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I am the “US-based Kremlin intermediary” that tried to help Tucker Carlson book an interview with Putin

By Anya Parampil · The Grayzone · March 20, 2023

Tucker Carlson accused the NSA of spying on his personal communications when he tried to schedule an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. I can corroborate his story.

On March 10, Fox News host Tucker Carlson told the Full Send podcast that the US government “broke into [his] text messages” in the summer of 2021, just months before the launch of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Carlson claimed the spying occurred as he was planning a trip to Russia, where he hoped to record a conversation with the country’s president. According to Carlson, he learned of the surveillance after a US government source arranged to meet him in Washington and proceeded to share information with him that only someone with access to his private, personal text messages could have known.

“This person’s like… ‘Are you planning a trip to go see Putin?’ This was the summer before the war started. And I was like, ‘how would you know that? I haven’t told anybody,’” Carlson recalled.

“I was intimidated,” he added. “I’m embarrassed to admit, but I was completely freaked out by it.”

Carlson’s interview with Full Send did not represent the first time he spoke publicly about the NSA’s surveillance of his private communications. On June 28, 2021, Carlson opened his primetime Fox News show with a monologue accusing the Biden Administration of spying on his team, disclosing that an NSA whistleblower had contacted him and “repeated back to us information about a story that we are working on that could have only come directly from my texts and emails.” At the time, he did not disclose specific details about the story in question.

“The NSA captured that information without our knowledge, and did it for political reasons,” the Tucker Carlson Tonight host declared, asserting his source informed him that the Biden Administration planned to “leak” his private texts “in an attempt to take this show off the air.”

Carlson’s colleagues at Fox proceeded to studiously ignore his allegations, while other mainstream news outlets appeared to mock the host for going public with the information. When anonymous NSA officials announced that an internal agency review found “no evidence” to support Carlson’s claims the following month, the corporate press took them at their word.

Amidst the NSA’s denials, however, a report surfaced that seemed to directly support Carlson’s narrative. On July 7, an Axios “scoop” cited unnamed US officials accusing the Fox host of “talking to U.S.-based Kremlin intermediaries about setting up an interview with Vladimir Putin shortly before [he] accused the National Security Agency of spying on him.”

Though the government officials who planted that story remain anonymous, I can confirm the identity of at least one of the “US-based Kremlin intermediaries” in question.

It was me. They lied.

In April 2021, Tucker Carlson told me that he was trying to book an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but that he kept running into roadblocks. Though Tucker knew I previously worked as an anchor and correspondent for the Russian government-funded news channel RT America in Washington DC, he was not asking for my assistance. In fact, I do not believe he even considered that I could help him book the interview in any way.

Regardless, I attempted to assist Tucker’s pursuit of the interview through a senior Russian government contact. Ironically, the contact had not been established through my time at RT America, but my work as a correspondent for The Grayzone, the online outlet that has employed me since early 2019. The Grayzone is fully independent and not connected to Russia or any other government, financially or otherwise.

In July 2019, I traveled to Caracas, Venezuela, to cover a high-level diplomatic meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement. While in Caracas, I met Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergey Ryabkov and interviewed him for The Grayzone’s YouTube channel. (Many of the predictions Ryabkov made, including that the US dollar would soon lose its significance in the global economy, are currently playing out as a direct result of US and European sanctions levied in response to the Ukraine war).

Having found his insights on international relations extremely relevant to my coverage of the emerging multi-polar world, I maintained occasional contact with Ryabkov over email in the months following our discussion. When Tucker told me that he was hoping to arrange an interview with Putin, I offered to connect him with Ryabkov.

I had met Tucker in July 2018, when we both covered President Trump’s highly anticipated summit with his Russian counterpart in Helsinki, Finland. Though Tucker had been dispatched to the Finnish capital for an interview with Trump, I personally always believed that a far more interesting conversation would have resulted from an exchange between him and Putin (who was instead left to have a predictably hostile, largely forgettable encounter with Chris Wallace, then of Fox, now at CNN).

When Tucker expressed his desire to interview Putin three years later, I volunteered to put him in contact with Ryabkov by email so they could discuss his plan to visit Russia. I expected to write a basic introductory email, receive a standard “thank you” from both parties, and let Tucker’s team manage communication from there.

Both Tucker and Ryabkov replied to my initial message within hours. Yet their digital exchange took an inexplicable turn.

On the evening of April 16, 2021, I sent a brief email introducing Ryabkov to Tucker. Tucker responded within minutes, informing Ryabkov that he planned to record shows in Russia in the summer of that year. Just over five hours later, Ryabkov replied that he would be happy to talk with Tucker and proposed time slots for a phone call the following week.

I assumed my role was done. Yet on April 20, I received a follow-up email from Ryabkov.

“Strangely, I can not send my message of interest to talk to Mr.Carlson directly to him. I tried it twice with no success,” the diplomat informed me, before asking me to relay his message.

At the time, I did not think much of the issue. I thought that perhaps Tucker’s email service, which was different than mine, had sent the note to spam, or that I had mistyped an email address. In retrospect, however, I should have been suspicious. Both Tucker and Ryabkov had received and replied to my initial message, meaning their respective addresses were typed correctly in the thread. And Ryabkov’s email to Tucker wasn’t going to spam – it was failing to deliver altogether.

The digital communication error between Ryabkov and Tucker was not a one-off event. Weeks later, on May 25, I received a message from Ryabkov’s team explaining that Tucker had failed to reply to a yet another email. They kindly requested I ask Tucker if he had received their message. Once again, he had not.

