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The Orwellian RESTRICT Act is a chilling echo of ‘1984’ and an erosion of American freedom

Far beyond cracking down on TikTok, the bill envisages frightening powers to control citizens’ access to ‘unwanted’ information

By Ian Miles Cheong | RT | April 15, 2023

In an eerie semblance to George Orwell’s ‘1984’, the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act, or RESTRICT Act, looms as a dark cloud over American liberties.

Branded as a mere “TikTok ban,” this act possesses a sweeping reach that would empower the federal government to designate any nation a “foreign adversary,” ban online services and products even indirectly controlled by an entity within their jurisdiction, and severely punish Americans who engage in almost any transaction with them.

Sponsored by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the RESTRICT Act not only targets the Chinese-linked TikTok platform but also has the potential to dismantle the very foundations of American freedom. One cannot help but draw comparisons to Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, where pervasive government surveillance and control are the norm. In a frightening twist, this proposed legislation could make such nightmarish fiction a stark reality.

The chilling provisions of the RESTRICT Act would impose a civil penalty of up to $250,000 by the Secretary of Commerce on individuals who conduct transactions that violate the act. The bill’s definition of a transaction is disturbingly broad, encompassing activities such as acquisitions, importation, data transmission, software updates, repairs, data hosting services, and other transactions designed to evade or circumvent the act’s application.

However, as in the oppressive world of ‘1984’, the $250,000 fine is only the beginning. American citizens found to be in violation of the act could face a criminal fine of up to $1 million and a jail sentence of up to 20 years.

The parallels to Orwell’s vision are striking, as the RESTRICT Act essentially serves as a tool of control and punishment. It is a sobering reminder of the dystopian fate that awaits the public if it allows government unchecked power in the name of security from foreign nations.

Moreover, the bill allows the federal government to seize and access various devices and services belonging to American citizens, including phones and computers, internet access points, e-commerce technology and services, cryptocurrencies, and even advanced technologies like quantum computing, post-quantum cryptography, advanced robotics, and biotechnology.

To add insult to injury, the government is granted immunity from public oversight by restricting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests related to the enforcement of the bill. In this regard, the RESTRICT Act resembles an American version of China’s “Great Firewall,” which isolates its citizens from a significant portion of the World Wide Web.

However, unlike in China, where VPN usage does not automatically lead to imprisonment and many citizens use it to access popular apps and video games without repercussions, the RESTRICT Act imposes much more severe penalties on those who violate its provisions.

Already, conservatives are sounding the alarm on the dangers of the bill, including Tucker Carlson, who dedicated a monologue warning that it would provide the government the ability to “punish American citizens and regulate how they communicate on the Internet.”

Donald Trump Jr. wrote on Twitter: “Nothing is ever as it seems. The uniparty wants more power to control what we do and see. And now we’re going to give the Biden goons the ability to throw us in jail for 20 years if they decide we’re in violation of this craziness? No thanks.”

The US House Committee on Financial Services issued a warning to other members of the Republican party to reject the bill, stating that the RESTRICT Act “is using TikTok as a smokescreen for the largest expansion of executive power since IEEPA.”

“The US can’t beat China by becoming more like the Chinese Communist Party,” it added.

It remains to be seen whether Americans will be able to wake up to the dystopian reality that looms just beyond the horizon should the ratification of the RESTRICT Act proceed. For their sake, and everyone else’s, let’s hope so.

Ian Miles Cheong is a political and cultural commentator. His work has been featured on The Rebel, Penthouse, Human Events, and The Post Millennial.

April 15, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Testing the system

XYMPHORA | APRIL 15, 2023

The affidavit used to establish the probable cause to get an arrest warrant for the patsy. Two things of interest: 1) whatever the experts might think is likely, Teixeira had a Top Secret security clearance, and 2) whatever Bellingcop might say, he was identified easily without recourse to fancy internet sleuthing of the granite countertop.

The standard model is that the authorities get a young, idealistic, patriotic guy (Lee Harvey Oswald, perhaps even Timothy McVeigh), and convince him that he needs to do some seemingly odd things in order to save his country from real peril. For example, he may be working to stop illegal sales of weapons by mail, or even protect the President from assassination (both options in the case of LHO). Given the current controversy over Presidents and classified documents, it would not be hard to convince a guy like Teixeira that he had to ‘test the system’ by posting documents on relatively obscure social media platforms, and talk up these documents on discussion groups, in order to determine how long before the government is aware of the risk. It is a plausible ‘stress test’ of the government’s ability to protect secrets. The oddity of using photos of previously folded documents may be because the team using the patsy was lazy and that was the easiest way to do it, particularly as it didn’t leave a computer trail the patsy might use in his defense, or perhaps it was just supposed to remove identifying marks that could be found by specialized search engines (or so he might have been told). In any event, none of this was true.

The reasons for the operation:

  1. to get the open-ended RESTRICT Act passed by producing a phony security crisis (‘the Chinese are using their apps to suck out all our secrets!’);
  2. to further integrate and normalize the (((media))) as a full part of the national security state;
  3. to publicize the utility of using British intelligence assets like Bellingcop, a method of getting US PR accepted as fact due to the ‘objective’ magic of ‘computer sleuthing’;
  4. to get out of the war in Ukraine, now generally considered to be a lost and embarrassing War For The Jews, damaging to the reputation of the hegemon, to turn to the war against China; and
  5. possibly, but it is a stretch, to use the lies revealed by the documents to replace Brandon with somebody more capable of facing the Deep-State-threatening Trump candidacy.

Of course, as is standard in these cases, the patsy will say various things in his defense, but his lawyers will tell him to shut up as: 1) everybody involved will deny everything, 2) he will have no concrete proof, and 3) raising these issues will just anger the judge and increase his sentence for slandering the good name of the Deep State and the patriotic people who do its bidding. He’ll be told to keep his head down and he may come out of this, older, but alive.

April 15, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

CDC Hired Ad Firm to Write ‘News’ Articles Promoting Flu Shots for Kids, Elderly, Documents Reveal

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 14, 2023

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) hired a marketing firm to write what looked like news articles but were actually ad placements created to persuade parents of young children and elderly people to get flu shots, according to documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD).

The documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, show the CDC in September 2020 hired Weber Shandwick, a marketing firm, to create and place unattributed articles on news sites.

The campaign was part of a multi-year, $32 million dollar contract between Weber Shandwick and the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) to promote influenza vaccination and strengthen NCIRD’s immunization program.

The FOIA-requested contract specifies the ad agency will develop a wide variety of media strategies to deliver the CDC/NCIRD’s message on flu vaccines — but not always in its name — including writing unbranded articles for media distribution, spokesperson training, celebrity outreach, social media blitzes, social listening and monitoring, podcasting and more.

The contract could be renewed for a total award of $55.2 million, according to USAspending.gov, a federal grants database.

The broader campaign, described in the documents obtained by CHD, is dedicated to implementing “strategic health communication to provide a full range of communication support to change attitudes and behaviors to prevent diseases of interest to NCIRD.”

Every year the CDC launches a flu vaccination campaign — seeking to vaccinate every person in the U.S. ages 6 months and older.

Past campaign strategies have been largely fear-based, with the CDC’s in-house marketing team explicitly encouraging television personalities and public health experts and others to “state concern and alarm (and predict dire outcomes)” for flu season and to represent each flu season in ways that will “motivate behavior (e.g., as ‘very severe,’ ‘more severe than last or in past years,’ ‘deadly’).”

The CDC recently incorporated another strategy that researchers call “native advertising,” which involves training and/or paying trusted, non-governmental actors to promote vetted ideas in conversation, community spaces and social media in ways that don’t appear to the targeted individual to be linked to official government campaigns.

Starting in 2021, the CDC spent hundreds of millions of dollars using these same advertising strategies to push the COVID-19 vaccines among communities of color.

‘Leveraging content with third-party credibility’

The FOIA documents — which only partially fulfilled CHD’s request and came heavily redacted — show Weber Shandwick subcontracted with Brandpoint, another public relations firm with expertise in “MAT release,” to create the articles related to flu shots.

MAT release means developing “branded, consumer-facing” articles that look like news articles, but are actually ads. Brandpoint specializes in making such ads and distributing them to a wide network of print and online publishers.

According to Brandpoint’s website, “These articles allow brands to leverage their own content and the credibility of third-party media companies while reaching consumers on the local news and media sites they frequent daily.”

In other words, the articles and announcements encouraging flu vaccination appear to be news, posted in English and Spanish on websites and radio stations that people know and trust, such as the San Antonio Express-News, the Houston Chronicle, WJCL in Savannah, Georgia, and KSBW in Salinas, California, according to the documents.

For example, Brandpoint has a Los Angeles Times content page that links to several of its articles. The print ads sometimes, but not always, carry a small label that marks them as a “paid post” but does not indicate who paid for them.

Figure 1: Sample Brandpoint Copy

Figure 2: Sample Brandpoint Image

For the flu vaccination campaign, Brandpoint developed article-like content, which included images of children, and paid to place them on different news sites. The CDC approved the ads, and most of them focus on childhood vaccination.

Some of the stories outlined CDC recommendations, but they don’t appear to be written by the CDC. Instead, the listed author is Brandpoint — often written as “(BPT)” — and the articles follow journalistic style conventions, so there is no way for the reader to know the CDC bankrolled the information.

Brandpoint committed to running ad articles on at least 800 online locations, flooding people’s media landscape with CDC-sponsored content. Many of Brandpoint’s story links from this campaign no longer work.

CHD is working to obtain records not yet provided by the CDC related to the agency’s contract with Weber Shandwick.

CDC supported ‘intentionally unbranded’ messaging to avoid appearance of ‘top-down’ advice

Since 2021, the CDC has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to create “culturally tailored” pro-vaccine materials and train “influential messengers” to promote COVID-19 and flu vaccines in communities of color in every state across the country.

The CDC’s strategy included training clergy members, teachers, neighborhood businesses, community organizations and others to promote its COVID-19 and flu vaccine messaging so it would appear those messages came from within people’s existing communities, rather than from the federal government.

FOIA documents show this “native marketing” strategy began at least as early as 2020. In this case, the strategy focused on placing “organic” messages in third-party and social media — places the marketing agencies identified would be most likely to influence the target audiences.

Peer-reviewed research published in Plos One in 2020 found that messaging on social media that was unbranded — not visibly associated with the CDC or other government agencies — was more likely than a “top-down” approach to yield “positive attitudes toward the flu vaccine,” particularly among African American and Latino people.

The research, funded by healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente, paid micro-influencers to select vetted messages and use them to create their own original content promoting flu vaccination on their social media pages.

Payment, which varied according to each influencer’s reach and influence, ranged from $84 to $360 per influencer.

Content was “intentionally unbranded to ensure that it aligned with the look and feel of their [influencer’s] pages.”

The “native advertising” strategy is used commonly in advertising, but prior to this study, it was untested in public health. It’s based on research demonstrating people are more likely to engage with — and change their behavior based on — content they don’t think is tied to a campaign or to advertising.

When people in the study’s target region, particularly among “at-risk groups,” were exposed to messaging from people with whom they “had trusting relationships,” they were in fact more likely to change their attitudes and behaviors regarding the flu vaccine than when the message came from the “top-down.”

But unbeknownst to them, the messages were created by researchers to include “pre-selected” and “vetted facts,” including messages like “everyone needs a flu shot,” side effects are minimal, the flu vaccine is “safe and effective,” etc.

Influencers also were instructed not to use the word “vaccine” but rather “shot” because of negative associations with the word vaccine.

A $10 billion market by 2030

The flu vaccine market is booming, according to market analysts who estimate the global flu vaccine market will grow to $10 billion by 2030, up from $5 billion in 2020.

Allied Market Research makes this projection based on the fact that “Healthcare organizations all over the world like Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have suggested vaccines” for the treatment of influenza.

Several major pharmaceutical companies produce flu vaccines available in the U.S., including AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Mylan, Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis, Sanofi Pasteur and Seqiris.

The CDC says private vaccine producers projected they will produce 173.5 million to 183.5 million doses of quadrivalent influenza vaccines for the 2022-2023 season in the U.S.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the CDC has advocated that people get the flu and COVID-19 vaccines and CDC vaccine promotion funding targeted the two vaccines together.

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in 2021 unanimously voted 14-0 to co-administer the COVID-19 and flu vaccine to adults and children, with no scientific evidence to back the decision.

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) vaccine advisory committee met in January, representatives from the CDC and FDA reported they thought instances of stroke following receipt of Pfizer’s new booster in the elderly may be connected to the flu vaccine and said they would conduct research to determine if this was the case.

When asked by a committee member if it would be prudent to separate the flu and COVID-19 vaccines for elderly people, the CDC’s Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, responded:

“I think talking about spacing the vaccine is premature and I’ll just reinforce that the CDC’s recommendation for COVID vaccination and for flu vaccination have not changed.”

The Allied Market Research report confirms that pairing the two vaccines is good for the flu vaccine markets.

It states, “The COVID-19 outbreak is anticipated to have a positive impact on growth of the global influenza vaccine market. As the number of the population affected with COVID-19 virus increases, the demand for influenza vaccine surges.”

Government efforts — which by the CDC have amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars for flu and COVID-19 — help Big Pharma’s profits soar.

“Increase in government support and surveillance regarding vaccination against influenza on the national and global levels to monitor the supply, distribution, and administration of flu vaccines is one of the crucial factors driving the market growth,” the report states.

Flu vaccine comes with risks, no evidence it’s effective

Although the CDC reports 36,000 to 80,000 deaths per year from flu, data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — available on the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) website — show that CDC’s annual estimates are off by orders of magnitude, according to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., CHD chairman on leave, who outlined the existing scientific data on flu in a May 2020 letter to Sanjay Gupta.

NCHS data report the average number of mortalities attributable to influenza on death certificates is little more than 1,000, but the CDC is able to inflate the data by conflating flu and pneumonia deaths, BMJ Senior Editor Peter Doshi reported.

Doshi charged the CDC with deliberately lying about annual flu deaths to “[work] in manufacturers’ interest by conducting campaigns to increase flu vaccination.” He warned that “by arbitrarily linking flu with pneumonia, current data are statistically biased.”

Even its promoters concede the flu vaccine has low efficacy. The Mayo Clinic reports the flu vaccine is, at best, 50% effective for reducing the risk of illness among healthy adults ages 18 to 64 (a group with already low flu risk) and the CDC reports it is 40-60% effective at reducing risk.

Two Cochrane reviews found the scientific data provides “no evidence for the utilization of vaccination against influenza in healthy adults as a routine public health measure” and no evidence that the vaccine reduces transmission.

The Cochrane researchers accused the CDC of deliberately misrepresenting the science in order to support their universal influenza vaccination recommendation.

Even the National Institutes of Health reported there is no evidence that flu vaccination in elderly adults reduces mortality from flu.

Evidence shows the vaccine carries serious risks. Roughly two-thirds of the claims compensated in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (5,297 claims) have been for influenza vaccine injuries. In 2021, the total compensation to date — paid by U.S. taxpayers — was almost $4.5 billion, CHD reported.

And there is a lack of safety studies for two of the most targeted demographics for the flu shot — children and pregnant women, Kennedy wrote. In fact, studies have linked flu vaccination to miscarriages and birth defects.

Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

April 14, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

“Joe Biden Is A Criminal” Says Ex-Obama Whistleblower Alleging Family “Kickback Scheme”

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | April 14, 2023

A former staffer who worked in the Obama administration is blowing the whistle on the Bidens – and has accused President Biden of being involved in a “kickback scheme” directly related to his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings.

Mike McCormick, a stenographer in the White House for 15 years who worked with Biden from 2011 to 2017, told Fox & Friends First that the FBI has completely ignored him despite his willingness to testify under oath before the grand jury investigating Hunter.

“In February, I went to the FBI and filed one of their tips on their website. If you do that, and you’re lying to them, you go to jail. I’m not lying. I’m telling the truth, and I’m not going to jail,” McCormick said on Thursday. “Joe Biden is a criminal. He was conducting malfeasance in office to enrich his family. Jake Sullivan is a conspirator in that, and there’s more… Obama officials involved in it, I believe.”

McCormick specifically noted a key dialogue involving then-VP Biden, aide Jake Sullivan and the press on Air Force Two before an April 21, 2014 trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, in which Sullivan – now Biden’s national security adviser – outlined a US investment in the Ukrainian energy sector just days after Hunter joined the board of Burisma.

Months after the trip, Congress allocated $50 million to Ukraine’s energy market.

“I’m sitting back there with a tape recorder. Jake Sullivan comes back and somebody asks about fracking. His answer is, well, we’re bringing a lot of American assistance over for fracking. Burisma was the direct beneficiary of that fracking, and that’s what I recorded, and that’s in a White House transcript,” said McCormick, adding: “In the transcript, you don’t know who Jake Sullivan is. It’s a senior administration official. I’m the witness that says Jake Sullivan is the guy who said it and he should be investigated because at the time Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma and Joe Biden is bringing American taxpayer money to enrich that company and himself and his family.”

Hunter joined the board of the Ukrainian natural gas firm on April 18, just three days before Biden and his team traveled to Kyiv. But that critical piece of the puzzle was not made public until May 12.

McCormick argued the timeline of the events suggests that Biden funneled American money overseas to “enrich” himself and his family, and used his own influence to aid his son’s rookie energy career.  

The former stenographer made it clear he wants to present the information under oath before the grand jury in Delaware probing Hunter’s business dealings, which is led by U.S. Attorney David Weiss. –Fox News

A federal probe into Hunter Biden’s suspected tax and foreign lobbying violations began in 2018, after banks filed dozens of suspicious activity reports (SARs) regarding foreign transactions that were flagged. Some of the SARs involved money funneled from “China and other foreign nations,” sources close to the probe tell Fox.

“If David Weiss can’t have me in front of his grand jury explaining what I know as a witness, that’s a fraudulent grand jury,” said McCormick. “It’s a fraudulent use of the American judicial system to cover for Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s crimes in office.”

McCormick says the information he has incriminates Biden – and likely other officials, in connection with the alleged influence peddling scandal.

“If I went in there, I would tell them to have Barack Obama called in as a witness because he’s part of the conspiracy. He’s an ex-president. He has to answer who was in charge of this, putting Joe Biden into this role? Did Barack Obama know about it?” he continued.

“There’s evidence I’ve seen and put in my Substack on April 16th, so two days before Hunter joins Joe Biden is with Hunter in the West Wing. They have a meeting, and then later that day in the evening, Joe Biden spends a day in the limousine in the back of Barack Obama’s limousine in western Pennsylvania.”

April 14, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Video | , | Leave a comment

Pentagon Leak: Disinfo Op to Expand Control of Internet & Get Rid of Biden

By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 14.04.2023

The Pentagon “leak” could have been deliberately orchestrated to force the removal of US President Joe Biden and/or to expand the power of the US government to regulate anything posted on the Internet, Larry Johnson, retired CIA intelligence officer and ex-State Department official, told Sputnik.

Twenty-one-year-old Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira was arrested on Thursday over the much-discussed Pentagon “leaks”. He was charged with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents.

In an affidavit accompanying the charges, an FBI special agent revealed that Teixeira had security clearance for the highest level of classification, “top secret/sensitive compartmented information” (TS/SCI).

“It’s not normal. It’s not typical. It’s not easy, particularly for a member of the National Guard [to gain this level of clearance],” Larry Johnson, a veteran of the CIA and the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism, who provided training to the US Military’s Special Operations task force for 24 years, told Sputnik. “So, this is very unusual and strange. The thing that captures my attention is that the individual was part of the Air Force unit that’s involved with information warfare. At that age and at that low rank the possibilities that he would have unlimited access to highly classified material is just extremely unlikely.”

The trove of documents was initially released on the Discord platform, popular with gamers, weeks ago. Later, the alleged Pentagon files found their way to major social media platforms and eventually were picked by the US mainstream media.

A Deliberate Leak and Here’s Why

Johnson believes that it was a controlled leak, even though initially the former CIA analyst had been inclined to think that the leaked documents were the work of a frustrated whistleblower. What struck Johnson was a document labeled “CIA Operations Center Intelligence Update” in the trove.

“The one document that did capture my attention as far as being highly unlikely that he would ever have access to it was the report from the CIA Operations Center,” Johnson explained. “That document is prepared for internal use only within the CIA. It’s not the kind of document that’s prepared and circulated within the other agencies that are considered part of the intelligence community.”

One might ask why the leak was needed. According to the CIA veteran, those who he claimed tricked Teixeira may have sought to kill several birds with one stone: to smear MAGA conservatives, justify new Internet restrictions and remove Joe Biden from the Oval Office. Thus, Teixeira was immediately described as a right winger, as an anti-Semite, as a racist, a gun lover and a religious extremist: he “checks all the boxes” routinely smeared by the US mainstream press. As Johnson wittingly remarked in his blog earlier in the day, “the only thing lacking is that the fellow, Jack Texeira, was not wearing a MAGA cap.”

“There’s current legislation being proposed that would not only ban Tik-Tok, but would expand the power of the US government to regulate anything posted on the Internet,” So this could be an act designed to help create political support for that kind of authoritarian crackdown on information, a complete violation of the First Amendment.”

“Another possibility is that disclosure of these documents is designed to embarrass the Biden administration, ultimately forcing the removal of Joe Biden,” the CIA veteran suggested.

Another thing that set alarm bells ringing for Johnson was Bellingcat, which is characterized by the former State Department official as “an Open Source Intelligence outfit that has been funded by US and British intelligence.” It was Bellingcat that allegedly managed to trace the “leak” to a Discord server called “WowMao,” which seemed to have been sourced from the Thug Shaker Central channel.

The story about “leaked Pentagon files” was also picked up by the New York Times and the Washington Post which are largely criticized for being in cahoots with the US federal government and its intelligence agencies.

“That’s why I think it’s a disinformation operation,” Johnson said. “Bellingcat has been funded by both MI6 and the CIA and has worked really as what they call an open source intelligence operation. And it has been used as an intelligence entity. And several of the reporters who were involved, both writing for The New York Times, had previously worked with Bellingcat. The timing of this is just very unusual, that all of a sudden it’s just discovered and the documents that are being leaked are very precisely focused on Ukraine, the conflict with Ukraine and Russia’s activities in Ukraine.”

Convenient Scapegoat

The 21-year old appears to be more of a convenient scapegoat rather than a “hero”, according to Johnson. The former CIA analyst does not rule out that Teixeira will be punished alone – akin to William Calley in the My Lai Massacre case – while his chain of command will be let off the hook.

“I don’t think he had any clear purpose for what he was doing,” said the CIA veteran. “And it’s not clear why he started doing this. And these things are getting posted to this gamer board. Ostensibly, again, that’s the story we’re being told. I don’t know what to believe anymore from the US government. The lies that have been told are so extensive and so massive. I just don’t know what to believe.”

If convicted, Teixeira faces up to 15 years in prison. And if it was indeed a controlled leak, it would send an alarming signal about the extent to which the US government agencies are eager to violate Constitutional rights of a US citizen to reach their objectives. Remarkably, the US mainstream press has not raised the question if Teixeira should be treated as a “whistleblower.”

“The government violating constitutional rights wouldn’t shock me at all,” remarked Johnson. “That’s why I said he’s a convenient scapegoat. They’re using him in this way. He was not working for some foreign intelligence service. He would not have been able just on his own to get access to those documents. I know how really difficult it is, even electronically, when you log into these systems to find some of that information and then to turn it off, then take it out and then decide to photograph and then post it. The story doesn’t add up.”

Touching upon the timing of the “leak” the CIA veteran suggested that “elements in the intelligence community” have eventually “recognized that the prospects for Ukraine in the war with Russia are bleak and hurting and getting more dismal by the day so that Russia is going to prevail and Ukraine is going to lose.”

“And that has really created some great consternation within elements of the intelligence community,” he concluded.

April 14, 2023 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

America faces a two-front war: Russia-China alliance moving ahead at great speed

By Gilbert Doctorow | April 14, 2023

Today China officially announced the visit of their Minister of Defense Li Shangfu to Russia on Sunday for three days of consultations with his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu and also with Russia’s senior military command in charge of the war operations in Ukraine.

Li Shangfu took his present post a little over a month ago following the re-election of Xi Jinping to the presidency and a reshuffling of ministerial portfolios. It was particularly noteworthy that Li has been on the U.S. sanctions list since 2018 for alleged cooperation with Russia.

The sense of this visit was interpreted by expert panelists on the news and analysis program Sixty Minutes earlier today as follows: to inform the Chinese leadership of what has been learned by the Russian command from the 14 months of war in Ukraine.

What is the relevance of Russia’s on the ground experience? Although armchair generals in the West were very quick to fault Russia with making serious mistakes and showing unpreparedness in the first phase of the war, the reality is that since WWII no major power has been engaged in a peer-to-peer war entailing vicious fighting on the ground without enjoying command of the skies. That is what we see in Ukraine today. The United States has had no such experience. Nor has China.

The Russians now have a lot to tell their Chinese friends about the latest NATO military tactics and about the U.S. and European hardware that is being given its baptism by fire in direct engagement with themselves. The capture of a German Leopard tank in battle near Kherson yesterday is just one of many war trophies that the Russians can lend out.

Will such sharing of information critically important to China as it examines the possibility of a similar armed conflict with the United States and its proxies over Taiwan be cost free? Of course not. We may take it as a given that during the visit of Li to Russia, he and the Russians will  be planning further steps to turn their strategic partnership into something more closely resembling a full-blown military alliance with mutual security obligations.

Meanwhile the Russian Pacific fleet is now on full alert and performing exercises to repel an unidentified potential aggressor. A gentle hint as to who this aggressor might be is the fact that particular attention is being given to maneuvers around the Kurile Islands, over which Japan has territorial claims. Though the subject is not much discussed in our mainstream media, the Russians consider the Japanese navy to be a formidable force. Japan is one of the key allies in the “Pacific NATO” that the U.S. is currently building to contain China and, as needed, to fight a big war against Beijing.

Also worth noting is that last week the Chinese military response to the meetings in California by Taiwan president Tsai Ing-wen with Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy was to simulate an air and sea blockade of Taiwan. This in turn elicited a call by the ever inflammatory Senator Lindsey Graham (R – South Carolina) for the U.S. to disrupt the flow of oil from the Middle East to China in the event of a blockade being imposed on Taiwan. If anything can hasten the signing of a full military alliance between Russia and China, it is precisely that threat.

All of the foregoing latest developments necessarily raise a question that was not discussed on Russian television but which is highly timely for Americans to deal with on their own: whether the Biden Administration, by its ongoing reckless foreign and military policy that is headed towards an unwinnable two-front war, is not betraying the security interests of the United States. I leave it to legal experts whether that would constitute an impeachable offense.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

April 14, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

Did Russian Officials Sting Evan Gershkovich?

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | April 14, 2023

Ever since the arrest by Russian officials of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on charges of espionage, U.S. officials have been vehemently denying that he is a spy. But as I wrote in my article “Evan Gershkovich: U.S. Spy or Simply Naive?” those denials mean nothing because U.S. officials would deny it even if he was a spy.

It is not difficult to imagine the CIA approaching Gershkovich and asking him to acquire secret information while he was reporting inside Russia. The CIA and the rest of the U.S. national-security establishment have been obsessed with Russia since at least 1947. Moreover, the CIA would know that as a reporter for the prestigious Wall Street Journal, Gershkovich would have a perfect cover, one that naturally would involve having the Journal and other mainstream newspapers unwittingly coming to his defense. 

It is also not difficult to imagine a young, right-wing, idealistic journalist jumping at the chance to be working secretly for the CIA. He would consider it a wonderful opportunity to “serve his country.”

After all, that was what Operation Mockingbird was all about during the Cold War racket. Countless American journalists leaped at the opportunity to become CIA spies or informants in the “patriotic” quest to defeat the Reds and prevent them from taking over America.

According to Wikipedia, 

Without identifying individuals by name, the Church Committee stated that it found fifty journalists who had official, but secret, relationships with the CIA. In a 1977 Rolling Stone magazine article, “The CIA and the Media,” reporter Carl Bernstein expanded upon the Church Committee’s report and wrote that more than 400 US press members had secretly carried out assignments for the CIA….

A much more likely possibility, however, is a Russian sting operation, one in which a Russian “friend” of Gershkovich or a trusted source gave him secret information in violation of Russia’s espionage laws. If that’s what happened, then that conversation or transaction was undoubtedly secretly videotaped or recorded. If Gershkovich was the victim of that type of sting operation, he would have a difficult time defending himself against a charge of espionage. 

U.S. officials would undoubtedly cry “entrapment” until they were blue in the face. But there would be a big problem with their cry — Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer who received a 25-year jail sentence here in the U.S. arising from a sting operation orchestrated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. 

As I detailed in my article “Time to Revisit the Viktor Bout Case,” in order to get Bout, the DEA came up with a concocted, made-up, fictitious crime that DEA officials induced Bout to commit — in Thailand! Working closely with Thai officials, U.S. officials then used that fake crime as the basis for extraditing, prosecuting, convicting, and incarcerating Bout here in the United States. Using their “sting” operation, U.S. officials proudly and gleefully took more than 10 years out of Bout’s life, until he was traded for Brittney Griner, the American basketball star who was convicted of violating Russia’s war on drugs.

It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if Russian officials decided to copy the modus that U.S. officials used to get Bout and employed it against Gershkovich. The Russians might well subscribe to the adage that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. 

April 14, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

Washington’s Crackdown on Whistleblowers Poses Danger to Free Speech

By James Tweedie – Sputnik – 14.04.2023

The US government is tightening its grip over the internet, social media and free speech. Facebook* whistleblower Ryan Hartwig and former Google and YouTube software engineer Zach Vorhies reveal the dangers and implications.

A US bill targeting the TikTok app is really a wider crackdown on online privacy and public scrutiny of government, two Big Tech whistleblowers have told Sputnik.

The Restrict Act, currently working its way through the US Congress, has been touted as an attack on Chinese software developer ByteDance — whose US CEO Shou Zi Chew was hauled before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in March.

The legislation would allow the government to restrict access to apps from any firm it chooses — raising the prospect of its use to protect US firms from foreign competitors. But tech experts and free speech advocates fear it will open the door to a widespread crackdown against online critics of the White House.

Ryan Hartwig said the legislation was “essentially the Patriot Act online” — referring to legislation passed in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that allowed unwarranted government wiretapping of US and foreign citizens’ phone lines.

“It’s a horrible piece of legislation. Basically it’s not only banning TikTok, it’s giving the government authority to arrest people for anything they say online. It’s definitely clear that the government wants to continue to restrict free speech online,” Hartwig said. “It is really a problem. They are going to crack down.”

The bill is ostensibly aimed at protecting children and teenagers from harmful content, which the former Facebook employee said had some validity. “But the Restrict Act does a lot more than just censor a few bad posts. It basically gives them blanket authority… and criminalizes any kind of political speech.”

“If I just attack them, if I say bad things about the president, it gives the government authority to arrest me.” Hartwig stressed. “The Restrict Act can punish people for whistleblowing on an illegal government action.”

Just this week, 21-year-old US Air National Guard enlisted Airman Jack Teixeira was arrested as the suspect in the embarrassing Pentagon leaks of Ukrainian plans for its yet-to-materialize spring counter-offensive. Teixeira was traced through an online chat group for video gamers on the Discord app. The whistleblower said its users should “be concerned.”

The ‘blockchain’ technology used by Bitcoin and other concerns — essentially a variant of mass file-sharing for online data — could protect users’ rights, he said.

“There are websites that are using blockchain technology to avoid censorship, which is great. So there’s one called Bastion that is Blockchain-based and cannot be deleted off the internet,” Hartwig explained, calling the technology “the future of the Internet.”

But protecting oneself from government snooping is difficult for the average casual web surfer.

“Unless you’re a tech nerd, and you have all kinds of things for it,” Hartwig says. “It starts with using a different operating system, because most people use Microsoft Windows. So a lot are moving over to Linux, which has less vulnerabilities,” he said.

Using a virtual private network (VPN) protects users from advertisers gleaning their web history, but “it’s hard to prevent that from tracking us because I’m sure the NSA has tools that can bypass pretty much anything,” he added. “They probably know exactly what we’re talking about.”

“People are waking up to government censorship and surveillance,” Hartwig insisted. “It’s important for us to realize that the government is not our friend… If that bill passes, then the United States will have become essentially a police state. We will no longer be a free country.”

Zach Vorhies emphasized that the point of online snooping was not to eavesdrop on citizens, but to tar them by association with known suspects.

“We know from the Snowden leaks that the NSA tracks by default the endpoints of communication. It turns out that the most valuable part of a communication is not the content that is said but identifying who is talking to who in order to build a relationship graph.”

Even AI assistants like Amazon Alexa have been used to record their users’ conversations. “Police have used court orders to grab audio content from these Alexa’s when they were supposedly not in active recording mode,” the tech expert noted.

Vorhies agreed that users of internet chats like Discord and 4Chan should be “concerned”, because “no corporate or public space is safe for private speech anymore. That ship has sailed long ago.”

He said the government and major tech corporations were “strong-arming companies to employ AI monitoring of content.”

“We saw this in the 2020 election when the iPhone app store kicked off Parler for not integrating content-approved moderation,” Vorhies noted. “It looks like the government is going to play a soft hand for the meantime and let the big tech organizations employ massive censorship through their terms of service.”

The tech guru said it would take about a day for someone with the coding know-how to write software for a “private space” on the internet, which government agencies would be unable to crack.

“It’s my expectation that the elite families that control governments and military are using such obscure private spaces to communicate,” he ventured. “I can’t stress enough what an exciting time we are entering. It’s also terrifying as we are entering an age of so many unknowns. It’s obvious that Pandora’s box has been opened, and the elites are putting both hands in and grasping tightly.”

April 14, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Poland about to manufacture depleted uranium weapons

By Lucas Leiroz | April 14, 2023

On April 12, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki stated that he wants to make his country a “service center” for US M1 Abrams tanks. These “services” would include the manufacture of depleted uranium (DU) ammunition, with the possible creation of a factory specialized in this toxic equipment in Polish territory.

“I want a service center for Abrams tanks for the whole of Europe, for maintaining their battle readiness, to be located in Poland (…) This is possible, I am in talks regarding this”, he told a journalist during an interview to local press. Also, specifically about DU weapons, he commented that Warsaw is “striving” to have an industry capable of producing them as soon as possible.

The official’s statement comes after his meeting with US Vice President Kamala Harris during his last visit to Washington. On his US tour, Morawiecki visited some facilities of the US military-industrial complex, including an Army warehouse in Alabama where Abrams tanks are stationed. Apparently, this would have “inspired” him to build something similar in Poland, leading him to initiate talks in this regard with his American partners.

With this, Morawiecki plans to formalize Poland’s role as the center of American provocations in Eastern Europe. In practice, the country has played this role for a long time, considering that it is from Poland that departs the largest flow of weapons and mercenaries that enter Ukrainian territory to be used against Russian forces. However, there now appears to be a desire on the part of Polish officials to formalize this role for the country, promoting measures such as the creation of large tank depots and the manufacture of DU ammunition, as well as an “additional presence of [US/NATO] several thousand soldiers” – in Morawiecki’s own words.

Poland’s strategic value to NATO is already clear. The geographical location makes Poland extremely interesting to become a NATO “service center”. In addition, anti-Russian ideology has been disseminated in the country for decades, with high degrees of racism which is why it is easier to convince politicians and even the population to support bellicose measures against Moscow.

Some important steps towards escalating Polish militarization have also been taken recently. Warsaw ordered 250 new American Abrams tanks. In addition, the country is also replacing its entire arsenal of Soviet-made T-72 tanks – many of which were delivered to Kiev – with new modern equipment of high combat power. The objective would be, according to Morawiecki, to build a kind of “armored curtain” to “protect” Poland, as well as attending NATO’s demand of combat readiness.

However, the main problem in this scenario is that the Polish government simply does not seem to understand that it is only serving the interests of another power, without gaining any major strategic advantage from these measures. Some analysts, including in the Polish media, believe that Morawiecki’s recent trip to the US was the result of American pressure to respond to Macron’s trip to China.

The French president, despite being geopolitically aligned with the US, has always been marked by his quest for “European autonomy”, trying to make the EU the leading bloc of the “Western world”. In this regard, he made a statement saying that Europe could not be a “vassal” of the US. According to experts, the American government would have summoned the Polish prime minister not only to increase bilateral cooperation but to make it clear that there are EU countries that disagree with Macron and that they are, in fact, willing to do anything to support Washington.

In this sense, by receiving American tanks and creating a supposed “service center” to handle this equipment, Poland would only be guaranteeing American power in Europe, without clear national benefits. Furthermore, by creating a DU munitions factory, the country would be taking a dangerous step against its own security. The toxic agents of these ammunition are harmful to human health, with reports of health problems with British and American soldiers who used them on the battlefield in Yugoslavia and Iraq. Recently, UK announced that it would be supplying such weapons to Kiev, creating a risk of escalation and internationalization of the conflict.

Poland, apparently, wants to be added to this context of rivalries without gaining anything in return. Accepting to produce radioactive weapons for American tanks – which will certainly be delivered to Kiev at some point in the future – is to frontally violate Russian red lines, increasing the risk of military escalation. Considering that DU ammunition does not have specific international regulation, Moscow could understand its manufacture and use as a violation of the principle of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. Warsaw is needlessly and irresponsibly fomenting regional chaos just to serve American interests.

Lucas Leiroz is a journalist and researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.

You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.

April 14, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Orban: Conflict in Ukraine to End Once US, Europe Stop Backing Kiev

Sputnik – 14.04.2023

BUDAPEST – Ukraine is a non-existent country in financial terms, and as soon as the US and Europe stop supporting it, the conflict will end, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday.

“In fact, Ukraine is a non-existent country in financial terms. The fall in economic indicators is huge, which is completely understandable… Obviously, Ukraine cannot finance itself. The question is whether we support Ukraine,” Orban told a Hungarian broadcaster.

He added that “the moment America and Europe answer ‘no’ to this question,” the conflict will end.

Europe spends tens of billions of dollars to support Ukraine, this cannot continue indefinitely, the Hungarian leader stressed.

April 14, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

What are the Russians saying about the intelligence leak in the USA?

By Gilbert Doctorow | April 13, 2023

The Russians took an immediate interest in the intelligence leak scandal in the USA because so many of the documents deal with the readiness of their own and Ukrainian military forces for the long awaited “counterattack” by Kiev which may be decisive in the outcome of the war. They were instantly asking whether there was not some intrigue here, an attempt to loll them into overconfidence given that the situation of the Ukrainian side was portrayed in these documents as unpromising to dire, especially as regards air defense and supply of munitions. However, on close examination, the intelligence experts who have appeared on Russian state television now are saying they have no doubt the documents are genuine and there was no reason to believe they were issued as disinformation for Moscow. Now they have redirected their attention to other aspects of the leak.

The first among these questions being asked in Moscow is: what was the intent of the leakers who are assumed by consensus to be Americans from within the 1,000 or so persons who had access to these top secret documents online, on specially programmed computers. In this matter, I was particularly impressed by one explanation that was set out at length by a panelist on yesterday’s Evening with Vladimir Solovyov show. The leak is viewed as an attempt to discredit Joe Biden. To discredit the biological Joe Biden and also what the Russians are calling the “collective Joe Biden,” meaning the team of assistants who do the thinking for Joe and feed him his lines to read.

The documents leaked show that the Biden Administration, through Lloyd Austin, through Antony Blinken is lying day after day about the real situation of the Ukrainian military. Even yesterday Austin spoke on camera after talking to his Ukrainian counterpart Reznikov and insisted that everything is just fine in Ukraine, that they have received the assistance they need and are ready to proceed with the counter-offensive.

The next level of analysis of the documents that I hear from the Russian intelligence experts and also from their counterpart in Israel Yakov Kedmi, who appears regularly on the Solovyov show, is that the documents demonstrate the vast flow of information coming in to the CIA every day from their illegal espionage, wiretapping and the like. They also demonstrate the low level of analytical competence of the CIA and other US intelligence analysts who are poring over this information flow. This comes out from the uncritical acceptance by the American intelligence reports of casualty figures and other highly relevant statistics they are receiving solely from one source, Kiev, and are passing on to the top leadership at face value.

The normal, historical and universal problem with intelligence is that the sources and summaries are good but they are wasted on incompetent political leaders who pay no attention or do not comprehend what they are being told by their subordinates responsible for intelligence. The American situation seems still more damaging: not only are the political bosses who are receiving the intelligence dimwits but the information being handed to them is of poor quality.

The Russians are not at all pleased with this situation. It strengthens the argument on their side by those who say that insanity rules in the USA, that you have to be prepared for every eventuality in escalation of the war.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

April 14, 2023 Posted by | Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

Pentagon ‘leak’ theatrics continue as US finds scapegoat

By Drago Bosnic | April 14, 2023

The pseudo-WikiLeaks 2.0 has just been stepped up a notch as the FBI arrested the perpetrator who shared the “secret docs” through a Discord server. The 21-year-old Airman First Class Jack Douglas Teixeira of the Massachusetts Air National Guard was apprehended on April 13 for his involvement with the “top-secret leak”. The controversial “Pentagon docs” contain what the US mainstream propaganda machine claims is “an array of national security secrets, including the breadth of surveillance the United States is able to conduct on Russia”.

Apparently, Teixeira posted the “classified documents” in an invitation-only Discord (mainly gaming-focused platform) chat group called “Thug Shaker Central”. According to the Washington Post, which reportedly talked to other members of the group, “classified Pentagon documents containing intelligence collected by the US and several other countries were posted by a man claiming to be a ‘military base’ worker”. The chat room apparently had no more than 20 members, mostly young men, who discussed video games, memes, movies and politics. It also included users from both Russia and Ukraine.

At some point during 2022, a user known as OG posted “a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon” and claimed to “know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people”. One of the unnamed members of the chat group told the Washington Post that “at the time, few people read the note” and added that “OG claimed he spent at least some of his day inside a secure facility of a ‘military base’ that prohibited cell phones and other electronic devices and copied the classified documents”, but insisted OG wasn’t hostile to the US or working for any foreign government.

The Washington Post report also presented OG as somewhat of an anarchist, since he supposedly “thought US law enforcement and intelligence were a sinister force that sought to suppress citizens and keep them in the dark” and complained about “government overreach”. The claim could very well be an attempt to portray OG as “a disgruntled serviceman who simply wanted to share dirty state secrets with the American people”. This would reinforce the idea that OG was supposedly acting on his own, further covering up the role of US intelligence in the so-called “leak”.

The Washington Post report never mentioned OG’s real name, but other media later revealed that he was indeed Jack Teixeira. Despite their own claims that he wasn’t involved with foreign intelligence, the US propaganda machine, never the ones to let a perfect opportunity for Russophobia slip by, were quick to blame Russia for the “leak”. Reuters insists that three “anonymous” US officials “confirmed that Russia or pro-Russian groups could be behind the leak”. Expectedly, no evidence whatsoever was presented to back up such claims. But then again, why worry? Who could possibly even contemplate the idea that any US official would ever lie about anything?

The New York Times also reported extensively on Teixeira’s case. According to NYT, Airman Teixeira was trained as a cyber transport systems specialist, a job that could also entail keeping his unit’s communication networks running. He was assigned to the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base. The NYT report admits that “military officials refused to disclose information on what in Airman Teixeira’s duties would necessitate him having access to daily slides about Ukraine, much less the daily deluge of intelligence reports from the CIA, NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence”.

Some US officials told NYT that Teixeira could also have gained access to “secret docs” through daily emails on a classified computer network, where those emails might’ve been automatically forwarded to other people. On the other hand, members of the Discord group chat told NYT that the aforementioned documents were “purely informative”, but started to get wider attention only when one of the teenage members of “Thug Shaker Central” took them and posted a few dozen “secret documents” to a public online forum where they were picked up by several Russian-language Telegram channels.

In short, the US propaganda machine wants us to believe that a 21-year-old intelligence technician who just graduated and held the rank of airman (equivalent of private in the US Army) was privy to top-secret intelligence on the Kiev regime’s offensive plans, Russia, South Korea, China and other global hotspots. NYT itself also reluctantly admitted that “the arrest raised questions about why such a junior enlisted airman had access to such an array of potentially damaging secrets, why adequate safeguards had not been put in place after earlier leaks and why a young man would risk his freedom to share intelligence about the war in Ukraine with a group of friends he knew from a video game social media site”.

US media claim that the Pentagon was completely unaware of the “leak” and learned of it only after the documents began surfacing on Telegram and Twitter. Apparently, the Pentagon even tried to hack and delete some of the posts about the documents, “but was ultimately unsuccessful”. Again, it’s quite bemusing that an institution wasting well over $850 billion every year is incapable of removing such “crucial information” from several Telegram channels almost exclusively run by civilian enthusiasts with no budget. The sheer amount of logical disparities indicates that this particular case is highly controversial (at best), while there’s an extremely strong possibility it’s all an elaborate counterintelligence operation.

Apart from the more obvious geopolitical benefits such as pressuring countries like Egypt to distance themselves from Russia or further disrupting Moscow’s relations with the traditionally pro-Russian Serbia (once again accused of weapons shipments to Kiev), there is a very strong domestic incentive to push the “leak” narrative. For instance, the infamous CNN argues that “the leak spotlights major ongoing US intelligence vulnerabilities“, which can hardly be interpreted as anything else but an attempt to strengthen government control in the US. The “leak” could also be used to accelerate the adoption of the truly totalitarian RESTRICT act that the disillusioned former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard described as PATRIOT Act 2.0, only worse.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

April 14, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

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