made by US cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike has taken PCs and servers used by airlines, railways, banks, broadcasters and even medical facilities around the world offline. For anyone following US politics over the past decade or so, the company’s name should be eerily familiar.
CrowdStrike is making global headlines (and causing global headaches) this week after an update released Friday morning afflicted thousands of corporate machines running Microsoft products with the infamous blue screen of death error.
While the company has already put out a fix, the buggy update is expected to cause billions of dollars and hours in lost productivity, and experts say it may take “weeks” for businesses and governments worldwide to fully recover.
But behind the company’s reputation as a major provider of endpoint security products is the odd routineness of its name popping up in US politics.
During the 2016 US presidential election, the Clinton campaign asked none other than CrowdStrike for help investigating the hack attack against the Democratic National Committee – which had revealed embarrassing info about the party’s efforts to rig the nomination process in Mrs. Clinton’s favor.
CrowdStrike’s probe gave rise to the very first claims that Russia was behind the DNC hack, and the company provided its “forensic evidence and analysis” to the FBI, starting the ball rolling on the Russiagate conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was colluding with Russia to “steal” the election.
CrowdStrike executive Shawn Henry admitted under oath in congressional testimony in 2017 that the company had no “concrete evidence” to back up its “Russian hackers” story, but by that point it was too late, and Trump would spend virtually the entirety of his term in office dogged by the “collusion” claims.
CrowdStrike’s name also came up in the infamous 2019 phone call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, with the then-US president asking Zelensky to “do us a favor” and “find out what happened” with CrowdStrike’s server, which Trump said was in Ukraine. The Trump team was convinced that CrowdStrike planted evidence on the DNC server to frame Russia while covering up Ukraine’s own efforts to “weaken the Trump bandwagon” during the 2016 race. Democratic politicians and anti-Trump media dismissed the president’s suspicions as groundless.
The Trump-Zelensky phone call, in which he also asked Kiev to look into then former vice president Joe Biden’s role in firing of a prosecutor probing his son Hunter Biden’s alleged corrupt activities while working for Ukrainian energy company Burisma, wound up sparking the first Trump impeachment in 2019.
CrowdStrike was also one a handful of firms tapped by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2021 to work out a ‘whole-of-nation’ cyber defense plan. The initiative has been criticized as an attempt to strengthen the US intelligence and Big Tech’s surveillance powers using cybersecurity as a cover.
The same year, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz blamed Russian hackers for the 2020 SolarWinds hack attack on the US Federal Government, but curiously admitted the company had no information of its own “to corroborate that finding.”
‘PR Nightmare’
“The PR aspect is of course a nightmare for CrowdStrike,” veteran independent cybersecurity expert Lars Hilse told Sputnik, commenting on Friday’s outage and the impact it’s had on the company’s image and stock price.
CrowdStrike’s market cap plunged by $12.5 billion, and its CEO George Kurtz saw over $320 million shaved from his personal fortune. The company stock’s price fell from about $343 to $302 per share, signaling that about 12 percent of the company’s market value has been wiped out.
Interestingly, not everyone in the company came out of the outage in the red, with Chief Security Officer Shawn Henry selling off 4,000 shares of CrowdStrike Holdings’ common stock on July 15 for $371.32 per share, or $1.49 million total, according to Security and Exchange Commission data.
Hilse says the main “lesson” from the CrowdStrike mess will be the demand that cybersecurity companies improve testing before rolling out critical updates – something especially important if they’re done as “a single update being pushed to a plethora of customers running cloud-based solutions, including those responsible for the flawless operation of critical infrastructure like airports, banks, etc.”
“With increasing reliance on technology comes exponentially increasing impact on society if these technologies fail, whether through a deliberate/targeted attack, or a faulty piece of software, like in this case,” Hilse emphasized.
Russian cybersecurity specialist Alexei Lukatskiy told Sputnik Russia has been able to dodge the CrowdStrike bullet thanks to strong homegrown cybersecurity companies. Friday’s outages thus serve as another important “lesson” for Russia, which has been “gradually switching away from products by foreign vendors to Russian ones,” that it’s on the right track, he said.
Another important takeaway, according to Lukatskiy, is the modern world’s increasingly critical level of dependence on computers. “IT has penetrated into a wide array of different areas, and the owners of companies working in critical industries must understand all the consequences and evaluate the unacceptable events that may occur due to the seeming failure of an ordinary computer…,” he said.
Recall that CrowdStrike Lied About DNC Server “Hack” in 2016
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse™ | July 20, 2024
second I saw the news yesterday that computers all over the world had been taken down—causing widespread disruptions to travel, medical care and an array of businesses—I couldn’t help wondering if it was an implicit reminder of how dependent we are on global computer systems, and therefore how vulnerable we are.
Then I saw the outage was purportedly traced to CrowdStrike—the same Austin-based cybersecurity hired by the DNC in 2016 to investigate the alleged “hack” of its server. The security breach resulted in the leak of incredibly embarrassing e-mails revealing John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and DNC leadership performing all manner of Machiavellian machinations.
Back then, when I read the Wikileaks e-mails, I immediately wondered, “How are these villains going to change the subject from the content of their e-mails to something else? What misdirection trick are they going to pull?”
Enter CrowdStrike, which the DNC hired to do a forensic cybersecurity analysis of the DNC server. Shortly thereafter, CrowdStrike claimed that Russian agents had hacked it.
It didn’t matter that there was no evidence of this, as CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry admitted under oath in a declassified December 2017 interview before the House Intelligence Committee. The lying mainstream media still ran with the story that became Russian Collusion HOAX—the biggest fraud of the decade.
Even though former NSA Technical Director, William Binney, tried to tell anyone who would listen that the leak must have resulted from a DNC insider who downloaded the e-mails onto a storage device, no major mainstream media outlet would listen to him.
I wondered about Binney’s concept on a DNC insider when I researched the mysterious death of DNC insider Seth Rich (An Extraordinary Unsolved Murder in Washington D.C.) shortly before the accusation of Russian hacking was made.
Did Rich—who was apparently disaffected with the DNC because of its shabby treatment of Bernie Sanders—reveal to someone that he knew that the leak was not the result of an external hack, thereby prompting the perception that he could easily debunk the Russian-Collusion Hoax if he weren’t silenced forever?
Now, less than one week after whoever is running this country allowed a would-be assassin to climb onto a roof and take a shot at Donald Trump on a stage 400 feet away, we are told that CrowdStrike’s defective update to its security software knocked out global IT systems.
It seems to me that CrowdStrike should be viewed with grave suspicion and that businesses should be asking if it is prudent to have CrowdStrike software running on their computer systems.
Retro Israel panel defies ‘America First’ foreign policy
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos | Responsible Statecraft | July 10, 2024
The National Conservatism Conference, which professes to represent a new conservatism to “understand that the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing,” has a foreign policy problem.
On the one hand the organizers and proponents rail against a globalism dominated by supranational neo-liberal institutions, and progressive litmus tests and ideas, but on the other they want borderless solidarity with other like minded nationalists across the globe. And for some reason this precludes them from talking too much about the biggest U.S. foreign policy issue in years, the Ukraine war, for which there is no panel scheduled over the course of the event, Monday through today.
It also means talking about Israel from a predominantly Israeli nationalist perspective. And talking about the Gaza war purely in the frame of Islamic extremism and the “mullocracy” of Iran. In other words, this is only an American interest insofar as, according to the speakers on Tuesday, U.S. presidents are accused of going too easy on Iran, which in part led to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. And now Washington has to help fix it.
Moreover, American political elites have allowed the “Islamosupremacists” to influence college campuses and Democratic administrations and turn Americans (in this case, Democrats) against not just Israel, but all Jews.
As Ben Weingarten charged in the one Israel panel — “Islam, Israel & the West” — the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas have had a grip on Washington since the George W. Bush administration, where the then-president had the temerity to declare that “Islam is peace.”
If that sounds familiar it is because the same people in the room today, 20 years older and graying at the ears, said the same exact thing after 9/11. But the difference here is that Israel is fighting its own war and making it an American war on terrorism and Islam is not going to work this time. What this national conservatism conference was missing was a true conversation about what is in America’s interest as it pursues policies with Israel, Iran, and the greater Middle East.
Instead we got old chestnuts from Weingarten, an “investigative reporter” for the Federalist, talking about “the troubling views held by large percentages of American Muslims (who) are or subscribe to the same worldview as Islamic supremacists who seek to impose… a theopolitical, Sharia-based ideology on America, wholly antithetical to our constitutional republic; while leftists and Islamic supremacists are in some ways polar opposites, traditional patriotic Americans are the chief stumbling block to each side achieving its objectives.”
To him, American protests against Israel’s military operations in Gaza, which have resulted in at 38,000 (or more) dead, the vast majority of the population displaced and hungry, most of the Strip’s civilian infrastructure (homes, electricity, hospitals, schools) damaged if not destroyed by American-made bombs, is merely the “the predictable consequence of an unholy alliance between progressives and Islamic supremacists that has for several years been fundamentally transforming not only the Democratic Party but America.”
Eugene Kontorovich, an Israeli legal scholar who now teaches at George Mason University’s Anton Scalia Law School, spent his time on the panel railing against international institutions including the United Nations, which he said were dominated by anti-Jewish, pro-Islamist ideologues that were in essence working for Hamas. This conveniently renders, at least to his mind, International Criminal Court charges against Israel, including the deliberate starvation of the Palestinian population, absolutely meaningless (plus, as he has suggested, the U.S. military does it too, a favorite justification among Israeli military apologists since Oct. 7).
Instead he calls the Israel operation in Gaza “clearly the most restrained war in modern times, with the lowest proportion of civilian casualties of any war in modern times.” Again, no conversation about whether the current U.S.-backed strategy will actually protect Israel in the long-term or destroy it from within, or whether it is in America’s interest to push it along.