Roughly one month later, Tucker informed me that a source inside the NSA had contacted him to warn that the US government had caught wind of his effort to interview Putin by spying on his electronic communications. Tucker went public with the story on June 28. As summarized above, virtually every single mainstream reporter, including those at Fox, trusted the denials of the US government rather than rally behind one of their own.

There are three points I must emphasize here. One: it is completely normal and routine for journalists to maintain contact with high-level government sources, domestic or otherwise. Two: it is also normal and routine for journalists to share those connections with trusted colleagues and friends. Three: at the time, I genuinely believed that a Tucker-Putin interview would have moved us closer to peace. Instead, we are currently positioned on the brink of nuclear war.

Oh, and the obligatory fourth point: I am absolutely not a Kremlin operative or “intermediary.” I have no relationship with the Kremlin, and I have not accepted financial support from any state or state-sponsored organization since my departure from RT America in December 2018. Even then, my “relationship” with the Russian government was completely transparent. Would anyone suggest that US or British citizens employed by Al Jazeera, for example, are representatives of the Emir of Qatar? I worked for RT America because they gave me an opportunity to cover the actions of my own country at home and abroad from a perspective that domestic, corporate-run networks would have never allowed. When that reality changed (paradoxically thanks to US, not Russian, government interference), I walked out — but that’s a story for another day.

In truth, even my “Russian” forename is simply a product of the fact that my Indian-American father and American mother could not agree on anything else to call me. So why did US government sources characterize me as a Kremlin intermediary? Do they have any evidence to formally accuse me of being such? Or did they simply dump that information on an unquestioning Axios reporter without even offering them my name?

The answer to the second question is of course, no. The answer to the third: probably. As for the first? Clues can be found in the more recent effort to tarnish Tucker’s reputation through legal machinations and the selective leaking of his private text messages.

Target: Tucker

In March 2021, Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News on the basis that it incurred financial damages as a result of the network’s coverage of the 2020 Presidential Election. Though Tucker is not named in the suit, last year a judge allowed Dominion to seize the Fox host’s private text messages. Within months, the contents of Carlson’s personal texts had made their way to the pages of the Washington Post.

Curiously, coverage of Carlson’s private messages has so far focused on a single comment he made about former President Trump — not Dominion Voting Systems. Earlier this month, mainstream outlets seized on a January 2021 text the Fox host sent one of his producers in which he claimed to “passionately” hate the former president. The story represented an obvious attempt to drive a wedge between Carlson and Trump just before the the 2024 presidential election season officially heats up.

Whether such tactics will succeed in undermining Carlson and Trump’s relationship is a question only they can answer. It is worth noting, however, that Carlson consistently attempted to reorient Trump toward his “America First” agenda throughout the latter’s time in the White House, using his show to offer principled critiques of the former president’s decision to bomb Syria, escalate regime change operations against Venezuela, and assassinate Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. In June of 2019, Carlson personally persuaded Trump to reject the advice of his national security team and elect not to retaliate against Iran over its decision to shoot down a US drone that had violated its sovereign airspace. The Fox host’s actions not only averted a deadly US military strike on Iran, but a potential regional war.

For anyone who values peace and diplomatic engagement over military conflict, Carlson’s influence over Trump — and the US public, for that matter — must be regarded as positive. Perhaps that is why the press, including his colleagues at Fox, have refused to publicly denounce the US government’s selective targeting of Tucker. After all, aside from a handful of Fox News hosts who have attempted to cop his anti-interventionist style, the mainstream media are in virtual lockstep when it comes to inciting continued US involvement in the Ukraine conflict.

Tucker is by far the most popular US media figure to consistently denounce Washington’s escalations in the Ukraine battle, articulate the looming reality of World War III, and sound the alarm over the threat of global nuclear war. As if such positions did not threaten powerful forces enough already, last December he even dedicated a lengthy show open to investigating the murder of President John F. Kennedy, revealing a source with “direct knowledge” of classified information told him the CIA did in fact have a hand in the assassination.

Though the campaign to cancel Tucker is largely framed in terms of the culture wars and partisan debate over the events of January 6, it is substantially driven by neoconservative interventionists seeking to muzzle the pro-war Uniparty’s single greatest foe. If the Dominion lawsuit succeeds in bankrupting Fox, or even casting Tucker as the network’s scapegoat, it will have succeeded in punishing the media’s pre-eminent opponent of the escalating Ukraine proxy war.

Which brings us back to the question: why did US government sources characterize me as a “Kremlin intermediary” while feeding a “journalist” information about Tucker’s private texts back in July 2021? The answer is simple: US officials weaponized my mere existence, through innuendo, in order to suggest Tucker was involved with Kremlin agents. By undermining his credibility, they aimed to invalidate his character and by extension, his anti-war positions.

Beyond the financial threat it poses to Fox, the Dominion suit similarly aims to discredit Tucker. And politics aside, it poses a major threat to the First Amendment.

What does the fact that a corporation can sue a media organization over critical coverage, allege financial damage, and gain access to a journalist’s private texts say about a society that claims to value a free press? If Dominion is able to target a company as powerful as Fox in such a manner, what does that mean for those of us who challenge corporate and government interests in independent media? Why aren’t more journalists asking these questions?

And finally, if the Fox-obsessed Beltway press corps is truly so concerned with holding journalists accountable for “knowingly lying” to the public, there is no shortage of willful deceptions to reckon with. After all, this week marks 20 years since the launch of the US military campaign in Iraq, a catastrophic war that was directly enabled by lies its greatest cheerleaders in the press still repeat to this day.

Anya Parampil is a journalist based in Washington, DC. She has produced and reported several documentaries, including on-the-ground reports from the Korean peninsula, Palestine, Venezuela, and Honduras.

March 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Mom files lawsuit after being reported to law enforcement for questioning “polysexual” school poster

By Ben Squires | Reclaim The Net | March 20, 2023

A mother of two in New Jersey has filed a lawsuit over an alleged smear campaign spearheaded by a military officer after she made a post on  opposing a “polysexual” poster at her seven-year-old daughter’s school.

The lawsuit, which the Thomas More Society filed on behalf of Angela Reading, alleges that North Hanover Township’s police chief together with military personnel at the Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst demanded the removal of her Facebook post, portrayed her as a “security threat” and reported her to several law enforcement agencies in an attempt to silence her.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

“Mrs. Reading’s November 22, 2022, Facebook post was made as a private citizen from her personal social media account to a discussion group about New Jersey schools,” Thomas More Society’s Special Counsel Christopher Ferrara explained.

“In it, she shared how she had attended an elementary school ‘math night’ the previous evening with her seven-year-old daughter, who after reading LGBT-affirming posters in the school’s entry, asked her mother what ‘polysexual’ meant. Mrs. Reading merely questioned why elementary children were being invited to research topics of sexuality, noting that it is not in the state educational standards nor the board of education approved curriculum. Mrs. Reading did not name names or schools, and invited respectful debate.”

Reading’s post was removed and was followed by a campaign spearheaded by US Army Reserve Major Christopher Schilling. The post was forwarded to the New Jersey State Police and the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness.

“This intention to trigger a preposterous widespread law enforcement investigation and state of alarm over Mrs. Reading’s protected speech as if it were an ‘incident’ of potential or even actual criminality, is a violation of Mrs. Reading’s civil rights,” Ferrara said.

According to the lawsuit, the situation escalated because law enforcement officers, members of the military, and the Township abused the power of their offices to not only get Reading’s post censored but also to get the public furious towards her.

“The defendants acted singularly and in conspiracy with one another to deprive and chill the exercise of Mrs. Reading’s rights, including rights protected by the United States and New Jersey constitutions, as well as other laws,” the lawsuit states.

Ferrara added that the defendant’s actions resulted in Reading and her family being “demonized, harassed, traumatized, and excoriated throughout the community, forced to resign their school board positions, and having been made unwelcome, now feel they must seek costly alternative education for their children. All of this is a direct result of a conspiracy to punish a mother who did not welcome a public school’s attempt to force a woke ideology upon her own, and other, young children – and to have the audacity to exercise her right of free speech to do so in a peaceful manner in an appropriate forum.”

March 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Biden fails to dismiss censorship collusion lawsuit

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | March 21, 2023

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) civil rights group has announced that a federal judge has rejected a motion to dismiss a  lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden, where the government is accused of involvement in censorship.

“The Court finds that the complaint alleges significant encouragement and coercion that converts the otherwise private conduct of censorship on social media platforms into state action, and is unpersuaded by defendants’ arguments to the contrary,” the decision reads.

We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.

The Biden White House thus failed to stop the legal challenge which alleges collusion between the government and Big Tech to suppress information they disapproved of concerning the pandemic and US elections.

The decision not to accept the motion was made in the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana by Judge Terry A. Doughty, a statement from the non-profit said.

The NCLA explained that it represented doctors Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Aaron Kheriaty, as well as Jill Hines, and that the suit lifted the lid on the censorship regime that the organization says a number of federal agencies had put in place.

The number in question is “at least” 11 agencies and sub-agencies (including the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security, DHS), the NCLA said, and backed this claim up by information that came out during the discovery process.

Government officials are accused of participating in a lawless censorship campaign that used a wide variety of tools to get social media companies to toe the line, from collusion and coordination, to coercion.

These serious claims laid out in the lawsuit, which Judge Doughty just allowed to proceed, further allege that the result was the censoring, blacklisting and shadow-banning of the clients represented by the NCLA, as well as other methods of silencing them, such as deliberately downranking their content, throttling, etc.

Explaining the decision to deny the motion to dismiss, the judge said that, based on past censorship, the threat of future censorship is “substantial” – rather than being “illusory or merely speculative.”

The NCLA welcomed the ruling, describing it as an important victory in the battle for free speech in the US, and lauded the district court for recognizing the scale and damage of government-orchestrated censorship.

“The Court has seen through the government’s unrelenting efforts to deny responsibility for using its vast power to silence thousands upon thousands of Americans online, often removing factually true information the government did not like,” commented NCLA’s senior litigation counsel, John J. Vecchione.

The case is now headed to a preliminary injunction hearing set for May 12.

March 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Arizona Senate Passes Defend the Guard Act

By Mike Maharrey | Tenth Amendment Center | March 21, 2023 

Today, the Arizona Senate narrowly passed the Defend the Guard Act, a bill to require the governor to stop unconstitutional foreign combat deployments of the state’s National Guard troops. Passage into law would take a big step toward restoring the founders’ framework for a state-federal balance under the Constitution.

Sen. Wendy Rogers (R) and three fellow Republicans introduced Senate Bill 1367 (SB1367) on January 31. Titled the Defend the Guard Act, the legislation would prohibit the governor from releasing any unit or member of the Arizona National Guard into “active duty combat” unless specific constitutional requirements are met:

The United States Congress passes an official declaration of war or takes an official action pursuant to article I, section 8, clause 15, United States Constitution, that calls on the National Guard to expressly execute the laws of the union, repel an invasion or suppress an insurrection.

“Active duty combat” is defined as performing the following services in the active federal military service of the United States:

  • Participation in an armed conflict;
  • Performance of a hazardous service in a foreign state; or
  • Performance of a duty through an instrumentality of war.

“Official declaration of war” is defined as “an official declaration of war made by the United States Congress pursuant to Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution.”

Last month, the Senate Military Affairs and Public Safety Committee approved the Arizona Defend the Guard Act by a vote of 4-3. On March 6, the Senate Rules committee also passed SB1367 by a 4-3 vote. Today, the full Senate approved SB1367 by a vote of 16-13-1.

In Practice

National Guard troops have played significant roles in all modern overseas conflicts, with over 650,000 deployed since 2001. Military.com reports that “Guard and Reserve units made up about 45 percent of the total force sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, and received about 18.4 percent of the casualties.” More specifically, Arizona National Guard troops have participated in missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries.

Since none of these missions have been accompanied by a Constitutional declaration of war, nor were they in pursuance of any of the three conditions set forth in Article 1 Sec. 8, the Defend the Guard Act would have prohibited those deployments.

Background

Article I, Section 8, Clauses 15 and 16 make up the “militia clauses” of the Constitution. Clause 16 authorizes Congress to “provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia.” Through the Dick Act of 1903, Congress organized the militia into today’s National Guard, limiting the part of the militia that could be called into federal service rather than the “entire body of people,” which makes up the totality of the “militia.” Thus, today’s National Guard is governed by the “militia clauses” of the Constitution, and this view is confirmed by the National Guard itself.

Clause 15 delegates to Congress the power to provide for “calling forth the militia” in three situations only: 1) to execute the laws of the union, 2) to suppress insurrections, and 3) to repel invasions.

During state ratifying conventions, proponents of the Constitution, including James Madison and Edmund Randolph, repeatedly assured the people that this power to call forth the militia into federal service would be limited to those very specific situations, and not for general purposes, like helping victims of a disease outbreak or engaging in “kinetic military actions.”

Returning to the Constitution

The founding generation was careful to ensure the president wouldn’t have the power to drag the United States into endless wars. James Madison made this clear in a letter to Thomas Jefferson.

The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature.

Congress has abrogated its responsibility and allowed the president to exercise almost complete discretion when it comes to war. The passage of Defend the Guard legislation would pressure Congress to do its constitutional duty.

West Virginia Rep. Pat McGeehan served as an Air Force intelligence officer in Afghanistan and has sponsored similar legislation in his state.

“For decades, the power of war has long been abused by this supreme executive, and unfortunately our men and women in uniform have been sent off into harm’s way over and over,” he said. “If the U.S. Congress is unwilling to reclaim its constitutional obligation, then the states themselves must act to correct the erosion of constitutional law.”

Passage of Defend the Guard would also force the federal government to only use the Guard for the three expressly-delegated purposes in the Constitution, and at other times to remain where the Guard belongs, at home, supporting and protecting their home state.

While getting this bill passed won’t be easy and will face fierce opposition from the establishment, it certainly is, as Daniel Webster once noted, “one of the reasons state governments even exist.”

Webster made this observation in an 1814 speech on the floor of Congress where he urged actions similar to the Oklahoma Defend the Guard Act. He said, “The operation of measures thus unconstitutional and illegal ought to be prevented by a resort to other measures which are both constitutional and legal. It will be the solemn duty of the State governments to protect their own authority over their own militia, and to interpose between their citizens and arbitrary power. These are among the objects for which the State governments exist.”

What’s Next

SB1367 will now move to the House for further consideration. It will first need to pass through the committee process before the full Chamber can concur. Residents of Arizona are strongly urged to contact their state representative to firmly request that they support the bill (locate contact info here).

March 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

‘Blackout’: Sy Hersh Says US, Germany Coordinated NYT ‘False Cover Story’ for Nord Stream Bombing

By Fantine Gardinier – Sputnik – 22.03.2023

On September 26, 2022, a massive explosion ripped through the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines on the Baltic seabed, severing a major natural gas connection and releasing colossal amounts of methane. The US had long objected to the line, which runs from Russia to Germany, urging Europe to buy more expensive US gas instead.

A new report by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh lays blame at the feet of US and German intelligence for a New York Times article claiming it was Ukrainian terrorists, not US Navy divers, who bombed the Nord Stream pipeline last September. Hersh said it was part of a coordinated “blackout” of his expose of Washington’s role in the attack.

“There is no evidence that any reporter assigned there has yet to ask the White House press secretary whether Biden had done what any serious leader would do: formally “task” the American intelligence community to conduct a deep investigation, with all of its assets, and find out just who had done the deed in the Baltic Sea,” Hersh wrote on Wednesday.

“According to a source within the intelligence community, the president has not done so, nor will he,” the journalist asserted. “Why not? Because he knows the answer.”

Hersh pointed to a curious meeting in Washington earlier this month between Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in which both media and aides were almost totally absent.

“There have been no statements or written understandings made public since then by either government, but I was told by someone with access to diplomatic intelligence that there was a discussion of the pipeline exposé and, as a result, certain elements in the Central Intelligence Agency were asked to prepare a cover story in collaboration with German intelligence that would provide the American and German press with an alternative version for the destruction of Nord Stream 2,” Hersh wrote.

“In the words of the intelligence community, the agency was ‘to pulse the system’ in an effort to discount the claim that Biden had ordered the pipelines’ destruction,” he explained.

Indeed, The New York Times, which was one of two newspapers that ran the story, has admitted in the past to letting the CIA proofread certain stories before publishing them.

Along with the NYT, which published an article on March 7 claiming “a pro-Ukrainian group” might have been behind the pipeline explosion, the German weekly Der Zeit published a companion piece that same day claiming German investigative officials had found a luxury yacht chartered by a group of Ukrainians under false pretenses in the area of the explosions just a few weeks before they occurred.

Screengrab of video by Swedish media showing underwater drone footage of damaged Nord Stream pipeline. – Sputnik International, 1920, 17.03.2023

Both reports were largely absent on precise facts, heavy on anonymous sourcing, and admitted that, as the Times put it, “there was much they did not know.” Hersh’s February expose on the pipeline bombing was derided by critics for using anonymous sources, who claimed it undermined the integrity of Hersh’s audacious claims.

In fact, the Der Zeit story even noted the belief among some “in international security services” that the yacht story “was a false flag operation.”
“Indeed it was,” Hersh wrote in reply.

He quoted a source within the American intelligence community as telling him: “It was a total fabrication by American intelligence that was passed along to the Germans, and aimed at discrediting your story.”

To further make his point about just how little the journalists behind the two papers’ exposes really knew about their supposed bombshell reports, Hersh quoted a NYT podcast interview with story co-author Julian Barnes from a few days after its publication in which Barnes admits their primary method for establishing the facts of the article was “asking exactly the right questions” of US intelligence officials.

“All those states that we just went through, did Russia do it? Did the Ukraine state do it? And that was just hitting dead end after dead end. We weren’t finding officials who were telling us that there was credible evidence pointing at a government,” Barnes told the podcast. “So my colleagues Adam Entous, Adam Goldman, and I started asking a different question. Could this have been done by non-state actors?”

“Well, we started asking, who might these saboteurs be? Or if we couldn’t answer that, who might they be aligned with? Could they be pro-Russian saboteurs? Could they be other saboteurs? And the more we talk to officials who had access to intelligence, the more we saw this theory gaining traction.”

Hersh finished his article by faulting the NYT journalists for using their trade to protect Biden from the ugly ramifications of the sabotage order he personally signed.

Hersh has been a journalist for more than 50 years, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his work in exposing the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US troops and its subsequent coverup. He later exposed the US’ secret bombing campaign in Cambodia in the 1970s, US torture of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and the false attribution of a chemical weapons attack in Ghouta, Syria, to the Syrian government instead of to a group of US-backed Islamist rebels.

March 22, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Russia to Retaliate If US Continues Flying Drones Over Black Sea, Moscow Says

Sputnik – 22.03.2023

MOSCOW – The United States, intending to continue flying drones over the Black Sea, will prompt a retaliation from Moscow, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Wednesday.

“It is not the depths at which the wreckage of the drone is located that is important, but that it was in the zone where we introduced a special regime related to the conduct of the military operation. The Americans defiantly, cynically, clearly, publicly deny the legality of such steps, declare their intention continue their activities of this kind. They, as they say, run into against our countermeasures in this case. We warn them against trying to play on our nerves, testing our patience,” Ryabkov told reporters.

Last week, the Russian Defense Ministry said a US MQ-9 drone fell in the Black Sea after engaging in sharp maneuvering, noting that Russian fighter jets sent to intercept it did not come into contact with it nor used weapons against it. The ministry said the air control of the Russian Aerospace Forces recorded the flight of the drone in the region of the Crimean peninsula in the direction of the Russian border. The US European Command, in turn, said that the incident that resulted in the complete loss of the drone involved a Russian Su-27 aircraft, which allegedly struck the drone’s propeller during an “unsafe and unprofessional intercept” over the Black Sea.

Deputy Foreign Minister added that Russia calls on the United States no to follow the path of escalation, commenting on US congressmen’s call for cluster munitions’ supply to Kiev.

A group of Republican lawmakers on Tuesday sent a letter to Biden, urging him to send cluster munitions to Ukraine for use amid Russia’s special military operation there.

“We urge the US side not to follow the path of escalation. I am not now taking up the question of how acceptable the use of cluster munitions is in an armed conflict,” Ryabkov told reporters.

The United States, in fact, every day, demonstrates the will to move along the path of escalation, the diplomat said, adding that the danger of such a course is obvious to Moscow.

US congressmen calling for the supply of cluster munitions to Kiev do not realize what consequences for the attackers could be, he said.

Meanwhile, the high-ranking diplomat stressed that Moscow does everything for detente. Clauses in the joint Russian-Chinese statement following the talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping regarding the inadmissibility of nuclear war and the deployment of nuclear weapons outside the national territory are a direct signal to the United States, Sergey Ryabkov said on Wednesday.

“I cannot but draw your attention to the fact that the documents signed as a result of this visit contain the most important statement regarding the inadmissibility of nuclear war, including the inadmissibility of deploying nuclear weapons outside the national territory. This is a direct signal addressed to the United States,” Ryabkov told reporters.

Thus, the leaders urge strategic adversaries to follow the path of de-escalation, stabilization of the situation, return to dialogue, search for a balance of interests and strengthening of strategic stability, the diplomat added.

Also Deputy Foreign Minister mentioned the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping discussed arms control.
“I proceed from the fact that the whole range of issues related to international security has been considered,” Ryabkov said

March 22, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Biolabs Commission Concluded That US Ready to Produce Weapons Abroad: Moscow

Sputnik – 22.03.2023

MOSCOW – The Commission on the biological program in Ukraine has come to the conclusion that the United States is ready to produce and use biological weapons outside its territory, Deputy Speaker of the Federation Council (upper chamber of the Russian parliament) Konstantin Kosachev said on Wednesday.

“Based on all that has been said, our commission comes to the conclusion… the United States supports and develops the ability to create components of biological weapons, and, if necessary, to produce and use them outside the national territory,” Kosachev said during a meeting of the commission.

The US violates almost all the provisions of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), Kosachev said.

“The Commission comes to the conclusion that by their actions in the field of global biological security, the United States violates almost all the fundamental provisions of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction,” Kosachev said.

March 22, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

China gives US advice on Ukraine

RT | March 22, 2023

The US should stop “fanning the flames” of the conflict in Ukraine instead of making accusations against Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin has said.

During a briefing on Wednesday, Wang responded to a statement by US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, who said the previous day that he didn’t think “you can reasonably look at China as impartial in any way” when it comes to the fighting between Moscow and Kiev.

Beijing has failed to condemn Russia’s military operation, while continuing to buy energy from the country, he stated. Chinese President Xi Jinping “saw fit to fly all the way to Moscow” this week, but has never even talked on the phone to his Ukrainian counterpart Vladimir Zelensky, Kirby added.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman rejected Kirby’s claims, stating that the US was itself too deeply involved in the conflict in Ukraine to accuse Beijing of being biased.

“The US side claims that China’s stance isn’t impartial. But is it impartial to continuously supply weapons to the battlefield? Is it impartial to constantly escalate the conflict? Is it impartial to allow the effects of the crisis to spill over globally?” Wang said, referring to the Biden administration’s policies.

“We advise the American side to rethink its own stance on the Ukraine issue, turn away from the erroneous path of adding fuel to the fire, and stop shifting the blame to China,” he said.

Beijing has “no selfish motives on the Ukraine issue, has not stood idly by… or sought profit for itself,” the spokesman insisted. “What China has done boils down to one thing, that is, to promote peace talks.”

As for Xi’s trip to the Russian capital, which took place between Monday and Wednesday, Wang pointed out that this was “a journey of friendship, cooperation and peace, which has aroused positive responses in the international community.”

The Ukrainian crisis was among the top issues discussed between Vladimir Putin and Xi in Moscow, with the Russian president stressing that many provisions of the Chinese peace proposal were “consonant with the Russian stance and can be taken as a foundation for a peaceful settlement when they are ready for it in the West and in Kiev.” However, Putin pointed out that Moscow currently didn’t detect readiness from either the US, its allies or the Ukrainian government.

March 22, 2023 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

Sino-Russian technological and military cooperation exponentially strengthens both superpowers’ capabilities

By Drago Bosnic | March 22, 2023

After the end of the (First) Cold War and the start of what Francis Fukuyama dubbed the “End of History”, the world seemed firmly in the hands of the political West. For the next two to three decades, this resulted in one of the most disastrous and unstable periods in recent human history, with the political West ravaging much of the world, while most of the rest was held under near-constant self-defeating subservience.

The US-led power pole engaged in what can only be described as war hopping, starting one aggression after another, or worse yet, several consecutive invasions against countries on multiple continents, with its numerous vassals and satellite states sending auxiliary forces or at the very least providing support in logistics and financing. America’s superiority was both quantitative and qualitative, leaving nearly everyone else far behind. The only exception was Russia, whose only advantage was its massive strategic arsenal, the last vestige of the (First) Cold War that kept the US from exerting absolute dominance.

Moscow’s main trump card was also the world’s trump card, providing precious several decades of peace to other sovereign-minded powers, primarily China. Beijing’s meteoric rise to superpower status would have been all but impossible without it and the Asian giant’s leadership is well aware of this. It could be said that both Russia and China “have each other’s backs”, with the cooperation reaching unprecedented levels, not seen in approximately 60 years.

Not counting the purely ideological “cold war” in the aftermath of the Sino-Soviet split, the relationship between Moscow and Beijing has been cordial at worst. However, in the last 30 years, particularly since President Putin consolidated Russia’s geopolitical standing, this relationship has transformed into a fully-fledged strategic alliance in virtually every aspect, truly limitless, as Putin and Xi Jinping recently described. Since the early 1990s, Russia has transferred copious amounts of its massive technological know-how, particularly in military tech, helping push China’s defense capabilities nearly half a century ahead in less than a decade.

The result was quite positive for Beijing, but was seen with contempt in Washington DC, which loathes the idea of having to deal with “another Soviet Union”, especially after investing nearly half a century into dismantling the original and after the Clinton administration announced the US will “never let the rise of another superpower” with the equivalent or close to the power of the USSR. However, despite US attempts to prevent it, exactly this happened. Russia, at first a mere shadow of its former glory and essentially dismissed as a “done deal” by the political West, started regaining its strength, but this time not as a socialist empire, but perhaps the world’s premier realpolitik superpower. With such an approach, Moscow kept most of its historic geopolitical partnerships and was also able to expand them, including with China. President Xi Jinping’s latest visit, the first foreign trip he went on after being reelected for his third term, serves as a testament to this growing alliance.

The superpowers signed over a dozen key strategic agreements laying out the prospects of their unprecedented cooperation by the end of this decade and beyond. Apart from the growing trade exchange, which is racing towards $200 billion annually, one of the key aspects of this is a technological and military partnership. China and Russia will further expand their cooperation in areas such as information technologies and advanced AI, involving approximately 80 new projects assessed at over $165 billion. This includes aircraft and machine tools manufacturing, space research and strengthening of military cooperation, including further unification of Moscow’s and Beijing’s know-how.

In a joint statement, the (Eur)Asian giants reiterated their commitment to regularly conduct bilateral naval and aerial patrols, as well as regular military exercises, expand cooperation within and beyond the framework of existing bilateral agreements and deepen mutual trust and interoperability between their armed forces.

One particularly important segment of this growing alliance is the exchange of military technologies in which both countries excel. China’s impressive strides in microelectronics and semiconductors are of great interest to Russia, while Moscow’s traditionally world-class expertise in rocket/missile and space technologies is greatly appreciated in Beijing. This includes the latest Chinese developments in new network-centric capabilities, with drone swarms being of particular interest for Russia, which could provide key tactical advantages on the battlefield.

Moscow has certainly developed a plethora of its own similar capabilities, but getting Beijing to participate in these efforts will help expand the said capabilities even further. On the other hand, China is greatly interested in Russia’s unrivaled hypersonic technologies, especially naval, as the primary threat to its security and development comes from the belligerent thalassocratic powers of the political West and their regional vassals.

Russian military expert Andrei Martyanov outlined the virtually unknown (to the vast majority of mainstream media) aspects of this cooperation, including the immediate threat that the AUKUS represents for Beijing. With virtually all of China’s Tier 1 cities and provinces being exposed to naval aggression from the US, the Asian giant is seeking ways to nullify this possibility or at the very least push it to a minimum. Of particular concern is the US Navy’s AGM-158 JASSM (Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile), a stealthy air-launched cruise missile deployed by American CBG (carrier battle groups), including the 2000-km range JASSM-XR variant. And while such missiles can hardly be considered comparable to the latest Chinese weapons, they are relatively cheap (by US standards) and numerous (at least 2000 procured by USAF and USN), providing a strong first-strike capability for Washington DC. According to Martyanov, precisely this was very likely one of the key topics of the behind-closed-doors talks between Russian and Chinese delegations.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

March 22, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

UCSF orders their doctors to ignore COVID vaccine injuries

They don’t file VAERS reports either. That’s a violation of federal law.

By Steve Kirsch | March 20, 2023

I sent a list of questions to UCSF media relations on March 20 at 10am PST. I also emailed and called the head of media relations at UCSF to let her know about my questions.

Their response: silence.

You know what that means, don’t you?

The questions I sent them

  1. The UCSF Chief Medical Officer has issued a verbal directive that medical staff (doctors, nurses, techs, etc.) are specifically instructed NOT to associate the COVID vaccine to any injuries. So even if they believe the vaccine caused the injury they are NOT allowed to talk to the patient about it. Can you explain how this is in a patient’s best interest? World health authorities such as Karl Lauterbach, Federal Minister of Germany for Health, have publicly admitted that the rate of severe vaccine injury is 1 in 10,000 and the V-safe data in the US shows the rate of severe injury (requiring medical care) is actually 100X higher: 8 SEVERE INJURIES per 100 fully vaccinated people. So why is the UCSF medical staff forbidden to make an association??
  2. I’ve been told that the staff are told not to ask if the person was recently vaccinated with the COVID vaccine because that would suggest to the patient that the COVID vaccine might have caused their medical condition. Is this true? So the patient must offer it to the doctor because the doctor isn’t allowed to ask? How does that improve clinical outcomes?
  3. I’ve been told that 70% of the Radiology Department (in Marin specifically) requested and were granted religious exemptions after seeing what happened to people who received the COVID vaccine. If it wasn’t 70%, what is the number?
  4. I’ve been told that the placentas of a majority of vaccinated women who give birth are not normal (calcified, blood clots, etc.). This started happening after the shots rolled out. Can you tell me what percentage was observed and why nobody at the hospital is speaking out to the press about this situation?
  5. Most troubling to me is that I was not able to find anyone who currently works at UCSF (including doctors, nurses, and lab techs) who would talk to me on the record for fear of being fired. Why would these doctors and nurses have such a fear? Will you guarantee in writing that any staff member who speaks out about any of the points above will be protected and not be fired just for speaking out? Have you fired anyone for speaking the truth? Who?
  6. With all the chatter about fear and intimidation tactics, have you issued WRITTEN assurances to the staff that 1) it is OK to ask about COVID vaccine status, 2) that it is OK to write vaccine exemptions when warranted such as allergic reactions, 3) that if they believe the vaccine caused an injury that they are free to talk about it with the patient and 4) that staff members who talk publicly about what they are seeing in the clinic with respect to vaccine-associated injuries/deaths and don’t violate any confidentiality/HIPAA rules will be protected from being fired? I want to know whether TRUE speech is protected and whether UCSF has notified staff of this in WRITING. If not, why not? Do fear and intimidation tactics yield better health outcomes?
  7. My friend Tim Damroth told me he suffered a cardiac arrest 2 minutes after getting his first COVID shot. He was in such pain since the shot that his UCSF doctors prescribed a nerve block shot. But in order to get the nerve block shot, UCSF required him to be fully vaccinated (i.e., 2 shots)! He asked for a vaccine exemption, but the UCSF doctors told him that UCSF doesn’t allow them to write any vaccine exemptions, even for people who almost died after getting the shot. So Tim got another shot in order to get the medical care he needed but this made his pain much worse. Can you confirm whether COVID vaccination is still required to get certain medical care at UCSF? If it isn’t still required, when did the requirement end? Can you explain the rationale for requiring vaccination to give a shot? Do you deny treatment to people with life threatening conditions if they are not fully vaccinated? How vaccinated must they be to be treated? 2 shots? 3 shots? I just talked to Tim and he will be delighted to sign a HIPAA consent to allow UCSF to talk about his case and all his medical records publicly so everyone can learn what happened to him. Are you proud of the way he was treated? Do you have any regrets?
  8. If you believe that COVID vaccine and masks are effective, why would you subject a patient to have to be vaccinated before receiving medical care? This is nonsensical in light of the Cleveland Clinic study which clearly showed that vaccines increase risk of getting COVID which would seem to put the staff at higher risk. You are clearly ignoring that study. On what basis? Nobody has been able to debunk the study. The precautionary principle of medicine requires that you hold off your vaccine requirement until you can resolve the ambiguity.
  9. How many UCSF staff have died within 6 months of receiving a COVID vaccine shot? Were autopsies done? Did they do the histopathology studies to rule out the COVID vaccine as a cause of death? Can we see the slides?
  10. How many UCSF staff have been seriously injured from the COVID vaccine?
  11. Why didn’t any doctor at UCSF file a VAERS report on the vaccine injuries of <redacted>, Jan Maisel, and Angela Wulbrecht. This is required by law. <redacted> was a former Chief Medical Officer at UCSF. Maisel is Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at UCSF. Wulbrecht was a top UCSF nurse. All of their injuries were required by law to be reported, yet no VAERS reports were filed. Why not? What are you doing to correct the problem?
  12. UCSF ultrasound technicians with decades of experience have seen an unprecedented number of menstrual irregularities in women who have been vaccinated. Why aren’t any of them warning the public about this? Is the public better off if nobody knows about this?
  13. I talked to one of the funeral homes used by UCSF. They are seeing a 20X higher rate of perinatal deaths after the COVID vaccines rolled out. This is a disaster. Why isn’t anyone saying anything about this? Why did the funeral director decline to be named for fear of being fired? Why isn’t UCSF just publishing the numbers to warn the community? How does keeping this information secret result in superior clinical outcomes?
  14. Nearly all of the UCSF neurologists know that the COVID vaccines have caused serious injuries to huge numbers of UCSF patients. Can you explain why none of them are speaking out publicly about what they are observing in the clinic?
  15. Why not make public health information from the hospital public? The information can be easily anonymized to protect privacy. Wouldn’t making medical records such as age/admission date/COVID vaccine dates/reason for admission be a huge public service? If the vaccine really works, everyone would know it. If the vaccine doesn’t work, everyone would know it. Why don’t we have data transparency?
  16. Is anyone at UCSF calling for data transparency from the CDC? If the death-vax records were public, we could instantly know whether the shots are beneficial or harmful. Is there a reason these records are not public and nobody at UCSF is calling for these records to be made public? Do we get better health outcomes when the CDC keeps the data from public view? The data can be easily anonymized to satisfy any HIPAA requirements. I personally released a subset of the death-vax records from Medicare. So I know it can be done. Oh, and it showed the vaccine were causing an enormous amount of excess deaths.
  17. How long do you think you can get away with hiding all these vaccine injuries from public view?
  18. Is this really in the public interest to keep all this stuff secret and engage in fear and intimidation tactics? Is there a paper in a peer-reviewed medical journal showing superior patient outcomes when the public is kept in the dark about vaccine injuries?

Summary

These should be easy questions for UCSF to answer, but they are ducking my questions for some reason. I just can’t figure it out. I don’t want to spread misinformation, and I’ve offered to correct any questions if they will supply evidence that I’m wrong, but all I hear is silence.

It’s not just me who wants answers to these questions. Pretty much all my readers want to know the answer too.

More importantly, I’d guess that most of the people who work at UCSF would want to know the answer to these questions as well.

But apparently UCSF management and the mainstream media don’t think any of these questions are important.

I wonder if any members of the UCSF Health Leadership Team are curious about the answer to any of these questions. And if not, why not? Do all of them think secrecy is the best way to go? Which questions do they not want to have answered and why? I’ve emailed Dr. Adler and I hope he will respond.

They can’t keep running from the truth. The longer they avoid answering these questions, the worse they look.

Some day there will be accountability. You can bank on that.

March 21, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Indonesia to ditch Visa and Mastercard

RT | March 21, 2023

The Bank of Indonesia is preparing to phase out Visa and Mastercard while introducing its own domestic payment system, Antara news agency reported on Monday, citing the regulator.

Last week, Indonesian President Joko Widodo urged regional authorities to wean themselves away from foreign payment systems and start using cards issued by local banks. He argued that Indonesia needed to shield itself from geopolitical disruptions, citing the sanctions targeting Russia’s financial sector from the US, EU, and their allies over the conflict in Ukraine.

“Be very careful. We must remember the sanctions imposed by the US on Russia. Visa and Mastercard could be a problem,” he said.

Commenting on the initiative, the central bank’s spokesperson, Erwin Haryono, said that the regulator was in talks with local businesses “and the progress is about 90%,” adding that domestic cards will have many advantages, including lower fees. Also, according to him, “offshore settlements and dependence on foreign payment networks such as US Visa or Mastercard will no longer be necessary.”

Board member of the Indonesian Credit Cards Association (AKKI), Dodit Proboyakti, told RIA Novosti that Indonesia would apply the experience of Russia and its Mir payment system to promote the domestic financial network.

Indonesia’s interbank system, GPN, currently supports only local debit cards and requires some adjustments to properly serve credit cards and international transactions, according to AKKI executive director Steve Marta.

Moscow rolled out its own national card system, Mir, soon after the US first targeted the country with sanctions in 2014, and created the domestic National Payment Card System (NSPK) to smoothly take over all Visa and Mastercard transactions should the US-based companies pull the plug.

March 21, 2023 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment