Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

West should end its support to Kiev to escape devastating consequences – military expert

Prolonging the conflict in Ukraine is the worst alternative for all sides

By Lucas Leiroz | August 24, 2022

Recently, some American pro-war activists wrote a letter entitled “U.S. must arm Ukraine now, before it’s too late”, in which they advocate an increase in aid to Kiev so that the situation of the conflict is reversed. The authors believe that the conflict is at a turning point and that aid must be provided now in order for Russia to be defeated. However, military experts disagree with this argument and say that there is no reason to try to prolong the fighting.

Despite all the difficulties the Western world has faced as a result of the conflict in Ukraine, many people still insist that aid to Kiev must continue – and increase – until Moscow is defeated. The main rhetoric of the pro-war militants is that Russia would not just win the conflict in Ukraine but would expand its operation to other countries in Europe, which is why it needs to be defeated now – which they consider possible by sending arms to Kiev. 

“For the U.S. and NATO, that time is now — and the place is Ukraine, a large country whose population understands that its choice is either defeating Putin or losing their independence and even their existence as a distinct, Western-oriented nation. With the necessary weapons and economic aid, Ukraine can defeat Russia. If it succeeds, our soldiers are less likely to have to risk their lives protecting U.S. treaty allies whom Russia also threatens. What does defeat for Putin look like? The survival of Ukraine as a secure, independent, and economically viable country”, the authors of the open letter asking more weapons to Ukraine say.

In fact, this rhetoric is absolutely unfounded in all its points. First, there is no reason to believe in an expansion of the Russian special military operation to NATO countries. Moscow just started military incursions into Ukraine because Kiev left no other alternative with its continuous policy of killing Russian citizens, but there is currently no equivalent situation in other countries. However, more important than that is to note the lack of realism on the part of the pro-Western militants in believing in the possibility of “defeating” Russia, despite the current stage of the conflict.

Russia did not mobilize all of its military power to attack Ukraine, but the small portion of the Russian forces sent to the operation was efficient in annihilating Ukrainian main bases of resistance. At the current stage of the conflict, there is no possibility of reversing the military situation. Kiev is defeated and only postpones the inevitable decision to surrender because it continues to receive Western weapons, guaranteeing a kind of “survival”, prolonging the battles indefinitely, even without a chance of victory.

This is the assessment of any expert who analyzes the case honestly and without ideological emotions. For example, Douglas Macgregor, war veteran and former advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, believes that the sending of weapons will not bring any positive change to Kiev due to the human capital deficit, both quantitative (with the low number of active Ukrainian soldiers), and qualitative (considering the tactical and operational inability of these fighters to reverse the conflict and even their lack of instruction in using the weapons they receive from the West).

With that, the weapons would only serve to prolong, not to effectively change the current military situation. He also claims that even if Kiev were to achieve major victories, the absence of human capital would not allow it to rebuild its troops after the long battles, while Russia, whose current combat mobilization represents only a small fraction of its military potential, would have the ability to recover quickly and thus regain the positions eventually lost.

“The hard truth is the introduction of new weapon systems won’t change the strategic outcome in Ukraine. Even if NATO’s European members, together with Washington, D.C., provided Ukrainian troops with a new avalanche of weapons, and it arrived at the front instead of disappearing into the black hole of Ukrainian corruption, the training and tactical leadership required to conduct complex offensive operations does not exist inside Ukraine’s 700,000-man army. In addition, there is an acute failure to recognize that Moscow would react to such a development by escalating the conflict. Unlike Ukraine, Russia is not currently mobilized for a larger war, but it could do so quickly”, he says. 

Macgregor claims that the letter written by the pro-war militants “reinforces the failure” of Ukraine. For him, the conflict is at a decisive moment, in which it must be ended, not prolonged. He still believes that the reasons that led to this conflict – NATO’s incursions on the Russian border – were disastrous and unnecessary and that Western countries should give up further provocations against Moscow. The best solution, he says, is to support the Austrian model of neutrality as a solution for Ukraine before the country is completely destroyed.

“Ukraine’s war with Russia is at a decisive point. It is time to end it. Instead, the authors of the letter seek to reinforce failure. They are demanding a deeply flawed strategy for Ukraine that will lead in the best case to Ukraine’s reduction to a shrunken, land-locked state between the Dnieper River and the Polish border (…) Expanding NATO to Russia’s borders was never necessary and has become disastrous for Europe. The longer the war with Russia lasts the more likely it becomes that the damage to Ukrainian society and its army will be irreparable. Neutrality on the Austrian model for Ukraine is still possible”, he adds.

In fact, this opposition of opinions reflects the old debate between realists and warmongers. Anyone who really understands war and military strategy knows that there is no other solution than the neutralization of Ukraine and the end of Western expansionism. Those who think through liberal idealism, however, advocate fighting “to the last Ukrainian”.

Prolonging the conflict is not good for either side: it increases the destruction in Ukraine, perpetuates the suffering of the people, raises the expenses of western countries and forces Russia to mobilize a greater part of its military forces.

Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

August 24, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Meet Henry Kissinger (2009)

Corbett • 08/21/2022

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Watch on Archive / BitChute / Odysee / Substack

FROM 2009: A war criminal, a genocidal eugenicist, a power-hungry plotter, a modern-day Machiavelli, a Rockefeller toadie. Meet Henry Kissinger.

SHOW NOTES AND MP3 AUDIO: https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-106-meet-henry-kissinger/

August 24, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Pro-Vax Bully Implicated in Virus Engineering Program

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | August 23, 2022

Dr. Peter Hotez, dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, has repeatedly dismissed the idea of a lab accident or deliberate spread, calling it “an outlandish conspiracy theory.” He’s also a fierce critic of the ongoing Congressional probe into gain-of-function research, decrying it as a “threat to American biomedical science.”1

Well, Hotez, the lab leak denialist and Congressional probe critic, has now been outed as a funder and project leader of risky gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Hotez Developed SARS Vaccine in Case of Lab Release

Hotez’s dismissal of the lab escape theory is particularly ironic considering he received a $6.1 million grant2 from the National Institutes of Health in 2012 for the development of a SARS vaccine in case of an “accidental release from a laboratory,” “deliberate spreading of the virus by a terrorist attack,” or a zoonotic spillover event. According to the grant abstract:3

“We have identified a highly promising lead candidate vaccine antigen, the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the SARS-CoV spike (S) protein that can induce potent neutralizing antibody response and protection against SARS-CoV infection.

Our objective is to develop a highly effective and safe recombinant RBD-based SARS vaccine that can be used in humans for prevention of future SARS outbreak and for biodefense preparedness.”

The research under that grant took place from 2012 until 2017. After spending five years preparing for the possibility of an accidental or deliberate release of SARS, why would Hotez think a lab leak of SARS-CoV-2 was out of the question?

Hotez Funded Creation of Chimeric Coronavirus

Clearly, Hotez is no stranger to the possibility of lab leaks. Could it be that his dismissal of the lab leak theory, and the Congressional inquiry into gain-of-function research, is based in fear that he may be implicated in SARS-CoV-2’s creation? As reported by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK):4

“While casting concerns about Wuhan’s labs as ‘fringe,’ Hotez has not mentioned his own connection to a project involving a laboratory-generated chimeric SARS-related coronavirus that has come under Congress’ microscope. The project was helmed by Zhengli Shi, a senior scientist and ‘virus hunter’ at the Wuhan Institute of Virology nicknamed the ‘Bat Lady.’

As part of his NIH grant, Hotez subcontracted funding for research on combined or ‘chimeric’ coronaviruses, a scientific paper5 shows. Hotez’s grant6 underwrote two of Shi’s collaborators on the project.

In the 2017 paper7 co-funded by Hotez, Shi and her colleagues generated a recombinant virus from two SARS-related coronaviruses: ‘rWIV1-SHC014S.’ It’s not clear whether the paper co-funded by Hotez should have been stopped under a temporary ‘pause’ on gain-of-function work before 2017.

However, some independent biosecurity experts have said research on this chimeric virus in some ways epitomizes lapses in NIH oversight of risky research in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

A prior study8 of one of the coronaviruses that comprised the chimera, WIV1, found it to be ‘poised for human emergence.’ Another prior paper9 on the other coronavirus, SHC014, stated that its future study in lab-generated viruses may be ‘too risky to pursue.’

‘The work here should have been at the very least, heavily scrutinized,’ said David Relman, a Stanford microbiologist and biosecurity expert. ‘This work should have been heavily reviewed for [gain-of-function], and probably should have been subject to the pause prior to December 2017.’”

The Ties That Bind Hotez, EcoHealth Alliance and the WIV

As explained in USRTK’s report10 and revealed in the 2017 paper11 titled, “Cross-Neutralization of SARS Coronavirus-Specific Antibodies Against Bat SARS-Like Coronaviruses,” another funding source of this joint project was the EcoHealth Alliance. The NIH grant12 behind EcoHealth’s part of the study has already come under scrutiny, as it involved the creation of chimeric coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab. As reported by USRTK:13

“Specifically, an EcoHealth Alliance grant report14 obtained by congressional investigators demonstrated that a WIV1-SHC014 chimera generated thousands of times the viral load and enhanced lethality in mice with human airway cells. This prompted concerns among some biosecurity experts, scientists and members of Congress.

In response to questions from congressional Republicans, NIH acknowledged15 that the research was out of compliance with its own regulations on gain-of-function research.’

In this limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with WIV1 bat coronavirus,’ the letter read. ‘As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result rather than something the scientists set out to do.’”

So far, Hotez has not been forthcoming about his apparent conflict of interest. On the contrary, he’s denied that his NIH grant supported Shi’s controversial research project at the WIV.

In an August 9, 2022, Twitter post,16 Ebright pointed out that such denials are provably false, as funding from NIH grant AI09877517 (Hotez’s grant) is acknowledged as a funding source in Shi’s paper,18 “Cross-Neutralization of SARS Coronavirus-Specific Antibodies Against Bat SARS-Like Coronaviruses.”

Hotez Is Part of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission

Hotez’s conflicts of interest are all the more pertinent when you consider he’s on The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, where he co-chairs the COVID-19 Vaccines and Therapeutics task force.19 Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry at Rutgers University, told USRTK:20

“The construction and threat-characterization of rWIV1-SHC014 was — unequivocally — gain-of-function research. It is a conflict of interest that, to my knowledge, has not previously been disclosed to The Lancet Commission … and that surely will be of interest to The Lancet Commission.”

As coincidence would have it, EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak was also on the Lancet Commission back when its COVID Origins task force was initially set up.21 Daszak was eventually “recused”22 from the Origins task force after his conflicts of interest were brought to light, garnering widespread criticism and lack of trust. The task force has now closed down permanently.23

Daszak was also selected by the Chinese to be part of the World Health Organization’s initial task force to investigate the origin of SARS-CoV-2. That task force has also been dismantled due to conflicts of interest and less than credible results, and has been replaced with a new working group.

Like Hotez, Daszak also went on record, early on, dismissing the lab-origin theory as “pure baloney,”24 and he was the mastermind behind the publication of a “scientific consensus statement” signed by 27 scientists, condemning the lab leak theory as “conspiracy theory.”25,26

Overall, it looks like Hotez and Daszak are reading from the same scripts. They’re also clearly funding the same controversial and highly risky research that likely played a major role in the COVID pandemic.

Hotez, One of the Most Shockingly Hateful People in Medicine

Hotez has made headlines a number of times through the years, typically delivering some kind of hateful rhetoric. Hotez has publicly stated he wants to “snuff out” vaccine skeptics,27 for example, and in May 2021 called for cyberwarfare measures to be deployed against people who share vaccine safety information, and he did this in the highly reputable science journal Nature, no less.28

Over the years, Hotez has repeatedly spewed vitriol at parents of vaccine-injured children and called for physical harm and imprisonment of people who don’t agree with the one-size-fits-all vaccine agenda, so it was rather funny when he whined and complained about getting bombarded with “anti-vaxx hate speech” in response to his cyberwarfare call.29

Hotez is not above casting an evil eye on other scientists either. As reported by independent journalist Paul Thacker in an August 9, 2022, Substack article titled, “Peter Hotez Sees Aggression Everywhere But in the Mirror”:30

“Patrolling scientific discourse, Hotez has a knack for discovering ‘antiscience’ in anyone who disagrees with him. Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor at Columbia University and chair of an international commission on COVID-19, charged in a wide-ranging interview31 last week that the National Institutes of Health and allied scientists were impeding an investigation into how the COVID-19 pandemic started.

Since the pandemic’s beginning, virologists have been attacking anyone who asks hard questions about what might have started this outbreak. Predictably … Hotez went on the assault, tweeting that Sachs, as leader of the Lancet Commission, did not represent the views of science.

Much like a Pentagon general wrapping himself in freedom and the flag to demand more federal monies for another foreign war … Hotez has been shrouding himself in the mantle of science to denigrate anyone who questions taxpayer funding for dangerous virus research by the National Institutes of Health.”

Lancet’s COVID Origin Task Force Disbanded Over Dishonesty

Sachs was in fact the one who shut down the Lancet Commission’s COVID Origins task force, a decision he says began with concerns about conflicts of interest between Daszak and the WIV, but in addition to that, Sachs claims he also came to realize that Daszak was “not always telling the truth.” The final straw came when Sachs sacked Daszak and members of the task force suddenly attacked him for being “antiscience.”

Shortly thereafter, a Freedom of Information Act request brought previously hidden NIH documents to light, and Sachs realized that those who were attacking him also had undisclosed ties that made their ability to get to the truth doubtful at best. At that point, he decided to disband the whole task force.

“My own experience was to witness close up how they’re … trying to keep our eyes on something else … away from even asking the questions that we’re talking about,” Sachs said in his Current Affairs interview.32

“Although Sachs did not name specific task force members who assailed him, it’s not hard to imagine who they were,” Thacker writes. Pulling up the archived webpage for the now-defunct task force, we find no fewer than seven members with direct professional and/or financial ties to Daszak: Peter Hume, Gerald Keusch, Supaporn Wacharapluesadee, Danielle Anderson, Linda Saif, Stanley Perlman and Sai Kit Lam. (In his article, Thacker details those ties.)

Hotez in Daszak’s Corner

Curiously, rather than supporting Sachs — or at bare minimum feigning concern about Daszak’s dishonesty and this extraordinary level of conflicts of interest — Hotez has defended Daszak, shooting down any and all critique with a single word: “Antiscience.” As noted by Thacker:33

“Anyone interested in joining the Hotez crusade against antiscience, should be forewarned: his scripture can be difficult to follow. The registry of the sinful often changes, with names of heretics rotating in and out of sermons, depending on political expediency.

In late 2020 when members of QAnon seemed to be hiding under every American bed, Hotez preached that members of the online conspiracy were mixing with anti-vaxxers and neo-Nazis to create a ‘globalizing anti-science confederacy or empire.’

A year later, QAnon fell out of the news, prompting Hotez to refocus … The threat of anti-science aggression now arose from three sources: far right members of Congress and conservative news outlets; an online ‘disinformation dozen’; and Russian propaganda …

Four months later — surprise!!! — Hotez discovered antiscience was more complex and multifaceted. Forgetting to cite Russia, Hotez identified a ‘troubling new expansion of antiscience aggression’ and railed in PLOS Biology against the three new horsemen of the antiscience apocalypse:34

1.Far-right members of the US Congress;

2.The conservative news outlets and;

3.A group of thought leaders who provide intellectual underpinnings to fuel the first two elements.

Cobbling together a set of disconnected thoughts, Hotez centered the threat to science on various accusations made against the NIH’s Anthony Fauci, as well as media reports on Peter Daszak. The essay touched on Nazis — of course!!! — and ended with a plea for swift and positive action that included ‘federal hate-crime protections’ for scientists who were being criticized.”

Who or What Is Hotez Really Fighting For?

In his article, Thacker goes on to review several other bizarre incidences involving Hotez. Most recently, he called scientific experts invited to testify before Congress “fringe elements” testifying and promoting “outlandish conspiracies.” So much for Ph.D.’s and med school. He also accused Sen. Rand Paul of promoting conspiracies.

“With a final flourish, Hotez proposed a new threat to science a couple days back: gain of function ‘conspiracy guys’ allaying themselves with antivaccine activists. But it’s not hard to imagine that Russians and Nazis will make another appearance in a Hotez tweet or essay soon to come,” Thacker concludes.35

Here’s the take-home: The reason Hotez protects Daszak and rails against “antiscience” is because it protects Fauci, and Fauci is the one Hotez is really beholden to. He’s received millions of dollars in grants from the NIH — and so has Daszak and a lot of other people who conduct completely unnecessary and dangerous research.

If Daszak goes down for illegal research, so does Fauci, and with him, the biggest research purse strings in America, if not the world. Ending gain-of-function research would have the same withering effect on funding — and hence careers — which is why anyone who questions the sanity of gain-of-function research is “antiscience” and should be cyberattacked on sight. So, all that hateful rhetoric? It all comes down to protecting self-serving interests. Who would have guessed?

Sources and References

August 23, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

US ramping up drone strikes in Middle East and Africa

Experts believe indiscriminate use of drones is the key contributor to overall instability across the troubled regions in which they’re deployed

By Drago Bosnic | August 23, 2022

Drone strikes have been an integral part of US aggression against the world for over two decades now. These strikes have been the mainstay of joint military-intelligence black ops, especially in the Middle East and Africa. From the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts of Libya, US strikes drones have been sowing death and destruction, ever so euphemistically called “spreading freedom and democracy.” 

These drones, first used only for ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) missions, were modified for rudimentary strike roles and were first tested in former Yugoslavia, laying the groundwork for their later usage in various US invasions. The strikes were massively expanded under Barack Obama, with thousands being approved by his administration. After Donald Trump came to power, he officially reduced the number of drone strikes, although they now became more specific, with US intelligence services getting even more involved. However, since Joe Biden took office, it seems the trend has now been reversed and US drones are coming back in full force.

On August 19 conflict monitors drew attention to a series of US strikes in Somalia, which have escalated significantly in the last couple of months. These attacks have gained little to no attention in the US corporate mass media despite resulting in the deaths of more than 20 people.

“If you were unaware that we were bombing Somalia, don’t feel bad, this is a completely under-the-radar news story, one that was curiously absent from the headlines in all of the major newspapers this morning,” wrote Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a senior adviser at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Last Wednesday, Dave DeCamp, writing for AntiWar reported that the US AFRICOM (Africa Command) launched its second strike on Somalia in less than a week. AFRICOM claims the attack, which occurred in Beledweyne, “had killed 13 fighters belonging to the al-Qaeda-linked Somali militant group al-Shabaab, and that no civilians were harmed.” AFRICOM claims drone strikes also killed four al-Shabaab members in three separate operations near Beledweyne on August 9, two fighters near Labi Kus on July 17, and five militants in a June 3 bombing outside Beer Xani.

All of the aforementioned strikes have taken place since President Biden approved the redeployment of hundreds of special forces to Somalia in May, reversing an earlier withdrawal decision under the administration of former President Donald Trump. DeCamp noted that Trump’s withdrawal from Somalia merely “repositioned troops in neighboring Djibouti and Kenya, allowing the drone war to continue. But Biden has launched significantly fewer strikes in Somalia compared to his predecessor.”

According to the London-based Airwars monitoring group, US forces have targeted Somalia at least 16 times since Joe Biden took office, killing between 465 and 545 supposed militants. On March 13, a single US drone strike reportedly killed up to 200 alleged militants. Airwars claims there were civilian casualties in just one of the drone attacks under the Biden administration, conducted in June 2021. The attack on the southern town of Ceel Cadde killed a woman named Sahro Adan Warsame and seriously injured five of her children, according to local media reports. US forces have carried out at least 260 strikes in Somalia since 2007. The Pentagon has so far admitted killing five civilians and wounding 11 others, but Airwars claims 78-153 civilians, including 20-23 children, have died in US attacks.

“Bottom line, it’s been a long time since the United States was not bombing Somalia,” wrote Vlahos. “This comes after a particularly bloody period during the [so-called War on Terror] in which the CIA was using the country to detain and torture terror suspects from across North Africa. Whether this has ultimately been a good thing for the country or for the broader security of the region, one need only to look at the continued instability and impoverishment of the people,” she added, “and of course, the persistent presence of al-Shabaab itself.”

In addition to Somalia, recent reports indicate that US drones have been reactivated over Libya as well. The US shows no intention of stopping these strikes, with most now being relegated to intelligence services, such as the infamous CIA, with minimal civilian oversight. Many experts believe the indiscriminate use of these drones is a major, if not the key contributor to the overall instability across the troubled regions in which they’re deployed, as the terrorist activity which they’re allegedly there to stop is only exacerbated as a result.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

August 23, 2022 Posted by | War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Mossad Likely Behind Salman Rushdie Stabbing: Denver Professor

Al-Manar | August 23, 2022

The last week’s stabbing of novelist Salman Rushdie, the author of a sacrilegious anti-Islam book may have been orchestrated by the Mossad, suggested Nader Hashemi, Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver.

In a Saturday interview with Negar Mortazavi, host of the Iran Podcast, Hashemi questioned the timing of the attack, highlighting what he believed to be two possible explanations.

Hashemi said that one possibility is that Iran wanted to take vengeance on the United States for the 2020 assassination of IRGC general Qassem Suleimani in a drone strike at Baghdad Airport.

Another possibility, Hashemi said, adding that he believes this is more likely, is that Rushdie’s attacker, Hadi Matar, had been convinced to commit the attack by a Mossad agent masquerading as an IRGC operative or supporter.

“That so-called person online claiming to be affiliated with the Islamic Republic of Iran could’ve been a Mossad operative.”

“The other possibility, which I actually think is much more likely, is that this young man Hadi Matar was in communication with someone online who claimed to be an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps member or supporter and lured him into attacking Salman Rushdie and that so-called person online claiming to be affiliated with the Islamic Republic of Iran could’ve been a Mossad operative.”

Hashemi went on to suggest that the Zionist entity’s motive for carrying out a false flag operation would be to galvanize opposition to the ongoing efforts of world powers to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement.

“Israel has taken a very strong position against reviving the Iran nuclear agreement,” he said. “We were in very sensitive negotiations, like an agreement was imminent, and then the attack on Salman Rushdie takes place. I think that’s one possible interpretation and scenario that could explain the timing of this at this moment during these sensitive political discussions related to Iran’s nuclear program.”

August 23, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel Conquers the World

Fealty to Israeli and Jewish interests is the new normal

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • AUGUST 23, 2022

I have to confess a certain liking for Russian President Vladimir Putin. No, it’s not over his actions in Ukraine, nor his authoritarian tendencies domestically. It is due to the fact that he sometimes articulates the hypocrisy of foreign countries and leaders in a pithy and take-no-prisoners fashion. He has lately been brave enough to compare and contrast what the Russian military has been accused of in Ukraine with what Israel has been doing to Gaza. He has done so by asking a series of questions that together demonstrate the hypocrisy of Washington and of some Europeans over what constitutes war crimes or crimes against humanity. The questions were “First, are there any sanctions against Israel for the murder and destruction of innocent Palestinian women and children? Second, are there any sanctions against the United States for killing and destroying lives of innocent women and children in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Cuba, Vietnam, and even stealing their diamonds and gold? And third, were there any sanctions against the US and France over the killing of Muammar Gaddafi and the destruction of Libya?”

Russia, of course, has been on the receiving end of sanctions and boycotts and even official theft of the money that it had in US and European banks. It has also had to deal as well with military support provided by NATO to the Volodymyr Zelensky regime in Ukraine. Last month the US Senate unanimously passed a ridiculous nonbinding resolution declaring Russia to be a “state sponsor of terrorism,” which, if endorsed by the White House, would inevitably lead to still more sanctions and increasing aid to Zelensky and his corrupt cronies in an openly declared attempt to weaken Russia and bring down Putin. It would also mean that a future functional diplomatic relationship between Moscow and Washington would become impossible. Implicit in Putin’s questions is the clear accusation that there is a double standard on what constitutes national security. The West supports military resistance by Ukraine against Russia but does not support the right of the Palestinians to defend themselves when attacked by Israel, as took place on August 5th, an unprovoked attack that killed inter alia 17 Palestinian children.

The Russian Foreign Ministry followed-up with a statement first posted on its Egyptian Embassy social media accounts. The statement included a screenshot of a tweet Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid posted April 3rd on the claimed killing of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, attributed by Lapid and the western media to Russian forces. Lapid declared “It is impossible to remain indifferent in the face of the horrific images from the city of Bucha near Kiev, from after the Russian army left. Intentionally harming a civilian population is a war crime and I strongly condemn it.” The Russian post observed how one might “Compare Yair Lapid’s lies about [Ukraine] in April and attempts to place blame and responsibility on [Russia] for the deaths of people in Bucha brutally murdered by the Nazis with his calls in August for bombing and strikes on [Palestinian] land in the Gaza Strip. Isn’t that a double standard, complete disregard and contempt for the lives of Palestinians?”

The point about a double standard is particularly relevant as Ukraine, which claims to be enduring a brutal Russian assault replete with war crimes, has openly endorsed Israel’s bombing and shooting of the unarmed Palestinians. Two weeks ago, Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel Yevgen Korniychuk expressed his full support for Tel Aviv, saying “As a Ukrainian whose country is under a very brutal attack by its neighbor, I feel great sympathy towards the Israeli public. Attacks on women and children are reprehensible. Terrorism and malicious attacks against civilians are the daily reality of Israelis and Ukrainians and this appalling threat must be stopped immediately.”

Korniychuk’s odd, and manifestly false, comment takes reality and turns it upside down. But nevertheless, to be sure, Israel’s recent bloody assault on Gaza did not earn it much favor from a global audience that has become tired of the Jewish state’s belligerency and self-serving flood of disinformation. A number of human rights organizations and even some churches responded by declaring Israel to be an “apartheid state.” Some critics of the Israelis have also been pleased to observe that ordinary voters in the US Democratic Party in particular have moved away from knee-jerk support of Israel and have accepted that it is racist and undemocratic. Even a considerable number young Jews, many of whom have protested against the Israeli automatic resort to gunfire and bombs in suppressing the Palestinians, have broken with their parents over the issue of what constitutes the legitimate “right” of Israel to “defend itself.”

Israel is far from defeated, however, and it has struck back in the time-honored fashion, using the Jewish diaspora and its vast wealth to buy up or leverage the media, to corrupt politicians at all levels, and to propagate a narrative that always depicts Jews sympathetically as perpetual victims. That narrative relies on the so-called holocaust and the slogan “never again” to generate the moral authority and outrage that makes the entire otherwise unsustainable imposture work.

What might be plausibly described as an International Jewish Conspiracy directed from the Israeli government’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs and from the think tanks, banks and investment houses on Wall Street and K Street is working hard to make it illegal to criticize Israel and is enjoying considerable success. Israel’s recent and continuing slaughter of Gazans and West Bank villagers has not induced the thoroughly controlled governments and media outlets that the Jewish state dominates that there is anything seriously wrong going on between the Israelis and Palestinians, only business as usual.

Israel appears to be winning its war against the Palestinians (and let’s not forget the Iranians) where it matters most, among the power brokers in both the US and elsewhere. Witness for example the reaction of the US government to the killing of the Gazans. President Joe Biden declared that Israel has a “right to defend itself,” the standard line also parroted by Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. Thirty-four congressmen meanwhile signed on to a letter calling on the United Nations to disband a UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) into Israel following recent controversial remarks by one of the commission’s members. The COI was set up to investigate possible Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied territories and Gaza.

The signatories particularly objected to what the always vigilant Anti-Defamation League has described as anti-Semitic statements by COI member Miloon Kothari, an Indian human rights expert and investigator. In a podcast Kothari observed that Israel routinely “practiced apartheid and settler colonialism against the Palestinians,” before rejecting criticism of his commission as the work of the Jewish lobby that controls the media, saying “We are very disheartened by the social media that is controlled largely by the Jewish lobby or specific NGOs,” adding that “a lot of money is being thrown at trying to discredit the commission’s work.”

Jewish power particularly in the anglophone world was also on display recently in Canada. The painfully politically correct Justin Trudeau regime has succumbed to the example set by Germany and several other European states in enshrining the official Jewish organizations’ perpetual victim narrative in the Canadian Criminal Code, s. 319. Henceforth

(2.1) Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, willfully promotes antisemitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust

  • (a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or
  • (b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.

So, from now on in Canada, if you question the claimed facts surrounding the approved so-called holocaust narrative you can be sent to prison for two years. So much for free speech or the right to challenge disinformation.

Finally, in Britain, the two contenders for the position of Prime Minister replacing the disgraced Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, and Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, were boasting of their pro-Israel credentials over the very weekend when Israel was killing more than fifty Palestinians, including 17 children, while wounding scores more. Truss and Sunak played the Israel/Jewish card big time, with Truss asserting that “The UK should stand side by side with Israel, now and well into the future. As Prime Minister, I would be at the forefront of this mission.” Truss has also hinted that she would follow the Zionist stooge Donald Trump’s lead in moving the British Embassy to Jerusalem and she has supported a Free Trade Agreement between the UK and Israel, which would primarily benefit the Israelis. She has also declared that any criticism of Israel is rooted in anti-Semitism, a popular line that is also being extensively promoted in the United States.

The two dominant parties in the UK’s parliamentary system are the Conservatives (Tories) and Labour. Both parties have organized “Friends of Israel” groups that have as members a majority of parliamentarians, including more than four out of every five Tories, who currently form the government. Recently, the Labour Party ousted leader Jeremy Corbyn because he dared to express sympathy for the Palestinians and replaced him with Keir Starmer, who is as close to Israel and the powerful British Jewish community as, well… choose your metaphor. For what it’s worth, Truss, Sunak and Starmer all support a hard line against Russia in Ukraine and also advocate putting extreme pressure on Iran, Israel’s declared regional enemy. They also all support using the British veto in the United Nations to protect the Jewish state against critics.

In 2001, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon angrily admonished his colleague Shimon Peres, who was arguing that Israel should heed US calls for a cease fire, saying “I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.” It now appears that the US, Canada, and Great Britain, joined by other anglophone states like Australia and New Zealand, are riding on the same horse when it comes to sacrificing actual national interests to pander to a foreign nation which can rightly be regarded as both a habitual war criminal and manifestly racist. The British and Canadian politicians on both sides of the aisle have now become like their American counterparts in allowing themselves to be corrupted by money and media influence, making an uncritical and near total commitment to Israel the defining issue in any political campaign for high office.

Modern Jewish power as a global phenomenon is a cancer that was in a certain sense made in America and has spread worldwide. But, fortunately, the smearing of critics as anti-Semites is beginning to wear thin. As Chris Hedges observed in March 2019 “The Israel Lobby’s buying off of nearly every senior politician in the United States, facilitated by our system of legalized bribery, is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact. The lobby’s campaign of vicious character assassination, smearing and blacklisting against those who defend Palestinian rights… is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact. Twenty-four state governments’ passage of Israel Lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact.”

It should also be a fact that Americans are beginning to rally against their government being manipulated by the unregistered insidious agents of a foreign government, but that will have to wait presumably. For the moment, Israel and its fifth column have key elements in both government and in the public space in their iron grip. It might require something like a revolution to loosen that.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

August 23, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Trump Files Suit Against FBI Over Mar-a-Lago Search, Requests ‘Special Master’ to Review Seized Docs

By Kirill Kurevlev – Samizdat – 22.08.2022

The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago earlier this month using a search warrant that stated possible Espionage Act offenses concerning the improper handling of secret data as the rationale for the probe. The release of specific portions of the affidavit that supported the search warrant is currently being decided by a federal judge.

Donald Trump, a former US president, filed a lawsuit on Monday in response to the search of his Mar-a-Lago property two weeks ago.

In the request filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Trump’s team claims the files were acquired under a “overbroad warrant” and asks the judge to appoint a special master to examine them. A note that Trump had his attorney deliver to a senior Justice Department attorney on August 11, just days after the search, is also included in the lawsuit.

“President Trump wants the Attorney General to know that he has been hearing from people all over the county about the raid. If there was one word to describe their mood, it is ‘angry.’ The heat is building up. The pressure is building up. Whatever I can do to take the heat down, to bring the pressure down, just let us know,” the message stated, per the lawsuit.

Additionally, the filing asks for a court order mandating the return of any object taken beyond the parameters of the government’s search warrant.

“President Trump, like all citizens, is protected by the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the filings said. “Property seized in violation of his constitutional rights must be returned forthwith.”

The records taken from Mar-a-Lago – according to court documents – are “presumptively privileged” as presidential materials, and must be examined by a disinterested Special Master reviewer.

Trump’s attorneys were initially notified by the government that it intended to evaluate the confiscated materials using a so-called “filter team.” Trump’s lawyers stated in the filings that, given the leader of the filter team is a subordinate of the case’s chief prosecutor, their protocols do not guarantee that members of the prosecution team won’t learn about privileged information.

Moreover, the document contains three questions that Trump addressed to the government and investigators “that any American citizen would ask under the circumstances.”

“Why raid my home with a platoon of federal agents when I have voluntarily cooperated with your every request?” Trump asked. “What are you trying to hide from the public – given that you requested that l turn off all home security cameras, and even refused to allow my attorneys to observe what your agents were doing? Why have you refused to tell me what you took from my home?”

According to the filing, leaks from the government to favored media outlets have given rise to inconsistent and incorrect “justifications” for the political behavior of the FBI and Department of Justice.

“These unsupported ‘justifications’ by anonymous sources hint at a breakdown in communications between President Trump’s representatives and the Government, or that there developed a need to obtain a search warrant,” it said.

Earlier, in addition to claiming declassified sensitive materials had been properly stored at Mar-a-Lago, Trump denounced the raid as an attempt to use the US court system as a weapon against him.

On Saturday, he again criticized the government’s action against him as “atrocities” and “unthinkable violations of freedom and the law.” Trump pointed out that these events are not new and have been going on for years since he announced his intention to run for president in 2016.

“The law enforcement of our Country has become that of a Third World Nation, and I do not believe the people will stand for it — between Fraudulent Elections, Open Borders, Inflation, giving our Military to the Enemy, and so much more — how much are we all expected to take?” Trump wondered.

August 23, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

Fauci finally promises to leave and collect his gratuities with a book deal

By Meryl Nass, MD | August 22, 2022

Mr. and Mrs. Barack Obama got a $65 million advance for their joint book deals. Except, nobody sells enough books to make such a stupefying advance work. So those of an inquiring mind wondered if the book deal was a way to launder money to the former President and his family for services rendered.

Mr. Fauci earns a bureaucrat’s salary. $437,000/year. But with royalties, adding in his wife’s salary (head Ethics officer for the NIH Clinical Center) and their investments, it is said the family earned $1.7 million dollars last year.

You’d have thought he got a tidy sum on his last book, which came out only 10 months ago. But no. He only got a basket of superlatives:

Compiled from hours of interviews drawn from the eponymous National Geographic documentary, this inspiring book from world-renowned infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci shares the lessons that have shaped the celebrated doctor’s life philosophy, offering an intimate view of one of the world’s greatest medical minds as well as universal advice to live by.

Before becoming the face of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and America’s most trusted doctor, Dr. Anthony Fauci had already devoted three decades to public service. Those looking to live a more compassionate and purposeful life will find inspiration in his unique perspective on leadership, expecting the unexpected, and finding joy in difficult times.

With more than three decades spent combating some of the most dangerous diseases to strike humankind– AIDS, Ebola, COVID-19–Dr. Fauci has worked in daunting professional conditions and shouldered great responsibility. The earnest reflections in these pages offer a universal message on how to lead in times of crisis and find resilience in the face of disappointments and obstacles.

Filled with inspiring words of wisdom, this profound book will offer readers a concrete path to a bright and hopeful future.

Editor’s Note: Dr. Anthony Fauci had no creative control over this book or the film on which it is based. He was not paid for his participation, nor does he have any financial interest in the film or book release.

Well then, since I don’t think he could legally be paid extra for a book while in office, it will be of great interest how much he gets for his next work of art. Somebody that good must be worth plenty.

Fauci’s final thoughts from STAT (he never forgets the $): “Thanks to the power of science and investments in research and innovation, the world has been able to fight deadly diseases and help save lives around the globe,” Fauci said. “I am proud to have been part of this important work and look forward to helping to continue to do so in the future.”

We the people will not necessarily benefit from Il Fauci giving up his post. What changed when Francis Collins left the NIH? Nothing. The Acting Director job was given to Lawrence A. Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D. Dentist Tabak was one of Fauci and Collins’ co-conspirators in the COVID origins coverup. He knows where the bodies are buried and has kept the shovels locked up.

August 22, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Dr. Robert Malone sues The Washington Post who accused him of spreading “misinformation” online

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | August 22, 2022

Dr. Robert Malone, an expert in mRNA technology and a vocal Covid vaccines critic who has been consistently censored by Big Tech, is suing the Washington Post for defamation. The lawsuit alleges that the news outlet made defamatory statements against him in an article published on January 24.

The article claimed that Dr. Malone spread “misinformation” in a speech where he said the vaccines “are not working” against the Omicron variant. As evidence the statement was false, the Post cited a paper by the CDC that found that booster shots were protecting people against severe disease.

The Post omitted the part where Dr. Malone said that vaccines, “do not prevent Omicron infection, viral replication, or spread to others.”

Speaking to The Epoch Times, Dr. Malone said: “I said nothing about disease and death at that point in time.” He went on to accuse the Post of selective misquoting and using the CDC study to counter a claim he never made.

The Epoch Times obtained an interview between the article’s writer, Timothy Bella and Dr. Malone, before the article was written. Bella told Dr. Malone, “I have respect for you and your body of work,” and that he was hoping to shadow the doctor during his stay in DC where he gave a speech at a protest against Covid mandates.

Malone initially sent a notice to the Post threatening legal action if the article was not removed or the defamatory statements retracted. When the outlet refused, he filed a lawsuit at a federal court in Virginia.

According to the lawsuit, the article made 10 defamatory statements against Dr. Malone, including that he has been “discredited,” his claims are “not only wrong, but also dangerous,” and that he “repeated falsehoods that have garnered him legions of followers.”

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

“The qualities WaPo disparaged—Dr. Malone’s honesty, veracity, integrity, competence, judgment, morals, and ethics as a licensed medical doctor and scientist—are peculiarly valuable to Dr. Malone and are absolutely necessary in the practice and profession of any medical doctor and scientist. WaPo ascribes to Dr. Malone conduct, characteristics, and conditions, including fraud, disinformation, misinformation, deception, and dishonesty, that would adversely affect his fitness to be a medical professional and to conduct the business of a medical doctor,” the suit states.

“Dr. Malone’s statements concerning COVID-19 and the purported ‘vaccines’ were 100% factually accurate. He has never committed fraud on [sic] engaged in any medical disinformation or misinformation. Further, the so-called ‘vaccines’ do not work, as is abundantly clear from both the scientific and anecdotal evidence to date,” it also says.

Dr. Malone is also currently involved in a lawsuit against Twitter over its censorship.

August 22, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

US Space Force wants to disrupt Russia-China space cooperation

Both Russia and China have been responding to the US militarization of space by enhancing their own capabilities, both separately and jointly.

By Drago Bosnic | August 22, 2022

Close strategic partnership between Russia and China has been the mainstay of their relationship for decades. The US has been trying to disrupt this successful partnership ever since, especially as Russia started regaining its strength, but the incessant belligerent actions of the imperialist thalassocracy have pushed the two (Eur)Asian superpowers even closer. This cooperation is manifold, but its space component is particularly concerning for the US, as it has serious security implications. The Pentagon is worried that the US “might not be able to match the united financing and know-how” of Moscow and Beijing.

“The two countries’ space cooperation, including in the military realm, has become inextricable since 2018 and works against U.S. interests,” said Kevin Pollpeter, senior research scientist at the CNA think tank’s China Studies Division. “I don’t think we can separate China and Russia. I just don’t think that’s possible,” Pollpeter said in response to a question from Air Force Magazine following a panel discussion on China-Russia space cooperation at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.

“While the countries do not have completely overlapping security concerns, they do share a strong desire to counter U.S. leadership, including in outer space,” he said. “What we need to do is, we need to mitigate whatever problems that relationship may cause for us. The two countries’ military space cooperation includes the areas of ballistic missile defense, space debris monitoring, and satellite navigation. The resulting exchange has included technology transfer, weapons sales, combined exercises, and compensating measures,” Pollpeter added.

In 1989, the US imposed sanctions on China, targeting Beijing’s defense and space industry. China looked to Russia for the necessary technology transfers and by 1997, the two countries started regular cooperation in space. Russia had the know-how, but its space industry was faced with severe funding shortages.

“… a number of embargoes that took place made [China] increasingly more reliant on Russia as a potential source of technology, particularly for dual use and defense,” said Pollpeter. “… China started looking more to Russia, and Russia started looking more to China for help with supporting their own space program.”

China also began cooperating with Russia on ballistic missile defense after the US unilaterally withdrew from the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty in 2019. In the immediate aftermath of the withdrawal, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that Russia would assist China in creating a ballistic missile early warning system. At the time, Putin said that China was perfectly capable of creating such a system itself, but that it would take longer, so Russia decided to aid Beijing in enhancing its strategic security in light of aggressive US moves in the Asia-Pacific region.

“There appears to be some sort of technology transfer going on,” Pollpeter added. “There’s been joint exercises – the Aerospace Security 2016 and 2017 involved joint air and missile defense planning and coordination.”

According to Pollpeter, another area of cooperation, space debris monitoring, “may sound innocuous,” but he claims “it has security implications.”

“If you have a space debris monitoring system, then you actually have a space domain awareness or space surveillance system,” he said. “This very much has a military role in helping China and Russia better monitor U.S. movements up in space.”

The US Space Force is particularly concerned about how “little is known about the satellite navigation cooperation between the two nations.” According to Pollpeter, other than the fact that there are compatibility and interoperability between the Russian and Chinese equivalents to GPS, the GLONASS and BeiDou navigation systems, nothing else is known about the security component of this cooperation. What is supposedly known is “the presence of augmentation stations in each other’s countries and performance monitoring,” Pollpeter claims.

“What they really want to do, then, is demonstrate that in a world where the U.S. and China could come into military conflict, they have an alternative,” he said. “They don’t have to rely on BeiDou exclusively. They also have the Russian system.”

As China doesn’t publicly discuss its space defense capabilities, Pollpeter claims it’s currently unknown which level of cooperation have Moscow and Beijing reached in this regard.

“A lot of it’s so opaque that when you get into something like counterspace, they’re not going to discuss that,” he said. “What China is developing is a capability that really is designed to threaten the United States space architecture from the ground all the way up to geosynchronous orbit.”

Existing agreements indicate close Chinese and Russian cooperation on launch vehicles, rocket engines, space planes, lunar and deep space exploration, remote sensing, electronics, space debris, satellite navigation and communication. Pollpeter thinks the US Space Force cannot halt the China-Russia cooperation, but it could do more to mitigate its effects.

“There’s really little we can do to separate the two countries, especially [on] the space side,” he said. “The distrust and, let’s say, to some extent, animosity of both countries towards the U.S. sort of precludes, at this point, that any of those efforts can be successful.”

As the US state-run space sector kept falling behind, private companies, the most prominent certainly being SpaceX, started closely cooperating with the US military. Both Russia and China have been responding to the US militarization of space by enhancing their own capabilities, both separately and jointly. While China started deploying pilotless spaceplanes, Russia is building land-based laser weapons to counter US space threats and is also launching its own spacecraft to track US space assets.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

August 22, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

MEET THE EX-CIA AGENTS DECIDING FACEBOOK’S CONTENT POLICY

By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | July 12, 2022

It is an uncomfortable job for anyone trying to draw the line between “harmful content and protecting freedom of speech. It’s a balance”, Aaron says. In this official Facebook video, Aaron identifies himself as the manager of “the team that writes the rules for Facebook”, determining “what is acceptable and what is not.” Thus, he and his team effectively decide what content the platform’s 2.9 billion active users see and what they don’t see.

Aaron is being interviewed in a bright warehouse-turned-studio. He is wearing a purple sweater and blue jeans. He comes across as a very likable, smiley person. It is not an easy job, of course, but someone has to make those calls. “Transparency is incredibly important in the work that I do,” he says.

Aaron is CIA. Or at least he was until July 2019, when he left his job as a senior analytic manager at the agency to become senior product policy manager for misinformation at Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In his 15-year career, Aaron Berman rose to become a highly influential part of the CIA. For years, he prepared and edited the president of the United States’ daily brief, “wr[iting] and overs[eeing] intelligence analysis to enable the President and senior U.S. officials to make decisions on the most critical national security issues,” especially on “the impact of influence operations on social movements, security, and democracy,” his LinkedIn profile reads. None of this is mentioned in the Facebook video.

Berman’s case is far from unique, however. Studying Meta’s reports, as well as employment websites and databases, MintPress has found that Facebook has recruited dozens of individuals from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as many more from other agencies like the FBI and Department of Defense (DoD). These hires are primarily in highly politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security and content moderation, to the point where some might feel it becomes difficult to see where the U.S. national security state ends and Facebook begins.

In previous investigations, this author has detailed how TikTok is flooded with NATO officials, how former FBI agents abound at Twitter, and how Reddit is led by a former war planner for the NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council. But the sheer scale of infiltration of Facebook blows these away. Facebook, in short, is utterly swarming with spooks.

TRUST ME, BRO

In a political sense, trust, safety and misinformation are the most sensitive parts of Meta’s operation. It is here where decisions about what content is allowed, what will be promoted and who or what will be suppressed are made. These decisions affect what news and information billions of people across the world see every day. Therefore, those in charge of the algorithms hold far more power and influence over the public sphere than even editors at the largest news outlets.

There are a number of other ex-CIA agents working in these fields. Deborah Berman, for example, spent 10 years as a data and intelligence analyst at the CIA before recently being brought on as a trust and safety project manager for Meta. Little is known about what she did at the agency, but her pre-agency publications indicate she was a specialist on Syria.

Between 2006 and 2010, Bryan Weisbard was a CIA intelligence officer, his job entailing, in his own words, leading “global teams to conduct counter-terrorism and digital cyber investigations,” and “Identif[ying] online social media misinformation propaganda and covert influence campaigns”. Directly after that, he became a diplomat (underlining how close the line is between those two professions), and is currently a director of trust and safety, security and data privacy for Meta.

Meanwhile, the LinkedIn profile of Cameron Harris – a CIA analyst until 2019 – notes that he is now a Meta trust and safety project manager.

Harris Embed

Individuals from other state institutions abound as well. Emily Vacher was an FBI employee between 2001 and 2011, rising to the rank of supervisory special agent. From there she was headhunted by Facebook/Meta, and is now a director of trust and safety. Between 2010 and 2020, Mike Bradow worked for USAID, eventually becoming deputy director of policy for the organization. USAID is a U.S. government-funded influence organization which has bankrolled or stage managed multiple regime change operations abroad, including in Venezuela in 2002, Cuba in 2021, and ongoing attempts in Nicaragua. Since 2020, Meta has employed Bradow as a misinformation policy manager. 

Others have similar pasts. Neil Potts, a former intelligence officer with the U.S. Marine Corps, is vice president of trust and safety at Facebook. In 2020, Sherif Kamal left his job as a program manager at the Pentagon to take up the post of Meta trust and safety program manager.

Joey Chan currently holds the same trust and safety post as Kamal. Until last year, Chan was a U.S. Army officer commanding a company of over 100 troops in the Asia Pacific region.

None of this is to say that any of those named are not conscientious, that they are bad people or bad at their job. Vacher, for example, helped design Facebook’s amber alert program, notifying people to missing children in their area. But hiring so many ex-U.S. state officials to run Facebook’s most politically sensitive operations raises troubling questions about the company’s impartiality and its proximity to government power. Meta is so full of national security state agents that at some point, it almost becomes more difficult to find individuals in trust and safety who were not formerly agents of the state.

Despite its efforts to brand itself as a progressive, “woke” organization, the Central Intelligence Agency remains deeply controversial. It has been charged with overthrowing or attempting to overthrow numerous foreign governments (some of them democratically elected), helping prominent Nazis escape punishment after World War Two, funnelling large quantities of drugs and weapons around the world, penetrating domestic media outlets, routinely spreading false information and operating a global network of “black sites” where prisoners are repeatedly tortured. Therefore, critics argue that putting operatives from this organization in control of our news feeds is deeply inappropriate.

One of these critics is Elizabeth Murray, who, in 2010, retired from a 27-year career at the CIA and other U.S. intelligence organizations. “This is insidious,” Murray told MintPress, adding,

I see it as part of the gradual and sinister migration of ambitious young professionals originally trained (with CIA’s virtually unlimited, U.S.-taxpayer funded pot of resources) to surveil and target ‘the bad guys’ during the so-called Global War on Terror of the post-9-11 era.”

MintPress also contacted Facebook/Meta for comment but has not received a response.

ARM’S LENGTH CONTROL

Some may ask what the big fuss is. There is a limited pool of individuals with the necessary skills and experience in these new tech and cybersecurity fields, and many of them come from government institutions. Casinos, after all, regularly hire card sharks to protect themselves. But there is little evidence that this is a poacher-turned-gamekeeper scenario; Facebook is certainly not hiring whistleblowers. The problem is not that these individuals are incompetant. The problem is that having so many former CIA employees running the world’s most important information and news platform is only one small step removed from the agency itself deciding what you see and what we do not see online – and all with essentially no public oversight.

In this sense, this arrangement constitutes the best of both worlds for Washington. They can exert significant influence over global news and information flows but maintain some veneer of plausible deniability. The U.S. government does not need to directly tell Facebook what policies to enact. This is because the people in decision-making positions are inordinately those who rose through the ranks of the national security state beforehand, meaning their outlooks match those of Washington’s. And if Facebook does not play ball, quiet threats about regulation or breaking up the company’s enormous monopoly can also achieve the desired outcomes.

Again, this article is not claiming that any of the named individuals are nefarious actors, or even that they are anything but model employees. This is a structural problem. Put another way, if Facebook were hiring dozens of managers from Russian intelligence agencies like the FSB or GRU, everybody would recognize the inherent dangers. It should be little different when it hires individuals from the CIA, an organization responsible for some of the worst crimes of the modern era.

FROM STATE INTELLIGENCE TO PRIVATE INTELLIGENCE

Facebook has also hired a plethora of ex-national security state officers to run its intelligence and online security operations. Until 2013, Scott Stern was a targeting officer at the CIA, rising to become chief of targeting. In this role, he helped select the targets for U.S. drone strikes across South and West Asia. Today, however, as a senior manager of risk intelligence for Meta, “misinformation” and “malicious actors” are his targets. Hopefully he is more accurate at Facebook than at the CIA, where the government’s own internal assessments show that at least 90% of Afghans killed in drone strikes were innocent civilians.

Other former CIA men at Facebook include Mike Torrey, who left his job as a senior analyst at the agency to become Meta’s technical lead of detection, investigations and disruptions of complex information operations threats, and former CIA contractor Hagan Barnett, who is now head of harmful content operations at the Silicon Valley giant.

BarnettMeta’s intelligence and online security team includes individuals from virtually every government agency imaginable. In 2015, Department of Defense intelligence officer Suzanna Morrow left her post to become director of global security intelligence for Meta. The FBI is represented by threat investigations manager Ellen Nixon and head of cyber espionage investigations Mike Dvilyanski. Facebook’s influence operations policy manager Olga Belogolova had stints at the State Department and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Before Meta, David Agranovich and Nathaniel Gleicher both worked for the National Security Council. Agranovich is director of global threat disruption at Facebook while Gleicher is head of security policy. Hayley Chang, director and associate general counsel for cybersecurity and investigations, worked formerly for both the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. And Meta’s global head of interaction operations, David Hansell, was once an Air Force and Defense Intelligence Agency man.

One of Meta’s most outwardly-facing employees is its global threat intelligence lead for influence operations, Ben Nimmo, a character MintPress has covered before. Between 2011 and 2014, he served as NATO’s press officer, moving the next year to the Institute for Statecraft, a U.K. government-funded propaganda operation aimed at spreading misleading information about enemies of the British state. He was also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, NATO’s semi-official think tank.

Perhaps then, it is not surprising that Facebook never seems to find U.S. government influence operations online – they are part of one!

CYBER WAR, CYBER WARRIORS

While Meta has not unmasked any nefarious U.S. government action, it regularly uncovers what it claims are foreign disinformation campaigns. According to a recent Facebook report, the top five locations of coordinated inauthentic behavior between 2017 and 2020 on its platform are Russia, Iran, Myanmar, the United States and Ukraine. However, it was at pains to note that American operations were driven by fringe far-right elements, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, and not the government.

This is despite the fact that it is now well-established that the Pentagon fields a clandestine army of at least 60,000 people whose job is to influence public opinion, the majority of them doing so from their keyboards. A Newsweek exposé from last year called it “The largest undercover force the world has ever known,” adding,

The explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas, the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same.”

Newsweek warned that this army was likely breaking both U.S. and international law by doing so, explaining that,

These are the cutting-edge cyber fighters and intelligence collectors who assume false personas online, employing ‘nonattribution’ and ‘misattribution’ techniques to hide the who and the where of their online presence while they search for high-value targets and collect what is called ‘publicly accessible information’—or even engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media.”

As far back as 2011, The Guardian was reporting on this enormous cyber force, whose job it was to “secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.” Yet the ex-military and ex-CIA officials Facebook employs do not seem to have found any trace of their former colleagues’ at work on the platform.

DIGITALLY SWINGING ELECTIONS

Since its beginnings in 2004, Facebook has grown to become a massive global empire and by far the most important news distributor the planet has ever known. The company boasts almost 3 billion active users, meaning that nearly 2 in 5 people worldwide use the platform. A recent 12-country study suggested that around 30% of the entire world gets its news via their Facebook feeds. This gives whoever is in charge of curating those feeds and controlling those algorithms inestimable power. It also represents a serious national security threat for all other countries, especially those that might wish to take a path independent from the United States. That those people are in large part former spooks makes this threat all the more perilous.

This is far from a hypothetical quandary. In November, less than a week before the country’s election, Facebook took the decision to delete hundreds of pages and accounts belonging to individuals and groups that supported the Nicaraguan Sandinista party – a longtime U.S. target for regime change. These included many of the nation’s most influential journalists and media outlets. Considering that around half of the country uses the platform for news and entertainment, the decision could barely have been more intrusive, and was likely designed to try to swing the election towards the pro-U.S. candidate.

Facebook claims that those accounts were bots engaged in “inauthentic behavior.” When those individuals migrated on to Twitter, recording videos identifying who they were to show they were not bots, Twitter immediately deleted those accounts too, in what was dubbed a coordinated attempt at suppression.

The individual behind this attempt was the aforementioned Ben Nimmo, who co-authored an unconvincing report, full of questionable assumptions and allegations. This included an insinuation that accounts following a pattern of activity whereby their Facebook usage levels peaked in the morning and afternoon and dwindled to almost nothing after midnight Nicaragua time suggested they were bots.

Facebook was also used by right-wing Cubans to attempt a U.S.-backed color revolution against the ruling Communist government last year.

Giving any individual or group that much control over the airwaves of communication raises huge questions about national security and sovereignty – doubly so when those individuals are so intimately connected to the U.S. national security state.

When asked what the public’s reaction would be to the news of such an intimate connection between Facebook her former employer, Murray stated that she was unsure whether many would be bothered:

I would like to think that the American public would strenuously object. However the CIA and other agencies have worked over many decades to cultivate a positive – indeed almost glamorous – image in the eyes of the vast majority of the public, mostly through TV series, Hollywood films, and favorable media coverage – so sadly my guess is that the vast majority of the public probably believes that these are the folks who should be in charge.”

However, she said, the news would likely land a very different way in countries that have been the target of Washington’s ire. “As you’re no doubt aware, the CIA has an atrocious public reputation in most parts of the world,” she added.

SPOOKS IN EVERY DEPARTMENT

MintPress has found former representatives of the U.S. national security state in virtually every politically sensitive department at Facebook. This includes even higher levels. Between 2020 and 2021, Kris Rose was a member of Meta’s governance oversight board – the group responsible for the overall direction of the platform. He left his job at the Director of National Intelligence as the president’s daily brief writer to take up the role. Before that, he had spent six years at the CIA as a political and counterterrorism analyst. Meanwhile, Gina Kim Sumilas, Facebook’s director and associate general counsel for the Asia Pacific region, spent nearly twelve years in the CIA before moving into the tech private sector.

There is also considerable overlap with the U.S. government in the company’s front facing staff. Kadia Koroma, for instance, was plucked from her position as an FBI spokesperson in January 2020 to become media relations manager at Facebook. Jeffrey Gelman, policy communications manager for Facebook’s oversight board, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and held influential roles in both the State Department and the National Security Council. And executive communications spokesman Kevin Lewis spent many years in the White House as President Obama’s spokesperson.

Meta’s vice president of legal strategy is Rachel Carlson Lieber, who went straight from the CIA into Facebook. Her first role at the Silicon Valley giant was as head of the North America regulatory and strategic response, a department that continues to feature a number of former state officials. This includes head of strategic programs, Robert Flaim, who spent more than twenty years as an FBI, and Erin Clancy, who left a 16-year career at the State Department to become a manager of strategic response policy.

Clancy’s official work centered around U.S. policy in the Middle East. Her own bio boasts that she worked on the U.S. sanctions regime placed on Iraq and Sudan. She also worked at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus at the time of the Arab Spring and the beginning of the Syrian Civil War. It is known that she also coordinated closely with the White Helmets, a controversial aid organization that some have alleged is far too close to Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Even after her Facebook appointment, Clancy moonlighted as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and as a fellow at the Atlantic Council, the hawkish body that serves as NATO’s brain trust.

Why are these national security state officials so attractive to Meta? One reason, Murray explained, is financial. “By snagging a CIA employee a company can save a considerable sum,” she said, explaining that, “The individual has likely undergone extensive professional training (at taxpayer expense) and probably has a security clearance,” something that is difficult, expensive and time-consuming to obtain in private sector work. Therefore, companies dealing with matters of state secrecy (such as defense contractors) have historically courted both current and former officers to fill their ranks, enticing them with much higher salaries than they can receive in government service.

“What is new (or at least newly known to us!) is that now these professionals are being sought after by social media companies like Facebook, Google and others who are now heavily into monitoring, surveilling, and censoring content, and then sharing data about users with U.S. government entities,” Murray added.

Such is the need for these individuals in these fields that private companies often hire former national security agents to do the recruiting for them. For instance, John Papp, who spent 12 years at the CIA as a senior intelligence officer and 4 years as an imagery analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, went on to work as a recruiter for many of the largest defense contractors in Washington. These included Booz Allen Hamilton, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, IBM and Lockheed Martin. Today, he works as a recruiter for Meta.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Meta also employs former spooks for their internal security operations. The company’s vice president, chief security officer is Nick Lovrien, a former counterterrorism operations officer at the CIA, while its head of insider protection is ex-CIA operational psychologist and “undercover officer” Nicole Alford.

Meanwhile, Meta’s director of global security governance – the individual reportedly responsible for the personal safety of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg – is Jill Leavens Jones. Jones left her job as a U.S. Secret Service special agent to take the appointment. And director of global security operations Alexander Carrillo continued on as a lieutenant commander in the Coast Guard for several months after his appointment at Facebook. The company also hires former feds to work directly with law enforcement on legal issues. One example of this is former FBI special agent Brian Kelley.

A LONG PATTERN OF INFILTRATION

45 years ago, legendary journalist Carl Bernstein released an investigation documenting how the CIA had managed to infiltrate U.S. and global media. The CIA had placed hundreds of agents into newsrooms and had convinced hundreds more reporters to collaborate with them. These included individuals at some of the most influential outlets, including The New York Times. The CIA needed to do this clandestinely because any attempt to do so openly would harm the effectiveness of the operation and provoke stiff public resistance. But by 2015, there was barely a murmur of disapproval when Reuters announced that it was hiring 33-year veteran CIA manager and director Dawn Scalici as a global director, even when the company announced that her primary responsibility was to “advanc[e] Thomson Reuters’ ability to meet the disparate needs of the U.S. government.”

Facebook, however, is vastly more influential than the New York Times or Reuters, reaching billions of people daily. In that sense, it stands to reason that it would be a prime target of any intelligence organization. It has become so big and ubiquitous that many consider it a de facto public commons and believe it should no longer be treated as a private company. Considering who is making many of the decisions on the platform, that distinction between public and private entities is even more blurry than many presume.

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles.

August 22, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Plan to Bomb Japan Before the Pearl Harbor Attack

Tales of the American Empire | August 18, 2022

Official history pretends that the United States was surprised by the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. In reality, American President Franklin Roosevelt was seeking war with Japan to justify entering the war against Germany. He approved many plans to provoke war with Japan. The most aggressive was JB 355 that was secretly funded in August 1941 to send dozens of American bombers to China, painted with Chinese insignia, to bomb strategic targets in Japan. President Roosevelt approved this plan despite objections by General George Marshall and Secretary of War Henry Stimson. They considered it an illegal act of war that required valuable aircraft needed by Britain and American forces in the Philippines.

___________________________

“The secret plan to firebomb Japan before Pearl Harbor”; Logan Nye; We Are the Mighty; September 12, 2019; https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty…

“Roosevelt’s Secret Pre-War Plan to Bomb Japan”; Mark Weber; CODOH; December 1, 1991; https://codoh.com/library/document/ro…

Related Tale: “The Attack on Pearl Harbor Was No Surprise”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1niZi…

August 22, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »