By Svetlana Ekimenko – Samizdat – 25.10.2022
On Monday, 30 Democratic lawmakers from the US House of Representatives – led by Pramila Jayapal, chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus – wrote to President Joe Biden urging him to alter his Ukraine strategy and hold direct negotiations with Russia, “redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire”.
The group of progressive House Democrats who urged President Joe Biden on Monday to make fundamental changes to US strategy regarding the security crisis in Ukraine by seeking direct negotiations with Russia, made a U-turn within hours of sending their letter to the POTUS.
Under a wave of pressure from other Democrats, the group, led by Congressional Progressive Caucus chairwoman Pramila Jayapal, released a statement confirming their support for the president’s strategy.
“Let me be clear, we are united as Democrats in our unequivocal commitment to supporting Ukraine in their fight for their democracy and freedom,” Jayapal announced, adding that “nothing in the letter advocates change in that support”.
The statement went on to say that although diplomacy is “an important tool that can save lives,” it is “just one tool”.
“As we also made explicitly clear in our letter and will continue to make clear, we support President Biden and his administration’s commitment to nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” the group of lawmakers concluded.
Before bowing to pressure and backpedaling, the 30 Democrats had initially stated in their letter that it was in the interests of the Biden administration to revise his strategy for Ukraine to avert a protracted conflict fraught with dangerous possibilities.
“We urge you to pair the military and economic support the United States has provided Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire,” the group – which includes Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Ro Khanna of California – said.
The Democrats added in the original letter:
“The alternative to diplomacy is protracted war, with both its attendant certainties and catastrophic and unknowable risks.”
The lawmakers had emphasized how the conflict would spill over into ordinary life and how the sanctions policy introduced by the US, the EU and allies against Moscow over its special military operation in Ukraine were self-harming. Food and gas costs have rocketed all over the world, including in the United States, and the soaring prices for wheat, fertilizer, and fuel have exacerbated global food shortages.
“If there is a way to end the war while preserving a free and independent Ukraine, it is America’s responsibility to pursue every diplomatic avenue to support such a solution that is acceptable to the people of Ukraine,” the letter said.
However, the letter’s call for a negotiation process that could include sanctions relief for Russia and security guarantees for Ukraine contents did not go down well with some other Democrats. Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona tweeted in response to the progressives’ letter that the way to end a conflict is, “Win it quickly”.
Although the US Congress passed a Bill to send $12Bln in new aid to Ukraine in September, with the Biden administration expected to pledge more aid for the Kiev regime in December, if Republicans win control of the House in the November mid-term elections, this strategy of pumping aid into Ukraine may be put to the test.
A number of GOP House lawmakers such as Florida’s Matt Gaetz have been vociferous in calling for aid to Ukraine to be curtailed. These calls have been echoed by other influential voices in the broader conservative movement, highlighting that the Biden administration has been spending too much to prop up the Kiev authorities and possibly prolonging the conflict. After his home state of Florida was lashed by a hurricane, Gaetz went on Twitter to suggest that aid to Ukraine was diverting assistance from his own constituents.
And Republican representative for Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, tweeted while announcing her vote against a spending resolution that included more funding for Ukraine, that she was opposed to “funding America’s 51st state: Ukraine”.
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, hoping that next month’s mid-terms will make him Speaker of the House, said in a recent interview: “I think people are going to be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine.” He indicated that Republicans would demand tighter oversight of aid to Ukraine if they win the majority.
Earlier, Republican representative for Pennsylvania, Scott Perry, who is chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, reportedly texted members of the group about the potential for investigating the Biden administration over its handling of the Ukraine crisis. Perry suggested, according to screenshots of a text to fellow Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, that the president might not have been honest with the American people about his goals in the conflict.
“If these nitwits in this jackwagon administration are blundering us or intentionally marching us to war with Russia, nuclear or otherwise, we’d better start to preserve the evidence so there can be accountability,” Perry said.
Russia has sent out repeated reminders that channeling military assistance to the Kiev regime will only prolong the conflict and is fraught with the risk of a further dangerous escalation of the crisis.
October 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Ukraine, United States |
Leave a comment
Florida Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, minces no words regarding his State’s stance on Covid Vaccine Mandates, after a CDC committee voted unanimously to recommend Covid vaccines for kids older than 6 months.
October 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | COVID-19 Vaccine, Florida, Human rights, United States |
Leave a comment
Samizdat – 24.10.2022
MOSCOW – Moscow considers unacceptable the fact that the United States had not issued visas to the Russian delegation to the IAEA international ministerial conference on nuclear energy in the 21st century, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
The conference will be held in Washington from October 26-28. The Russian delegation comprising representatives of state corporation Rosatom and technical watchdog Rostekhnadzor planned to take part in it.
“The United States never issued visas to the Russian delegates, despite the fact that the relevant applications were submitted by them in advance in accordance with the established procedure. Thus, Russia’s participation in an important international event under the auspices of the IAEA was blocked in an absolutely unacceptable way and without any reason,” Zakharova said in a statement.
The refusal of the United States to issue visas to the Russian delegation to the IAEA conference grossly violates the norms in the agreement between the IAEA and the state hosting the event, this gives reason to think about the advisability of holding international forums in the United States, Zakharova said.
This is another example of how the United States “implements its short-sighted policy of ignoring international law and replacing it with a perverted postulate of some kind of ‘rules-based order’ that Washington itself invents and adjusts for itself,” she noted.
“This is another reason to think about whether it is worth trusting the holding of large international forums to a country that is not able to organize them properly,” Zakharova added.
October 24, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Russophobia | IAEA, Russia, United States |
Leave a comment
“You can send a man to Congress but you can’t make him think,” quipped comedian Milton Berle in the 1950s. To update Berle for our times: You can spend $60 billion a year on intelligence agencies but you can’t make politicians read their reports. Instead, most politicians remain incorrigibly ignorant and hopelessly craven when presidents drag America into new foreign fiascos.
Congressional docility has been paving the way to war since at least the Vietnam era. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson invoked an alleged North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin to ram a resolution through Congress giving LBJ unlimited authority to attack North Vietnam. LBJ had decided earlier that year to attack North Vietnam to boost his reelection campaign. The Pentagon and White House quickly recognized that the core allegations behind the Gulf of Tonkin resolution were false but exploited them to sanctify the war.
When the official story of the Gulf of Tonkin attacks begin unraveling at secret 1968 Senate hearings, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara proclaimed that it was “inconceivable that anyone even remotely familiar with our society and system of government could suspect the existence of a conspiracy” to take America to war on false pretenses. But indignation was no substitute for hard facts. Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) declared, “In a democracy you cannot expect the people, whose sons are being killed and who will be killed, to exercise their judgment if the truth is concealed from them.” The chairman of the committee, Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-AR), declared that if senators did not oppose the war at that point, “We are just a useless appendix on the governmental structure.” But other senators blocked the release of a staff report on the lies behind the Gulf of Tonkin incident that propelled a war that was killing 400 American troops a week. Sen. Mike Mansfield (D-MT) warned, “You will give people who are not interested in facts a chance to exploit them and to magnify them out of all proportion.” The same presumption has shielded every subsequent U.S. military debacle.
Lazy, cowardly congressmen perpetually paved the way for foreign carnage. In October 2002, prior to the vote on the congressional resolution to permit President George W. Bush to do as he pleased on Iraq, the CIA delivered a 92-page classified assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to Capitol Hill. The classified CIA report raised far more doubts about the existence of Iraqi WMDs than did the 5-page executive summary that all members of Congress received. The report was stored in two secure rooms—one each for the House and the Senate. Only six senators bothered to visit the room to look at the report, and only a “handful” of House members did the same, according to The Washington Post. Sen. John Rockefeller (D-W VA) explained that congressmen were too busy to read the report: “‘Everyone in the world wants to come to see you’ in your office, and going to the secure room is ‘not easy to do.’”
Hundreds of thousands of Americans were sent 6,000 miles away because congressmen could not be bothered to walk across the street. Congressmen acted as if going to a secured room to peruse a 92-page document was the equivalent of reading the entire 38 volume Encyclopedia Britannica by candlelight in a musty closet. Most congressmen had ample time to give speeches seconding Bush’s saber rattling, but no time to sift the purported evidence for the war. The only relevant evidence for many congressmen were the polls showing strong support of the president.
More details of the path to the Iraq War have been exposed in Sen. Patrick Leahy’s new memoir, The Road Taken. Leahy was one of the few senators who went to the classified room to read some of the confidential material on the war. As he and his wife were out on a Sunday walk in their ritzy McLean, Virginia neighborhood in September 2002:
Two fit joggers trailed behind us. They stopped and asked what I thought of the intelligence briefings I’d been getting… I went through a requisite disclaimer that if I was in briefings and if they were classified, I could not acknowledge that they even occurred and could not talk about them if they had. They told me they understood that, but asked whether the briefers had showed me File Eight.
It was obvious from the look on my face that I had not seen such a file. They suggested I should and that I might find it interesting. Quickly thereafter I arranged to see File Eight, and it contradicted much of what I had heard from the Bush administration.
A happy ending? No, not quite. A few days later, Leahy and his wife were out walking and the same joggers reappeared and asked what he thought of that secret file. Leahy commented, “It was the eeriest conversation I’d experienced in Washington. I felt like a senatorial version of Bob Woodward meeting Deep Throat—only in broad daylight.” The joggers then asked if Leahy “had also been shown File Twelve, using a code word… The next day, I was back in the secure room in the Capitol to read File Twelve, and it again contradicted the statements that the administration, and especially Vice President Cheney.”
The following Sunday, Leahy and his wife were walking past Robert Kennedy’s former estate when black cars with multiple antennas and darkened windows pulled up. Leahy wrote:
“A member of the presidential inner circle leaned out from the back window, greeting both myself and [his wife] Marcelle, and asked if he could talk with me… I got in the car with him while the security people got out of the car. We sat there and talked, and he said, ‘I understand you’ve seen File Eight and Twelve.’ I said I had, and I knew of course that he’d seen them. He said, ‘I also understand you’re going to vote against going to war.’ I said, ‘I am, because we all know there are no weapons of mass destruction and the reasons for going to war are just not there.’ He asked if he could talk me out of that, and I said no, and we ended the conversation. I started to get out of the car, and he said they would give me a ride home. ‘Thanks—let me tell you where I live.’”
The unnamed top Bush administration official replied: “We know where you live.” Leahy didn’t ask the dude whether he also knew all of Leahy’s computer passwords.
Leahy voted against the Bush resolution to use military force against Iraq. But Leahy waited 20 years to reveal the inside shenanigans he had seen on the road to war. And Leahy still refuses to disclose the name of the “member of the presidential inner circle” who was stalking him that morning in McLean. Podcast host Jimmy Dore scoffed that Leahy’s story was “just like a political thriller but at the end nothing happens and nothing is resolved.” Dore commented, “There’s a war anyway and he says nothing for 20 fucking years. The end. Did they even bother testing that ending with audiences?” Edward Snowden tweeted on Leahy’s story: “How could Leahy sit on classified information he knew could stop a war?”
But cover-ups are often unnecessary in Washington because few members of Congress are paying attention regardless. After four U.S. soldiers were killed in Niger in 2017, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) admitted they did not know that a thousand U.S. troops were deployed to that African nation. Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, admitted, “We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world militarily and what we’re doing.” U.S. troops were engaged in combat in 14 foreign nations at that time, purportedly fighting terrorists. But most members of Congress probably could not list list more than 2 or 3 nations where U.S. troops are fighting.
As the U.S. government has become far more secretive in recent decades, congressional intelligence committees supposedly provide a check-and-balance for agencies hiding behind iron curtains. But “intelligence committee” is perhaps Washington’s biggest oxymoron.
Congressional intelligence committees lead the charge to kowtow to the CIA and other agencies. The Senate Intelligence Committee effectively absolved all of the Bush administration’s lies on the path to war with Iraq. When its report was released in mid-2004 (just in time to boost Bush’s re-election campaign), committee chairman Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) announced, “The committee found that the intelligence community was suffering from what we call a collective groupthink.” And since everyone was wrong, no one was at fault—especially conniving Vice President Dick Cheney. (Antiwar.com was right long before the war started). The CIA also paid no price when it was caught illegally spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of CIA torture during the Obama administration.
And then there are the official bootlicking awards. The CIA publicly awards its Agency Seal Medal to members of Congress who boost its budget, coverup its crimes, and refrain from asking embarrassing questions. Pat Roberts got one—along with Rep. Jane Harman (D-California), Sen. John Warner (R-Virginia), and Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI)—all reliable stooges for the agency. The Founding Fathers would spin in their graves at the notion of federal agencies giving awards to congressmen who were supposed to be holding the leash on the agency. This is akin to a judge bragging about receiving a Public Service Award from a mobster who he connived to find not guilty.
There are some smart, dedicated, principled members of Congress who overcome the prevailing lethargy and bureaucratic roadblocks to learn enough to recognize the follies of proposed interventions. But those stalwart souls will probably always be outnumbered by the herd of senators and representatives far more likely to skim the latest polls than to read any official report longer than a tweet thread.
Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books.
October 24, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | CIA, United States |
Leave a comment
Samizdat | October 24, 2022
The fact that discussions about the possible use of nuclear weapons have become part of Western rhetoric is worrisome, Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), has said.
Contrary to claims by Western leaders, Russia is “absolutely” not threatening to deploy nuclear weapons, the senior official explained. But Kiev has openly claimed that it wants to become a nuclear power, an outcome that Naryshkin called on the world to prevent.
The Russian intelligence chief was referring to a speech that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky delivered during the Munich Security Conference in February. The Ukrainian leader lamented that Kiev had given up nuclear weapons stationed there during the Soviet era and said that his country could break its promise to stay a non-nuclear state.
Naryshkin was speaking on Monday in his capacity as head of the Russian Historical Society at the opening of an exhibition marking the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The current stand-off between Russia and the US over Ukraine has been compared by many to the events that happened six decades ago.
“The American elites today believe that they can maintain the aggression against our nation for as long as they want, feuling military action with thousands of lives of Ukrainian citizens and mercenaries,” the official remarked, drawing a parallel to how the Cuban Missile Crisis started.
The stand-off back then was triggered by the US decision to deploy missiles to Turkey, threatening the Soviet Union, he explained. When Moscow reciprocated, “the reaction of the US political elites, who had convinced themselves of being exceptional, was painful, nervous and acute,” he noted.
The administration of President John F. Kennedy recognized that there were red lines that neither the US nor the USSR should cross, Naryshkin said. There were people in the US government who “thought rationally, were able to calculate the consequences of their actions, and kept their word.”
It’s not clear that the same approach can be found in the Joe Biden administration, Naryshkin stated.
“Today, we will not be able to find a politician in a Western nation of the same magnitude as Kennedy,” he added.
The Russian official also suggested a way to discourage nuclear powers from deploying their arsenals for goals other than deterrence. He told the audience that holding the US accountable for the 1945 nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have had a cold shower effect.
October 24, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | NATO, Russia, United States |
Leave a comment
This week, Boston University found itself at the centre of scorn over claims its laboratories were engineering a “SARS-CoV-3” virus that would (hypothetically) put humanity one lab-leak away from a renewed Covid pandemic.
In the midst of worldwide relief over SARS-CoV-2’s eventual replacement by the mild, ‘common cold’ Omicron variant, BU’s scientists have created de novo an “Omicron S-bearing virus”, potentially marrying Omicron’s transmissibility with the Wuhan strain’s dangerous pathogenicity.
Boston University leadership should not be shocked by the widespread condemnation of this experiment. It has its own hubris to blame: steamrolling neighbourhood opposition to the urban placement of America’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL), through which BU amasses lucrative research grants. As the philosopher Spider-Man has said, “with great power, there must also come great responsibility.”
In this case, BU exhibits power, but avoids responsibility. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is examining whether these experiments should have triggered a federal review as ‘gain of function’ with SARS CoV-2’s gaining new or enhanced abilities, which NIH deems “inherently risky”. Boston University says it “did not have an obligation to disclose this research”, despite having received federal NIAID funding which BU states was only for “tools and platforms” used by the scientists.
“We take our safety and security of how we handle pathogens seriously, and the virus does not leave the laboratory,” noted NEIDL’s Dr. Ronald Corley. Cynics might point out that as recently as 2018, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) touted that its work “held the secret to preventing epidemics”. NEIDL has (probably) released fewer unintentional pandemics than WIV, so there’s that.
NEIDL can be seen as either a bulwark against – or conversely, a conduit for – bioterrorism. NEIDL houses the Level-3 Biosafety Lab (BSL-3) of this trans-viral graft experiment as well as one of the rare US BSL-4 laboratories, intended for studying the deadliest transmissible diseases, such as Ebola.
Lab-coat scientist researchers are not selected or rewarded for political acumen, nor should they be. Actual wet-lab work often embodies the phrase by which physicians tease anesthesiologists: “99% boredom and 1% panic” – but, without the panic. Instead, researchers have their 1%-portion comprised of the brief, refreshing glory on the occasion of publishing consequential results – the news of which usually stays within a small coterie of PhDs cognisant of the technical ‘twin-speak‘ pertinent to the narrow focus of the experiment performed.
Upending the news cycle, bringing fear and then furor to a Covid-weary populace, and a posse of paparazzi upon itself is not the usual modus operandi of researchers releasing a preprint dryly titled (as they often are): “Role of spike in the pathogenic and antigenic behavior of SARS-CoV-2 BA.12 Omicron“. Boston University’s Mohsan Saeed (et al.) ‘buried the lede‘ by not communicating clearly having formed a SARS-CoV-2 mutant through chimeric graft of Omicron spike onto SARS CoV-2.
The researchers’ insularity is evident in their not predicting that producing novel camouflage for the pandemic’s perpetrator would be sufficient cause for all hell to break loose. Given Dr. Saeed’s interim disappearance from the scene, it is assumed notoriety was not the researchers’ actual intent. His additional lack of communicating the societal need for a rejiggering of COVID-19 spare parts into a new mutant strain is its own problem.
NIAID says that the BU should have communicated in advance the purpose and nature of the study. BU responds that it did not have to because the primary funds were from BU itself. Medical ethicist Dr. Arthur Caplan says, “the entire research community would benefit from better communication.” Perhaps even earlier “better communication” might have obviated the experiment itself.
By focusing so intently within the micro-world, it’s perhaps forgivable virologists lose sense of the macro. Conversely, the general public has earned every right to be twitchy and tetchy over ‘gain of function’ engineered augmentations to SARS-CoV-2 after the many millions of excess deaths following what many suspect was a Wuhan lab leak.
The Daily Mail’s story headlined “‘This is playing with fire – it could spark a lab-generated pandemic’” had this graphic stating the mutant strain has an 80% kill rate.

Sensationalism definitionally entails shocking language at the expense of accuracy. Corrections are therefore in order:
- Yes, this lab is performing a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ experiment: putting Omicron’s spike protein (head) on ancestral SARS CoV-2’s envelope (body) – but, this is the standard operating procedure for virologists. Chimeric work allows comparisons to be made gauging the relative strength or pathogenicity of individual virion segments.
- Yes, this is a brand-new ‘deadly strain’ – but for a particularly and purposefully vulnerable strain of mice, not for humans. The new ‘Frankenstein’ Omicron-spike-and-Wuhan-body chimeric coronavirus caused 80% of hACE-2 lab mice to die – fewer, actually, than had perished from the ancestral Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 itself. For better or worse, these mice have been specifically genetically engineered to have 100% fatality to SARS-CoV-2. If the mice instead replicated human’s very low fatality rate against this virus (less than 0.1% in the non-vulnerable), it would be nigh impossible to make any statistically significant judgements in any experiment unless multi-thousands of mice were included in every phase.
This specific type of work was performed in an appropriate BSL-3 laboratory, and was technically legal even though it encompassed ‘gain of function‘ work. There had been a moratorium in the mid-2010s on such potentially dangerous work within the United States, but that was repealed in 2017. The rationale for reversing the moratorium was similar to that of any military’s maintaining and testing weaponry and engaging in wargames: “Researchers deliberately make viruses more dangerous to help prepare better responses to outbreaks that might occur naturally.”
Ostensibly, the moratorium was lifted to keep us safe; however, it was instituted for the very same reason, in 2014, to curtail scientists’ juicing up avian flu.
In 2011, Fouchier and Kawaoka alarmed the world by revealing they had modified the deadly avian H5N1 influenza virus so that it spread between ferrets (animals used for their similarity to humans’ influenza response). Critics worried a souped-up virus could spark a pandemic if it escaped from a lab (accidentally or as bioterror).
The flip-flopping in allowing gain of function research points to the dual needs in relation to such cutting edge science. Even as the moratorium was lifted, there were rules about the flow of information on gain of function experiments. Open communication is a prerequisite to scientific innovation but also can provide ready blueprints for any intrepid bioterrorist. An additional complication is that almost every study in the U.S. receives federal funds, creating a loophole of having to divulge sensitive results through any given FOIA request.
It is uncertain if BU’s newly chimeric COVID-19 mutant could qualify as a bio threat. Personally, I think not. Almost every one of its mutations is less efficacious than the parent. Viruses go through trillions in order to adapt sequentially to changing immune systems amongst the host. That researchers would come up with a highly dangerous one on the first try seems unlikely. In any event, there is vast natural immunity to Omicron and natural and vaccine immunity to ancestral SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19.
So what was the purpose of the BU NEIDL team? Since poor communication seems to be a threat throughout this story, it is perhaps no surprise that this preprint’s abstract section lacks clarity – and features instances of ‘begging the question (highlighted).
The recently identified, globally predominant SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (BA.1) is highly transmissible, even in fully vaccinated individuals, and causes attenuated disease compared with other major viral variants recognised to date. The Omicron spike (S) protein, with an unusually large number of mutations, is considered the major driver of these phenotypes. We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant. The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%. This indicates that while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by mutations in S, major determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S.
Let’s translate the abstract into general English:
Omicron is milder – and its spike protein is structurally different enough from the ancestral Wuhan strains that an mRNA vaccine to SARS CoV-2 does nothing to protect mice from Omicron. This is somewhat immaterial because Omicron doesn’t make these mice sick in the first place (basically the same situation as with humans). So, with research funding in hand, what are we going to do? Let’s put an Omicron ‘Halloween mask’ on the dangerous Wuhan strain! How many mice will die? A lot, nearly 80%. That’s sounds really bad, but we forgot to mention (in this abstract) that Wuhan strain without the Omicron-spike mask kills 100% of these mice, which sadly are canaries in a coal mine, engineered to die from SARS-CoV-2. Conclusion: the stuff inside the SARS-CoV-2 envelope is the really bad stuff. With its very own original spike protein it’s more dangerous, but what did we expect? We just made a virus that’s different from a fairly dangerous one and it’s not quite as dangerous.
Thus restated, it becomes difficult to ascertain the genuine need for doing this experiment (whose results seem obvious, predictable and axiomatic). Einstein favored Gedankenexperimente (‘thought experiments’) using conceptual rather than actual experiments in creating the theory of relativity. There’s nothing like the ‘real thing’, but I’m imagining 99% of virologists could have foreseen a conclusion similar to this without having done any of the study. Moreover, most would not have seen a real point in doing this study in the first place. Of course, getting paid and churning research grants can help provide motivation.
Even without the researchers’ having read my own article “Is it Time to Accept That Omicron is not COVID-19?” in The Daily Sceptic, September 25, 2022 – they should still have had enough information to know Omicron (despite its Greek letter) is not a SARS CoV-2 variant nor lineal genomic or genetic descendent. Such information was easily available January 2022. With this in mind, the highlighted portions make little sense and the purpose of the study even less.
One virologist offered these criticisms of the preprint’s study (in confidence):
- Why put Omicron S on a virus that is no longer circulating? I’m not sure what scientific question they are trying to answer.
- The grants that are cited for the work were meant to study innate immunity. They claim they want to study the role of spike protein in phenotype but they are not using the proper controls.
- It would have made more sense to have reversed the experiment, i.e., put the Wuhan spike on the Omicron envelope.
- Also, site-directed mutagenesis (creating specific, targeted changes) would have been a more useful technique, given that there are so many mutations in Omicron’s spike protein compared to earlier variants.
- The authors’ conclusion, “These findings indicate that the S protein is not the primary determinant of Omicron’s pathogenicity in K18-hACE2 mice,” should say that “S protein was not a primary determinant of Wuhan pathogenicity”.
- They actually [downwardly] attenuate the Wuhan strain by putting the Omicron-S onto that virus, yet try to sell it as if they had made the virus more lethal.
- Overall, they seem to really be studying Wuhan pathogenicity in the context of Omicron spike.
All products and methods of technology (e.g. nuclear power, mining, fossil fuels) are variously considered ‘double-edged swords’. So too it is with these studies. There are potential benefits and potential risks. In this particular case, were the risks worth it? Was the study appropriately directed and was the information gleaned worth the global consternation? The answer to both is ‘no’.
“It’s not like they made this monster virus, that’s a complete misinterpretation,” states infectious disease specialist Dr. Daniel Kuritzkes. “Researchers compared the ancestral version, Omicron, and a combined version of the two to research what piece of the virus dictates how sick a person will get. What we see in animal models does not translate directly to what we will see in humans. The labs are extraordinarily careful in how they do these experiments. There are strict protocols in place to make sure that nothing produced in the lab is released into the environment.”
My assessment is that this is more ‘tempest in a teapot’ than monster – although Dr. Frankenstein’s methods and ethical issues find resonance here. That there is a federal investigation into this case is interesting for the side reason that it seems an admission against its own interest, namely to the possibility that virology laboratories can potentially leak mutant strains. Who would’ve thought? For so long, it was all but forbidden to consider such a possibility for China’s WIV, even though ancillary evidence is nearly conclusive it occurred.
Dr. Randall Bock is a primary care physician near Boston, Massachusetts, and the author of Overturning Zika.
October 23, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, United States |
Leave a comment
Good products do not need universal liability shields, but bad actors are enabled by them.
much as been made about the possibility of schools mandating covid vaccinations for kids to be allowed to attend.
it may or may not happen. perhaps it will be treated like a flu shot. perhaps they’ll try for requirements. it’s likely to vary place to place and many states are already saying “no way” and if imposed this could cause flood of school change and really unleash the idea of vouchers and free choice and a swansong for public schools.
in the end, i’m not sure how many are crazy enough to try it and honestly, i doubt that any public school system in america could survive for long mandating this.
i doubt that this is really what the approval is about.
and that is a thing we need to fix.
longtime gatopal™ jennifer cabrera has a simple, common sense solution:
If the predicted red wave produces a strong Republican majority in Congress, one of their first acts should be to repeal the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. No excuses, Republicans. Liability is the only mechanism that can produce safe vaccines.
because this law is an abomination.
it creates ALL the wrong incentives and has swollen the US pediatric vaccine schedule (which used to be 3 well tested vaxxes, MMR, DTP, polio) with ineffective or marginally effective crap lacking valid risk reward and possessing meaningful side effect tails.
the case for several (HPV, flu, rota, pneumococcal) is basically non-extant.
but hey, no liability, no need to worry.
interestingly, gardasil does not appear to have this coverage hence the mass of lawsuits.
stop me if this sounds familiar:

landing in court on this is not, perhaps “the system working” as this vaccine looks to have been approved and marketed on numerous false pretenses and perhaps outright fraud. but at least the system is cleaning up its mess after the fact and discouraging such behavior in the future.
and the covid vaccines put all the others in the shade in terms of corners cut and data looking dodgy. but if we shield them and other things like them from liability, where is the disincentive to act badly? (and if you just said “because the drug companies wouldn’t lie to us!” i have some denver harbor bonds to sell you.)
you can get around this exemption by pfinding phraud, but should this really be necessary (especially when they hide the data and thus could have all sorts of little gems in it that the public had not seen)?
so how about we end this harmful “safe harbor” instead?
there is NO good consumer protection reason for this act. it’s a license for pharma to misbehave and it eliminates accountability and incentive to test properly. if you want to jab your drugs into kids, you need to own the side effects.
if you fail to predict or disclose risks, you own the ill outcomes instantly and forever.
let them decide, on that basis, how many studies to do and for how long prior to release.
i would LOVE to see what a class action jury award for fraud in a child vaccine lawsuit looks like.
this is the reason we have a tort system.
let it work.
it’s really simple:
mandate + no liability = disaster and “soft mandates” are just as bad.
everyone passes the buck to claim “iT wUZ nEvER a MAnDatE!” when they know full well that it functionally was.
how many times did you see this?

you mandate, you own the side effects. simple, reasonable, and incentive aligning.
this is one we can easily do.
we made this law. it has had perverse, anti-consumer effects. so let’s unmake it.
no more liability waivers.
only voluntary informed consent to risk subject to strict disclosure liability. “oh, we never tested for that!” is no longer an excuse.
i am not saying you get to sue for any bad outcome. but if the risks were not disclosed or were misstated you can. if they did not look for fear of what might be found, they own that. the onus is on them to prove safety and delineate risks and share them accurately and completely.
this encourages full, accurate reporting so people can make real, informed decisions.
it’s kind of stunning that we don’t have this.
if any public agency requires a jab, they become liable for bad outcomes.
no one gets forced and drug companies need to make a case for risk reward that will convince people and providers of healthcare.
let the market find the proper level of testing and reporting.
because healthcare is everywhere and always a cost benefit decision.
and you need free choice and sound data to make such choices well.
not exactly rocket surgery, is it?
or did you need another tour of the land of perverse incentives and regulatory capture?
October 23, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
Leave a comment
By Evgeny Mikhaylov – Samizdat – 23.10.2022
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated that Washington had fueled the movement against Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, since the US doesn’t consider the country obedient enough.
“Now, it turns out that the opposition in Budapest was also financed. The Hungarian [newspaper] Magyar Nemzet published an investigation into the funding of the liberal-left coalition of opponents of [Prime Minister] Viktor Orban by the American NGO Action for Democracy. The investigators and special services will probe all the circumstances of the attempts of foreign meddling in the political life of the country, but it is already obvious that the bill approaches millions of dollars,” Zakharova said.
According to the report, the foundation, created just before the February elections, enjoyed close ties with the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). The report also suggested that Action for Democracy is connected to Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros, who funds Open Society Foundations, banned by Hungary several years ago.
Zakharova also reminded that the EU leadership was also discontent with Budapest’s independent stance, threatening Hungary with fines and sanctions, while calling it an “electoral autocracy” for refusing to follow orders from Brussels.
Hungary has staunchly opposed the EU sanctions against Russia. Budapest has repeatedly warned that Brussels’ decision to send military aid to Kiev amid the Russian special military op there and to impose restrictions against Moscow will result in a major economic collapse of the bloc.
The sanctions, backed by the US, Britain, and the EU, exacerbated fuel market issues, resulting in a major energy crisis across Europe, with record-high inflation and skyrocketing cost of living.
October 23, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Russophobia | Action for Democracy, European Union, Hungary, Open Society Foundation, United States |
Leave a comment

Critics have long questioned why the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would fund experiments by University of North Carolina of Chapel Hill (UNC) professor Ralph Baric to develop a technique for hiding evidence of human tampering in laboratory-created super viruses.
Aided by some $220.5 million in National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funding, Baric developed a so-called “Seamless Ligation” technique, which he boasted could perfectly conceal all evidence of human tampering in laboratory-created viruses. Baric nicknamed his invention the “no-see’m” method.
Now a new study, “Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV2,” published on the preprint server bioRxiv, shows that — apparently unbeknownst to Baric — the “seamless ligation” concealment gimmick leaves its own minute but legible signature.
Most momentously, these same researchers have discovered that damning signature in the genome of the virus that causes COVID-19.
Baric’s technique has long been controversial. “It’s the artist that doesn’t sign his name to the painting; the virologist that doesn’t put his signature into the virus to let us know whether or not it is emerging naturally or whether it is produced in a laboratory,” said Jeffrey Sachs, chair of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, a task force that investigated the origins of COVID-19.
“All of it says, my God, there was really a big, very risky research agenda underway.”
This month, Sachs published the results of his 22-month investigation in The Lancet, including the damaging conclusion that COVID-19 was probably laboratory-generated and that the technology probably came from NIH-funded science.
Referring to Baric’s seamless ligation methodology, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein observed:
“It’s the exact opposite of what you would do if your interest was public health. Public health scientists would be marking their enhancements with red flags — not devising ways to hide them. The only reason you would want a concealer is to advance a sinister purpose — such as illegal bioweapons development — some mischief that the scientist didn’t want traceable back to his lab.”
Baric taught his “no-see’m” method to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) “Bat Lady” Shi Zhengli in 2016. In return, Baric received Chinese coronaviruses collected by Shi from bats in Yunnan province. (Scientists have linked the COVID-19 genome’s pedigree to closely related bats.)
Shi and her colleagues at the Wuhan Institute subsequently demonstrated their mastery of Baric’s high-risk technique in a series of published — and highly controversial — gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan lab. It has been even more puzzling to his critics that Baric, again with NIAID funding, chose to share this dangerous technique for weaponizing pathogens with Chinese scientists who have clear links to the Chinese military.
Experts say that the implications of this new study could be far-reaching. By pointing the finger at Baric, the study raises the possibility of potentially devastating liability for the NIAID and the University of North Carolina and other parties.
Scientists, including those close to Dr. Anthony Fauci, have repeatedly pointed out that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has genomic sequences that appear inconsistent with natural evolution: The COVID-19 virus is no longer infectious in bats, and its spiked protein feature — which is unknown in this family of coronavirus — includes numerous mutations that make it ideally infectious in humans.
The closest known coronavirus relative — a coronavirus from the Wuhan lab — is 96.2% identical to SARS-CoV-2. The peculiar spike accounts almost completely for the entire 3.8% difference. Oddly, there are multiple novel mutations in the spike and almost none in the rest of the genome.
Natural evolution would be expected to leave mutations distributed evenly across the genome. The fact that virtually all the mutations occur on the spike led these scientists to suspect that that particular Wuhan lab coronavirus collected by Shi Zhengli is the direct progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 and that its new spike was implanted through engineering.
However, the unmistakable fingerprints of lab engineering were absent — leaving many experts wondering whether Baric’s technique was used to assemble a novel coronavirus with the engineered spike while removing the evidence of lab generation.
This new study connects the biological breadcrumbs that link federally funded research to a global pandemic. That trail leads directly to UNC and NIAID.
The authors of the study — a team of researchers from Duke University, University Clinics of Würzburg and an industry group — identified a characteristic signature in the amino acid code. That indelible artifact could only have emerged from Baric’s “no-see’m” methodology.
In an interview last spring, Baric himself confessed, that at the time the pandemic began, only two or three labs in the world were using his protocol – including his UNC lab and the WIV.
The study’s authors’ conclusions rest on the presence of unique sites in the COVID-19 virus. These sites allow special enzymes called “restriction enzymes” to cut the DNA into building blocks of unique size that then can be “stitched together in the correct order of the viral genome,” according to the study’s authors.
Essentially, Baric’s technique leaves behind unique spellings in the “genetic vocabulary.” The new words include “odd spelling choices” subtly distinguishing them from typical viral vocabulary.
The magic of Baric’s “no-see’m” technique is to invisibly weave these telltale “spelling” changes into the viral sequence between relevant genes without altering the viral protein. This is like changing the “spelling” of the word without changing its meaning; the casual listener will never notice the difference.
The research team used forensic tools to drill down on minute “spelling differences” in the SARS-CoV2 genome that betray laboratory tampering using the “no-see’m” technique.
Consider how a Brit would spell “colour,” “manoeuvre” or “paediatric.” The choice to spell a word in a certain way can reveal your nation of origin. Similarly, these nearly imperceptible changes in the viral sequence give away the laboratory origins of this virus.
In sharing his seamless ligation technique with Shi Zhengli, Baric assured that the WIV possessed all the required elements of the assembly process. EcoHealth Alliance’s infamous DEFUSE proposal describes the same techniques in detail. (submitted to The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, in 2018).
The world now has proof positive that SARS-CoV2 is an engineered laboratory creation generated with technology developed by Ralph Baric with U.S. government funding.
Prosecutors and private attorneys representing clients injured by the COVID-19 pandemic now have a smoking gun. The gun points at humanity. Forensic scientists have now successfully lifted faint but precise fingerprints from the lethal pistol’s grip and trigger. Those fingerprints belong to the NIAID and the University of North Carolina.
Baric is Fauci’s favorite gain-of-function scientist. The cascade of NIAID funding to Baric and his UNC lab has financed 152 studies approaching a quarter-billion dollars.
Those federal grants have made Baric the global kingpin of gain-of-function science. In conformance with standard practice, it is probable that UNC pockets one-quarter to one-half of NIH’s financial felicities to Baric for “administrative costs.”
These monumental payments have probably incentivized UNC to turn a blind eye to Baric’s reckless experiments and to his controversial decision to transfer his dangerous technologies to a Chinese military laboratory known to suffer from deficient safety protocols and shoddy construction that make it, in the words of Congressional investigators, less secure than a “dentist’s office.”
UNC’s role in enabling the questionable conduct may have precipitated a global pandemic that could easily give rise to liability for negligence.
UNC and NIAID’s liability is now clear. But do we have positive proof that the Wuhan lab created the monstrosity that caused COVID-19?
The cumulative evidence strongly suggests that the Wuhan lab used Baric’s methodologies to cobble together the chimeric virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic. But a few missing puzzle pieces still prevent us from definitively proving that this dangerous construction project occurred at the Wuhan lab.
As The Lancet Commission report concluded, the released emails show that NIH’s Dr. Francis Collins, NIAID’s Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak, and others are continuing to collaborate with Shi Zhengli and Chinese officials to suppress the public release of information that would allow us to complete this picture. Stay tuned!
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.
October 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Anthony Fauci, Covid-19, NIAID, NIH, Ralph Baric, United States, University of North Carolina |
Leave a comment
The CIA, thanks to Hollywood and fanboys, enjoys an undeserved reputation for competence in carrying out espionage and covert actions. I am fascinated by the delusional punditry offered by former CIA officers, such as Douglas London and Steven Hall. Full disclosure, Hall was a young 20 something in my Career Trainee class (we entered on duty in September 1985). He is emblematic, in my opinion, of the problems that have plagued the CIA over the last thirty years–he was a legacy, i.e. got into the agency in part because his Daddy preceded him. Steve, if you recall, was one of the liars who signed a letter declaring that Hunter Biden’s laptop had all the earmarks of Russian disinformation. Attaching himself to such a libelous letter (he was impugning the character of John Paul Mac Isaac) highlights his tendency to follow the herd and eschew critical thinking.
But I want to focus on Douglas London. He is popping up all over media, especially CNN and the Wall Street Journal, and offering analysis that ranges from the banal to the delusional. Consider this snippet, published in the Wall Street Journal, in March:
I spent 34 years in the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine service, and watching Vladimir Putin’s brutal war in Ukraine from the sidelines fills me with both sadness and a sense of opportunity. Espionage is a predatory business, and there’s blood in the water. Mr. Putin’s self-inflicted damage has done more to turn his own people against him than anything the West could have done. . . .
Russian mystique is gone. Mr. Putin has proved his country is the declining power that the best-informed Russia watchers claimed it was. Fewer pundits will wax poetic over Mr. Putin’s cunning and strategic brilliance. He might have been a capable operations officer during his KGB career, but he clearly missed the classes on self-awareness and counterintelligence. The more he tightens the security screws and covers Russia’s window to the world, the more likely those he depends on will turn against him.
Got that? Russia, whose economy is clicking along nicely in contrast to the implosion underway in Europe, is a declining power in Mr. London’s fanciful world. Since the start of the Special Military Operation last February, Putin has frustrated Western attempts to paint him as Hitler reincarnated and has forged closer ties with China, India, Saudi Arabia and Brazil. Oh, did I mention he enjoys popular support among the Russian people:
The proportion of Russian citizens’ confidence in President Vladimir Putin stood at over 80%, according to the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center that published the results of a survey conducted from October 3 to 9 among 1,600 respondents aged over 18, reports TASS.
“When asked about trust in Putin, 80.9% of respondents answered positively (-0.2% over the week), the approval rate of the Russian president’s work was 75.6% (-1.3 % over the week),” the pollsters noted.
https://www.daily-sun.com/post/650584/Poll-reveals-level-of-Russian-public%E2%80%99s-confidence-in-Putin
I want to remind you of the desperation of the West to portray Putin as a loser bereft of popular support. Five years ago, Statista claimed that Putin was losing popular support:
According to a Pew Research Center survey released last week, Russians still have a high level of confidence in President Putin’s ability to do the right thing regarding world affairs. Despite his high overall approval rating, however, Putin is actually losing public support on many key issues. Support for his handling of relations with Ukraine and the EU have dropped 20 and 15 percentage points respectively since 2015. Russians are also increasingly dissatisfied with the way their president is handing relations with the United States.
If you thought that an experienced spook like London would take the time to actually gather some facts and compare them to history, think again. Sure looks like Mr. London is not about to let facts get in his way. London believes that his ability to speak Russian grants him special insight into the mind of Vladimir Putin. Here is his keen analysis from a recent column in Just Security :
Policymakers would do well to remember three fundamentals that guide Putin’s decision-making: 1) he is the product of the 1970’s and 1980’s KGB and stood witness in then-East Germany in 1991, when the world as he knew it ceased to exist; 2) ego, survival, greed, and ambition direct his moral compass; and 3) he has come to believe his own propaganda.
Unlike all other political leaders, Putin is driven by “ego, survival, greed, and ambition.” Excuse me, but good grief!! Thank God that neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama nor Boris Johnson were motivated to run for office because of “ego, survival, greed, and ambition.” Any further question why I deride London as banal. Hell, Mr. London does not even understand himself, i.e., what motivates him. Apart from Jesus Christ, I have not had the privilege of knowing any political leader of substance that was free of ego, self-preservation, greed and ambition. This kind of superficial, shallow thinking is part of the reason that officers like London wormed their way up the ranks of the CIA bureaucracy. As long as you mouth platitudes and do not rock the boat of established thinking, you get a great Personal Appraisal Report (aka PAR), and are promoted in accordance with the Peter Principle.
The London Express asked Mr. London about Putin’s decision to name General Surovikin as Supreme Commander of the Military Operation in Ukraine:
Douglas London, . . . believes Vladimir Putin did not appoint Surovikin on merit but because the Russian Air Force Commander lacks the connections within the military to launch a coup. Putin installed Surovikin, nicknamed “General Armageddon,” to oversee Russian operations in Ukraine this month after a run of heavy defeats at the hands of Ukrainian forces in Kherson and Kharkiv. . . .
General Surovikin previously headed up Russian operations during the Syrian Civil War when Moscow propped up the regime of Bashir Al-Assad against Islamist rebel forces.
He was credited with masterminding the recapture of large swathes of Syria from rebel hands, the use of overwhelming firepower, and scant regard for collateral damage.
Surovikin’s appointment as the top Russian commander in Ukraine coincided with the use of widespread suicide drones to target Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
Got that? Surovikin is without “merit”, yet he is credited with capturing large portions of Syria from Islamic rebels. If Douglas London really had any analytical talent at all–along with some intellectual honesty–he could have at least acknowledged that Putin’s choice of Surovikin was in fact grounded in merit. Putin was not looking for some boot licking toady to kiss his ass and tell him what a wonderful dictator he is. Putin selected a General with experience in running a combined arms operation with a clear track record of success. I don’t know if London is just stupid and ignorant or if he sincerely believes the nonsense he is spouting. Could it be that his own experience as a boot licker is clouding his judgment?
U.S. policymakers, when it comes to Russia, are an ignorant lot with little appreciation for history. They are blinded by ideology and tend to view present day Russia through the expired constructs of the Cold War. Putin and Russia are inept. They are bumbling. They are backward. Etc.,etc. etc.
None take into account the remarkable transformation of life in Russia under Putin during the last 22 years. Russia was a genuine shit hole in 1999. Rather than spend Russian tax dollars on disastrous foreign policy expeditions like Iraq and Afghanistan, under Putin’s leadership the creaky, rotten infrastructure left by the Soviet regime was renovated and modernized. Russia’s military services also were upgraded dramatically and its technological skills, particularly in the realm of space exploration, surpassed that of the West. The vast majority of people in the United States fail to appreciate the implications of Russia’s role in providing the rockets and space craft that ferried U.S. astronauts to the Space Station.
Back in 2004, President Bush announced that NASA’s aging space shuttle program would be retired in 2010 and — eventually — replaced by a plan to return to the moon. At the time, NASA realized there would be a four-year gap between the space-shuttle retirement and when the new manned space transport system would be in place.
But at that point, it didn’t seem like a big problem for NASA to ask Russia to transport US astronauts to and from the space station in the interim. Relations between the two countries were friendly — Bush was telling reporters that he’d looked into Putin’s eyes and “got a sense of his soul.” What’s more, NASA had relied on Russian transport for 29 months after the Columbia disaster in 2003, when the shuttle program was put on hold.
Development of NASA’s replacement vessels, however, has taken much longer than anticipated — the agency won’t have a replacement for the shuttle until 2017. There are a few reasons for that. Bush’s moon program was cancelled by Obama in 2010 and replaced with a plan for private companies to shuttle astronauts. Meanwhile, NASA’s budget requests to pay for the new program were repeatedly underfunded by Congress.
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/5/5674744/how-nasa-became-utterly-dependent-on-russia-for-space-travel
Just to be clear. The incompetent, inept, backward, technologically unsophisticated Russians have been the Uber driver for the United States, carrying U.S. astronauts to and from the International Space Station. But when it comes to running military operations in Ukraine, the Russians supposedly cannot pour piss out of a boot. I offer this as the clearest example of the delusion that blinds the minds of supposed super spies like Douglas London and Steve Hall and others. Instead of acknowledging that Russia, notwithstanding its relatively small population compared to other countries, is a certified leader in sophisticated, complex technology, Western intelligence officials and politicians only see the bad old days of the Soviet Union and the craven party politics that sundered the Soviet empire. The West fails to understand that there is a new kid on the block who is not going to buckle or cower in the face of belligerent threats from the cretins in the West. A failure to know one’s opponent (or enemy) is a recipe for disaster. Sadly, I fear the West is consumed by that recipe and will continue to fight a figment of their collective imagination that no longer exists.
October 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | CIA, United States |
Leave a comment
An ABC News investigative journalist disappeared six months ago. He seems to have known a lot about US aims in Ukraine.

FILE PHOTO. James Gordon Meek, an ABC News investigative journalist. © Michael Le Brecht/ABC via Getty Images
By Felix Livshitz | Samizdat | October 22, 2022
On 27 April, ABC News reporter James Meek tweeted a single word – “facts” – above another Twitter post from a retired CIA officer, who stated that the 2014-2022 Ukrainian civil war was an eight-year “lab experiment” on Russia’s military “tactics, techniques, and procedures.” It added that US intelligence and “unconventional warfare” experts had “learned a shit ton.”
It was the last time, to date, Meek posted on the social network. In fact, it seems it was the last time he did anything in public at all, both online and in-real-life. Rolling Stone has published an investigation into the veteran journalist’s vanishing act in the months since, revealing how just hours after that tweet was posted, a number of menacing vehicles blocked off roads around Meek’s apartment in Arlington, Virginia, then proceeded to raid the premises.
Neighbors interviewed by the magazine recall a collection of police cruisers, official-looking cars with blacked-out windows, and even armored tactical vehicles frequently used by the FBI, which resemble tanks. Quick as a flash, their occupants exited and rushed into Meek’s apartment complex, “at least 10” of them being “heavily armed.”
The raid was reportedly over very quickly, and Meek apparently didn’t leave the scene with the authorities. To this day, there is no indication of what if anything was seized or why it was conducted, and all records related to the case remain sealed, including the search warrant approved a day prior. While no charges have officially been filed, Meek has dropped off the face of the Earth, and his apartment has remained vacant ever since.

At precisely this time, Meek is said to have resigned “very abruptly” from his ABC News post without warning or explanation, with even close coworkers unaware of the reasons for his departure.
He is also said to have telephoned Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret, with whom he was collaborating on an almost completed book, “Operation Pineapple Express: The Incredible Story of a Group of Americans Who Undertook One Last Mission and Honored a Promise in Afghanistan,” to tell him he needed to withdraw from the project due to “serious personal issues.” Meek was apparently “really distraught” during the call.
Almost immediately, Meek’s name was scrubbed from the work’s entry on US publishing giant Simon & Schuster’s website, and its cover on various e-commerce sites listing it for pre-order. Several tweets from Meek promoting his involvement in the project have also been deleted.
Tell no tales
It’s remarkable that it has taken six months for anyone to publicly raise the alarm over Meek’s disappearance, and raise questions as to his whereabouts. One might think that a relatively high-profile veteran mainstream US journalist suddenly going missing would stoke concerns among his employers, if not fellow reporters, particularly given Meek’s history of reporting on contentious topics.
He has previously broken stories on foiled terrorist attacks, and military cover-ups surrounding the fatal ambush of four Green Berets by ISIS in 2017, and the accidental death by friendly fire of US private James Sherrett II in 2008. The latter exposure resulted in Meek meeting personally with President Barack Obama.
To source such scoops would have necessitated maintaining close high-level contacts within Washington’s national security apparatus – and there are clear indications Meek could himself have experience in that very sphere. As a 2013 ABC press release announcing the creation of a new investigative unit stated, since 2011 he’d “served as Senior Counterterrorism Advisor and Investigator for the House Committee on Homeland Security, grappling with some of the top threats to our country, including the bombing at the Boston Marathon.”
What this grappling entailed isn’t explained, although Rolling Stone interviews with his ABC peers indicate that despite his background being “shrouded in mystery,” Meek was in close quarters at various times with military and intelligence professionals. One of his coworkers mentioned a photo in his office taken in a desert, featuring Meek posing with a number of people who had had their faces retrospectively blacked out.
These nuggets might suggest not only that Meek had a background in military and/or intelligence work, but that these professional exploits could have overlapped with his journalism career, perhaps up to the present day.
This interpretation is greatly reinforced by an underexplored disclosure in Rolling Stone’s article. It is noted that unnamed sources had said “federal agents allegedly found classified information on Meek’s laptop during their raid.” One of Meek’s ABC coworkers further told the magazine: “it would be highly unusual for a reporter or producer to keep any classified information on a computer.” Which is true – but was he simply a “reporter or producer,” or something else too?
Even stranger, Rolling Stone fails to put two and two together when discussing how it would be unusual and unprecedented for the FBI to seize a reporter’s documents, as US laws make it illegal for journalistic material to be captured by federal prosecutors without special prior authorization from the US Attorney General’s office, and there is no evidence in the public domain that such an agreement was officially reached.
Again though, such restrictions only apply to documents held by journalists – not regular citizens, or individuals involved in national security work. As such, Meek’s final tweet – despite being posted after a warrant to search his home was secured – might be a highly incisive clue as to the rationale for the mysterious and completely unpublicized FBI raid.
Meek’s tweeting about the situation in Ukraine since 24 February was fairly sparse, but on 4 March, he revealed that America’s Germany-based 10th Special Forces Group had “spent a decade training Ukraine’s special operations forces in unconventional warfare, almost exclusively. They are seeing those tactics being used very effectively against the Russian Bear.”
In exposing this secret schooling, Meek was notably ahead of the curve – it is only since late September that Western news outlets have acknowledged the decade-long 10th Special Forces Group training provided to Kiev. This indicates he knew something the rest of the media didn’t, or maybe wasn’t allowed to mention at the time.
Meek’s other posts on Ukraine suggest that while far from a Russian apologist, he was very critical of US policy in the region, particularly plans to ship endless weapons to Ukraine, believing it would be difficult for the cargo to reach the frontline, let alone be used very effectively by local troops. Both obvious outcomes have been subsequently admitted, leading to online backlash, and official denials.
The ABC journalist’s knowledge of that covert training, and the US intelligence community exploiting the post-Maidan regime’s brutal war on the Donbass civilian population as a petri dish for prepping war with Russia, strongly suggests insider access. Combined with public skepticism over Washington’s war effort, could it be that Meek planned an expose of inconvenient hidden truths about the Western proxy war in Ukraine, or alternatively knew too much, and was dangerously well-positioned to publicize it?
Declassified documents reveal that the rule change protecting a journalist’s possessions from seizure contain massive loopholes. If the FBI is trying to identify an individual who leaked documents to a reporter, or attempting to surveil someone they believe to be an intelligence operative, those protections evaporate, and the bureau can monitor privileged private communications without the Attorney General office’s approval.
Were it the case that Meek was both a journalist and intelligence professional, by receiving sensitive briefings on US involvement in the war in Ukraine, he could have walked into a series of traps of his dual career’s own making, with no legal protections, and no need for official sign-off on a massive spying and raid operation targeting him.
It is unknown quite what information he could have possessed that the US government wanted to suppress, although the White House is so desperate to maintain official narratives on the Russia/Ukraine conflict that it’s giving direct briefings to Tik-Tok stars on the subject.
Of course, it’s entirely conceivable that someone who could blow the whistle on how Russia’s intervention was provoked, or what the US is trying to get out of prolonging the fighting, would need to be silenced as a matter of urgency.
October 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance | CIA, FBI, Ukraine, United States |
Leave a comment