Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Mainstream media goes full Orwell telling readers they’re using the word ‘Orwellian’ wrong

By Helen Buyniski | RT | January 13, 2021

Complaining about authoritarian government intrusion into one’s life or surreptitious rewriting of history no longer qualify as “Orwellian,” according to an article that ironically embodies the concept in trying to redefine it.

News outlet USA Today has managed to personify the term ‘Orwellian’ in its profoundly condescending writeup scolding readers for “using the term ‘Orwellian’ wrong.” Published on Monday, the piece goes to great lengths to shame those insecure about their vocabulary by suggesting the term “Orwellian” can only be used correctly by liberals.

“Chances are, you’ve seen George Orwell’s name thrown around a lot in the past week on social media, either by conservatives invoking his name with sincerity or by liberals poking fun at conservatives for its misuse,” the article starts, smirkingly laying the groundwork for canceling out all usage of the term by those on the Right.

But the examples it holds up to mock – presidential scion Donald Trump Jr.’s complaint about the disappearance of his father’s Twitter account and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley’s blaming the “woke mob” for the cancellation of his book contract – are not as wide of the mark as the thought police at USA Today would have us believe.

Hawley’s book denouncing the “tyranny of Big Tech,” for example, isn’t just “a publisher drop[ping] your book because your brand has become toxic” – it’s a disturbing example of what are supposed to be separate industries (social media, book publishing) marching in ideological lockstep with the prevailing political ideology.

Nor is the younger Trump’s complaint about Twitter deleting his father’s account ‘just’ an example of “an internet platform enforcing its terms of service.” For better or worse, Trump’s Twitter feed was a historical document, his primary means of addressing the American public throughout his presidency. Suspending it permanently is the equivalent of throwing four years of official proclamations down the memory hole, never to be seen again, as 1984’s protagonist Winston Smith did with inconvenient historical documents as a loyal Party member.

USA Today brings in a scholar who wrote his dissertation on Orwell to connect the iconic “Two Minutes Hate” to the “social media mob mentality” and the QAnon conspiracy theory, perhaps missing the forest (four years of “Orange Man Bad!” ritualistically shouted at the top of one’s digital lungs) for the trees.

The article notes that Orwell fought fascism in Spain, strongly implying today’s conservatives are the ideological descendants of Franco’s fascists – a conclusion it doesn’t try to support with facts, but merely guilt by association. Which dovetails perfectly with the writer’s efforts to narrow the definition of “Orwellian” by the use of “the manipulation of language” to conceal reality.

After all, even this heavy-handed propaganda piece acknowledges that Orwell discovered “the failures of Soviet communism,” finding it one of “two sides of the same totalitarian coin” with fascism and disowning both extremes.

And as much as 21st century liberal revisionists would like to lay claim to the term “Orwellian” just for themselves, the dystopian future-Britain of 1984 was crafted in the image of the Soviet Union, not fascist Spain or Germany. “INGSOC,” the name of the Party’s totalitarian ideology, is short for “English Socialism.” Attempting to dismantle the author’s own intent to sell the ideological flavor-of-the-month is pretty, well, Orwellian.

Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23

January 13, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

10 Facts From the UK Government Pfizer Vaccine Guidance that Promote “Vaccine Hesitancy”

By Johnny Vedmore | Unlimited Hangout | December 29, 2020

Official government guidance has been released in the United Kingdom to assist healthcare professionals in administering the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine BNT162b2. While the UK government goes to war against supposed misinformation, the official narrative is clearly based on very little to no supporting data from incomplete clinical trials. This article examines the document “Reg 174 Information for UK Healthcare Professionals” and narratives being pushed in the mainstream media that directly contradict that document.

Healthcare professionals globally have begun the controversial campaign to vaccinate large swathes of their respective populations with various experimental medical products. The vanguard of the mainstream pro-vax extremists have been busy enacting mass censorship tactics and committing blatant acts of digital book burning on a scale never before seen in the internet era. So-called “trusted sources” have become indistinguishable from the state-run media apparatus of your bog-standard dictatorship with the usual MSM outlets working non-stop to skew any information that threatens their hyper-aggressive official narrative. Throughout 2020, our basic civil liberties have been quickly stripped away by countless unelected officials from a wide array of unaccountable global power structures, all of them connected to a small group of elites who are sitting aloft the COVID-19 money train and using the heavily exaggerated epidemic to achieve their own long term goals.

Any useful data, scientific paper, or other credible research contradicting the official narrative is being purposely hidden from view. Too many uncomfortable, yet ultimately necessary, questions for vaccine companies such as Moderna, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and their many collaborators, are being heavily censored by those pushing their own various COVID-related agendas. The promised “war on truth” is in full swing throughout all nations globally and their respective state media machines are nearly all towing their official government lines. Mainstream talk shows and podcasts worldwide are also in lockstep, and have often been caught publicly guilt-tripping their easily swayed audiences to help push them deeper into queues for mass medical trials for vaccines and other products that lack research studies on their long term effects. This inconvenient lack of completed research will not stop the money men from pumping this milky white liquid into the arms of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

At this point in the process, the medical professionals who are administering these heavily rushed vaccines are being given the opportunity to defer responsibility and accountability for their actions to the government’s vaccine-related guidance. As the Stanley Milgram experiments have proven, when the option to defer responsibility is present, then roughly 65% of participants will follow the orders they have received regardless of the risk to their subjects. In 1974, Stanley Milgram detailed the behaviour of his participants in his famous study and suggested that people have two basic states of behaviour when they are in a social situation: “The autonomous state”, where people direct their own actions and ultimately take responsibility for the results of those actions and “the agentic state”, where people allow others to direct their actions and then pass off the responsibility for the consequences to the person giving orders, in essence acting as agents of another person’s will.

The majority of the people who are injecting these experimental drugs into their trusting patients are not likely to question the official guidance, as the overwhelming majority will often simply be in an agentic state. Thus, it should be in the best interest of anyone thinking of receiving an mRNA vaccine to first study the guidance offered by the various government sources. And, when one does study the official guidance given to healthcare professionals, one will find many different glaring contradictions and shocking admissions.

While all official bodies are attacking any inconvenient fact as misinformation, they are all busy defrauding the global population with their own misinformation campaigns that surely would have inspired awe in the likes of Joseph Stalin. So, let’s study their own words and examine the NHS guidance given to the medical professionals in the UK for the administration of the recently approved Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

An Introduction to Reg 174 Information for UK Healthcare Professionals (#1-4)

The short ten page official guidance being given to UK healthcare professionals contains many interesting admissions. In fact, the document, released in early December 2020 to accompany the vaccine rollout, appears to advise healthcare practitioners not to risk giving the experimental injection to the majority of the people who are due to receive the vaccine, particularly “prioritized” populations. Those in charge are pushing to vaccinate as much of the population as possible, before any critical public questions can be asked and answered, a situation that has left the safety and ethics of the vaccination campaign questionable at best and inhumane at worst.

In going through the Reg 174 document, it becomes very clear that there are many issues and recommendations that are being hidden from the general public. Here are ten of the most notable causes for concern contained within the official UK guidance document.

1. This medicinal product does not have UK marketing authorisation but has been given authorisation only for temporary supply

The authorisation to produce and supply this experimental vaccine in the UK was given by the UK Department of Health and Social Care, led by Matt Hancock – the UK Secretary of Health, and also by the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). While the MHRA is part funded by the Department of Health and Social Care for the regulation of medical devices, the costs of medicine regulations are met through fees paid by the pharmaceutical industry. The agency’s financial reliance on Big Pharma has led to suggestions by some Members of the UK Parliament that the MHRA is not actually independent. Being in associated roles at the MHRA since 1985, June Raine was officially appointed as CEO in September 2019 and had previously been the Director of Vigilance and Risk Management in the Medicines Division.

2. The official Phase III safety trials will not be completed until 2023

Section 1 of the medical guidance clearly states that this vaccine guidance refers specifically to the “Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 concentrate for solution for injection.” On 2 December 2020, the MHRA became the first medicines regulator in history to approve an mRNA vaccine for human use, granting emergency authorisation for BioNTech and Pfizer’s BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine for widespread use only a week after its first Phase III eight-week trial had finished. However, the Phase III trials for BNT162b2 will not actually be fully completed until January 2023 meaning that, if you’re ready to take the vaccine now, then you should be informed that the safety trials for these experimental vaccines have at least two more years before the results are in. Regardless of that fact, Raine told reporters “no corners have been cut in approving it” and that “the benefits outweigh any risk”.

3. Will you be truly “protected” from COVID-19?

The official guidance clearly states that individuals may not be protected until at least 7 days after their second dose of the vaccine. This fact has again been ignored by various reckless pro-vax media campaigns where powerful elites such as Tony Blair have contradicted this specific recommendation, suggesting recently in an interview that people should only be given a single dose of any vaccine. Mr Blair told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that “Does the first dose give you substantial immunity, and by that I mean over 50 percent effectiveness? If it does, there is a very strong case for not, as it were, holding back doses of the vaccine.” Blair, writing in the Independent, stated that the current vaccination strategy needed to be “altered and radically accelerated”. In responding to Blair’s call for radical acceleration, Professor Wendy Barclay, chair of virology at Imperial College London and member of the UK government’s NERVTAG, said: “I think that the issue with [Mr Blair’s suggestion] is that the vaccine is on the basis of being given in two doses, and the efficacy is on that basis.” Barclay went on to point out that “To change at that point, one would have to see a lot more analysis coming out from perhaps the clinical trial data.”

It is very important to pay attention to the wording of Reg 174 because the Pfizer vaccine purportedly boosts the immune system, rather than stopping the transmission of the virus. This would suggest that you will not be fully “protected” from COVID-19 and that you will still be able to catch the virus and could still suffer complications. The official guidance also states that “Immunocompromised persons, including individuals receiving immunosuppressant therapy, may have a diminished immune response to the vaccine,” with the guidance admitting “No data are available about concomitant use of Immunosuppressants.”

Reg 174 goes on to make this most pertinent of points when it states “As with any vaccine, vaccination with COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 may not protect all vaccine recipients.” The guidance also states clearly that “administration of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 should be postponed in individuals suffering from acute severe febrile illness and that individuals receiving anticoagulant therapy or those with a bleeding disorder that would contraindicate intramuscular injection, should not be given the vaccine unless the potential benefit clearly outweighs the risk.”

4. The complicated multistage dilution and thawing process of the vaccine vials opens the major possibility of human error

In investigating the official instructions for the vaccine’s administration, we can clearly see that there are plenty of opportunities for potential human error. Section 2 of this document describes the distributed vaccine as coming in “a multidose vial and must be diluted before use.” Confirming that each vial contains 0.45 ml (which equates to 5 doses of 30 micrograms) of BNT162b2 RNA embedded in lipid nanoparticles. The delicate preparation process will be repeated 100s of millions of times globally and the multidose vial will be stored frozen and must be thawed prior to dilution. The guidance describes the process for preparing the frozen vials stating that they should be transferred to temperatures of between 2 °C to 8 °C to thaw or, alternatively, the frozen vials may also be thawed for 30 minutes at temperatures up to 25 °C for immediate use. Once thawed, the undiluted vaccine can be stored for up to 5 days at 2 °C to 8 °C, and up to 2 hours at temperatures up to 25 °C. The thawed vial must then come to room temperature and be gently inverted 10 times prior to dilution.

Some of the featured diagrams and instructions found in Reg 174

The complicated thawing and dilution process will obviously leave room for individual error. Healthcare practitioners are also warned not to shake the vials and instead to gently turn them 10 times. Prior to dilution, the vaccine should present as an off-white solution with no particulates visible. The guidance states that you must discard the vaccine if particulates or discolouration are present. The thawed vaccine must be diluted in its original vial with 1.8 mL sodium chloride 9 mg/mL (0.9%) solution for injection, using a 21 gauge or narrower needle and aseptic techniques and this complex, multistage process isn’t completed there.

The healthcare professional should then equalise vial pressure before removing the needle from the vial by withdrawing 1.8 mL of air into the empty diluent syringe. Then they should gently invert the diluted solution 10 times, again being careful not to shake the solution. The official guidance continues: “The diluted vials should be marked with the dilution date and time and stored between 2 °C to 25 °C. After dilution, the vial contains 5 doses of 0.3 mL.” The healthcare professionals are then told to “withdraw the required 0.3 mL dose of diluted vaccine using a sterile needle and syringe and discard any unused vaccine within 6 hours after dilution.”

The instructions must be followed precisely to safely administer the mRNA vaccine; there are no data available on potential consequences for the vaccine recipient if anything goes wrong during this tedious and complex multistage process. On 19 December 2020, video emerged of an official drive-thru vaccination hub which had begun operating out of a car park of Hyde Leisure Centre in Greater Manchester. The video in question, shared by No Comment TV on YouTube, shows people being vaccinated outdoors at Hyde Leisure Centre by gloveless staff and in less than sterile conditions. In an article in the Manchester Evening News four days prior to the videos release the local news site stated that “The first batch of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine arrives in the borough on Tuesday, with vaccinations starting at Hyde Leisure Centre on Wednesday, December 15.”

No Data Available (#5-10)

When reading Reg 174, you will soon notice a recurring theme throughout the document. The guidance clearly states on multiple occasions that there are no data available concerning some of the most important questions surrounding the mRNA vaccine. As previously noted, the actual Phase III section of the safety trials will not be completed until January 2023, meaning that two years of trials are still to be run before the vaccine can be confirmed as safe, effective and ethical.

5. The safety and efficacy of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 in children under 16 years of age have not yet been established

Although the guidance states that the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine has not been established in children, it doesn’t mean that children have not been included within the studies. In fact, in the official Pfizer study entitled “Protocol C4591001”, one of the two main study groups included children as young as 12 years old. The inclusion of children in trials but not the guidance raises the important question, why were children included in the trial? If the vaccine is not to be given to those under the age of 16 years old, then why include children as young as 12 in the trials for an experimental vaccine technology never before authorised for use in humans?

The mainstream media, instead of raising concerns about the involvement of children in the Pfizer clinical trials, have been fully supportive of the move to test experimental pharmaceuticals on minors. CNN reported on children as young as 12 being involved in trials in an October 2020 article entitled “This 12-year-old is happy to be testing a Covid-19 vaccine” while Microsoft News recently announced that “China begins Covid test trials on children as young as age three.”

6. No data are available on the use of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 in persons that have previously received a full or partial vaccine series with another COVID-19 vaccine

We are currently witnessing the very first of many tailor-made vaccines being rolled out for general use, so don’t expect the COVID-19 jabs to be the only vaccines coming our way. With a 20 to 1 return on investment on many of these new technologies, most pharmaceutical giants will surely be lobbying governments across the globe for the next “necessary” vaccination program. The idea of multiple COVID-19 vaccinations throughout the year is already being presented as a very possible outcome for the future of humanity. Yet, no studies have been completed showing the risk of taking different types of vaccines. There have also been suggestions that people will have to have the same vaccine that they had previously taken every six months or so. This will leave Astrazeneca, Pfizer and Moderna picking up repeat vaccine contracts worth billions in secured future revenue before there are any real data on the results of the vaccines.

7. No interaction studies have been performed and there are no, or a limited amount of, data from the use of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2

Admissions like these should be a cause for concern for anybody reading the official guidance. While officials and carefully chosen “trusted sources” are telling you that “no corners have been cut” in the race to approve these vaccines, it is also true that no full length studies have been completed either. These two facts are juxtaposed and obviously contradict the official narrative that is being thrust upon the general public by all of those involved.

It is clear that the officials have no real data on what will happen next and that there is a tsunami of ethical questions that are not being answered. In the absence of data, there will be speculation.

8. It is unknown whether COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 is excreted in human milk and It is unknown whether COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 has an impact on fertility

It is vital to note the potential dangers posed by the BNT162b2 to unborn and newborn babies as well as the reproductive organs in general. There are so many parts of the Pfizer/BioNTech clinical trials that have not yet been completed. Dr. Peter Klatsky, the Director of Fertility Preservation at the Bay Area’s Spring Fertility, talking about the coming animal trials which are to be performed over the coming months was quoted in SFGate as saying, “It will reassure me an awful lot if the protein expression is not seen on the placenta. That the mRNA isn’t making it to the placenta in animals,” he said. “I don’t expect to see any.” The article goes on to explain that it will be about another 9 months until the data has been collected and analyzed.

Section 4.6 of the official guidance recommends pregnant women should not recieve the BNT162b2 vaccine

Big names in mainstream media have also been caught recklessly promoting the vaccine to pregnant women, such as Karen Weintraub writing for USA Today, whose recent article quickly states, “Although there are very little data on how pregnant and nursing mothers will respond to a COVID-19 vaccine, professional organizations and individual doctors say the benefits are very likely to outweigh the risks.” Even though the clinical trials intentionally excluded pregnant women, Weintraub went on to state that “23 women in the Pfizer-BioNTech trial and 13 in Moderna’s became pregnant during the trial.”

While the UK’s official guidance is left sounding ambiguous, on the European continent, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) states that “the Pfizer vaccine should be considered on a case by case basis for pregnant women”, but they also reserve the right to alter the guidance if more data becomes available. It seems there is no longer any erring on the side of caution with some regulators when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccinations.

9. Non-clinical data reveal no special hazard for humans based on a conventional study of repeat dose toxicity but animal studies into potential toxicity to reproduction and development have not been completed

Animal studies have not been completed and, as referred to in the previous section, the data on those animal trials will not be available for another 9 months. It is, of course, a very rare decision to approve an experimental medical technology before any animal studies have been completed. This should be a great cause for concern for any free thinking man or woman. The fact that they have had to use what they refer to as “non-clinical” data in these studies is also in conflict with the idea that the trials were conducted to the highest professional standard. The document also fails to clearly define what non-clinical data actually means.

10. In the absence of compatibility studies, this medicinal product must not be mixed with other medicinal products

Possibly the most fascinating admission in the entire document is the absence of any compatibility studies when somebody is given the vaccine while on any other medication or medical treatment. The guidance clearly states “this medicinal product should not be mixed with other medical products.” This completely jaw dropping sentence will lead many to assume that if you are on any medication at all, then you shouldn’t be given the vaccine. Whether this refers to the mixing of other medical properties directly together with the vaccine, or simultaneous dosing of any other medical product is unclear from the official guidance.

The Mail Online and The Guardian reported in 2019 that a staggering 1 in 4 people in England – nearly 12 million people – were taking what was described as “addictive” prescription medicines such as antidepressants, sleeping pills and opioid painkillers, saying that “the NHS must take action”. Those statistics throw into question the mass rollout of a vaccination with no compatability studies. This makes the fact that elderly care home residents, followed by those aged over 80, will be the first to recieve the experimental Pfizer vaccine an extremely risky strategy. Also in 2019, Age UK reported that nearly 2 million older people were on more that 7 prescription medicines and were at “risk of side effects that are severe in some cases, and occasionally even life threatening.” This worrying issue has been barely reported by the “trusted news sources”.

A Conclusive Lack of Real Data

After examining the official guidance, one fact becomes glaringly obvious — there is little to no data on the official Pfizer vaccine in key areas. In the clinical trials, children as young as 12 years old were used as unnecessary guinea pigs. There also wasn’t enough care taken to avoid pregnant women being involved in the initial clinical trials and under the cover of unyielding and uneducated mainstream propaganda, the safety of some of the most vulnerable people involved in the vaccine trials have been ignored by Pfizer and the politicians who have successfully pushed for the public vaccination campaign to essentially replace mass clinical trials. The stage has been set for a potential disaster on an unimaginable scale. It isn’t only the participants of the trials who are risking their health for the sake of big pharmaceutical companies’ hyperinflated profit margin, but it is also the medical professionals who could be risking their futures by collaborating in these risky experimental trials, which will certainly see many people dead and irreversibly injured.

In one section of Reg 174, the Big Pharma giant lays out the risk to people’s health from the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. The most common adverse reaction in participants 16 years of age and older was pain at the injection site, which affected a massive 80% of those taking part in the Pfizer trials. Fatigue came a close second with 60% of trial participants becoming sluggish and tired. Half of those involved in the studies suffered from a headache as the experimental vaccine went to work while myalgia was experienced by 30% of vaccine recipients, though the results do not indicate whether the myalgia was acute (short-term) or chronic (long-term). Almost a third of participants came down with chills, while just under 1 in 5 people suffered from arthralgia (joint pain) and 1 in 10 from pyrexia (increased body temperature).

Adverse reactions reported in clinical trials are listed in the study in decreasing order of frequency and seriousness. Just under 1 in 10 people who take the vaccine will suffer from the very common and common adverse reactions referred to in the latter paragraph, such as headaches, myalgia and chills, but the more serious issues are classified as uncommon – including Lymphadenopathy (which causes swollen or enlarged lymph nodes) and nervous system disorders – which may affect up to 1 in 100 people. Rare adverse reactions that could affect up to 1 in 1000 people and very rare adverse reactions that would affect less than 1 in 10,000 of the vaccine recipients were not included in Pfizer’s self-reported safety information. It has obviously been decided that this information should be kept out of the public domain as much as possible to avoid any further vaccine hesitancy.

Not only does the official guidance actively hide the types of rare and very rare adverse effects, but they have also been leaving out some of the adverse reactions reported during the clinical trials. As I write this, the Reg 174 guidance for healthcare professionals is on version 10.1 of the document and, since its release, they have yet to admit to the potential of a certain uncommon adverse reaction to the vaccine being a specific nervous system disorder. Structural nervous system disorders include brain or spinal cord injury, Bell’s palsy, cervical spondylosis, carpal tunnel syndrome, brain or spinal cord tumors, peripheral neuropathy, and Guillain-Barré syndrome. However, previous versions of the guidance gives no clue as to what type of nervous system disorders they were referring to. However, recent articles in the USA Today, heavily promoted by the Microsoft Network, suggested that the Bell’s palsy some people came down with in the vaccine trials wasn’t related to the Pfizer jab. The article states that on Dec. 10, the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research held the 162nd meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee to discuss the emergency use authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. The USA Today piece even goes on to admit that , “a 53-page briefing noted that there had been four cases of Bell’s palsy among the vaccinated group and none among the placebo group.”

Bell’s palsy causes drooping facial muscles similar to the effects of a stroke, image source PTHealth.com

Even though Miriam Fauzia, who wrote the USA Today piece, claims that the Bell’s palsy was not related to the experimental Pfizer vaccine, the 53-page briefing she sources clearly states, “Among non-serious unsolicited adverse events, there was a numerical imbalance of four cases of Bell’s palsy in the vaccine group compared with no cases in the placebo group, though the four cases in the vaccine group do not represent a frequency above that expected in the general population.” While it is true that 1 to 4 people in 10,000 will develop Bell’s palsy within the general population, it should be noted that the 4 cases in the vaccine trials and none in the placebo group makes for a statistical anomoly that must be examined more thoroughly. Instead, the mainstream media moved quickly to discredit the Bell’s palsy links to the Pfizer vaccine using various misleading tactics to achieve their aims.

Many mainstream outlets were caught spouting the same misleading information with articles entitled “Why you shouldn’t worry about a connection between Bell’s palsy and COVID-19 vaccines,” from Business Insider and a Reuters article from 14 December 2020 entitled, “Fact check: Photo does not show three recipients of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine that developed Bell’s palsy.”

In the case of the Reuters article, which is described as written by “Reuters Staff” rather than a specific journalist, the focus was not on the four Pfizer clinical trial participants who developed Bell’s palsy but instead the article discredits a random post on social media of three people with Bell’s palsy unconnected to the Pfizer vaccine. These type of misinforming mainstream media articles are commonly found to be using obvious fallacies to mislead their readership and with no individual taking responsibility for writing the misinforming piece, a trick repeated by many other media companies complicit with the official narrative. The Reuters article even goes on to admit that: “According to the FDA’s briefing document dated December 10, Bell’s palsy was reported in four vaccine participants and none in the placebo group, out of the 44,000 total participants of the late-stage vaccine trial.” However, the title of the Reuters article would mislead even some of the most keen eyed observers.

The mainstream media has been creating a flood of misleading stories, but it appears as though they have been given carte blanche to continue to do so, probably because they are sticking so tightly to the official narrative. It’s a narrative that is thick with irony, for it is the “trusted sources” who are being caught systematically misleading the general population again and again while also declaring a propaganda war against “fake news”.

The official guidance noted in Reg 174 doesn’t only highlight the serious lack of real data gained from Pfizer’s clinical trials for its Covid-19 vaccine so far, but it also exposes the wealthy medical professionals involved in these experimental vaccine development programs as complacent, reckless and very naive. It’s no secret that children are, more often than not, incapable of giving informed legal consent for such a risky and unethical enterprise. But the pro-vax extremists are using every tactic to coerce and manipulate children and their guardians into becoming human guinea pigs for Big Pharma. Pregnant women are also treated as acceptable collateral damage to advance the new science of gene, mRNA and DNA manipulation, a science and technology that pushes a sinister transhumanist agenda.

Don’t be fooled by the carefully worded vacuous celebrities, self-serving politicians, Big Pharma, and the mainstream medias authoritarian style misinformation campaigns. Keep your humanity intact and read their own words. The government guidance to healthcare professionals clearly states on multiple occasions that there are “no data available”.

Johnny Vedmore is a completely independent investigative journalist and musician from Cardiff, Wales. His work aims to expose the powerful people who are overlooked by other journalists and bring new information to his readers. If you require help, or have a tip for Johnny, then get in touch via johnnyvedmore.com or by reaching out to johnnyvedmore@gmail.com

December 29, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Instagram is Using False “Fact-Checking” to Protect Joe Biden’s Crime Record From Criticisms

By Glenn Greenwald | December 17, 2020

A long-standing and vehement criticism of Joe Biden is that legislation he championed as a Senator in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly his crime bill of 1994, contributed to the mass incarceration of Americans generally and African-Americans specifically.

Among the many on the left and libertarian right who have voiced this criticism (along with President Trump) is then-Senator Kamala Harris, who said during the 2020 Democratic primary race that Biden’s “crime bill — that 1994 crime bill — it did contribute to mass incarceration in our country.” When Hillary Clinton was running for President in 2015, Bill Clinton, who as president signed Biden’s bill into law, told the NAACP: “I signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it.”

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told Biden during a 2019 presidential debate: “There are people right now in prison for life for drug offenses because you stood up and used that tough-on-crime phony rhetoric that got a lot of people elected but destroyed communities like mine.” Booker then said in an interview with The Huffington Post that that Biden’s “crime bill was shameful, what it did to black and brown communities like mine [and] low-income communities from Appalachia to rural Iowa,” also denouncing it for “overwhelmingly putting people in prison for nonviolent drug offenses that members of Congress and the Senate admit to breaking now.”

In 2016, author and scholar Michele Alexander argued that Hillary did not deserve the votes of black people due to her and her husband’s support for numerous bills, including Biden’s 1994 crime bill, that led to the mass incarceration of African-Americans. Harvard’s Cornel West said in 2019: “When [Biden] says [the 1994 crime bill] didn’t contribute to mass incarceration, I tell him he has to get off his symbolic crack pipe.”

While that debate over the damage done by Biden’s crime bill has long raged in Democratic Party politics and the criminal justice reform movement, it is now barred from being aired on the Facebook-owned social media giant Instagram, or at least is formally denounced as disinformation. With Joe Biden about to enter the White House — one that will exercise significant influence in determining Silicon Valley’s interests, will be filled with tech executives, and was made possible in large part by Silicon Valley’s largesse poured into the Biden/Harris campaign — Instagram has arrogated unto itself the power to declare these well-established criticisms of Biden and his crime bill to be “False” and having “no basis in fact.”

As first noted on Monday by former Sanders campaign organizer Ben Mora, Instagram publicly denounced as “False” a post on Sunday by the left-wing artist and frequent Biden critic Brad Troemel, who has more than 107,000 followers on that platform. Troemel’s post said nothing more than what Biden’s chosen running mate, Kamala Harris, has herself said, as well as numerous mainstream media outlets and countless criminal justice reform advocates have long maintained.

Troemel posted a 1994 photo of a smiling, mullet-sporting Biden standing next to then-President Bill Clinton. The photo contained this caption: “Find someone that looks at you the way Biden looked at Clinton after signed Biden’s crime bill into law. Bringing mass incarceration to black Americans.” This was the same photo and caption which an anonymous Trump supporter under the name “realtina40” first posted back in June.

Shortly after Troemel posted this on Sunday, Instagram appended a note in red letters, with a warning sign that read: “Learn why fact-checkers have indicated that this is false.” That was followed by a note plastered over Troemel’s original post with the title: “False,” and which claimed “independent fact-checkers say this information has no basis in fact.” The same thing was done by Instagram to “realtina40” original June post.

This is not the first time Troemel has been censored by Instagram for posting criticisms of Biden. In response to questions, he told me he first earned the “false” label when posting a meme in April which he had created that mocked Biden’s campaign messaging. Instagram’s retaliation happened after the Biden campaign loudly complained about Troemel’s satirical ad. Biden campaign operatives falsely blamed the Trump campaign for having created it, and then induced Twitter to censor it.

As Troemel told me: “Here you can see Dems using the Russia-tinged cover of disinformation as a way to discredit any and all criticism of Biden found on social media.” When Troemel re-posted that meme last month with the clear notation that it was satirical, Instagram began “shadow banning” him: severely limiting the reach of his posts. It was those events — all involving Troemel’s criticisms of Biden from the left — that caused Instagram to heavily scrutinize his postings, culminating in its blurring of his latest post with a “False” label that contained these well-documented criticisms of Biden’s crime bill.

The only thing that is demonstrably “false” here is Instagram’s Biden-shielding assertion that there is a “fact-checking” consensus that this criticism of Biden’s 1994 crime bill is false. It is true that one media outlet, USA Today, fact-checked the identical claim posted back in June by the anonymous Instagram user and concluded that “our research finds that while the crime bill did increase the prison population in states, it did not bring about a mass incarceration relative to earlier years.” But that article so concluded even while admitting that Biden’s “crime bill did increase the prison population in states” and “any increase in the overall prison population would automatically translate into a larger number of Black inmates.” The article’s own premises thus bolster, not refute, the claim at issue.

But numerous other media outlets and fact-checking organizations — far more than just one — concluded the opposite: namely, that there is at least a reasonable and substantial basis for these claims about Biden’s bill:

  • PolitiFact rated as only “Half True” Biden’s claim that the 1994 crime bill “did not generate mass incarceration,” noting the bill provided funds to states on the condition that they force prisoners to serve longer sentences and that it bolstered the tough-on-crime climate that led to higher incarceration rates in the states (that was the same point Bill Clinton made to the NAACP: “the federal law set a trend…. [W]e had a lot people who were locked up, who were minor actors, for way too long”);
  • The Washington Post’s designated fact-checker Glenn Kessler assigned two Pinocchios to Biden’s insistence that his crime bill “did not generate mass incarceration,” noting that “the bill encouraged states to build more prisons — with more money coming to them if they increased penalties.” Kessler cited a Brennan Center report that “the 1994 Crime Bill is justly criticized for encouraging states to build and fill new prisons.”The Post added: “There are many factors that contributed to the United States having such a high incarceration rate, but few dispute the crime bill was a contributor. Bill Clinton has acknowledged this.” The paper’s “two Pinocchio” rating means Biden’s denial contains “significant omissions and/or exaggerations…. Similar to ‘half true’”);
  • CNN purported to fact-check the same claims from Biden and found that Biden’s denial “misses the broader impact that federal policy can have on the way that states incarcerate, including the influence of federal money,” concluding that the view that the 1994 crime bill was a significant factor in mass incarceration was, at the very least, debatable.
  • The fact-check from NBC News flatly stated that “though the bill was not the root cause of ‘mass incarceration,’ it was ‘the most high-profile legislation to increase the number of people behind bars,’ according to a Brennan Center analysis in 2016.”
  • Fact-checking Sen. Booker’s accusations against Biden, The Atlantic said: “it is true that the bill—which extended the death penalty to 60 new crimes, stiffened sentences, offered states strong financial incentives for building new prisons, and banned a range of assault weapons—helped lead to the wave of mass incarceration that’s resulted in the United States accounting for 25 percent of the world’s prison population.” It added that “a 2016 analysis by the Brennan Center concluded that the 1994 bill contributed both to the subsequent decline in crime and to the doubling of the rate of imprisonment from 1994 to 2009.”
  • The New York Times’ fact-check of Biden’s denial rated it “Exaggerated,” quoting a criminologist to say that Biden’s bill “encouraged [states] to mass incarcerate further.”
  • Regarding Biden’s denial that his 1994 crime bill “led to more prison sentences, more prison cells, and more aggressive policing — especially hurting Black and brown Americans,” Vox pronounced: “The truth, it turns out, is somewhere in the middle,” noting that “the law imposed tougher prison sentences at the federal level and encouraged states to do the same” and also ensured “an escalation of the War on Drugs.”

One could spend literally all day listing media outlets, criminal justice experts, and politicians from both parties who have insisted that Biden’s 1994 crime bill was a significant factor in mass incarceration generally and of African-Americans specifically, or that the assertion is at least reasonably debatable and grounded in empirical facts — exactly what Instagram has decided is out of bounds to state. It is axiomatically true, or at the very least logically reasonable, that if Biden’s crime bill led to more mass incarceration — and few doubt that it did — then the bill, in the words of the denounced Instagram post, “brought mass incarceration to black Americans.”

Share

On Monday, The New York Post sought comment from Facebook about Instagram’s “False” label. The tech giant, in the words of that paper, said “that Instagram won’t end its censorship unless USA Today changes its assessment.” Yet the Post — long an advocate for tough-on-crime legislation — itself echoed virtually every other media outlet by noting that “whether Biden’s law contributed to mass incarceration is a matter of debate.”

Indeed, from what I can tell, USA Today is the only prominent media outlet of all the ones which fact-checked this issue to conclude that the claim about Biden’s bill is “false.” The overwhelming consensus of fact-checkers and experts is that the 1994 crime bill at the very least contributed to mass incarceration generally and of African-Americans specifically, and that the magnitude of that role is debatable.

But Instagram has closed this debate, at least on its platform. They have announced that the claims about Biden’s 1994 crime bill as expressed by not only Brad Troemel — but also Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton, Cory Booker, Cornel West, the Brennan Center and countless others — has been proven false.

This episode demonstrates two crucial facts. The first is that what is so often passed off as quasi-scientific, opinion-free “fact-checking” are instead extremely tendentious, subjective and highly debatable opinions. That’s how Instagram can cherry-pick the conclusions of USA Today and treat it as if it is Gospel even though numerous other outlets, mainstream politicians in Biden’s own party, and criminal justice experts reached a radically different conclusion. “Fact-checking” in theory has journalistic value, but it is often nothing more than a branding tactic for media outlets to disguise their highly subjective pronouncements as unchallengeable Truth.

The second, more important point is that Silicon Valley giants lack any competency to determine the truth or falsity of political claims even when they act with the best of motives. Who at Instagram decided to rely on the USA Today claims while ignoring all the conflicting conclusions from other outlets and experts, and who decided how to apply that conclusion to the post at issue? And why did USA Today randomly decide to subject an anti-Biden meme about his crime bill from the account of a relatively obscure, anonymous Trump supporter but ignore similar statements coming from Senators Harris and Booker and Bill Clinton, thus handing Instagram an excuse to label any similar views as “False” and without “any basis”? Why are tech companies trying to officiate political debates this way?

Recall that the censorship of Twitter and Facebook of The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was based at least in part on the claim that the documents were the by-product of hacking and “Russian disinformation” — claims that have “no basis in fact.” As Matt Taibbi put it last week when warning of the dangers of YouTube’s decision to ban from its platform any questioning of the legitimacy of the 2020 election while still allowing similar questioning of the 2016 election: “There’s no such thing as a technocratic approach to truth. There are official truths, but those are political rather than scientific determinations, and therefore almost always wrong on some level.”

Moreover, the assumption that tech giants are acting with the best of intentions is completely unwarranted. Like every faction, these companies are awash with bias, partisanship, ideological dogma and self-interest. They overwhelmingly donated to the Democratic Party and the Biden campaign. Their executives are residing in virtually every sector of the Biden/Harris transition. Currying favor with the Biden administration — by, say, soft-censoring or discrediting harmful critiques of the President-elect — serves their corporate interests in multiple ways. And their overwhelmingly establishment-liberal employees are increasingly insistent that views they dislike should be censored off their platforms.

This is why it has been so dangerous, so misguided, to acquiesce to a campaign that is being led by corporate media outlets to insist that these tech giants abandon a belief in a free internet and instead censor more aggressively. That a person will now be declared by Facebook’s properties to be a disseminator of disinformation for voicing long-standing and well-documented criticisms of Joe Biden’s crime record is yet another bleak glimpse of a future in which unseen tech overlords police our discourse by unilaterally arbitrating truth and falsity, decree what are permissible and impermissible ideas, and rigidly setting the boundaries of acceptable debate.

December 17, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

Instagram censors claim that Biden’s 1994 Crime Bill led to ‘mass incarceration’ of black Americans

RT | December 17, 2020

Instagram has been actively censoring a meme about President-elect Joe Biden’s legislative record, after it flagged as “false” an artist’s post linking the ex-Senator’s 1994 Crime Bill to mass incarceration of black Americans.

The political meme, uploaded by Brad Troemel on Wednesday, shows an old photo of Biden and then-President Bill Clinton, along with a caption that reads: “Find someone that looks at you the way Biden looked at Clinton after Clinton signed Biden’s crime bill into law. Bringing mass incarceration to black Americans.”

The Facebook-owned platform quickly flagged Troemel’s image as “false information.” Instagram also cited “independent fact-checkers” from USA Today, who apparently “say this information has no basis in fact.” Thus, before being able to view the image, the platform requires users to first read a disclaimer, which links to a USA Today article allegedly debunking the claim that the 1994 crime bill led to mass incarceration of black Americans.

The so-called “fact check,” written by Doug Stanglin and published in July, asserts that despite the Crime Bill being “a grab-bag of crime-fighting measures,” ‘mass incarceration’ actually began “in the 1960s” and is not a racialized phenomenon.

Troemel’s interaction with Instagram was easy to verify, as the platform still almost immediately slams the “false information” label on a newly uploaded image.

Yet, USA Today’s analysis appears to fly in the face of assessments by both left-wing and some conservative supporters of criminal justice reform.

The issue ultimately appears up for debate, with some critics saying that the Crime Bill contributed massively to mass incarceration, while others split hairs, saying it simply exacerbated an already ongoing trend.

Instagram’s move, however, was largely seen as overly-protective of Biden, with some even calling it political censorship.

Facebook spokesperson Stephanie Otway told the New York Post, that Instagram would not stop flagging the Biden meme, as long as the platform’s “fact-checking partners” keep the rating the same. The Post itself referred to the so-called fact-check as “hotly disputed.”

After his post was flagged, Troemel updated his Instagram bio to say he was “currently shadowbanned for criticizing Joe Biden.”

In October, Biden himself admitted it was a “mistake” to support the bill, after facing renewed criticism over its impacts – and later reiterated the point during the final presidential debate against Donald Trump.

December 17, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Cuties and Useful Idiots

Amazing Polly | September 16, 2020

The Cabal of Global Oligarchs is losing control of the narrative they’ve kept under wraps for so long and the cover-upperers have gone berzerk in their effort to hide what they are doing. In this video I look at the latest anti-anti-human trafficking pieces from the media, as well as the reaction to a new, revolting Netflix film.

References:

VIDEO: The Richest Most Twisted Swamp Creatures Ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kpayw4PPvU

Sundance sex abuse: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/sundance-film-festival-co-founder-charged-sex-abuse-n993601

HuffPo: It’s out of Control: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/how-qanon-impedes-legitimate-anti-trafficking-groups_n_5f4eacb9c5b69eb5c03592d1?ri18n=true

California Law more lenient for homosexual offenders: https://abc7.com/governor-gavin-newsom-sex-offender-law-californias-registry-senate-bill-145/6420294/

RAMRANTS Joe Biden videos: https://twitter.com/RAMRANTS/status/930065838387863552

Daily Mail Sundance sex abuse: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6970607/Man-abused-Sundance-founder-tells-confronted-filmmaker.html

USA Today: Star of Cheer charged s with minor: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2020/09/14/jerry-harris-cheerleader-netflix-cheer-fbi-investigation-search-warrant-alleged-sexual-misconduct/5741805002/

IOM stats on trafficking: https://www.ctdatacollaborative.org/iom-data-overview

HUFFPO: It’s out of Control Q: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/how-qanon-impedes-legitimate-anti-trafficking-groups_n_5f4eacb9c5b69eb5c03592d1?ri18n=true

Matt Binder: https://www.wvxu.org/post/how-qanon-gaining-traction-mainstream-politics#stream/0

To send a contribution to this channel (thank you!) you can send:
– via Paypal: https://paypal.me/PollyStGeorge
– through the mail: PO Box address here: https://www.amazingpolly.net/contact.html

September 17, 2020 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

FAIL: Despite Media Alarm, Back-to-Back Gulf Hurricanes Have Happened Before

By Anthony Watts | Watts Up With That? | August 26, 2020

Over the past few days, there’s been a persistent media buzz over the National Hurricane Center’s prediction of two hurricanes to hit New Orleans. Jason Dunning, a TV meteorologist at NBC2 WBBH-TV in Fort Meyers, Florida posted on Facebook: “… it would be the first time in recorded history with two hurricanes in the gulf at the same time.

Needless to say, the post went viral. Now it appears his Facebook post has been removed.

And then there’s the ever-hyping CNN, which published the story ‘Unprecedented’ back-to-back hurricanes will target the same state, forcing evacuations in Louisiana.  According to the article, the two storms, Marco and Laura, are forecast to arrive within two days of each other, making landfall somewhere between New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama as reason to say such an event is “unprecedented.”

Then there’s USA Today with this ridiculous guest commentary by opinion contributor Monica Medina:

How can Trump ignore climate crisis with twin hurricane-season storms barreling toward us?
Climate change is wreaking havoc on people’s lives right now. This month alone, not a section of the country has been spared a devastating event.

How can Trump ignore climate crisis with twin hurricane-season storms barreling toward us?

Climate change is wreaking havoc on people’s lives right now. This month alone, not a section of the country has been spared a devastating event.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/08/24/climate-change-twin-hurricanes-confront-crisis-now-column/3424879001/

Typical alarmist, confusing weather with climate for an agenda.

Dunning, CNN, and Medina are wrong, and badly so. All they had to do is look at the historical records of hurricanes to know this has happened before, and it is nothing new.

Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer commented in a Facebook post:

“When I researched the 500-year history of hurricanes hitting the New World for my Amazon Kindle book Inevitable Disaster: Why Hurricanes Can’t Be Blamed On Global Warming, I was struck by the number of cases of back-to-back hurricanes.” Adding,  “… when the Hurricane Center talks about records, they are generally referring to only the last 150 years. A little over 120 years ago, Miami didn’t even exist.”

For example, in his book, Spencer cites the Twin Mobile Hurricanes In late September of 1740; two separate hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast region around Mobile, Alabama within one week of each other. These two hurricanes, together with the hurricane of Sept. 23, 1740, caused major damage to the Louisiana colony.

Finding this information isn’t difficult, and you don’t need a degree in climatology; the Twin Mobile Hurricanes of 1740 are listed in Wikipedia and in Louisiana Cajun History.

There are many other instances of back to back hurricanes hitting near the same location within a few days of each other. Besides the 1740 event, in 1933 and 1959, two tropical storms entered the Gulf of Mexico at the same time. But they were not both hurricanes at those times.

Journalists and some meteorologists seem to have this conceit that if it isn’t recorded in the modern-day record of the past 150 years, it didn’t happen. The worse conceit is the fact that they ignore just how few records we have compared to how long nature has been launching hurricanes at the Gulf Coast. Literally this has been going on for millions of years, and somehow because we have the ability to observe, track, and predict hurricanes like never before in history, it’s “unprecedented”? How many times has it happened before we were around to observe it?

Of course the idea of labeling such things as “unprecedented” goes straight to the heart of climate alarmism, because they are already blaming it on “climate change.” In the story First ever double hurricane could hit the Gulf of Mexico, Space.com made this claim“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that as climate change warms the oceans, strong hurricanes are likely to become more frequent than they were in previous years.”

But that’s wrong too, and the data tells us so. In Climate-at-a-Glance: Hurricanes we find there has been no increase in hurricanes as the planet has modestly warmed. Even the UN climate body known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agrees, finding no increase in the frequency or severity of hurricanes in their latest 2018 report.

What has increased is the hype over hurricanes, which started back in 2005 with former vice president turned climate activist Al Gore claiming events like Hurricane Katrina would be the new normal. Following that pronouncement, Gore’s predictions fell flat and there was an 11-year “drought” of major hurricanes hitting the United States. In fact, peer reviewed science shows hurricane activity has been decreasing since 1950.

So, don’t pay any attention to what the media says about the “unprecedented” nature of hurricanes this week. For years, the media and climate change zealots have pushed hype over facts. We would be better off ignoring the hype and focusing on facts.

August 27, 2020 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Corporate Media Backing Clinton Exploits Orlando Shooting for Passive Holocaust Denial

By Robert Barsocchini | Empire Slayer | June 16, 2016

Within hours of the mass shooting in Orlando, the corporate media backing neoconservative favorite Hillary Clinton began, almost unanimously, to exploit the opportunity to passively promote holocaust and genocide denial.

Outlets including the NY Times, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, Newsweek, USA Today, and so on, all referred to the Orlando massacre unequivocally as the worst shooting and/or worst act of gun violence in US history. (CBS News, at the time it was accessed for this piece, was running a large “I’m With Her” ad for Hillary Clinton at the top of its page.) A useful comparison to the corporate assessment might be to imagine if a German civilian gassed a group of people to death and the German press reported it as the worst gassing in German history. After the Paris shooting, the Western press likewise reported that as the worst shooting in recent Parisian history, despite that the Parisian police not long ago massacred some 300 peaceful marchers protesting the French dictatorship in Algeria and dumped their bodies in the river that runs through the city (more info in previous piece).

Native News Online quickly pointed out that the corporate media was almost completely whitewashing “mass killings of American Indians in its reporting” on Orlando. It gave two well-known (as far as these go) examples of worse gun-violence and mass-shootings: some 300 Native men, women, and children, were massacred at Wounded Knee, and 70 to 180 were massacred at Sand Creek.

One commenter on the Native News piece shared that she “wrote to every single news outlet yesterday from the New York Times, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, and Salon to CNN, NBC, and the BBC. I have yet to receive a reply from any of them with the exception of the Oregonian, who changed its language immediately. They also informed me that the Associated Press has just begun to change its language. I’m hoping the Guardian and BBC begin to do the same too.”

Another commenter on the Native News piece gave a short list of some acts of gun-violence, mass-shootings, or mass killings perpetrated in US history, by US forces:

1864 – 300 Yana in California
1863 – 280 Shoshone in Idaho
1861 – 240 Wilakis in California
1860 – 250 Wiyot in California
1859 – 150 Yuki in California
1853 – 450 Tolowa in California
1852 – 150 Wintu in California
1851 – 300 Wintu in California
1850 – 100 Pomo in California
1840 – 140 Comanches in Colorado
1833 – 150 Kiowa in Oklahoma
1813 – 200 Creek in Alabama
1813 – 200 Creek in Alabama
1782 – 100 Lanape in Pennsylvania
1730 – 500 Fox in Illinois
1713 – 1000 Tuscarora in North Carolina
1712 – 1000 Fox in Michigan
1712 – 300 Tuscarora in North Carolina
1704 – 1000 Apalachee killed & 2000 sold into slavery in North Carolina
1676 – 100 Algonquian and Nipmuc in Massachusetts.
1676 – 100 Occaneechi in Virginia
1675 – 340 Narragansett in Rhode Island
1644 – 500 Lanape in New York
1640 – 129 Massapeag in New York
1637 – 700 Pequot in Connecticut
1623 – 200 Powhatan & Pamunkey in Virginia with “poison wine”

Professor David E. Stannard describes one such massacre, wherein US forces weakened a Delaware group of Native men, women, children, and elders through starvation, convinced them it would be in their best interest to disarm, then tied them up and exterminated them and mutilated their dead bodies. Stannard notes that such massacres by US forces “were so numerous and routine that recording them eventually becomes numbing”. (American Holocaust, pp. 125/6)

A couple of corporate news outlets used somewhat more precise language to describe the Orlando massacre, editorializing (while again presenting it as fact) that it was the ‘worst shooting in modern US history’.

However, this still leaves unstated the writer’s opinion of what constitutes ‘modern’. The wounded knee massacre took place in 1898, and the Black Wall Street massacre, for example, in which 55-400 people were murdered and a wealthy black community in Oklahoma ethnically cleansed, took place in 1921. (More examples.)

And, of course, the US has massacred millions of people, many of them with rifles and other types of guns, but also in far worse ways, outside the territory it officially claims, and continues to do so. Obama recently massacred almost a hundred people at one time with what could be viewed as an AR-15 on steroids. Is any of this part of ‘modern US history’? Why or why not? The qualifications are unstated and thus subjective. The vague language from the neoliberal, government-linked corporate outlets may lead readers to believe that all of US history is included in their ‘factual’ statements, and that the US has never massacred more than fifty people anywhere.

In some cases, this impression will have been intentional on the part of the oligarch mouthpiece outlets, which have an interest in fostering a benevolent image of the US to help elites further capture global markets . In others, it will have been a result of conveniently self-aggrandizing ignorance on behalf of the writers and editors – an ignorance that makes an important contribution to their job security.

As some of them partially or belatedly demonstrated, all of the corporate outlets could have easily avoided any holocaust/genocide-denial by calling the shooting the worst by a single civilian on US territory in at least the last thirty years, or any number of other obvious, simple, direct phrasings, which are supposed to be integral to journalism, anyway.

But as John Ralston Saul points out, the neoliberal/neoconservative ideology relies on the ‘whitewashing of memory’. That doesn’t always work, though, especially on survivors of US and Western genocides, which is why, as Ralston Saul further notes, the West and its proxies are behind most of the global murders of writers, who may try to expose facts and evidence that interfere with the West’s historical whitewashing.

Since the Orlando massacre, both Clinton and Trump have called for further escalation of Western aggression in the Middle East.

Robert Barsocchini is an internationally published author who focuses on force dynamics, national and global, and also writes professionally for the film industry. Updates on Twitter.

June 17, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Law Enforcement Misrepresentation of Orlando Killer’s 911 Call Ignores U.S. Foreign Policy Motivation

By Matt Peppe | Just the Facts | June 14, 2016

In the aftermath of the horrific mass murder at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando over the weekend in which 50 people were killed, media including CNN, USA Today, NPR, NBC News, and CBS News, all reported that the gunman called 911 during his murderous rampage and pledged allegiance to ISIS. None of the journalists writing for any of these news outlets heard the call themselves; they all cite the FBI as their source.

The U.S. government has been engaged in a war against the self-professed Islamic State for the last two years. Their military intervention consists of a bombing campaign against ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria. Hyping the threat members connected to the terror group – or spiritually loyal to it – pose to American citizens is supportive of U.S. foreign policy. If ISIS, or people claiming to act on behalf of ISIS, are a real danger to Americans, it bolsters the notion that the group is a threat to national security and helps justify the government’s military response.

The FBI seems eager to show itself as disrupting ISIS plots in the States. As Adam Johnson has written in FAIR, the FBI has put Americans in contact with informants who claim to represent ISIS and then led the targets to believe they would help the targets join the terrorist organization. The media have then conflated this with an “ISIS Plot” and “ISIS Support,” when no members of ISIS were ever involved in any way.

The FBI’s motivation to portray events in a way that supports U.S. foreign policy, and its history of portraying its actions in a way that has served to hype an ISIS threat should make journalists cautious about taking officials’ words at face value. Especially in the case of a 911 call, which is a public record in Florida, proper journalistic due diligence would be to consult the actual source of the claims being disseminated.

Instead, not a single journalist appears to have done this with Orlando killer Omar Mateen’s 911 call.

On Tuesday, CNN aired interviews of eyewitnesses to the shooting spree who described their harrowing encounters with the gunman inside the club. Patience Carter, who was inside a bathroom stall feet from the gunman when he called 911, said he told the dispatcher that “the reason why he was doing this is because he wants America to stop bombing his country.” (Mateen is a native of the United States, but he was presumably referring to Afghanistan, where both of his parents are from.) She said he then declared that “from now on he pledges his loyalty to ISIS.”

This demonstrates that his primary motive for his terror attack was retaliation for the U.S. aggression in Afghanistan, where nearly 100,000 people have been killed since the illegal U.S. invasion in 2001. His mention of ISIS seems merely adjunct to what he admits was his justification for the attack. His motivation precedes his ideological alignment with ISIS, not the other way around.

Anti-war activists have long argued that overseas military operations endanger not only the populations whose countries are invaded, occupied and bombed, but Americans in the United States who are at risk of terrorist retaliation from people outraged by the death and destruction war inevitably produces to the point of being willing to resort to violence themselves.

Carter’s version of the 911 call reveals a very different picture than the partial one revealed by the FBI and reprinted by each of the largest news organizations. The complete conversation depicts Mateen as indicating that he considered his actions a response to U.S. foreign policy. Of course, the murder of innocent civilians is always reprehensible and can never be justified by claiming they are a response to a state’s military aggression, regardless of how deadly and devastating such military operations are. But it should be predictable that some people will use this rationalization regardless and seek out soft targets in the country whose government they claim to be retaliating against.

The FBI chose to omit Mateen’s professed motive entirely when recounting the 911 call to the media, and merely state that he professed allegiance to ISIS. Perhaps they recognized how putting Mateen’s call in context may lead people to question whether U.S. wars in Afghanistan (and Iraq) raise the terrorist threat at home.

After all, this is not the first time this has happened. The surviving Boston Marathon bomber cited the U.S. wars abroad as his motivation for committing the attack that killed three people and maimed dozens more.

It is not clear whether any journalist even asked to hear the 911 call themselves. But it is clear that they chose to disseminate second-hand information when the primary source should have been easily accessible. If it was not made available (as required by law), the public deserves to know that it was suppressed and be given an explanation why.

Media stenographers parroted government officials’ descriptions of the call, which left out the killer’s professed motivation for his politically motivated attack and failed to put the ISIS claim in any context. Unsurprisingly, their misrepresentation served the government’s policy agenda and avoided having the incident serve as an example of a negative consequence of U.S. foreign policy – one that anti-war dissenters have used in arguing against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since the War on Terror was launched more than a decade and a half ago.

June 15, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Slaughtering the Truth and the False Choice of War on Iran

By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep In America | September 2, 2015

Even outspoken supporters of the nuclear deal signed between Iran and the P5+1 (the US, UK, France, China, Russia and Germany) rely on myriad entrenched myths and falsehoods about Iran’s nuclear program to make their case. For instance, the constant claim that the agreement “prevents Iran from building a nuclear weapon” is a facile talking point that assumes an Iranian drive for a bomb that has never actually existed.

What the deal – known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – does is, in exchange for removing sanctions, verifiably limit Iran’s nuclear infrastructure by restricting enrichment levels, expanding monitoring access beyond the legal requirements of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and Iran’s safeguards agreements to affirm the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program, a program that has never been found to have ever been militarized.

Nevertheless, advocates of the accord have consistently argued that without this deal, Iran would inevitably race toward producing the bomb it’s never wanted and has prohibited for decades, and as a result, the United States (or Israel) would be forced to bomb Iranian nuclear and military facilities to save the world from the clutches of evil atomic mullahs.

We’ve heard the same thing for decades, that the “clock is ticking” and “time is running out” to attack Iran or force it to capitulate on its legal nuclear program, lest Iran acquire the atomic arsenal that we’ve been told since the mid-1980s is only “a few screwdriver turns” away and right around the corner.

These are bad facts, built upon a two-pronged foundation of alarmism that promotes the supposed inevitably of two things that will never happen: Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon and a U.S./Israeli military attack on Iran. And with bad facts come worse analysis.

In essence, even the deal’s own supporters buy into ahistorical, Netanyahu-inspired narratives of malevolent Iranian intent and prepare their appeals from there. One of the most striking examples of this egregious practice is a recent opinion piece by Anne-Marie Slaughter in USA Today, a publication with a history of terrible reporting and commentary on Iran.

Slaughter surely has impressive credentials. She’s taught at elite universities, including Harvard and Princeton, served for two years as Hillary Clinton’s director of policy planning in the U.S. State Department and currently heads the New America Foundation, an influential center-left think tank in Washington D.C.

With this résumé, it is both shocking and illuminating how little she seems to understand about Iran’s nuclear program. Slaughter refers to “Iran’s illegal nuclear program,” despite the fact that Iran has the inalienable right to a domestic nuclear program as affirmed by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). She is also apparently convinced Iran is engaged in a “quest for a nuclear weapon” (alternatively rendered as “Iran’s illegal pursuit of a nuclear weapon”), which it decidedly is not and for which there is no credible evidence.

And that’s not all. Slaughter’s analysis gets a lot more wrong.

Slaughter’s Imaginary Stockpiles

Here’s Slaughter’s opening gambit:

The opponents of the Iran deal are absolutely right about the existence of an alternative. We could bomb Iran. A sustained attack could destroy its nuclear facilities and presumably a large part of its stockpiled plutonium and highly enriched uranium.

For starters, the argument of either a “deal or war” is a wholly false choice, despite Slaughter’s conclusion that, “Like it or not, those are the only two choices we have.”

In fact, with no deal, Iran would still be a member of the NPT, have a comprehensive safeguards agreement with the IAEA, and continue to call for a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East, as it has done for decades. An attack on Iran, a sovereign nation that virtually all intelligence agencies on the planet have determined is not pursuing nuclear weapons, would be a undeniable war crime.

But in her second sentence, Slaughter makes a gigantic, and completely inexplicable, error. Iran has exactly zero “stockpiled plutonium and highly enriched uranium.” This is not a controversial issue; anyone who knows absolutely anything about Iran’s nuclear program knows this.

Before it can be stockpiled, plutonium must first be extracted and reprocessed from the spent uranium fuel of an operational nuclear reactor. Iran has never done this and doesn’t even have a reprocessing plant. Iran has literally never extracted plutonium from a reactor core, let alone stockpiled it, as Slaughter claims.

Iran has also never produced, let alone stockpiled, any “highly enriched uranium” (HEU), which is defined by the IAEA as “uranium containing 20% or more of the isotope 235U.” Only when uranium is enriched to about 90% does it become suitable for weaponization. Prior to the implementation of the November 2013 Joint Plan of Action (JPOA), Iran had been enriching uranium to between 3.5% and 5% 235U for use as fuel in nuclear power plants and to about 19.75% 235U for use in medical research reactors. Since the plan went into effect, Iran ceased all enrichment above 5%, diluted or disposed of its entire stockpile of 19.75% LEU, and converted the vast majority of its remaining stockpile of LEU to a form incapable of being weaponized.

Even the Israeli intelligence community, perhaps the entity most hostile to Iran and likely responsible for the murder of five Iranian scientists, doesn’t claim Iran has any stockpiled plutonium or HEU. In a top-secret 2012 memo, the Israeli Mossad assessed that, although Iran maintained a declared stockpile of LEU, “it does not appear to be ready to enrich it to higher levels.” Furthermore, the cable noted that, without a plutonium reprocessing plant in Iran, the plutonium produced as a byproduct of running the heavy water research reactor in Arak (still under construction), “will not be able to be used for weapons.”

No amount of criminal airstrikes can bomb away material that does not exist. With this little grasp of the issues at stake, the fact that Slaughter was a policy adviser to a Secretary of State for two years is a harrowing thought.

Slaughter’s Bad Facts on the Iran Deal

Slaughter’s comprehension of the deal itself – the deal she herself supports – is similarly tenuous. Regarding sanctions relief and specifically the unfreezing of Iranian assets abroad, she writes, “If, in fact, Iran complies with the terms of this deal, stops pursuing a weapon and completely dismantles its nuclear supply chain, then it is entitled to recover the funds.”

Ok, no. This is wrong. As noted already, since Iran isn’t “pursuing a weapon,” it doesn’t actually have anything to stop doing in that regard.

Beyond this, Iran will absolutely not be “dismantling its nuclear supply chain,” which extends from the mining and milling of natural uranium ore to yellowcake conversion to centrifuge manufacturing and storage facilities to enrichment and fuel production. None of these elements of Iran’s program is being dismantled under the deal; rather, unprecedented monitoring and surveillance access is being granted by Iran to the IAEA at every step of the way, a level of inspections and insight unmatched anywhere in the world.

Slaughter’s Obfuscation of U.S. Role in Failed Iran Diplomacy

Later on in her oped, Slaughter engages in quite a bit of fictional storytelling about her past experience in the State Department:

George W. Bush’s administration spent eight years just trying to get Iran to come to the table to negotiate, without success. In 2010, during my first year working as director of Policy Planning under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, we thought we had a deal with the Iranians to ship most of their highly enriched uranium to Russia, but it promptly collapsed when the Iranian negotiators took it back to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. And all the while, the Iranians moved from hundreds of centrifuges to about 20,000, of ever more sophisticated design. Their supply of highly enriched uranium, just one step away from the fuel needed for a bomb, went up and up.

Again, Slaughter pretends that Iran has produced and maintained a supply of “highly enriched uranium.” It hasn’t, and never has. Also, the link she provides to support the absurd claim that the Bush administration was desperate for diplomacy with Iran is a piece of utter propaganda written by Stephen Hadley, a stalwart neocon who served as Bush’s national security adviser.

Slaughter omits the fact that, in 2002 and 2003, diplomacy between Iran and the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany) resulted in the suspension of Iran’s nascent enrichment program and voluntary adoption of the stringent Additional Protocol, which allowed the IAEA extensive access to Iran’s program for over two years. In that time, the IAEA consistently affirmed that Iran had never diverted any nuclear material to military purposes.

It was only after Iran’s European negotiating partners, at the behest of the Americans, reneged on their promise to offer substantive commitments and respect Iran’s inalienable right to a domestic nuclear infrastructure that talks dissolved and Iran resumed enrichment. The proposal eventually brought to Iran by Western negotiators on August 5, 2005 has been described as “vague on incentives and heavy on demands,” and even dismissed by one EU diplomat as “a lot of gift wrapping around an empty box.”

Nevertheless, since late 2005, Iran has proven willing time and again to engage in negotiations over its nuclear program and the international sanctions regime. Its numerous proposals over the years have consistently reiterated its willingness to officially ban nuclear weapons development through legislation, cap its level and scope of enrichment, immediately convert its enriched uranium to fuel rods “to preclude even the technical possibility of further enrichment” towards weapons-grade material, “to provide unprecedented added guarantees” to the IAEA that its program would remain peaceful, and open its enrichment program to international partnership.

Iran’s offers were routinely rejected by the United States government, which long maintained the irrational position that Iran capitulate to the American demand of zero enrichment on Iranian soil. “We cannot have a single centrifuge spinning in Iran,” declared George W. Bush’s undersecretary of state for arms control Robert Joseph in early 2006. As recently as this past March, Slaughter’s former boss Hillary Clinton was still indicating her preference for “little-to-no enrichment” in Iran.

What made successful diplomacy with Iran possible was not, as so many still erroneously claim, the devastating sanctions imposed on the Iranian people or even the 2013 election of Hassan Rouhani, it was the Obama administration’s eventual abandonment of the “zero enrichment” demand, opening the door for acknowledging (albeit implicitly) Iran’s right to enrich and for negotiations to move forward productively.Perhaps the most curious comment Slaughter makes, however, is about the 2009 P5+1 nuclear swap proposal, in which she claims the United States and its partners offered “to ship most of [Iran’s] highly enriched uranium to Russia.”

Forgive the repetition, but remember, Iran never had any “highly enriched uranium,” so Slaughter is beginning with a completely false premise. Placing the blame on the Iranian leadership for the failure to implement the deal is also disingenuous. Here’s what really happened:

In June 2009, while it was enriching uranium up to 5% LEU only, Iran announced publicly that it required a new stock of nearly 20% LEU to keep the U.S.-built Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) operational and producing vital medical radioisotopes used to treat nearly a million Iranian cancer patients. In advance of the depletion of its reactor fuel, Iran tried to purchase more enriched uranium on the open market under full IAEA supervision.

Despite the safeguarded TRR presenting no proliferation threat, the United States and its European partners prevented any discussion of such a commercial sale. Instead, in October 2009, they offered a “swap” proposal whereby Iran would ship out most of its stockpiled low-enriched uranium to Russia to be enriched to the requisite 19.75%. This would then be shipped to France where fuel rods that could power the TRR would be produced. Iran would then, theoretically, receive those rods a year after shipping out its stockpile.

Iran agreed in principle to this arrangement, with the intention of hammering out mutually acceptable details at a later date. In late 2009, the deal was still in the works. Iran’s then foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki reiterated that Iran was “willing to exchange most of its uranium for processed nuclear fuel from abroad” in a phased transfer of material with full guarantees that the West “will not backtrack an exchange deal.”

In reviewing the P5+1 offer, the Iranian press reported, “technical studies showed that it would only take two to three months for any country to further enrich the nuclear stockpile and turn it into metal nuclear rods for the Tehran Research Reactor, while suppliers had announced that they would not return fuel to Iran any less than seven months.”

As the parties discussed final terms, Mottaki suggested Iran initially hand over a quarter of its enriched uranium stockpile in a simultaneous exchange on Iranian soil for an equivalent amount of processed fuel for use in the medical research reactor. The remainder of the uranium would then be traded over “several years,” under an agreed upon and internationally supervised framework.

This proposed timetable was immediately rejected by Western powers. An unidentified senior U.S. official was quoted by Voice of America as claiming that the Iranian counter-proposal was inconsistent with the “fair and balanced” draft agreement. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Slaughter’s boss at the time, urged Iran to “accept the agreement as proposed because we are not altering it,” which is the definition of an ultimatum, not a negotiation. Talks predictably fell apart.

When Iran later renegotiated the swap arrangement with Brazil and Turkey in May 2010, the Obama administration angrily rejected the terms and aggressively pushed more sanctions through the UN Security Council.

Slaughter’s History of Support for Military Intervention

Despite her distressing lack of accurate information about Iran’s nuclear program, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s uneasy embrace of the Iran deal is, at minimum, still a welcome departure from her usual militarist posture.

Five years after supporting the invasion of Iraq, Slaughter was annoyed by the “gotcha politics” of being held accountable for her bad judgment, grousing in The Huffington Post that “debate is still far too much about who was right and who was wrong on the initial invasion.”

In 2011, after leaving the State Department, Slaughter lent her full-throated support to the NATO bombing campaign in Libya, extolling herself as a champion of humanitarianism and democracy and then hailing the operation as an unmitigated success. It’s been anything but.

A year later, she was calling for U.S. allies to arm rebel forces against the Assad government in Syria, writing in The New York Times, “Foreign military intervention in Syria offers the best hope for curtailing a long, bloody and destabilizing civil war.”

In 2013, Slaughter openly lamented her support for the invasion of Iraq a decade earlier. “Looking back, it is hard to remember just how convinced many of us were that weapons of mass destruction would be found,” she wrote in The New Republic. “Had I not believed that, I would never have countenanced any kind of intervention on purely humanitarian terms.”

Slaughter said she had learned her lesson. “Never again will I trust a single government’s interpretation of data when lives are at stake, perhaps especially my own government,” Slaughter resolved. “And I will not support the international use of force in a war of choice rather than necessity without the approval of some multilateral body, one that includes countries that are directly affected by both the circumstances in the target country and by the planned intervention.”

Nevertheless, after penning this mea culpa, Slaughter continued busily advocating unilateral American airstrikes on Syria and pushing for Obama to at least threaten military action against Russia in Ukraine. “A US strike against the Syrian government now would change the entire dynamic,” she wrote for Project Syndicate. “It would either force the regime back to the negotiating table with a genuine intention of reaching a settlement, or at least make it clear that Assad will not have a free hand in re-establishing his rule.” Her calls for the U.S. bombing of Syria, and also Iraq, have since intensified.

Just last week, Slaughter again pressed her case for imposing a no-fly zone over Syria, citing “both moral and strategic reasons.” The direct American military intervention, Slaughter suggests, could be conducted “using sea-based missile systems” and “would force Mr. Assad to reconsider his long-term prospects and, most likely, force him to the negotiating table.”

Claiming that military strikes would inevitably follow the (increasingly impossible) Congressional rejection of the Iran deal is its own form of bellicosity. Deal opponents falsely argue that a “better deal,” not bombing and regime change, is their real goal, but that too is ridiculous.

It is indeed unfortunate that intelligent and influential commentators like Slaughter feel the need to resort to their own fear-mongering and false narratives to support a diplomatic initiative whose benefits need no such bludgeon. Real threat reduction over the Iranian nuclear issue would be far better served by an honest appraisal of the facts, examination of hard evidence and a refusal to engage in selective history.

Without these facts at her fingertips, Slaughter winds up promoting the very thing she supposedly seeks to prevent. She supports the deal, but for all the wrong reasons. If her former boss becomes the next commander-in-chief, Slaughter will almost certainly return to a high-powered position in government. Let’s hope she gets her facts straight before then.

September 5, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media | , , | 1 Comment

Iran Nuclear Weapons Claims Still Need Correcting

By Peter Hart | FAIR | September 23, 2013

Hassan Rouhani

Hassan Rouhani

Yesterday in USA Today (9/22/13), Aamer Madhani wrote this about the challenges facing Barack Obama:

The president is also trying to take advantage of a diplomatic opening–created by the installation of a new, more moderate president in Iran–to persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

As you might know by now, this is misleading; Iran is suspected by some governments of having a nuclear weapons program, but there is no solid intelligence that such a program exists.

USA Today made a similar claim a few months ago; when FAIR activists wrote to the paper, it eventually got around to issuing a correction. But good luck figuring that out; the paper had originally claimed that new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was “known for his negotiating skill over the country’s nuclear weapons program.” The paper’s correction read:

A June 17 story on Iranian President-elect Hassan Rouhani misstated his previous position. He was a negotiator over Iran’s nuclear program.

There’s basically no chance that any reader of the paper would have been able to know what was being corrected. But if the paper is actually interested in accuracy, they might want to run another correction.

Bob Schieffer (photo: CSIS)

Bob Schieffer (photo: CSIS)

They’re not the only ones who should consider clarifying the record. Here’s CBS Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer (9/22/13):

Rouhani says that Iran does not want and is not pursuing a nuclear weapon. Does anybody take that at face value?

Actually, the burden of proof should be the other way around: Politicians who claim that Iran has such a program should have to prove it. Schieffer obviously doesn’t see the world that way. He’s interviewed people like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and failed to  challenge their claims about Iran’s weapons. Indeed, Schieffer presented them as facts, telling viewers about Iran’s “continuing effort to build a nuclear weapon” (FAIR Blog, 7/15/13).

So Schieffer is indeed skeptical of government claims. Iran‘s government, that is.

September 24, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

Is the Afghan Surge Really Over?

By Peter Hart – FAIR – 09/21/2012

Misleading media reports today are announcing the end of the U.S.  troop surge in Afghanistan.

USA Today:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the Washington Post:

There are many more along the same lines.

It’s important to understand that the troop reductions are only part of the total troop surge that happened under Obama.

As FAIR noted last year (Media Advisory, 6/23/11) there were two major increases in the number of U.S. troops in 2009:

When Obama took office in 2009, the U.S. had about 34,000 troops in Afghanistan. Obama has initiated two major troop increases in Afghanistan: about 20,000 additional troops were announced in February 2009, followed by the December 2009 announcement that an another 33,000 would be deployed as well; other smaller increases have brought the total to 100,000.

The surge that is “ending” today refers to the 33,000 that were sent in December. But the troops that were sent in the earlier Obama surge are still there. As the USA Today article notes, there are still 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, roughly double the number that were in the country when Obama took office.

These headlines might give the impression that the Afghan War is winding down. Based on the troop levels alone, that would be highly misleading.

September 21, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | Leave a comment

Hillary Clinton’s Iran Weapons Lie Is ‘Tough Talk’

By Peter Hart – FAIR – 05/08/2012

Covering Hillary Clinton’s trip to India, USA Today’s Richard Wolf writes (5/8/12):

Fielding rapid-fire questions at a town-hall-style event in Kolkata, she denounced Iran’s nuclear arms program and urged India to reduce its Iranian oil imports further.

“We appreciate what has been done, and of course we want to keep the pressure on Iran,” she said.

When I read that I thought, “Here we go again, another outlet misstating the basic facts about the Iran debate.”

Then I checked the transcript of the Clinton’s town hall, and that is indeed what she said, in response to a question about U.S. pressuring India to stop buying oil from Iran:

That’s a very good question, and let me give you a little context for that question. When President Obama took over in 2009, we knew Iran’s continuing development of a nuclear weapons program would be very destabilizing in the region, because there would be an arms race with the nations in the region who have pre-existing enmity between themselves and Iran. And it would also cause a great threat to Israel.

USA Today should have noted that there is no evidence that Iran has any nuclear weapons program at all–as U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon secretary have acknowledged. That’s what newspapers should do when politicians mislead. Instead, the paper puts this headline over the piece: “Clinton Wraps Asia Trip with Tough Talk on Iran.”

“Tough talk” is a weak way to describe a government official’s misrepresentation of the facts.

May 9, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | , , , | 1 Comment