No doubt, the discussion appealed to the paranoia among this retro crowd that Islamists have more power than they actually have in Washington (which is why Netanyahu is getting a red carpet on Capitol Hill this month, weapons and money slushing to Tel Aviv, and votes sailing through Congress cutting off aid to Palestinians and the very institutions Kontorovich abhors?).
But the National Conservatism conference, founded by the Edmund Burke Foundation under the tutelage of Israeli nationalist Yoram Hazony, should not be confused with the America First foreign policy now being debated in conservative circles today. After three days of programming, that much is clear.
There were a few counterbalances — a thoughtful discussion about the future of NATO, which included realist Sumantra Maitra, and remarks from Elbridge Colby, a self-described conservative realist. During a plenary speech, he said U.S. foreign policy must be rooted in the goals of preserving fundamental American interests of freedom, security, and prosperity, and cast in the lens of prioritization and power balancing. While North Korea, Russia, and Iran pose threats, he contended, they are regional threats to traditional U.S. allies and partners but not existential threats to those aforementioned American core interests. Therefore, he said, they are not foreign policy or security priorities for which the U.S. needs to militarize.
He does suggest, however, that China is a threat to the U.S. economy and the security of our allies in the region, and that requires priority. “Strategy and conservative realism would call for balance of manifest strength in Asia, but also openness to a modus vivendi in China. We must be laser focused on the rightful conservative goal here, to preserve peace, if at all possible, but decent peace, one that ensures Americans are safe, free, and prosperous, and most high necessity prevents China from dominating Asians.”
While not all realists and restrainers agree with Colby’s China perspective here, his brief against the primacist foreign policy of the last 70 years sits well with a growing faction of conservative foreign policy (American interest-focused) today, much to the contrast of the Israel panel dominated by the throw-back ideological rhetoric of the past.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is Editorial Director of Responsible Statecraft and Senior Advisor at the Quincy Institute.
Shirion Collective: Ultra-Zionist troll farm that targets pro-Palestine voices in West
By David Miller | Press TV | July 20, 2024
Shirion Collective is an ultra-Zionist troll farm dedicated to targeting pro-Palestine voices and causing them social harm, including embarrassment, loss of employment or earnings, or in some cases, threats and violence as well.
It was launched in late 2023 and operates in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
It uses the technique known as Doxxing, meaning it publishes personal details, including photographs and home addresses of those it deems to be advocates of the Palestinian cause.
It also offers a bounty for the disclosure of useful information related to pro-Palestine groups.
In late 2023, there were indications that the collective was gaining a foothold in Australia. In December 2023, a Sydney resident named Theo had a picture of his house and his address posted to a Facebook group, which proved it had already infiltrated there.
Theo had raised a Palestinian flag and placed a blackboard with messages critical of the Israeli regime in front of his home in Sydney.
Less than two weeks later, a jerry can with rags stuffed into it, a disposable lighter and large bolts were placed on the bonnet of his car with a message: “Enough! Take down the flag! One chance!!!!”
In February this year, the Shirion Collective launched an infiltration campaign of the pro-Palestine movement promising that Operation Global Insight would recruit infiltrators:
- Individuals who can maintain cool, calm, and collected demeanors under triggering Jew hate and pressure.
- Volunteers who are willing to wear keffiyehs and walk in these demonstrations masked.
- Individuals with Arabic-sounding names and Middle Eastern appearance may be uniquely positioned for deeper infiltration and will receive cash compensation for their vital role in our operation.
Those signing up were promised “an hour-long basic training by one of our ex-Mossad team leads.”
There are indications that the announcement may have been simply intended to intimidate demonstrators as implied by messages on its Telegram channel:
“We won’t need to do anything,” one volunteer wrote. “They [supporters of Palestine] will:
- Tone down
- Police their own
- Maybe even beat up their own just because they think those are us
And all accomplished just by one tweet. Doesn’t even cost a cent.”
There are other indications that the group is involved in psychological warfare such as its claim to be developing a sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool to produce fake materials with which to attack pro-Palestine campaigners.
However, the pro-Israel AI, Macabbee, has never been launched.
Shirion seeks to fan the flames of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian hate while celebrating the carnage in the Gaza Strip, and violence against their supporters in the West.
It has repeatedly celebrated the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza, including journalists and children.
This raises a pertinent question: who or what is behind this anonymous group? And to what ideas and ideologies are those running it attached?
So who or what is the Shirion Collective and how does it relate to other Zionist troll groups active in the West? There are many of these, each of which traces back in one way or another to the Zionist regime.
Here’s a select list of a few of them:
- Canary Mission, a campaign of defamatory attacks on university students and staff who support the Palestinian cause.
- The Tel Aviv Institute which recruits social media “influencers” to shill for genocide
- The Psy-Group, a kind of private Mossad set up by the former regime spooks to conduct psychological warfare against the Palestine solidarity movement.
- Black Cube is another of these Zionist troll groups, which also specializes in spying having been founded by “former” Zionist spooks.
As with many of these troll networks, it is small digital clues put together in the manner of a jigsaw that can reveal details they want to remain hidden.
A moderator name used by the collective led to a user name “Dantheprompt” which ran a series of other social media accounts. A match came when the same photo was used for an account on Reddit as on the Multiplex system.
In a message on that system in May 2023, the user introduced himself with his real name ‘Dan Linden’.
Dan Linden, it turns out, is a budding entrepreneur having set up a string of companies and dabbled in AI as well as in pornography.
As the Guardian reported, Linden has displayed a preoccupation with OnlyFans, the platform that allows producers of adult content to monetize their content.
A December 6, 2022 screenshot of one of his personal Facebook accounts shows an OnlyFans payment notification indicating a net quarterly take of more than $155,000.
On Amazon, Linden is credited as co-author of a Spanish-language ebook whose title translates as Master OnlyFans in just 7 days! and whose blurb promises to show readers techniques to build “an account that will give you an average of 2,000 dollars a month”.
According to Stop Zionist Hate, a social media campaign against hate spewed by Zionists, posts from the Shirion Collective disclosed a habit of “lying” and this certainly seems evident in a post about Stop Zionist Hate from the Shirion Collective making outlandish claims about the accountability project.
As can be seen, this was based on claims made by another separate troll network, the Canary Mission.
This raises questions about the extent of connection to the wide range of other troll and doxxing operations run for and often coordinated with or directed by the Zionist regime.
It is well established that the Ministry of Strategic Affairs created (or inherited) a large number of front groups and developed an international and coordinated network of groups.
This has recently been rejuvenated and given a new name – Voices of Israel. This is an extensive network but, as yet, there is only confirmation of some handful of the groups involved in what appears to be a corpus of more than 50 groups.
It is plain that these groups copy from, and at least informally work together, and this provides a force multiplier such that it may be appropriate to discuss the state capture of elements of US society.
David Miller is the producer and co-host of Press TV’s weekly Palestine Declassified show. He was sacked from Bristol University in October 2021 over his Palestine advocacy.
DONALD TRUMP AND THE TOLL OF VITRIOL
The HighWire | July 18, 2024
Nearly a decade of increasingly dangerous rhetoric and bias from corporate ‘journalists’ and those in power have prepared the grounds for violence. Who is to blame??
Secret Service under suspicion amid contradictions in Trump’s attempted assassination
By Uriel Araujo | July 19, 2024
Contradictions on Trump’s attempted assassination pile up, with serious security breaches and officials claiming an investigation is needed to determine whether it was a matter of incompetence or malice.
To begin with, according to the ABC News, “law enforcement officials investigating the assassination attempt on Donald Trump told lawmakers Wednesday that 20 minutes passed between the time U.S. Secret Service snipers first spotted the gunman on a rooftop and the time shots were fired at the former president.” How can one explain that?
Moreover, it is a well-established fact now that onlookers alerted the authorities about the presence of an armed man on a nearby roof. One witness reported that to the BBC shortly after the incident.
In addition, local officials in Pennsylvania are complaining that the Secret Service, in an attempt to deflect blame, is throwing them “under the bus”. According to one local police officer: “The Secret Service came out here more than a month ahead of time and met with all the local agencies. They tell us exactly what to do, exactly what they want and exactly how they want it. It’s all on them.”
More intriguingly, several witnesses describe a second shooter, and there seems to be plenty of cell phone footage indicating that – while the Secret Service insist there was only one. According to a Times of India story, “an audio forensic analysis conducted by experts from the National Center for Media Forensics at the University of Colorado in Denver suggests the possibility of a second shooter in the incident”. A CNN story in turn reports that “forensic analysis suggests that as many as three weapons were fired at the Trump rally.”
Stephen Bryen, security expert, takes the second shooter allegation seriously, and, in his Substack newsletter, he is calling for a “solid FBI investigation with Congressional oversight” on the matter. He adds that “there is a general consensus that security at the Trump Rally was poor”, and adds: “if the Secret Service actually approved all the security measures … we wonder, like millions of others no doubt, how could they overlook the rooftops.” Bryen is no fringe figure – he is a former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, who writes for Newsweek, the Jewish Policy Center, and others.
Cory Mills, a member of the United States House of Representatives, takes the matter a bit further, saying an investigation on the Secret Service is needed to determine whether this was merely incompetence or rather malice, with an intent to neutralize Trump.
Cory Mills is a former military, and was a member of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) 20 in Iraq. He is also a defense contractor, who has earned a Master of Arts in international relations and conflict resolution from American Military University. Again, this is also no fringe figure, and his allegations raise eyebrows.
Given all the above, it is no wonder suspicions abound – the fact that Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle is very close to the Biden couple certainly doesn’t help. According to the New York Post, she “landed her role thanks largely to a close relationship with first lady Jill Biden.” In any other country, by the way, after such a scandal, the Secret Service director would have been fired already or would have resigned. One thing that hampers further scrutiny, however, is an American cultural trait, namely the distaste for “conspiracy theories” (which is rather ironic in a country where conspiracies abound). Here, some context is needed.
Most scholars concede that sometimes conspiracy theories (CT) are proven to be at least partly correct. A “true” or ideal CT is supposed to always be false – meaning that its narrative does not describe reality. However, what happens when new data changes the “official” story? For instance, nowadays it is known that in 1962 the US Department of Defense proposed a false flag operation (the Operation Northwoods), calling for CIA operatives to actually commit terrorist attacks against American civilians and military targets in American cities (with bombings and hijackings) and then using those to justify a Cuban invasion. Then President John F. Kennedy rejected the plan, but the proposal existed, and no one denies it.
It is thus not clear at all how a “correct” conspiracy theory (one which later happens to be proven true) differs from a false one. Was it a CT when critics argued that the US government had lied about the real motivations which led it to invade Iraq? Other authors define “conspiracy theories” in a more neutral manner as any hypotheses that try to explain an event by invoking a “conspiracy” – namely, a secret plan carried out by a group of people.
One should also be cautious as to avoid equating a mere CT (about anything) and a conspiratorial way of understanding society and history in general. The latter (conspiracism), implicitly holds that nothing ever happens by chance but rather everything (especially tragedies) happens by design. Conspiracies do exist but not everything is a conspiracy. On the other hand, in the face of a major politically charged event, when various contradictions pile up, it would be naïve to readily dismiss everything as a “coincidence” (I would describe it as a “coincidence theory”).
With Biden’s undeniable senility getting worse, it is becoming increasingly clear he is not fit to run for the presidency again – he can barely participate in a debate or give interviews. Given this, the question then, as I wrote, is how can he govern, or rather how come has he been governing thus? In other words, who has been doing all the governing? Some talk about a “ triumvirate”, referring to Biden’s close advisers Bruce Reed, Mike Donilon, and Steve Ricchetti – the matter is far from being clear, though. One can only imagine the amount of palace intrigue going on amid this “emperor clothes” scenario.
With the ongoing political crisis, any investigation on the Secret Service will be either weaponized by Republicans against Democrats or covered up by the latter, amid a major narrative war and claims about “conspiracy theories”. The crisis is thus also an epistemic one, so to speak.
This state of affairs can only further undermine the legitimacy of American institutions, with serious consequences for the country’s stability. With a suspicious murder attempt on a presidential candidate and an embarrassingly senile incumbent president, the rest of the world holds their breath while the politics within the Atlantic superpower has just gone mad.
Palestinian Factions: The day after the war is a Palestinian internal affair
Palestinian Information Center – July 19, 2024
GAZ – The Palestinian national and Islamic factions said on Thursday evening that the day after the war on Gaza is a purely Palestinian national affair, and no external party will be allowed to interfere in the Palestinian internal affairs.
The factions stressed in a statement that the Rafah crossing is a Palestinian-Egyptian border crossing, and that the form of its management on the Palestinian side is determined by the Palestinian forces and definitely not the USA or Israel, or those who cooperate with them.
“The recent Knesset resolution which rejects the establishment of a Palestinian state takes us to the heart of the conflict with the occupier,” the statement added.
The factions called for establishing a widespread national movement aimed at “reclaiming the Palestine Liberation Organization that has been silenced for decades and for developing a national strategy and program for liberation.”
The factions’ statement comes in light of the news about a secret meeting held last week between the USA, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, represented by its intelligence chief Majid Faraj, to discuss reopening the Rafah crossing under the control of Israel and the USA.
For 73 days, Israeli occupation forces have been occupying and closing the Gaza crossings, preventing the wounded and sick from traveling abroad for treatment or bringing in any humanitarian aid into the besieged Strip, turning a blind eye to warnings from humanitarian and relief organizations and international demands to reopen the crossings to avoid famine and to save the lives of thousands of citizens.
Collapsing Empire: Yemen Defeats US Navy
By Kit Klarenberg | Al Mayadeen | July 19, 2024
On July 12th, the Associated Press (AP) published an astonishing report, on the return of US Navy fighter pilots to Virginia after nine months of failing to thwart the righteous anti-genocide blockade of Red Sea shipping by Yemen’s Ansar Allah. The article was at pains to portray the pilots’ arrival Stateside as a heroic homecoming for courageous American flying aces. In reality, the Empire’s terminal weaknesses, and drastically ever-reducing power, were amply exposed.
AP described the pilots as “feeling relieved…after months of shooting down Houthi-launched missiles and drones off Yemen’s coast in the most intense running sea battle the Navy has faced since World War II.” Accompanying photos depicted them embracing their wives, and children waving the Star Spangled Banner. One pilot, “clearing the emotion from his voice,” boasted that he “couldn’t be prouder of his team” – the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier strike group – and “everything that the last nine months have entailed.”
The pilot looked ahead to spending time with his family, and trying to “make up for nine months of lost time.” The wife of a Navy lieutenant commander and pilot lamented that she “initially thought this deployment would be relatively easy” – “it was going to be, if you could call it, a fun deployment where he’s going to get lots of ports to visit.” As it was, the USS Eisenhower became embroiled in a brutal, unwinnable quagmire, and “plans continued to change.”
The drastic prolongation of her husband’s deployment “was exacerbated” due to knowing “people” – in other words, Ansar Allah – “[wanted] to harm the ship.” She was forced to consult “counselors provided by the Navy,” and was not alone. AP records “months of fighting and extensions placed extra stress on roughly 7,000 sailors and their families.” Pentagon officials are now investigating how to care for pilots and sailors “when they return home, including counseling and treatment for possible post-traumatic stress.”
It’s been a hellacious nine months for the US Navy in the Red Sea, courtesy of God’s Partisans [literal translation of Ansar Allah]. AP notes the Eisenhower and its accompanying ships have been bombarded relentlessly by Ansar Allah drones, and ballistic and cruise missiles. Frequently, these attacks have penetrated multiple layers of on-ship defenses, which is totally unprecedented in modern history. AP reports many sailors “have seen incoming Houthi-launched missiles seconds before they are destroyed by their ship’s defensive systems.”
Battling an enemy that can actually fight back has been a deeply ravaging experience for the US Navy. One pilot remarked, “most of the sailors…weren’t used to being fired on given the nation’s previous military engagements in recent decades.” He described the experience as “incredibly different”, “traumatizing for the group”, and “something that we don’t think about a lot.” A new experience it may be – but it’s one the US military will need to promptly and permanently adapt to.
Given the pace with which events move in this epoch, many may have forgotten the tubthumping fanfare that accompanied Operation Prosperity Guardian’s launch in December 2023. This followed a flurry of ineffectual, flaccid British and US airstrikes on Yemen. Officials in Washington bombastically announced that a multi-country coalition led by the US, comprising Bahrain, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, the Seychelles, and Spain would be dispatched to the Red Sea, to decisively end Ansar Allah’s blockade, and ensure “freedom of trade”.
Almost immediately though, the much-vaunted coalition came apart. France, Italy, and Spain all announced they wouldn’t actually be taking part. Despite this inauspicious debut, when footage emerged of a grand international naval flotilla dramatically slicing its way to the region, many prominent social media users shrieked that Yemenis were about to find out why Americans don’t enjoy universal healthcare. Fast forward to July this year, and the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) published a forensic report on the impact of AnsarAllah’s “attacks on international trade.”
It found that container shipping through the Red Sea, which typically accounts for approximately 10-15% of international maritime trade, had declined by approximately 90% since Operation Prosperity Guardian began. Due to Ansar Allah’s inexorable onslaught against corporations and countries supporting the Gaza genocide, many ships were forced to take alternative routes around Africa, adding approximately 11,000 extra nautical miles, up to two weeks further transit time, and approximately $1 million in additional fuel costs for each voyage:
“For many shipping companies, the combined costs of crew bonuses, war risk insurance (roughly 1000% more than pre-war costs), and Suez transit fees make the additional time and financial costs traveling around Africa less expensive by comparison…Threats to Red Sea transits are compounding ongoing stress to global maritime shipping…Insurance premiums for Red Sea transits have risen to 0.7-1.0% of a ship’s total value, compared to less than 0.1% prior to December 2023.”
The DIA calculates that “at least 65 countries’ interests have been affected” by Ansar Allah’s actions, and “at least 29 major energy and shipping companies have altered their routes to avoid Houthi attacks.” And this is while their anti-shipping aerial strikes have been subject to relentless bombardment by US missiles and pilots.
On July 15th, mere days after Associated Press surveyed the smoldering wreckage of Operation Prosperity Guardian, AnsarAllah announced three separate operations in response to the Zionist entity’s massacre at the UN al-Mawasi Khan Yunis refugee camp. Undefeated and indefatigable, God’s Partisans are not backing down, and are going nowhere. The Resistance fights to win.
Should RFK, Jr., Have Accepted Secret Service Protection?
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | July 19, 2024
In the aftermath of the near-assassination of President Trump, President Biden finally granted independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s longtime request to be granted Secret Service protection. However, I can’t help but wonder whether Kennedy is now having second thoughts, not only given the Secret Service’s massive incompetence, at best, that led to the Trump shooting but also given the possibility, at worst, that there was criminal culpability on the part of the Secret Service, including by simply knowingly letting the shooting happen.
While the event will inevitably be blamed on incompetence by U.S. officials and the mainstream press, one thing is certain: While there is now no doubt that the John F. Kennedy assassination was orchestrated and covered up by the military and the CIA, given the military’s fraudulent autopsy on JFK’s body and the CIA’s production of a fraudulent copy of the Zapruder film on the weekend of the assassination, there is also no doubt that there were elements of the Secret Service involved in the assassination and cover-up. (For a detailed account of the autopsy fraud and the film fraud, see my books The Kennedy Autopsy and An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.)
Consider Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman. He was riding in the passenger seat of the presidential limousine when the first shot was fired at Kennedy. Kellerman’s duty as a Secret Service agent was to jump over the seat and cover Kennedy with his body. Instead, he sat there like a bump on a log, waiting for the fatal shot that hit Kennedy in the head.
Fifty-nine witnesses stated that the driver of the limousine, William Greer, made a complete stop or a near-stop after the first shot rang out, which obviously made it easier for the shooter to hit Kennedy in the head with the fatal shot. Yet, that stop or near-stop is not seen in the extant Zapruder film of the assassination.
As I detail in An Encounter with Evil, the official story has always been that the Zapruder film was shipped to Chicago on the Saturday after the Friday assassination, where LIFE magazine’s printing plant was located. This was after Dallas businessman Abraham Zapruder had sold the print rights to his film of the assassination to LIFE magazine.
In the late 2000s, that official narrative was burst asunder when one of the CIA’s most renowned photo intelligence analysts, Dino Brugioni, disclosed that two men who identified themselves as Secret Service agents secretly delivered the Zapruder film to him and his team at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington, D.C., on the Saturday night after the assassination on Friday. That meant that the film had secretly been diverted from Chicago to Washington. That would not have been difficult to do given that LIFE’s publisher, C.D. Jackson, was a CIA asset under the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird program.
Brugioni’s job was to make blow-ups of frames from the film that the two Secret Service agents selected and post them on “briefing boards.” As I detail in my book, when Brugioni was shown the extant Zapruder film in the late 2000s, he stated unequivocally that it was not the same film he had seen on that Saturday night.
On the following evening, a man who identified himself as a Secret Service agent delivered a 16mm copy of the Zapruder film to another NPIC team, stating that this copy was actually the original film that he had just brought from Hawkeyeworks, a top-secret CIA film facility located in the middle of Kodak’s research and development facility at its national headquarters in Rochester, New York.
How do we know that that that 16mm film was a copy and not the original? Because Zapruder’s film was an 8mm-wide film. There is no way to convert an 8mm film into a 16mm film except by making a copy of it.
Could they have produced a 16mm top-quality copy of an 8mm film at Hawkeyeworks? Brugiioni had visited Hawkeyeworks and had been told that they were capable of “doing anything” at that facility.
How would they have done that? As I detail in An Encounter with Evil, they would have done it with what was called an “aerial optical printer,” which could produce an altered copy that would come out looking like an original. Using that piece of equipment, they could produce an altered copy of the film that deleted all the frames that showed Secret Service agent Greer’s stop or near-stop of the limousine, which, again, had been seen by 59 eyewitnesses.
Since the CIA could view Zapruder’s 8mm film at NPIC, there was no reason whatsoever to secretly take the film to Hawkeyeworks except to produce an altered, fraudulent copy of the film. (While the CIA worked closely with Kodak film experts at Hawkeyeworks, no evidence has ever surfaced that Kodak had any role in helping to produce the altered copy of the Zapruder film.)
Returning to Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman, it’s worth mentioning that he was the agent in charge of the Secret Service team at Parkland Hospital that forcibly prevented the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, from conducting an autopsy on Kennedy’s body, as Texas law required. Brandishing guns and screaming, yelling, and issuing a stream of profanities, Kellerman and his team forced their way out of Parkland with JFK’s body and delivered it to new President Lyndon Johnson, who was patiently waiting for it in Air Force One at Dallas’s Love Field and who would later deliver JFK’s body into the hands of the military.
As I detail in The Kennedy Autopsy, the president’s body was secretly delivered to the Bethesda National Medical Center morgue at 6:35 p.m. in a cheap shipping casket, which was almost 1 and 1/2 hours before the official entry time of the body into the morgue in the heavy, ornate casket into which it had been placed in Dallas.
You’ll never guess who was in charge of the secret operation to get JFK’s body back into the Dallas casket after it had been secretly delivered to the Bethesda morgue at 6:35 pm in the cheap shipping casket. Yes, Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman, who obviously was a very busy man on November 22, 1963.
After the Assassination Records Review Board was brought into existence in 1992, the ARRB sent a notice to all federal agencies, including the Secret Service, specifically advising them that they were not to destroy any assassination-related records. With full knowledge of that directive, the Secret Service knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately destroyed its records of Kennedy’s trips in the month preceding the assassination. Those records were important in part because of an assassination plot in Chicago that was foiled, one that involved a “patsy” who was similar to Lee Harvey Oswald, a man named Thomas Vallee.
Given the manifest incompetence of the Secret Service with respect to the Trump shooting, at best, and given that elements of the Secret Service were criminally culpable in the Kennedy assassination, and given the Secret Service’s contemptible conduct with the ARRB, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., might today be wishing he had stuck with a private-sector security firm.
US not solution but obstacle in way of resolving international issues: Iran
Press TV – July 19, 2024
Iran’s interim foreign minister says the United States’ unilateral approach to international issues has proven to be a failure, stressing that Washington is not part of the solution, but an obstacle in the path of peace.
Speaking to reporters in New York on Friday, Ali Bagheri Kani criticized the US’s withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and its export of weapons to Israel amid the regime’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.
“The Americans’ claims that unilateralism can bring about peace, stability and security to the world have failed,” he said.
“Practically, the American’s approaches to the Iran nuclear negotiations, as well as the Palestine issue and the Zionist’s aggression against Gaza, demonstrated that they cannot be part of the solution, but they are themselves the main obstacle.”
The top diplomat also noted that the US is not qualified to be a “neutral mediator” as it disrupted the JCPOA’s implementation and is even “encouraging” Israel to commit more crimes in Gaza by providing the regime with lethal arms.
Bagheri Kani made the remarks after he attended two United Nations Security Council meetings focusing on the developments in Palestine and multilateralism.
He said that in the meetings, he had underlined the need for an immediate end to the Gaza genocide and highlighted the consequences if the regime committed a “strategic mistake” by invading Lebanon.
“The Zionists are killing and injuring 20 oppressed Palestinians almost every hour. Thus, the world should not remain silent and passive in the face of these continued crimes that are being normalized,” he added.
The interim foreign minister further hailed resistance as an effective element in the region, saying it plays a major role in creating regional stability and prevents the Zionists from escalating their offensive and massacre in the region.
Israel unleashed its brutal Gaza onslaught on October 7, 2023, after the Hamas resistance group carried out its historic operation against the occupying entity in retaliation for the regime’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
The Tel Aviv regime has so far killed at least 38,848 Palestinians, mostly women, and children, in Gaza, and injured 89,456 others in the besieged Gaza Strip.
US declares ‘mission complete’ for Gaza Aid Pier after delivering one day’s worth of food
The Cradle | July 18, 2024
The Pentagon announced on 17 July that the floating pier built off the coast of Gaza would be dismantled for good, declaring its “mission complete” two months after it started operations.
“The maritime surge mission involving the pier is complete. So there’s no more need to use the pier,” Navy Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, deputy commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM), told a news briefing late Wednesday.
“Our assessment is that the temporary pier has achieved its intended effect to surge a very high volume of aid into Gaza and ensure that aid reaches the civilians in Gaza in a quick manner,” Cooper said, adding that nearly 20 million pounds of aid entered Gaza via the pier – the equivalent of about 600 truckloads.
For months, the UN and other human rights organizations have established that a minimum of 500 to 600 truckloads of aid need to enter Gaza daily to alleviate critical famine conditions. A large part of the aid that reached Gaza via the pier rotted under the sun for weeks after the US and Israel used the alleged humanitarian corridor to launch a bloody rescue operation in Nuseirat camp that killed nearly 300 Palestinians.
Cooper also announced that efforts to deliver aid to Gaza by sea would shift to the Israeli port of Ashdod. He added that, after US troops failed to re-attach the pier last week for a final time, about five million pounds of aid stranded in Cyprus and at sea will be heading to Ashdod.
“Having now delivered the largest volume of humanitarian assistance ever into the Middle East, we’re now mission complete and transitioning to a new phase,” Cooper claimed. “In the coming weeks, we expect that millions of pounds of aid will enter into Gaza via this new pathway.”
Earlier this week, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that the floating pier would be replaced with a “dedicated facility” called Pier 28 in Ashdod Port without specifying a timeline.
He also claimed that the facilities will include a field hospital to “treat Palestinian children.” “This is a significant short-term solution that will address immediate humanitarian needs until a permanent mechanism is established to evacuate and treat ill children,” Gallant’s office said.
US President Joe Biden, who announced the construction of the $230 million structure in March, expressed disappointment in the pier’s ultimate failure, saying, “I was hopeful that would be more successful.”
After its launch in mid-May, the pier operated for fewer than 25 days, and aid agencies used it only about half that time due to security concerns, as the Israeli army has continuously targeted aid convoys and humanitarian groups operating in Gaza.
Barely any humanitarian aid has entered Gaza since the start of May when Israel violently took control of the Rafah crossing after Hamas accepted the terms of a US-backed ceasefire agreement. Tel Aviv is also in control of another six land crossings into the besieged enclave, which could allow for the delivery of necessary assistance that has been rotting on the Egyptian side of the border.
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Aaron Siri’s Book: Vaccines, Amen
By Maryanne DemasiMaryanne Demasi | Brownstone Institute | June 15, 2026
For decades, vaccines have been treated as the sacred cow of modern medicine. I was taught that they were the holy grail. To question them was heresy. To raise concerns about safety was to risk professional exile.
Aaron Siri makes it clear in Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines that the story we’ve been told about vaccine science rests far more on belief than proof.
“No child should be sacrificed on the altar of the religion of vaccines,” Siri writes, as he turns his focus to America’s overcrowded childhood immunisation schedule.
I assumed little in this book would surprise me. I’ve spent years reporting on drug safety, regulatory capture, and the corruption of science. But Siri showed me how wrong I was.
Siri is not a doctor or a scientist. He is an attorney, and this, he says, is his advantage. In court, rhetoric won’t save you. Evidence does. As he puts it, he doesn’t get to say “trust me” the way many doctors do. “I need to prove claims with real data.”
And he does. … continue
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