Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

American Military Cities in Germany

Tales of the American Empire | August 5, 2021

Soon after World War II ended, the US military began building massive military bases in Europe and shipped families to Europe to accompany servicemen. These bases grew into American cities that are great fun, but very costly and reduce the readiness of units. Should war occur in Europe, military units there will remain dysfunctional for weeks until their families are safely back in the United States. This assumes children are not killed or maimed by missile or commando attacks since these bases would be the main enemy target during a war. Generals know this, but European tours are too much fun and those who profit from this racket have political clout to derail efforts at reform.

______________________________________

“Cut Army Fat in Europe”; Carlton Meyer; G2mil; 2013; https://www.g2mil.com/wiesbaden.htm

“Closing Spangdahelm”; Carlton Meyer; G2mil; 2012; https://www.g2mil.com/spangdahlem.htm

DODEA Europe website; details on the massive American school complex in Europe. https://www.dodea.edu/Europe/index.cfm

US Army Corps of Engineers Europe website; details on construction projects in Europe; https://www.youtube.com/user/usaceEur…

“Germany spent far less than other major allies on cost-sharing for US bases last year”; John Vandiver; Stars and Stripes; March 12, 2021; https://www.stripes.com/news/europe/g…

“Milley is right – the U.S. should reevaluate its military commitments”; Dan DePetris; Defense News; December 10, 2020; https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/2…

“US Army building up force in Europe with two new units”; Jen Judson; Defense News; April 13, 2021; https://www.defensenews.com/land/2021…

August 7, 2021 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

San Francisco Sheriffs Will Quit or Retire if Forced to Be Vaccinated, Police Union Says

By Alexandra Kashirina – Sputnik – 07.08.2021

Almost half of the US population is fully inoculated against COVID-19, but vaccination rates have slowed due to widespread scepticism. However, the US federal government has left it up to state and local institutions, companies and other establishments to decide whether or not to make the shots compulsory.

The San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs’ Association (SFSO) has warned that the city’s vaccination mandate may force law enforcement agents to retire amid an insufficient number of deputy sheriffs and other first responders, according to an official statement posted on Facebook on Friday.

“The problem we are faced with now is the strict San Francisco Mandate, which is: vaccinate or be terminated. If deputy sheriffs are forced to vaccinate, a percentage of them will retire early or seek employment elsewhere,” the organisation says.

The union stressed that a significant number of employees, 160 out 700, have already been vaccinated, while the rest of the deputy sheriffs “prefer to mask and test weekly instead of being vaccinated due to religious and other beliefs”.

“Currently, the staffing at the SFSO is at the lowest it has ever been due to the past 9-month applicant testing restriction placed on the Sheriff’s Office by the Mayor,” the post continues. “San Francisco cannot afford to lose any more deputy sheriffs or any first responders. If they retire early or quit this will affect public safety even more.”

SFSO asked city authorities to allow the personnel to comply with California’s rules, that provide the option of getting weekly tests as an alternative to inoculation. Last month San Francisco authorities imposed mandatory inoculation for all of the city’s public employees: around 35,000 people.

Amid the latest surge of COVID-19 delta variant in many countries, the US President Joe Biden, speaking last week on further measures against the coronavirus pandemic, didn’t rule out the possibility of compulsory vaccination nationwide, stressing that local authorities and employers have already the authority to require vaccination certificates.

Many institutions, including public bodies and some of the biggest companies such as Facebook, Google and Netflix, have introduced compulsory vaccination. The US military is also expected to implement mandatory inoculation, according to recent reports.

To date, nearly 194 million people (58 percent of the population) in the US have been vaccinated; almost 166 million have received two vaccine doses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

August 7, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

The Panic Pandemic: How Media Fearmongering Led to ‘Unprecedented’ Censorship of Scientific Research

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | The Defender | August 5, 2021

Now that we’re more than a year into the pandemic, it’s crystal clear that the panic that ensued was unnecessary and the draconian measures put into place for public health were unwarranted and harmful.

John Tierney, a former reporter for The New York Times, looked back over the pandemic, providing a timeline of the media-induced viral panic that led to censorship and suppression of scientific research on an unprecedented scale.

In his article for City Journal, where he is a contributing editor, he explained that the “moral panic that swept the nation’s guiding institutions” during the pandemic was far more catastrophic than the viral pandemic itself.

Media-induced panic set off in March 2020

The panic was started by journalists beginning in March 2020, when the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team released “Report 9” on the impact of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPSs) to reduce deaths and health care demand from COVID-19.

The report’s computer model projected that intensive care units in the U.S. would be overrun, with 30 COVID-19 patients for every available bed, and 2.2 million dead by summer. They concluded that “epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time,” which led to lockdowns, business and school closures and population-wide social distancing. But as Tierney noted:

“What had originally been a limited lockdown — ‘15 days to slow the spread’ — became long-term policy across much of the United States and the world.

“A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness that had been rejected in previous plans for a pandemic. It was a dangerous experiment being conducted without knowing the answer to the most basic question: Just how lethal is this virus?”

John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford, was an early critic of the response, who argued that long-term lockdowns could cause more harm than good. Ioannidis came under intense fire after he and colleagues revealed that the COVID-19 fatality rate for those under the age of 45 is “almost zero,” and between the ages of 45 and 70, it’s somewhere between 0.05% and 0.3%.

In Santa Clara County, in particular, he and colleagues estimated that in late March 2020, the local COVID infection fatality rate was just 0.17%. “But merely by reporting data that didn’t fit the official panic narrative, they became targets,” Tierney explained. “… Mainstream journalists piled on with hit pieces quoting critics and accusing the researchers of endangering lives by questioning lockdowns.”

Journals refused to publish solid, anti-narrative research

The discrediting and censorship of researchers who spoke out against the official narrative — even if they included supportive data — became a common and alarming theme over the last year, one that extended to virtually every aspect of pandemic-related policy, including masks.

The “Danmask-19 Trial,” published Nov. 18, 2020, in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that among mask wearers 1.8% (42 participants) ended up testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, compared to 2.1% (53) among controls. When they removed the people who reported not adhering to the recommendations for use, the results remained the same — 1.8% (40 people), which suggests adherence makes no significant difference.

Initially, numerous research journals refused to publish the results, which called widespread mask mandates into question. Tierney said:

“When Thomas Benfield, one of the researchers in Denmark conducting the first large randomized controlled trial of mask efficacy against COVID, was asked why they were taking so long to publish the much-anticipated findings, he promised them as ‘as soon as a journal is brave enough to accept the paper.’

“After being rejected by The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA, the study finally appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the reason for the editors’ reluctance became clear: the study showed that a mask did not protect the wearer, which contradicted claims by the Centers for Disease Control and other health authorities.”

A similar experience was had by Dr. Stefan Baral, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist with 350 publications, who wanted to publish a critique of lockdowns. It became the “first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere,” he told Tierney.

Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff also wrote a paper against lockdowns and couldn’t get it published, noting that most other scientists he spoke to were also against them but were afraid to speak up.

Kulldorff and colleagues soon banded together to write the Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for “focused protection” of the elderly and those in nursing homes and hospitals, while allowing businesses and schools to remain open. Soon after, they too were attacked:

“They managed to attract attention but not the kind they hoped for. Though tens of thousands of other scientists and doctors went on to sign the declaration, the press caricatured it as a deadly ‘let it rip’ strategy and an ‘ethical nightmare’ from ‘COVID deniers’ and ‘agents of misinformation.’”

Physicians targeted, labeled heretics

Dr. Scott Atlas of Stanford’s Hoover Institution was another common target, as he also suggested that protections should be focused on nursing homes and lockdowns would take more lives than COVID-19. According to Tierney:

“When he joined the White House coronavirus task force, Bill Gates derided him as ‘this Stanford guy with no background’ promoting ‘crackpot theories.’ Nearly 100 members of Stanford’s faculty signed a letter denouncing his ‘falsehoods and misrepresentations of science,’ and an editorial in the Stanford Daily urged the university to sever its ties to Hoover.

“The Stanford faculty senate overwhelmingly voted to condemn Atlas’s actions as ‘anathema to our community, our values and our belief that we should use knowledge for good.’”

Similarly, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, which regulates the practice of medicine in Ontario, issued a statement in May prohibiting physicians from making comments or providing advice that goes against the official narrative.

Actor Clifton Duncan shared the Orwellian message on Twitter, urging his followers to “Read this. Now. And then share it as much as you can.”

Because, equally as disturbing as the notion of publicly dictating to physicians what they’re allowed to say, is the fact that, as Duncan said, the statement has a glaring omission, “The health and well-being of the patient.”

Florida’s mortality rate from COVID lower than average

Certain states have stood out for their refusal to buy into the draconian public health measures that were adopted throughout much of the U.S. Florida is chief among them. After a spring 2020 lockdown, Florida business, schools and restaurants reopened, while mask mandates were rejected.

“If Florida had simply done no worse than the rest of the country during the pandemic, that would have been enough to discredit the lockdown strategy,” Tierney said, noting that the state acted as the control group in a natural experiment. The results speak for themselves:

“Florida’s mortality rate from COVID is lower than the national average among those over 65 and also among younger people, so that the state’s age-adjusted COVID mortality rate is lower than that of all but ten other states. And by the most important measure, the overall rate of ‘excess mortality’ (the number of deaths above normal), Florida has also done better than the national average.

“Its rate of excess mortality is significantly lower than that of the most restrictive state, California, particularly among younger adults, many of whom died not from COVID but from causes related to the lockdowns: cancer screenings and treatments were delayed, and there were sharp increases in deaths from drug overdoses and from heart attacks not treated promptly.”

The crisis crisis

It defies reason how so many government, academic and policy leaders could support rampant censorship and suppress scientific debate for so long, all while propagating panic. One of Tierney’s explanations is what he calls “the crisis crisis,” or the “incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians”:

“It’s a longstanding problem — humanity was supposedly doomed in the last century by the ‘population crisis’ and the ‘energy crisis’ — that has dramatically worsened with the cable and digital competition for ratings, clicks and retweets.

“To keep audiences frightened around the clock, journalists seek out Cassandras with their own incentives for fearmongering: politicians, bureaucrats, activists, academics and assorted experts who gain publicity, prestige, funding and power during a crisis.

“Unlike many proclaimed crises, an epidemic is a genuine threat, but the crisis industry can’t resist exaggerating the danger, and doomsaying is rarely penalized. Journalists kept highlighting the most alarming warnings, presented without context. They needed to keep their audience scared, and they succeeded.”

The politicization of research is another major issue that contributes to groupthink and the suppression of scientific debate in order to support one agenda. Meanwhile, while the media advertised that we’re all in this pandemic together, some were clearly more affected than others — namely the poor and less educated, who lost jobs while professionals were mostly able to keep working from the “safety” of their homes.

Children from disadvantaged families also suffered the most from year-long school closures. “The brunt was borne by the most vulnerable in America and the poorest countries of the world,” Tierney wrote, while many of the elite got richer. The reality is, lockdowns have caused a great deal of harm, from delays in medical treatment and disrupted education to joblessness and drug overdoses, and for little, if any, benefit.

Data compiled by Pandemics ~ Data & Analytics (PANDA) also found no relationship between lockdowns and COVID-19 deaths per million people. The disease followed a trajectory of linear decline regardless of whether or not lockdowns were imposed. Yet, this is the type of information that has been censored from the beginning. As Tierney put it:

“This experience should be a lesson in what not to do, and whom not to trust. Do not assume that the media’s version of a crisis resembles reality. Do not count on mainstream journalists and their favorite doomsayers to put risks in perspective. Do not expect those who follow ‘the science’ to know what they’re talking about.”

August 7, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

DHS hypes ‘increasing’ threat from ‘conspiracy theorists & extremists’ seeking Trump return… but unaware of ‘specific plots’

RT | August 7, 2021

The US Department of Homeland Security has again alleged growing threats of violence from online conspiracy theorists who expect ex-president Trump to return to power, even as it said it had no details on “planned actions.”

The agency warned of “an increasing but modest level of activity” by those advocating violence online, saying they may resort to more drastic measures if Donald Trump does not regain the presidency sometime this month, as they purportedly believe will happen.

“Some conspiracy theories associated with reinstating former president Trump have included calls for violence if desired outcomes are not realized,” the DHS said on Friday in an internal intelligence bulletin obtained by ABC News.

“Over the last few days… there’s been much more public visibility, meaning the discussions and these theories have migrated away from being contained within the conspiracy and extremist online communities.”

However, despite the alarming tone of the document, the DHS went on to say that “we lack information on specific plots or planned actions,” instead citing generic “reporting” which suggests “these activities may occur during August 2021.”

Still, the agency said it does not have the “luxury” to wait around for evidence and must take a more proactive approach, adding that “lone offenders and small groups of individuals could mobilize to violence with little-to-no warning.” It did not elaborate on how it planned to prevent such unspecific threats.

Friday’s bulletin is far from Homeland’s first on the subject, as it has issued a flurry of similar warnings about so-called “domestic extremists” since the riot at the US Capitol on January 6. The agency churned out two separate documents on the growing extremism threat in June, one also pointing to ‘QAnon’ conspiracy theories about Trump’s imminent return to office. Nonetheless, that bulletin also acknowledged that DHS had “no evidence” of any particular plans for violence at the time, but merely noted that some extremists have been influenced by conspiracy theories in the past.

The FBI has also joined the growing crusade against homegrown extremism, putting out its own series of breathless warnings about QAnon, Trump supporters and conspiracy theories since the unrest at the Capitol. One joint report with the DHS in June predicted that many believers in such theories would soon “disengage from the movement,” though that apparently did not come to pass given the steady stream of warnings since.

Last month, the bureau even went as far as to urge friends and family members of suspected violent extremists to report their loved ones to the feds. The request drew heated criticism online, with some blasting the FBI as the ‘American Stasi.’

August 7, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

A Tonkin Gulf Incident in the Gulf of Oman?

BY PAT BUCHANAN • UNZ REVIEW • AUGUST 6, 2021

A week ago, the MT Mercer Street, a Japanese-owned tanker managed by a U.K.-based company owned by Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer, sailing in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Oman, was struck by drones.

A British security guard and Romanian crew member were killed.

Britain and the U.S. immediately blamed Iran, and the Israelis began to beat the war drums.

Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said action against Iran should be taken “right now.”

Tuesday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warned Israel could “act alone.” “They can’t sit calmly in Tehran while igniting the entire Middle East — that’s over,” said Bennett. “We are working to enlist the whole world, but when the time comes, we know how to act alone.”

Wednesday, Gantz ratcheted it up, “Now is the time for deeds — words are not enough. … It is time for diplomatic, economic and even military deeds. Otherwise the attacks will continue.”

Thursday, Gantz went further: “Israel is ready to attack Iran, yes. … We are at a point where we need to take military action against Iran. The world needs to take action against Iran now.”

And what do the Americans say?

“We are confident that Iran conducted this attack,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “We are working with our partners to consider our next steps and consulting with governments inside the region and beyond on an appropriate response, which will be forthcoming.”

Iran, however, has repeatedly denied that it ordered the attack.

What makes the attack puzzling is its timing, as it occurred just days before the inauguration of the newly elected president of Iran, the ultraconservative hardliner Ebrahim Raisi.

Query: Would Raisi have ordered a provocative attack on an Israeli-owned vessel, just days before taking office, when his highest priority is a lifting of the “maximum pressure” sanctions imposed on his country by former President Donald Trump? Why?

Would Raisi put at risk his principal diplomatic goal, just to get even with Israel for some earlier pinprick strike in the tit-for-tat war in which Iran and Israel have been engaged for years? Again, why?

If not Raisi, would the outgoing president, the moderate Hassan Rouhani, have ordered such an attack on his last hours in office and risk igniting a war with Israel and the U.S. that his country could not win?

Could the attack have been the work of rogue elements in the Iranian Republican Guard Corps? Gantz and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid claim that Saeed Ara Jani, head of the drones section of the IRGC, “is the man personally responsible for the terror attacks in the Gulf of Oman.”

Or was this simply a reflexive Iranian reprisal for Israeli attacks?

For years, Israel and Iran have been in a shadow war, with Iran backing Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and the Shia militia in Syria and Iraq.

Israel has both initiated and responded to attacks with strikes on Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, and by sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program and assassinating its nuclear scientists.

But whoever was behind the attack in the Gulf of Oman, and whatever the political motive, the U.S. was not the target, and the U.S. should not respond militarily to a drone strike that was not aimed at us.

No one has deputized us to police the Middle East, and we have not prospered these last two decades by having deputized ourselves.

With America leaving Afghanistan and U.S. troops in Iraq transiting out of any “combat” role, now is not the time to get us ensnared in a new war with Iran.

Lest we forget. It was in an August, 57 years ago, that the Tonkin Gulf incident occurred, which led America to plunge into an eight-year war in Vietnam.

President Joe Biden’s diplomatic goal with Iran, since taking office, has been the resurrection of the 2015 nuclear deal from which former President Donald Trump walked away. In return for Iran’s reacceptance of strict conditions on its nuclear program, the U.S. has offered a lifting of Trump’s sanctions.

Whoever launched the drone strike sought to ensure that no new U.S.-Iran deal is consummated, that U.S. sanctions remain in place, and that a U.S. war with Iran remain a possibility.

But, again, why would Tehran carry out such a drone attack and kill crewmen on an Israeli-owned vessel — then loudly deny it?

Since he took office, Biden has revealed his intent to extricate the U.S. from the “forever wars” of the Middle East and to pivot to the Far East and China. By this month’s end, all U.S. forces are to be out of Afghanistan, and the 2,500 U.S. troops still in Iraq are to be repurposed, no longer to be designated as combat troops.

Those behind this attack on the Israeli-owned vessel do not want to reduce the possibility of war between the United States and Iran.

They want to make it a reality. We ought not accommodate them.

August 6, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

What Viruses are Being Studied by US Military Bio-Laboratories in Kazakhstan?

By Vladimir Platov – New Eastern Outlook – 06.08.2021

There’s been a lot of complaints lately about America’s continued activity in the field of biological weapons development, as there’s a growing list of reasons for those complaints to appear. One of the primary ones is the ongoing activity of more than 400 military biological laboratories created by the United States in 25 countries, including former Soviet republics – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

Although US politicial figures try to convince the rest of the world that those are merely “research centers” where American specialists help local scientists develop ways to combat dangerous diseases, Washington carefully supresses any information about what is actually taking place inside those military facilities. Elected officials of the above-mentioned have no real idea what goes on inside behind closed doors. The US centers deployed across those countries and the research facility at Fort Detrick military base, where Pentagon lab-coats have been working on weaponizng biology for decades are one and the same.

Suspicions about the involvement of foreign US bio-laboratories in the emergence of very strange diseases in the countries where such secret facilities exist are growing.

Thus, on July 30, Channel One Eurasia, a local Kazakh television station, reported an unexpected mass death of livestock from an unknown disease in two regions of Kazakhstan. In particular, livestock deaths were registered in the North-Kazakhstan region. Veterinarians speculate that this disease is blackleg, or emphysematous carbuncle, which has not been seen in this land for a very long time. The infection primarily affects young, immature animals that cannot yet be vaccinated due to their age. Mass mortality of livestock also occurs in the neighboring Akmola Region: in the villages of Azat and Karabulak, more than 500 heads of livestock fell ill.

Experts note that in recent years, epidemics of either unknown diseases or old, almost forgotten diseases considered to have been eradicated have periodically broken out in various regions of Kazakhstan. As a result, cattle are dying en masse. The public associates this with the American military biolab, located in Alma-Ata and whose activities remain out of the scope of formal ovesight not only of Kazakhstan, but international scientific circles as well.

Recall that in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia and China have highlighted the need to check similar facilities worldwide. However, the US ignored it. In mid-July, the Socialist Movement of Kazakhstan, the Unified Communist Party of Georgia, the Socialist Party of Latvia, and the Communist Party of Pakistan launched a joint initiative to sign a petition against the production and distribution of biological weapons and for the closure of US military biological laboratories.

This initiative was motivated to a large extent by  the fact that over a dozen similar facilities operate in post-Soviet countries. The Central Reference Laboratory Inc was built several years ago in Alma-Ata with American money and is used by the Pentagon. Earlier, some Kazakhstani media tried to draw attention this topic. Last year, at a time of a raging coronavirus pandemic, high mortality, and strict quarantine in Kazakhstan, a popular local newspaper reminded readers that, according to Washington’s official statement, one of the purposes of the very American Central Reference Laboratory located in Alma-Ata is to combat the spread of dangerous infections. In this regard, Kazakhstan justifiably wondered: where is this fight?

The fact that the US has never stopped producing biological weapons, contrary to all international conventions, is no secret. And this is confirmed: there is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA in the Pentagon, which is engaged in developing and implementing the most advanced technologies in the military sphere. And it has a biotechnology department that does just that. The US Defense Department admits that their technology is dual-use. However, under US law, certain types of experiments are prohibited in the United States due to the threat they pose to the local population. This means that they are held abroad, including in the former Soviet Union area.

In October 2018, the American Journal of Science released an article titled “Agricultural Research or a New Biological Weapons System?” In this article, German and French microbiologists, concerned about the growing number of such laboratories near the borders of Russia and China, expressed the view that the US was preparing for a bacteriological war, thousands of kilometers away from their own borders. This article talked about a Pentagon program called Insect Allies, which involves major biological experiments and experiments whose results could be used for military purposes.

One of the first to speak out against foreign laboratories in Kazakhstan was Amirbek Togusov, former Kazakh Deputy Defense Minister who handed over to Russia materials about the US military’s experiments with deadly viruses in the summer of 2020.

“We are like test monkeys here, and our territory is the Pentagon’s natural proving ground for testing new viruses… The laboratories are taken out of national control and work in secrecy,” General Amirbek Togusov said at the time. Shortly after that, General Togusov “died suddenly and unexpectedly.”

But this topic was picked up by many representatives of the Kazakhstani public, who stated, in particular, that the source of the COVID-19 epidemic in the republic was the same American biolab in Alma-Ata. These statements received wide public response, although the Kazakh authorities did their best to prevent their replication and even opened more than 100 criminal cases against the initiators of such comments.

The position of the Kazak authorities on the “laboratory issue” has been constantly changing over the past year. It was even stated that there were no “foreign researchers” working there. However, the fact that US military personnel is employed  at the Center for Highly Hazardous Infections has been openly acknowledged even by the administration of the research center itself, which announced in April 2021 that it continues to work with CH2M Hill Constructors, Inc, a firm representing the US Department of Defense, a part of the Jacobs Engineering military corporation. CH2M worked in Kazakhstan under a contract with the Defense Threat Prevention Agency (DTRA) to manage and support facilities established under the Pentagon’s Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP). DTRA invested 400 million dollars to establish biological laboratories in Kazakhstan. The extent of the Pentagon’s involvement in CH2M’s operations is revealed by the fact a US Army Corps of Engineers officer, Eric Graham, who took part in the construction of the American military biolab in Georgia, listed as a head of one of its branches.

According to publicly available US sources, DTRA has been conducting reserach in Kazakhstan since at least 2005. There are now six biological facilities there, created with Pentagon money as part of the CBEP project, which CH2M and Jacobs are responsible for managing. Many Kazakhstanis suspect that several epidemics in the country were triggered by researchers at these closed facilities. However, nobody so far has managed to provide a confirmation of those fears, and Washington is doing its best to keep activities a secret.

In May 2020, Sergei Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation criticized the US for refusing to be transparent about bio laboratories. He pointed out that the American refusal to support creating a verification mechanism in the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons makes one wonder about Washington’s actual goals.

August 6, 2021 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Pro-Israel group secures ‘stunning’ victory in US primary election

MEMO | August 5, 2021

US Shontel Brown on 1 August 2021 [Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images]The Democratic primary election in the US state of Ohio on Tuesday saw pro-Israel Shontel Brown defeat progressive Nina Turner in a hotly contested race that has left a bitter after taste. It’s alleged that votes were tipped in favour of Shontel with outside money poured in by the pro-Israel Political Action Committee (PAC) Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI).

According to research group tracking money in US politics, OpenSecrets, DMFI, one of many pro-Israel Super PAC, raised nearly $6.5 million in funds to back their preferred candidate.

It’s claimed that DMFI, which has multiple ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), spent more than $1.9 million on TV ads, digital ads, and mailers that were either pro-Brown or anti-Turner. American news agency, Brick House publication reported that this sum is more than the $1.7 million than the Brown campaign had disclosed spending on the race as of its final spending filing, which covers through July.

In her concession speech, Turner blamed what she called “evil money”, which is thought to be a reference to the outside spending in the race from DMFI and other groups that secured her defeat in a close primary.

Ohio’s 11th congressional district is a safe Democrat seat which means that Brown, favoured by pro-Israel right-wing members of her party, is the likely candidate to become  a member of Congress for Ohio. The election was triggered by the resignation of Marcia Fudge, who has been appointed to the position of housing secretary by President Joe Biden.

Turner is an outspoken progressive who came to national prominence as a Bernie Sanders surrogate. She was predicted to win the race. But her surprise defeat has left a bitter after taste. “I am going to work hard to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen to another progressive candidate again,” she said. “We didn’t lose this race, evil money manipulated and maligned this election.”

Like fellow progressives within the Democrat party, Turner has called for conditioning US aid to Israel to “align with significant advances in human rights,” while Brown has said she supports continuing to give Israel $3.8 billion annually in military aid without any strings under a $38 billion aid package approved by former US President Barack Obama in 2016.

Brown thanked her “Jewish brothers and sisters” during her victory remarks, according to a report in the Haaretz. She described how her 2018 trip to Israel gave her insight into the importance of the US-Israel relationship.

Following Brown’s victory, DMFI congratulated the councilwomen saying that it was a “stunning upset” and that the pro-Israel group was “proud to have supported her successful campaign.”

August 5, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

Washington’s Terrorist Friends: Prominent Americans Continue to Support a Murderous Cult

By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 5, 2021

One might ask if Washington’s obsession with terrorism includes supporting radical armed groups as long as they are politically useful in attacking countries that the US regards as enemies? It is widely known that the American CIA worked with Saudi Arabia to create al-Qaeda to attack the Russians in Afghanistan and the same my-enemy’s-enemy thinking appears to drive the current relationships with radical groups in Syria.

Given the fact that Iran continues to be the Biden Administration’s enemy du jour, it is perhaps not surprising to observe that the US also supports terror groups that are capable of attacking targets in the Islamic Republic. To that end, recently a number of former senior government officials and politicians were involved in cultivating their relationships with the Iranian terrorist group Mojahedin e Khalq (MEK), which held its most recent annual international summit in Paris for three days starting on July 10th. The event was online due to French COVID prevention guidelines and the featured speaker was Michele Flournoy, former US undersecretary of defense for policy under President Barack Obama. Flournoy was once considered a front runner to be President Joe Biden’s defense secretary and she currently heads a consulting firm WestExec Advisors that she co-founded with current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken which has had considerable influence over staffing and other issues in the White House. In her talk, she accused Iran of posing a danger to the security of the Middle East, the United States, and to its own people, elaborating how “Since 1979, every US administration has had to deal with the threat posed by Iran’s revolutionary regime and the Biden administration is no different. Iran is one of the most urgent foreign policy issues on the president’s desk.” She called for an “internal regime change” in the Islamic Republic.

A bipartisan group of US lawmakers also spoke before the online gathering. Speakers included House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Senator Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as well as Democratic Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. Also participating were Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida and both Texas Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. Former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Donna Brazile also spoke as did former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said that the MEK should be “blessed and protected.”

The summit self-described as “the largest-ever online international event dedicated to liberating Iran” with the objective of “inciting uprisings against the government in the Islamic Republic.” Though it would be charitable to suggest that the congressmen and former officials were largely involved to pick up the generous fees paid to speakers, it must also be noted that knowledge of MEK and its history is readily available on the internet and elsewhere. Flournoy in particular should have known better but even she, after the fact, claimed implausibly that she did not know that she was speaking to a former terrorist group that had killed Americans.

It should also be observed that the participating Congressmen all have extremely close ties to Israel and its domestic lobby, which have been assiduous in their efforts to vilify Iran as America’s designated enemy. To be sure, no one at the summit even mentioned Israel’s use of MEK operatives to carry out assassinations of scientists and sabotage operations inside Iran.

MEK is a curious hybrid creature in any event in that it pretends to be an alternative government option for Iran even though it is despised by nearly all Iranians. It is considered to be both irrelevant and ineffective but Iran hatred is so prevalent that it is greatly loved by the Washington Establishment which would like to see the Mullahs deposed and replaced by something more amenable to US and Israeli worldviews.

MEK is run like a cult by its leader Maryam Rajavi, with a number of rules that restrict and control the behavior of its members. One commentary likens membership in MEK to a modern-day equivalent of slavery. A study prepared by the Rand corporation for the U.S. government conducted interviews of MEK members and concluded that there were present “many of the typical characteristics of a cult, such as authoritarian control, confiscation of assets, sexual control (including mandatory divorce and celibacy), emotional isolation, forced labor, sleep deprivation, physical abuse and limited exit options.”

The group currently operates out of a secretive, heavily guarded 84 acre compound in Albania that is covertly supported by the United States intelligence community, as well as through a “political wing” front office in Paris, where it refers to itself as the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). MEK is financially supported by Saudi Arabia, which enables it to stage events in the United States and in Europe where it generously pays politicians to make fifteen-minute speeches praising the organization and everything it does. It’s bribing of inside the Beltway power brokers and its support by Israel proved so successful that it was removed from the State Department terrorist list in 2012 by Hillary Clinton even though it had killed Americans in the 1970s.

As indicated above, MEK made the transition from terrorist group to “champions of Iranian democracy” by virtue of intensive lobbying of Iran haters. A Guardian article also describes how “A stupendously long list of American politicians from both parties were paid hefty fees to speak at events in favor of the MEK, including Rudy Giuliani, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, Newt Gingrich, Elaine Chao and former Democratic party chairs Edward Rendell and Howard Dean – along with multiple former heads of the FBI and CIA. John Bolton, who has made multiple appearances at events supporting the MEK, is estimated to have received upwards of $180,000. According to financial disclosure forms, Bolton was paid $40,000 for a single appearance at the Free Iran rally in Paris in 2017.”

It apparently has never occurred to the congressmen and senior officials that the MEK group had a whole lot of history before it appeared on the scene in Washington and began buying American politicians. MEK, which consisted of a group of dissident students having Marxism inspired anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist roots, had a bloody falling out with the Iranian revolution leaders in 1979, forcing it to resettle at Camp Ashraf, near Baghdad. It was protected by Saddam Hussein and used to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran. It was also fiercely anti-American beginning back in the 1970s when it was still in Iran, to include attacks on US businesses and denunciations of the United States presence in Iran under the Shah. In 1979 it supported executing the US Embassy hostages rather than negotiating their release. One of its songs went “Death to America by blood and bonfire on the lips of every Muslim is the cry of the Iranian people. May America be annihilated.”

Within the US government, MEK was notorious for its assassination of at least six US Air Force officers and civilian defense contractors. One particularly audacious ambush in which two air force officers were murdered by MEK while being driven in from the airport was reenacted for each incoming class at the Central Intelligence Agency training center in the late 1970s to illustrate just how a perfectly executed terrorist attack on a moving vehicle might take place.

Given how currently nearly every news cycle includes stories about fake news on social media, it is surprising that MEK is never mentioned. Its current Albanian operational center uses banks of computers manned by followers, some of whom are fluent in English, who serve as bots unleashing scores of comments supporting regime change in Iran while also directing waves of criticism against any pro-Iranian pieces that appear elsewhere on social media, to include Facebook and Twitter. By one account, more than a thousand MEK supporters manage thousands of accounts on social media simultaneously. The objective of all the chatter is to convince the mostly English-speaking audience that there is a large body of Iranians who are hostile to the regime and supportive of MEK as a replacement.

It is an indisputable fact that over the past ten years, members of both major parties in Congress have either traveled to the group’s compound in Albania or spoken via video messages or live appearances in exchange for hefty speaking fees. The support provided by prominent officeholders and policymakers to include effusive praise of a terrorist group that is viscerally anti-American and has killed US officials is a disgrace. It is also a symptom of deeper problems in terms of how our foreign policy has been developed through the ascendancy of special interests. That America’s Iran policy should lead to praise of a radicalized extremist cult that is funded by authoritarian Saudi Arabia and politically supported by apartheid Israel ignores US actual interests at our peril.

August 5, 2021 Posted by | War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Pentagon documents reveal DOD bullies forcing movie and TV producers to accept their ‘assistance’

By Tom Secker | RT | August 5, 2021

For the first time, the US military’s central office for dealing with Hollywood has re-leased internal reports on its operations, revealing how the Department of Defense strong-armed the industry to achieve its propaganda goals.

The reports were obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request and offer a rare glimpse inside the DOD’s main entertainment liaison offices at the Pentagon, which oversees the individual branch offices in Los Angeles run by the Army, Navy, Air Force and others. The reports cover approximately two years of activities and illustrate just how aggressive the DOD can be when dealing with film and TV producers, as well as their involvement with some of the biggest-name filmmakers in Hollywood.

The sheer range of products mentioned in the documents as having gained assistance from the US military is staggering, from Navy-assisted episodes of Cake Boss and the Great Food Truck Race to the Disney sci-fi fantasy A Wrinkle in Time. Numerous other films are listed, including blockbusters like Captain Marvel, Top Gun: Maverick and Transformers: The Last Knight.

On Captain Marvel the DOD and US Air Force provided research trips to military bases, filming access at several military locations, and extensive promotional help including an Air Force recruitment campaign that tied into the film. The documents also reveal how the two co-directors of the movie, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, paid a visit to the Pentagon just before the film’s release.

One document notes, “During their visit they attended office calls and had lunch with Air Force leaders. They also participated in a professional development session” for Air Force and DOD public affairs officers, showing just how integrated the military-Hollywood relationship has become.

The files also confirm the military’s support on the final season of Homeland, though only after the “major problems noted in scripts” were resolved by the showrunner making “significant edits to the problematic areas.” The result was a show that preempted the false story that the Russian government had been funding Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, and played up fears about what will happen when the US finally withdraws from the country.

The Pentagon also worked on smaller films such as The 15:17 to Paris, a Clint Eastwood-directed retelling of how three Americans, including two servicemen, tackled a gunman on a train from Amsterdam to Paris in 2015. One entry in the reports records how they received “a long list of things that the film makers hope to obtain from us” but the DOD only approved support after ensuring that they could “create enough military portrayal to justify use of our assets.”

Beefing up the military’s presence in films, and the role of military characters in the unfolding storylines, is a key aim of the DOD’s Hollywood offices, but they don’t always get what they want. Christopher Nolan approached them about providing Osprey and Chinook aircraft for use in Tenet, and the National Guard and Air Force “indicated interest if military characterizations are rewritten emphasizing military mission.”

A few weeks later, it seems that Nolan simply stopped responding to the military’s phone calls, with one update commenting, “Likely cause is that producer/director were reluctant to make changes needed to gain DOD support.” This echoes what happened on Interstellar, Nolan’s previous sci-fi epic. Reports from the Navy’s Hollywood office record how he approached them about potential support, but the relationship broke down after he refused to share his script with Navy officials, having clearly learned from the extensive rewrites the military demanded on Man of Steel.

At the other end of the Hollywood scale is Tom Hanks, who has worked with different US government agencies throughout his career, from the CIA on Charlie Wilson’s War to Homeland Security on The Terminal, as well as several military-supported productions. Hanks’ name comes up multiple times in the documents, as the DOD provided help to his historical war film Greyhound, as well as his forthcoming post-apocalyptic drama Finch.

The strict criteria that the military apply when deciding whether to support a production results in a high number of rejections, which can have the effect of killing a movie or TV show. Among the rejections detailed in the documents are “documentaries about Vladimir Putin and about the trials at Guantanamo Bay” and a film about the Bermuda Triangle, where the DOD were “Not impressed by the quality of the writing nor the story itself.” Neither the Bermuda Triangle film nor the Gitmo documentary appear to have been made.

Other movies that were turned down include Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse as well as Rob Reiner’s Shock and Awe, in the latter case because “premise is how the WH & DoD (mainly the WH) claimed that Bin Laden and Hussein conspired to create the 9/11 attacks, and fabricated evidence of Saddam collecting materials to fabricate nuclear weapons to use against the U.S. and its allies.”

Likewise, a feature-length documentary about Operation Eagle Claw – the failed attempt by US special forces to rescue some of the hostages held in Iran – was turned down after their request was forwarded to the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, highlighting how high-up policy wonks are sometimes part of the decision-making process. This documentary also appears to have fallen by the wayside, unable to be produced due to the Pentagon’s censorious approach to pop culture.

However, the most egregious censorship revealed by the new documents came on the 2019 CBS drama series The Code, about Marine Corps lawyers prosecuting and defending cases brought under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Code was initially made without any military input, because the producers wanted to explore topics of which the DOD wouldn’t approve.

In the opening episodes the cases handled by the lawyers include a Marine-turned-congressman who is accused of murdering an Iraqi civilian execution-style, and the fallout from a Marine killing a Spanish citizen while drunk driving. Meanwhile, the widow of a murdered Marine decides to sue the Corps and challenge the Ferris Doctrine – a law that prevents people from suing the US military based on events that happened while on active duty.

These are precisely the sort of storylines that the DOD routinely removes from scripts for shows they support, such as NCIS and Hawaii Five-0. The documents record how on an NCIS: New Orleans episode they “Took issue with the latest NCIS NOLA script, in which a team of former U.S. Army rangers are portrayed as ‘killers for hire’.” An update days later reports that, “Filmmakers responded by saying they are working to remove all references to killers having been affiliated with U.S. Army Rangers.”

But this wasn’t possible on The Code, because the producers resisted numerous efforts by the military to get involved and have influence over the scripts. As the reports detail, “The showrunner turned down several offers of assistance by the Marine Corps Entertainment office during production.” An investigation by Task & Purpose found that the Marines kept trying to insert themselves into the production of The Code, but as one official put it, they were “essentially told to f-ck off” by the showrunners.

The documents go on to note that – somehow – Marine Corps leadership got hold of the early episodes of The Code before they’d aired. They were “displeased enough that they communicated what they saw as serious shortcomings in the depiction of the Marines.” The Corps imposed themselves on the production, and as a result, “CBS Television has indicated a desire to correct the problems in future episodes by accepting DoD assistance.”

The upshot of this was that the show took a turn and abandoned the controversial storylines of its earlier episodes, including the lawsuit around the Ferris Doctrine – though the suit is abandoned not due to pressure from the military brass, but so that the widow can embark on a romantic relationship with one of the key witnesses.

A few months later The Code was cancelled, having given up on the only thing that made it stand out in a crowded marketplace of criminal and legal procedurals. In essence, the DOD sabotaged a TV show because they didn’t like its politics.

While the likes of Christopher Nolan are powerful enough to sometimes resist the military’s overtures and manipulations, the DOD’s hostile takeover of Hollywood is gathering pace due to these aggressive, domineering tactics.

Tom Secker is a British-based investigative journalist, author and podcaster. You can follow his work via his Spy Culture site and his podcast ClandesTime.

August 5, 2021 Posted by | Film Review, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Baylor Professor Calls for Prosecution of Criticism of Fauci and Other Scientists as Hate Crime

By Jonathan Turley | August 4, 2021

Physicist Richard P. Feynman once said “Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.” Feynman’s statement captures how science depends upon constant questioning and challenging of assumptions. Yet, what is healthy debate to some is criminal dissent to others. Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine is calling for federal hate-crime protections to be extended to cover criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other scientists. The frequent MSNBC and CNN guest wants Congress to expand hate crimes to “scientists currently targeted by far-right extremism in the United States.”

In a July 28 paper in Plos Biology titled “Mounting Antiscience Aggression in the United States,” Hotez encourages Congress to focus on the “band of ultraconservative members of the US Congress and other public officials with far-right leanings are waging organized and seemingly well-coordinated attacks against prominent US biological scientists.”

Hotez insists that it is not enough to support such science but to criminalize attacks on their research. This suggestion is just one of a number of ideas briefly put forward to support scientists but it is the most chilling. Referring Nazi and fascist movements in history, Hotez argues that good science requires cracking down on the right. He concludes:

“As Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once pointed out, neutrality or silence favors the oppressor. We must take steps to protect our scientists and take swift and positive action to counter the growing wave of far-right antiscience aggression. Not taking action is a tacit endorsement, and a guarantee that the integrity and productivity of science in the United States will be eroded or lose ground.”

The federal hate crime laws focus on basis of a person’s characteristics of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity. We have seen calls for adding professions like police officers, which I also opposed. As with police officers, the inclusion of such professions would have a direct and inimical impact on free speech in our society. Indeed, it would create a slippery slope as other professions demand inclusion from reporters to ministers to physicians. Hate crimes would quickly apply to a wide array of people due to their occupations.

What is most striking about the Hotez article is its lack of analytical balance. He rages against the right without even acknowledging how social media companies have already enforced a massive censorship program that bars even reporting the results of public clinical trials or repeating CDC positions on vaccinations. For a year, Big Tech has been censoring those who wanted to discuss the origins of pandemic and those who suggested the lab theory were attacked as right-wing conspiracy theorists. It was not until Biden admitted that the virus may have originated in the Wuhan lab that social media suddenly changed its position. Facebook only recently announced that people on its platform will be able to discuss the origins of Covid-19 after censoring any such discussion.

Many of us have criticized the hateful rhetoric on both sides of our politics. However, there remain important debates over not just the underlying science relating to Covid-19 but the implications of such science for public policies. Criminalizing aspects of that debate would ratchet up the threats against those with dissenting views, including some scientists. That would harm not just free speech but science in the long run.

August 4, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Why People Don’t Trust the Mainstream Media

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | August 4, 2021

An article in the Washington Post about the January 6 protests at the Capitol goes a long way toward explaining why people do not trust the mainstream media. The article, written by a Post reporter named Mike DeBonis, focuses on allegations that the FBI infiltrated the ranks of the protestors and actually helped to incite them to illegally enter the Capitol and engage in mayhem after doing so.

The overall tone that DeBonis sets forth is one that is oftentimes found in the mainstream media when it comes to alleged wrongdoing by the federal government. The article has a mocking tone to it, suggesting that the people who are making this allegation are conspiracy theorists for actually believing that federal officials would do such a horrible thing. 

There is a critical sentence in DeBonis’s article: “The FBI declined to comment.”

Why is that line important? Because there are two ways that a reporter can go when he is writing a story about this type of allegation. 

On the one hand, he can mock and ridicule those who are making the allegation, pointing out that they haven’t produced any evidence to support their “unfounded claim.” 

On the other hand, he can aggressively go after FBI officials and demand a definitive yes-or-no answer instead of simply settling for a “no comment” by the FBI and also engage in an aggressive investigative effort to determine whether there is evidence to support the allegation.

DeBonis chose the first route. But why? After all, a “no comment” answer by the FBI is about as incriminating as an answer can be, short of an outright admission of wrongdoing. That’s because if the FBI were not guilty of the wrongdoing, it would undoubtedly simply say, “The allegation is false.” The FBI clearly did not do that with its “no comment” answer. It’s “no comment” answer leaves open the possibility — perhaps even the likelihood — that the FBI was involved in wrongdoing, 

DeBonis makes a big issue of out of the fact that the people who are making this allegation have not provided any evidence to support their allegation. But what people have pointed out is a similar course of conduct by the FBI in other cases, which would be enough to cause any reasonable person to assume that it might have engaged in the same course of conduct with respect to the January 6 protests.

For example, consider the case that involves the alleged kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. DeBonis is aware of that case because he links to an article from BuzzFeedNews.com about the case. That article alleges that the FBI played a major role in inducing the defendants in the case to commit the kidnapping. Even if what the FBI allegedly did wasn’t enough to support a defense of entrapment, its alleged actions are nonetheless enough to cause any reasonable citizen, including investigative journalists, concern. 

But that’s not all. As journalist Glenn Greenwald has documented, the FBI has a long history of inciting people to commit acts of domestic terrorism. The idea is to incite people to commit crimes so that the FBI can then be praised and glorified for busting them up. See Greenwald’s July 24 article “FBI Using the Same Fear Tactic From the First War on Terror: Orchestrating its Own Terrorism Plots.” Also, see the July 31 article “Will More Media Bias Save Democracy?” by James Bovard.

Given the history of the FBI engaging in this type of misconduct, you would think that any journalist worth his salt would say, “I need to get to the bottom of this latest assertion. I need to know whether the FBI did the same thing here. Rather than mocking and ridiculing these people by pointing out that they have furnished no evidence to support their allegation, I need to do my job and go after the FBI to see if there is any evidence to support the allegation.”

Rather than do that, DeBonis goes off on the other track by implicitly assuming that the FBI would never do such a thing and implicitly assuming that those who are making the allegation are nothing more than “conspiracy theorists.”

That’s why so many people don’t trust the mainstream media.

This is not a recent phenomenon. 

We can go all the way back to Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s secret program in the 1960s and 1970s whose aim was to acquire CIA assets from within the mainstream press, whose secret job would be to come to the defense of the national-security establishment whenever necessary, including but calling people “conspiracy theorists” whenever they allege wrongdoing on the part of CIA officials.  

According to the Wikipedia entry on “Operation Mockingbird,” 

In a 1977 Rolling Stone magazine article, “The CIA and the Media,” reporter Carl Bernstein expanded upon the Church Committee’s report and said that around 400 press members were considered intelligence assets by the CIA, including New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, columnist and political analyst Stewart Alsop and Time magazine. Berstein documented the way in which overseas branches of major US news agencies had for many years served as the “eyes and ears” of Operation Mockingbird, which functioned to disseminate CIA propaganda through domestic US media.[6]

The best example, of course, of the deference to the authority of the national-security establishment relates to the Kennedy assassination. Today, there are two separate worlds when it comes to that assassination: the world of the mainstream media and the world of Internet. They are two completely different worlds — actually, parallel universes. 

On the Internet, it’s possible to find people analyzing, questioning, and challenging the official lone-nut theory of the case, pointing to the mountain of evidence, for example, that establishes that the national-security establishment conducted a fraudulent autopsy on President Kennedy’s body. (See my books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2 as well as the recorded presentations at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s recent conference “The National Security State and the Kennedy Assassination.”

Not so in the mainstream press. It is considered verboten in the mainstream press for any reporter or commentator to challenge or question any aspect of the official lone-nut theory of the assassination. Woe to the reporter or commentator who does so. He will be looking for a new job post haste — somewhere on the Internet.

In the December 6, 1963, issue of Life magazine, a well-known Life magazine reporter named Paul Mandel wrote an article about the assassination in which he claimed that the famous Zapruder film showed that the president had turned around to face the Texas School Book Depository. The president’s action, Mandel said, explained how it was that the president was shot in the throat.

No one could verify Mandel’s statement because Life magazine had purchased the film from Abraham Zapruder for $150,000, which in today’s dollars amounted to around $1.2 million. Life locked the film away, saying that it wanted to protect the American people from ever having to see such violence.

In 1969, Jim Garrison, the district attorney in New Orleans, brought a criminal prosecution against a man named Clay Shaw in which Garrison alleged that the Kennedy assassination was actually a sophisticated regime-change operation on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment. Garrison subpoenaed the Zapruder film from Life magazine and showed it in court. The film showed that the president had never turned around and faced the school book depository. By this time, of course, the official story revolved around the magic bullet theory, which posited that the president had actually been shot in the rear of the neck (i.e., not through the throat), with the bullet supposedly having come out the front (and then supposedly striking Gov. John Connally in multiple places, with the bullet magically ending up in a pristine condition.) 

In other words, Mandel had lied, either intentionally or because someone at Life magazine had falsely told him that that’s what the film showed. There is no other conclusion that can be reached. There is no way that Mandel’s allegation could be construed to be an innocent mistake, because Life magazine had the film. 

There is another interesting aspect to the saga. According to Wikipedia:

General Charles Douglas (C. D.) Jackson (March 16, 1902 – September 18, 1964) was a United States government propagandist and senior executive of Time Inc. As an expert on psychological warfare he served in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II and later as Special Assistant to the President in the Eisenhower administration…. After Abraham Zapruder took the famous film in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Jackson purchased it on behalf of Time/Life to “protect the integrity of the film.” Upon viewing it on Sunday morning, he ordered it locked in a vault at the Time/Life building in Manhattan.

In 1972 — three years after the Zapruder film was shown in the Shaw trial — Life magazine, which had been one of the most popular weekly magazines in history, cease publication as a weekly. Some people said that it was because of the rising popularity of television. Another possibility is that people no longer trusted Life magazine.

For the past 25 years, the mainstream media has been losing readership  and money. Some people blame it on the rising popularity of the Internet. Another possibility is that people no longer trust the mainstream media.

August 4, 2021 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

No indication of Iran’s involvement in Israeli tanker attack: Russia

Press TV – August 2, 2021

A senior Russian foreign ministry official strictly rejects existence of any indications pointing to Iran’s likely involvement in a recent attack on an Israeli oil tanker off the Omani coast.

“We have not the slightest reason to believe [that Iran was involved in the attack],” the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Second Asian Department Director, Zamir Kabulov told Russia’s Sputnik news agency on Monday.

In a statement on Friday, Zodiac Maritime, the Israeli-owned firm managing the tanker, said that two crewmen, a Briton and a Romanian, had been killed in the assault.

The Israeli regime and its sworn allies, the United States and the UK, rushed to accuse Iran of having a role in the incident, without providing any evidence. The Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also alleged that the attack was deliberate and coordinated by Tehran.

Kabulov, however, reiterated Russia’s stance, saying Moscow’s refusal to corroborate such accusations was because “we have no facts.”

“When there are facts, then we will work out our position,” he added.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry has summoned Britain’s chargé d’affaires and Romania’s ambassador to convey Tehran’s strong protest, reminding the envoys that the source of instability in the Persian Gulf was not the Islamic Republic, but actually extra-regional presence.

Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh has also refuted such accusations as “absolutely groundless,” saying they feature “contradictory,” “hollow,” and “provocative” claims.

The official also sounded a strong warning against any act of adventurism targeting the Islamic Republic’s interests based on the unfounded claims.

August 3, 2021 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »