Category Archives: CIA

‘Confirmed’ Has Become A Meaningless Word In Mainstream News Reporting

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Last week Politico published a major exclusive report that the “Iranian government is weighing an assassination attempt against the American ambassador to South Africa” in retaliation for the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani earlier this year, citing (you guessed it) anonymous government officials.

The claim was nonsensical on its face; the idea that Iran would see the assassination of some random ambassador to an irrelevant country as a proportionate response to the killing of its wildly beloved top military commander would only make sense to someone with a very US-centric worldview who knows nothing about Iran. On top of that, the South African government published a statement that “the information provided is not sufficient to sustain the allegation that there is a credible threat against the United States Ambassador to South Africa”.

The flimsy nature of this allegation was of course not enough to prevent bombastic Twitter threats from America’s manchild-in-chief that this nonexistent assassination plot “will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!” if carried out.

It also wasn’t enough to prevent the Politico article’s co-author, Natasha Bertrand, from falsely claiming that The New York Times had “confirmed” her reporting.

“The NYT has confirmed Nahal Toosi and my reporting about Iran,” Bertrand tweeted today with a link to a new Times article, quoting the excerpt “Lana Marks, the American ambassador to South Africa and a political supporter of Trump, was a potential target of an Iranian attack…Politico earlier reported that Ms. Marks was a target.”

The New York Times has in fact not confirmed Bertrand and Toosi’s reporting, and Bertrand omits a very significant portion of text from her excerpt. Here is the quote in full, bold mine:

Lana Marks, the American ambassador to South Africa and a political supporter of Mr. Trump, was a potential target of an Iranian attack, according to national security officials. But some briefed on the intelligence said Iran has not decided to directly target any American official, and other current and former officials accused the Trump administration of overstating the threat. Politico earlier reported that Ms. Marks was a target.

Awful lot of important information hiding in that ellipsis of yours, Ms Bertrand.

So NYT had in fact merely spoken to unnamed officials (probably some of the same ones) and found there to be misgivings about the claim Bertrand had promoted, and then Bertrand deceptively omitted text which contradicted the claim she was making that her report had been “confirmed”.

It should surprise no one that Bertrand would abuse the trust of her followers in such a phenomenally sleazy way. As Antiwar‘s Dave DeCamp explained after the Politico report was discredited by the South African government, Bertrand “built her career on hyping the Steele Dossier, a now-discredited document that made unverified claims about the Russian government and the Trump campaign in 2016.”

But Bertrand’s slimy manipulation is also to be expected because she knows she can get away with it. The word “confirmed” has been misused and abused to such a spectacular extent in mainstream news reporting of late that it doesn’t actually mean anything anymore when they say it.

When a news reporter announces that they have independently confirmed another outlet’s reporting, the reader imagines that they have done actual investigative journalism, traveled to the places about which the claims are being made, done deep digging and looked at the evidence with their own two eyes and found that the claim is true. In practice, all it often means is that they spoke to the same sources the other reporter spoke to and are in fact just confirming that the source did indeed make a given assertion. The reader assumes they’re confirming the source’s claim is true, but all they’re actually confirming is that the first reporter didn’t just make up the claim they’re uncritically parroting.

Take when the anonymously sourced story about Russia paying bounties to Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan for killing occupying coalition forces was first reported by The New York Times. We now know this story was completely baseless, but when it first broke there were a bunch of mass media reporters buzzing around claiming to have “confirmed” one another’s stories on the matter.

“The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have confirmed our reporting,” the NYT story’s co-author Charlie Savage tweeted after the story broke.

“We have confirmed the New York Times’ scoop: A Russian military spy unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan,” tweeted The Washington Post‘s John Hudson.

“We matched The New York Times’ great reporting on how US intel has assessed that Russians paid Taliban to target US, coalition forces in Afg which is a pretty stunning development,” tweeted Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Lubold.

All three of these men were lying.

John Hudson’s claim that the Washington Post article he co-authored “confirmed the New York Times’ scoop” twice used the words “if confirmed” with regard to his central claim, saying “Russian involvement in operations targeting Americans, if confirmed,” and “The attempt to stoke violence against Americans, if confirmed“. This is of course an acknowledgement that these things had not, in fact, been confirmed.

The Wall Street Journal article co-authored by Gordon Lubold cited only anonymous “people”, who we have no reason to believe are different people than NYT’s sources, repeating the same unsubstantiated assertions about an intelligence report. The article cited no evidence that Lubold’s “stunning development” actually occurred beyond “people familiar with the report said” and “a person familiar with it said“.

The fact that both Hudson and Lubold were lying about having confirmed the New York Times‘ reporting means that Savage was also lying when he said they did. When they said the report has been “confirmed”, what they really meant was that it had been agreed upon. All the three of them actually did was use their profoundly influential outlets to uncritically parrot something nameless spooks wanted the public to believe, which is the same as just publishing a CIA press release free of charge. It is unprincipled stenography for opaque and unaccountable intelligence agencies, and it is odious.

Earlier this month The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald published an article titled “Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using ‘Confirmed’ to Mean Its Opposite“, about an anonymously sourced claim by The Atlantic that Trump had said disparaging things about US troops. An excerpt:

Other media outlets — including Associated Press and Fox News — now claim that they did exactly that: “confirmed” the Atlantic story. But if one looks at what they actually did, at what this “confirmation” consists of, it is the opposite of what that word would mean, or should mean, in any minimally responsible sense. AP, for instance, merely claims that “a senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,” while Fox merely said “a former senior Trump administration official who was in France traveling with the president in November 2018 did confirm other details surrounding that trip.”

Greenwald also documents how in 2017 CNN falsely reported that Donald Trump Jr had received an encryption key to WikiLeaks which let him preview the 2016 DNC leaks ten days before they were published, which we shortly thereafter learned was actually due to nobody involved in the story bothering to read the date on the email correctly. The whole entire story, in reality, was that Trump had merely received an email about an already published WikiLeaks drop.

Greenwald writes the following:

Very shortly after CNN unveiled its false story, MSNBC’s intelligence community spokesman Ken Dilanian went on air and breathlessly announced that he had obtained independent confirmation that the CNN story was true. In a video segment I cannot recommend highly enough, Dilanian was introduced by an incredibly excited Hallie Jackson — who urged Dilanian to “tell us what we’ve just now learned,” adding, “I know you and some of our colleagues have confirmed some of this information: What’s up?” Dilanian then proceeded to explain what he had learned:

 

“That’s right, Hallie. Two sources with direct knowledge of this are telling us that congressional investigators have obtained an email from a man named ‘Mike Erickson’ — obviously they don’t know if that’s his real name — offering Donald Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. access to WikiLeaks documents. … It goes to the heart of the collusion question. … One of the big questions is: Did [Trump Jr.] call the FBI?”

 

How could that happen? How could MSNBC purport to confirm a false story from CNN? Shortly after, CBS News also purported to have “confirmed” the same false story: that Trump Jr. received advanced access to the WikiLeaks documents. It’s one thing for a news outlet to make a mistake in reporting by, for instance, misreporting the date of an email and thus getting the story completely wrong. But how is it possible that multiple other outlets could “confirm” the same false report?

That’s three mainstream outlets–CNN, MSNBC, and CBS, all claiming to have independently “confirmed” a story that would have been recognized as false if even one person in any of those outlets had done the tiniest bare minimum of independent investigation into the claim that its source was making, namely looking with their eyeballs at the actual information they were being presented with.

They didn’t, because that’s the state of the mass media today. That is its culture. That, in answer to Greenwald’s question above, is how this could happen: the western mass media are nothing but a bunch of lackeys mindlessly regurgitating incendiary narratives by those in power in their rapacious search for ratings.

Natasha Bertrand is acutely aware of this, which is why she feels comfortable falsely telling the world that her absurd reporting has been “confirmed”.

So now you know. Whenever you see the mass media saying an important claim has been “confirmed”, just ignore them. They have no respect for that word, and it has lost all meaning among their ranks. The western media class does not exist to tell you the truth about the world, it exists to distort your understanding of the world for the advantage of the powerful.

Social media fact-checking, brought to you by the Deep State

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By Daniel Espinoza

Source: Off-Guardian

Almost four years of mainstream media hype about “fake news” and “Russian meddling” propaganda has brought to the world exactly what they were intended to bring: an effective mechanism for internet and social media censorship.

In the center of this move toward global discourse control is an organization called the Poynter Institute, home to the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), a body created to coordinate, promote and train dozens of fact-checkers from around the world.

The IFCN and many non-profits working in the same field are funded by the big capitalist “philanthropists” of our era, like George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, Bill Gates, and even the Koch brothers…but also by the US Department of State and a shady “aid” – in reality, political meddling – organization, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), historically linked to the CIA and regime change operations.

Google and Facebook – itself tied to the warmongering Atlantic Council and its “Digital Forensic Research Lab” – are also associated with Poynter, by funding and partnerships to fight “fake news” (including the development of an “automated” fact-checking program for the upcoming 2020).

The marriage between Poynter’s IFCN, politically inclined billionaires, the State Department – and the whitewashed public face of the Deep State – suggest that the institute is probably working in what Nelson Poynter, its founder, worked on for a key part of his life: propaganda and censorship for the US government.

Although this information is not available in Nelson Poynter’s Wikipedia profile or in poynter.org’s history page, his work for a government propaganda agency is not exactly a secret. A resemblance of his wife, Henrietta, also at the institute’s website, quickly passes over the fact that Poynter did work for the Office of War Information (OWI) during WWII, but his specific role as a government censor and propagandist is never mentioned.

Nevertheless, Hollywood Goes to War, a book written in 1987 by Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, is one of the many historical sources that tell the details of Poynter’s job.

FILM CENSORSHIP AND THE BIRTH OF THE VOICE OF AMERICA

Nelson Poynter was recruited by the OWI with his wife Henrietta, who worked as assistant program chief under Elmer Davis, head of the agency. She came up with the name for the “Voice of America”, the famous psychological war operation of the US government.

The radio project was established in February 1942 and soon grew to be the most important US overt propaganda arm of the Cold War.

Unlike his wife’s job, Poynter’s regarded not radio – or his previous line of work, journalism – but movies. In 1942, the OWI’s Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) set up office in Hollywood, naming Poynter as its head. His mission was to act as liaison between the agency and the owners of Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, MGM and the other big studio names.

Elmer Davis, head of the OWI, regarded films as:

The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds”, in part, because they “do not realize that they are being propagandized”.

Davis was a career journalist who worked for ten years for the New York Times before being recruited by the government. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s White House needed the film industry to incorporate specific themes in their movies, ideas that promoted the notion of WWII as being a “popular” war, fought to defend his Four Freedoms.

But at first, Poynter’s office in Hollywood had little veto power over what the industry could produce – for the entire Western world – limiting itself to suggest cosmetic changes here and there, or the toning down of reactionary and racist imagery and language, an inherent feature in the Hollywood of that era.

The heads of the studios were in fairly good terms with the US Army, historically close to the industry. Its owners were happy to portrait US wars abroad as heroic, in exchange for the lending of military equipment, installations and expert advice.

But in most cases, a disappointed Poynter complained, war ended up only as “a backdrop” for shallow romance, cheap comedies and other proven formulas. Poynter and his boss at the BMP, Lowell Mellett, also hired a former assistant of Harold Lasswell, a famous social researcher who said – back in the 30s – that democracy needed propaganda because people were not the best judges of their own interest.

Eventually, the team devised a way to exert more power over the unruly, reactionary and overly commercial Hollywood studios. They decided to ask the US Office of Censorship to weight in and threat them with banning “offending” films from export, seriously reducing their potential earnings.

According to Koppes and Black’s Hollywood Goes to War, it was a success, prompting MGM, Warner and the other big names to start turning their scripts for review to the Poynter. The BMP knew it was important to intervene right at that stage, before big amounts of money were spent in production.

Poynter was a diligent censor and propagandist, going as far as to suggest dialogues for the movie scripts he was reviewing, breaching “one of the industries taboos” and provoking the powerful tycoons, according to the authors mentioned above.

When the war ended, Poynter went back to journalism. He eventually took over the St. Petersburg Times (renamed Tampa Bay Times in 2012), owned by his father. He also founded the Congressional Quarterly with his wife Henrietta, who died in 1968. As we can read in the Poynter institute’s website:

When Henrietta died suddenly at the age of 66, Nelson mourned deeply. ‘Her passing marked the end of an era for Mr. Poynter,’ said David Shedden, former research librarian at The Poynter Institute. ‘He started looking to the future and thinking about his legacy. He focused on creating a school for journalists, which of course became the Modern Media Institute, and then the Poynter Institute’.”

Nevertheless, historian W.C. Bourne explains that many of the OWI’s top brass – as Elmer Davis and Nelson Poynter, former journalists – returned to the corporate media after the war, but “retained an abiding belief in the things for which OWI stood and the possibilities of accomplishment in the international information picture”.

Many of them also retained the Deep State contacts and a nationalistic “spirit of collaboration”.

A LEGACY OF CENSORSHIP

Nelson Poynter’s work for the government ended many decades ago, and it would be reasonable to suggest that his ties to the US government and its propaganda apparatus probably never involved the journalism institution he founded years after leaving the OWI.

But we have evidence pointing precisely in the opposite direction.

Firstly, the obvious – and open – ties between the institute and today’s version of the foreign meddling machine installed by the US during the Cold War (i.e. the NED). As informed on many occasions by independent journalists, one of the founders of the National Endowment for Democracy once admitted that:

A lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA.”

Secondly, the intimate ties between the Poynter Institute and the US State Department, which selected it to conduct the “Edward Murrow Program for Journalists”. It brings together “more than 100 emerging international journalists from around the world to examine journalistic practices in the United States”.

In other words, to be indoctrinated in Western corporate journalism and culture and start a relationship with a potential foreign opinion leader.

The State Department’s Murrow program is part of Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), an agency dedicated to “cultural diplomacy”, intimately tied to intelligence and foreign policy since way before the Cold War. The participants to be trained by Poynter are chosen by US embassies abroad.

A 2017 report of the historical success of the educational exchange agency stated that:

…565 alumni of the ECA programs are current heads or former heads of state and government, and 31 alumni are heads of international organizations.”

Thirdly, the Poynter Institute, too, redacted an infamous blacklist of “fake news” sites, with the intention of marginalize and, in this case, deny many of them of any kind of advertisement money.

A BLACKLIST TO DEFUND THEM ALL

For this operation, launched on April 30, 2019, Poynter ganged-up with the rest of the fact-checking “cartel”, so to speak.

The institute gathered the blacklists and analysis done in recent years by Snopes, Fact-check.org, Politifact (owned by the Tampa Bay Times and Poynter), OpenSources and the Fake News Codex, and used them to create the mother of all blacklists, naming 515 “unreliable” news websites.

It was retracted shortly after its publication, on May 2, after coming under criticism for “unreliability and poor methodology”. The irony! And this should be understood as an indictment on the whole bunch. As one critic from the George Washington University noted:

Beneath the veneer of its precision, the fact-checking enterprise relies heavily on opinion and interpretation…If a list summarizing fact-checking results and verified by fact checkers is ultimately retracted by those same fact checkers for not being rigorous, it underscores the question of why we should trust anything from the fact-checking community.”

To add insult to injury, Poynter’s dubious list of “unreliable websites” was intended to cause financial harm to those named in it, by guiding advertisers and ad-technology applications to deny them of ads.

After the retraction, Stephen Gutowski, a writer from one of the affected websites, Free Beacon, wrote:

What a disgusting exercise in bad faith from an organization that’s supposed to be about improving and promoting journalism. Instead, they’re creating tabloid-level listicles to smear reporters without offering even a single piece of evidence. Shame on you, @Poynter.”

Philip Klein, from The Washington Examiner – also listed – thought it was:

…worrisome to call for advertisers blacklisting news organizations, especially given the opacity of the process and arbitrariness of many of the judgements [sic].”

THE “CARTEL”

Most of the non-profits behind Poynter’s blacklist share patrons, except for the controversial Snopes, that runs on less grant money than advertisement revenues.

The International Fact-checking Network and its more than a hundred “associated” – subordinated – smaller fact checkers around the globe, are also funded by the same “philanthropists”, like Bill Gates, whose foundation already finances tens of mainstream corporate news outlets with tens of millions of dollars, just like the Columbia Journalism Review recently uncovered.

Regarding Poynter and Gates, specifically:

…Poynter senior vice president Kelly McBride said Gates’s money was passed on to media fact-checking sites, including Africa Check, and noted that she is “absolutely confident” that no bias or blind spots emerged from the work, though she acknowledged that she has not reviewed it herself.”

In a blatant conflict of interests, those same fact-checkers often (try to) debunk information related to the Gates Foundation, just like a private PR agency.

Many lesser players in the global constellation of fact checkers are also funded directly by George Soros and his Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the US embassy and/or the NED.

When “fact-checking”, the members of this private-public consortium often limit themselves to copy/paste from their “parent” sources, like Poynter’s Politifact and Snopes.

As Emil Marmol and Lee Mager recently wrote for Project Censored, the “fake news” psychological operation was little more than a “Trojan horse for silencing alternative news and reestablishing corporate news dominance”:

The fake news hysteria created by those in government and echoed by the corporate news media is being harnessed and used as a pretext for the suppression of dissent and counterhegemonic viewpoints while re-establishing the corporate press’s preeminence as the sole purveyor and manufacturer of public opinion”.

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the degenerative process under the guise of “protecting us”, prompting democratic governments to take dangerous paths, like arresting citizens for promoting street marches on Facebook.

The internet opened up a world of information to the regular citizen, we must keep it open so more of us can take a look.

 

Daniel Espinosa lives in Arequipa, second largest city of Peru. He graduated in Communication Sciences in Lima and started researching propaganda and mainstream media. He writes for a Peruvian in-print weekly, Hildebrandt en sus trece, since 2018, and collaborates with many online media. His writings are a critique of the role of mass media in society. You can read his previous work through his MuckRack profile.

Alleged Salas Family Assailant Previously Worked for US/Israeli Intelligence-Linked Firm

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The alleged gunmen who killed the son of Esther Salas, the judge recently assigned to the Epstein-Deutsche Bank case, worked for a company of corporate spies and mercenaries with ties to intelligence and also to Deutsche Bank.

By Whitney Webb

Source: Unlimited Hangout

The news of the shooting of the husband and son of Esther Salas, the judge recently assigned to oversee the Jeffrey Epstein – Deutsche Bank case, caused shock and confusion while also bringing renewed scrutiny to the Epstein scandal just a week after Epstein’s main co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, was denied bail in a separate case.

The case Salas is set to oversee is a class action lawsuit brought by Deutsche Bank investors who allege that Deutsche Bank “failed to properly monitor customers that the Bank itself deemed to be high risk, including, among others, the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.” The case came after the New York state Department of Financial Services had settled with Deutsche Bank over the bank’s failure to cut ties with Epstein-linked accounts, resulting in Deutsche Bank paying a $150 million fine. Deutsche Bank, unlike other financial institutions, failed to close all of its accounts linked to Epstein until less than a month prior to his arrest last year, even though the bank had identified him as “high risk” years before.

Beyond the tragedy of Sunday’s shooting, which claimed the life of Salas’ only child, the quick discovery of the death of the main suspect, Roy Den Hollander, of a “self-inflicted” gunshot to the head before he could be arrested or questioned by authorities has led to speculation that there is more to the official narrative of the crime than meets the eye.

With law enforcement sources now claiming that Esther Salas was not the intended target of the attack and some media reports now suggesting that Den Hollander’s motive was related to his dislike of feminism, it appears there are efforts underway to distance Sunday’s tragic shooting from Salas’ recent assignment to the Epstein case, which occurred just four days before the tragic shooting.

The most likely reason for any such “damage control” effort lies in the fact that both U.S. law enforcement investigations and mainstream media reports have consistently downplayed the connections of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual trafficking and financial crimes to intelligence agencies in the U.S. and Israel. Similarly, Roy Den Hollander previously worked for a New York firm has been described as a “private CIA” with ties to those countries’ intelligence agencies and, also, ties to Deutsche Bank.

A Private CIA

According to his website, Den Hollander once worked for Kroll Associates Moscow Office, where he “managed and upgraded Kroll’s delivery of intelligence and security in the former Soviet Union” from 1999 to 2000. A few years prior, Kroll had won a considerable bid from the Russian government to locate money allegedly “spirited out of the country by the directors of state enterprises when they realized that privatization was inevitable.” The Kroll executives in charge of the Russian portfolio prior to Den Hollander were E. Norbett Garrett, a former CIA station chief in Cairo and Kuwait, and Joseph Rosetti, former chief of security for IBM. During that period and prior to his hiring at Kroll, Den Hollender worked as a lawyer in Russia regarding “legal and business issues, including international financing and marketing” and married a Russian woman he met during his time there that he subsequently claimed was part of the “Russian mafia.”

Founded by Jules Kroll in 1972, Kroll Associates would later become known as the “CIA of Wall Street” and “Wall Street’s Private Eye” and was alleged to be an actual front for the CIA by French intelligence agencies, according to theWashington Post. Part of the reason for this nickname, which was once a boasting point for top Kroll executives, owes to the fact that the firm frequently hired former CIA and FBI officers, as well as former members of MI6 and Mossad. K2 Intelligence, the successor to Kroll Associates founded by Jules Kroll and his son Jeremy in 2009, has similar hiring practices, counting former FBI and NSA officials among its ranks alongside former high-ranking members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency. Kroll also boasted ties to the Bush family, with Jonathan Bush (George Bush Sr.’s brother) serving on its corporate advisory board, and Kroll was also employed by Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign.

Though it is mainly involved in corporate security and investigations, Kroll has also frequently investigated targets of Washington foreign policy, including Saddam Hussein, and was also the company tapped to “reorganize” Enron in 2002. Kroll Associates also has long been a subject of scrutiny for those that question the official narrative on the attacks of September 11, 2001, given that the company was put in charge of security for the World Trade Center complex from 1993 bombing up through the 2001 attacks and has no shortage of ties to companies and individuals that profited from the attacks. Kroll itself experienced a “surge in business” following the events of 9/11, a day when its top executives all avoided going to work despite ostensibly providing security for the complex.

A similar “surge in business” for Kroll followed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq after the company’s investigations into Saddam Hussein’s and the Bath Party’s finances had been used as partial justification for the military incursion. Kroll became a major provider of mercenaries along with companies like Blackwater and DynCorp to the U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation through its subsidiary Kroll Security International. Its clients included the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which has long fronted for the CIA, and also provided mercenaries for the war in Afghanistan.

Kroll executives over the years have commented to the press on their reputation as a “private CIA” and have also noted the advantages of being a “private” as opposed to “public” intelligence agency. For instance, E. Norbett Garrett, the former CIA official turned Kroll executive, told The New Yorker in 2009 the following:

“Garrett explained the disparity between what Kroll could do and what the C.I.A. could in a place like Sudan. “They have to rely on public and covert sources,” he said. “But we can go straight to Salah Idris. He’s our client, after all. We can go straight to his friends. We can be manipulated, of course, shown incomplete information, and sometimes we have to walk away from a case if we don’t trust somebody. But we definitely have some advantages.”

Kroll Associates and the Epstein Network

Aside from Kroll Associates’ own role as a private intelligence firm, it is also worth pointing out that Jules Kroll had an odd meeting with Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, shortly before his death, alleged by most Maxwell biographers and his family to have been a homicide. Roughly two weeks before his death, Kroll met with Maxwell at New York’s Helmsley Palace Hotel. According to a 1992 article in Vanity Fair, “Maxwell had ushered Kroll and two other men out onto the patio so that their conversation could not be overheard or bugged,” with Maxwell allegedly seeking to hire Kroll to uncover “people out to get him, to destroy his empire, to cripple him financially, and to destroy his life and business in any way they could.”

The article further notes that “the meeting broke up with Maxwell’s promising that he would send Kroll what he called “a memorandum of suspicions and unexplained events.” “Maxwell was working on this compendium,” said the  [anonymous] participant [in the meeting], “when he met his death.” Kroll Associates was never formally hired.”

Much more recently Kroll came under scrutiny after being hired by disgraced media mogul Harvey Weinstein alongside the “private Mossad for hire” firm Black Cube. Weinstein had been instructed to hire Black Cube by Ehud Barak, the former Israeli military intelligence head and Israeli Prime Minister with close ties to Jeffrey Epstein and a frequent visitor of Epstein’s residences. Weinstein hired Kroll to harass and cyberstalk women who had accused him of sexual assault. Weinstein was a one-time business partner of Jeffrey Epstein’s and the testimony of Epstein victim Maria Farmer strongly implies that Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein “shared” women, and potentially underage girls, with the film producer. The Daily Beast later reported that Epstein had used his ties to Weinstein to impress and recruit potential victims and at least one of those victims landed a role in a film produced by a Weinstein-owned company due to Epstein’s ties to Weinstein.

In addition, Kroll’s long-time executive Vice President for Operations, James Bucknam, was previously chief adviser to former FBI director Louis Freeh and is now CEO of the Freeh Group. Freeh has since become notorious for having been hired by Epstein associate, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, to “investigate” the Epstein scandal, and was also involved in the cover-up of the Penn State child molestation and abuse scandal. Freeh was also director of the FBI when the Bureau declined to investigate accusations regarding Leslie Wexner, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein and their involvement in the sex trafficking of minors, first reported to the FBI in 1996 by Maria Farmer.

The Kroll – Deutsche Bank “Revolving Door”

After “retiring” from Kroll associates, Jules Kroll created a credit-rating agency, a field he had called just years earlier “a heck of a racket.” Named the Kroll Bond Rating Agency (KBRA), the firm was envisioned by Kroll as a “credit-rating agency on steroids,” but has failed to make a dent in the market shares of the so-called “Big Three” credit-rating agencies: Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Service, and Fitch Ratings.

Though it hasn’t managed to become a dominant force in credit ratings, KBRA has managed to be profitable and to have produced something of a “revolving door” between its senior management and Deutsche Bank executives. For instance, KBRA’s top executive in Europe, Mauricio Noé, had previously been a Managing Director of Deutsche Bank’s London branch. In another example, Vice President for Credit Structuring at Deutsche Bank in New York, Ian Ross, was previously employed by KBRA and Yee Cent Wong, managing director of KBRA for CMBS, was previously Vice President of the Credit Solutions Group at Deutsche Bank Securities. Another managing director of KBRA, Bill Baneky, had previously served as Deutsche Bank’s Vice President and National Relationship Manager. One of KBRA’s senior managing directors, Rosemary Kelley, is also a former Deutsche Bank Vice President, while another, Ken Kockenmeister, was Deutsche Bank’s Director for Large Loan Securitization and Underwriting.

While they may not be the “biggest” credit-rating agency, KBRA analysts and executives frequently speak to media outlets where they comment on the state of various businesses, Deutsche Bank among them. Given the amount of overlap between Deutsche Bank and KBRA, it is unsurprising that KBRA has lobbied in the press on Deutsche’s behalf. For instance, KBRA analyst Christopher Whalen told Business Insider in 2016 that “The problem with Deutsche Bank may be the end of Merkel’s career,” adding that “The question is does she want to be remembered for doing the right thing — which is to provide support for the bank and diffuse the situation — or does she want to be remembered for standing by when one of the largest banks in Europe failed?”

Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Deutsche Bank go back decades, and potentially earlier. After working for Bear Stearns earlier in his career and then as a so-called “financial bounty hunter” with ties to intelligence-linked arms dealers and Wall Street, Epstein set up a Ponzi scheme with Steve Hoffenberg called Tower Financial, which collapsed in 1993 and subsequently landed Hoffenberg 20 years in prison. Epstein’s name, despite being a clear co-conspiractor, was suspiciously dropped from the case during the trial. Hoffenberg subsequently alleged that Epstein used his ill-gotten gains from Tower Financial alongside a series of suspect loans from Deutsche Bank to create his investment company.

Hoffenberg subsequently told The Observer the following:

“His lead bank is Deutsche Bank, Germany, that runs the lead on his financial trust company. They run the platform in the trading of the currencies for Epstein and with Epstein. He’s never disclosed to the investors that provide the money to Deutsche Bank his true legacy, that’s securities fraud.”

Following that point, Epstein’s financial activities, aside from his Deutsche Bank-enabled investment vehicle, were publicly conducted through Bear Stearns (until its 2008 collapse) and J.P. Morgan. When J.P. Morgan dropped Epstein as a client, he again turned to Deutsche Bank in 2013, becoming a client of the bank’s private wealth division in New York. Anti-money laundering compliance officers at the bank’s branches in New York and Florida subsequently flaggedEpstein’s accounts in 2015, in 2016 and again in 2019, creating suspicious activity reports regarding the movements of large amounts of funds tied to Epstein-linked accounts outside of the U.S.

However, the bank did not fully terminate their relationship with Epstein until June 2019, just a few weeks prior to his arrest last year. Epstein was believed to have dozens of accounts with the bank at one point and those accounts were shut down slowly over a period of several months beginning in late 2018.

Ties that Bind

The narrative emerging that Den Hollander was motivated to kill Esther Salas’ husband and sons due to his hatred of feminism is a rapid attempt to explain away a story that clearly warrants further investigation, albeit into avenues that mainstream media and powerful individuals in the public and private sectors prefer remain untouched.

As the heinous act targeting the Salas family has shown, individuals with a lot to lose are willing to go to the farthest extremes to keep the ties of Epstein to the financial sector and to intelligence out of sight and out of mind. Indeed, just last December, Epstein’s personal banker at Deutsche Bank, Thomas Bowers, the chief of Deutsche Bank’s Private Wealth Management division in New York from 2012 to 2015, was found dead in his home. His death was quickly ruled a suicide by hanging. Bowers had also signed off on “unorthodox” loans, not just for Epstein, but Donald Trump, who has his own ties to the Epstein scandal.

While some have been quick to point out that Trump (as well as his son-in-law Jared Kushner) could stand to lose from potential revelations in the Epstein-Deutsche Bank trial, there are other key power-brokers tied to both Epstein and Deutsche Bank who could also be feeling the heat. For instance, Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who became close to Epstein in the early 1990s and subsequently connected him to the Clinton White House and later to Alan Dershowitz, is intimately involved in the Deutsche Bank Microfinance Consortium.

Aside from Epstein’s use of the money, Deutsche Bank has been notorious for years as a cesspool of money launderingfor organized crime networks, paying $14.5 billion in fines in just seven years for official action taken against the bank by several governments. It is highly likely that the brutality of what happened outside the Salas family home on Sunday is more related to Deutsche Bank than Epstein, as numerous powerful individuals have ties to the embattled bank.

Even the recent move by Attorney General William Barr to remove SDNY District Attorney Geoffrey Berman from his post appears to be more related to Berman’s efforts to investigate Deutsche Bank than the Epstein scandal, as some have alleged. This is because Barr’s new pick for Berman’s old job counts Deutsche Bank among his former clients and notably defended the bank in a recent anti-money laundering probe, whereas Berman was investigating the bank (albeit for political reasons that took aim at the bank’s dealings with Trump).

While Epstein’s egregious and criminal actions targeting minors have now become public knowledge, in role in facilitating white collar crime, money laundering and financial frauds on behalf of corporations, governments and oligarchs remains sorely under-covered, despite his role in such activities preceding and continuing after his involvement in an intelligence-linked sexual blackmail operation.

It arguably remains one of the key components of the Epstein scandal, yet the most poorly understood and most under-investigated. If anything, the tragic events at the Salas family home on Sunday, and what appears to be a rapid yet shoddy cover-up of the shooter’s ties to Kroll Associates and actual motives, reveal that Epstein’s financial ties are more frightening to certain powerful individuals and institutions than his trove of sexual blackmail.

Why Freedom Is Ending

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

First, the force that is ending freedom will be identified and described; and, then, the force that they fear and hate the most (and are trying to destroy) will be identified and described.

THE FORCE THAT IS ENDING FREEDOM

The force that is ending freedom is empire.

Every empire is a dictatorship. No nation can be a democracy that’s either heading an empire, or a vassal-state of one. Obviously, in order to be a vassal-state within an empire, that nation is dictated-to by the nation of which it is a colony. However, even the domestic inhabitants of the colonizing nation cannot be free and living in a democracy, because their services are needed abroad in order to impose the occupying force upon the colony or vassal-nation. This is an important burden upon the ‘citizens’ or actually the subjects of the imperial nation. Furthermore, they need to finance, via their taxes, this occupying force abroad, to a sufficient extent so as to subdue any resistance by the residents in any colony.

Every empire is imposed, none is really voluntary. Conquest creates an empire, and the constant application of force maintains it. Every empire is a dictatorship, not only upon its foreign populations (which goes without saying, because otherwise there can’t be any empire), but upon its domestic ones too, upon its own subjects.

Any empire needs weapons-makers, who sell to the government and whose only markets are the imperial government and its vassal-nations or ‘allies’. By contrast, ‘enemy’ nations are ones that the imperial power has placed onto its priority-list of nations that are yet to become conquered.

There are two main reasons to conquer a nation:

One is in order to be enabled to extract, from the colony, oil, or gold, or some other valuable commodity.

The other is in order to control it so as to be enabled to use that land as a passageway for exporting, from a vassal-nation, to other nations, that vassal-nation’s products.

International trade is the basis for any empire, and the billionaires who own controlling blocs of stock in a nation’s international corporations are the actual rulers of it, the beneficiaries of empire, the recipients of the wealth that is being extracted from the colonies and from the domestic subjects. 

The idea of an empire is that the imperial nation’s rulers, its aristocracy, extract from the colonies their products, and they impose upon their domestic subjects the financial and military burdens of imposing their international dictatorship upon the foreign subjects.

Some authors say that there is a “Deep State” and that it consists of (some undefined elements within) the intelligence services, and of the military, and of the diplomatic corps, of any given dictatorship; but, actually, those employees of the State are merely employees, not the actual governing power, over that dictatorship.

The actual Deep State are always the aristocrats, themselves, the people who run the revolving door between ‘the private sector’ (the aristocracy’s corporations) and the government.

In former times, many of the aristocrats were themselves governing officials (the titled ‘nobility’), but this is no longer common. Nowadays, the aristocracy are the individuals who own controlling blocs of stock in international corporations (especially weapons-making firms such as Lockheed Martin and BAE, because the only markets for those corporations are the corporation’s own government and its vassal states or ‘allies’); and such individuals are usually the nation’s billionaires, and, perhaps, a few of the mere centi-millionaires. A small number, typically less than 100, of these extremely wealthy individuals, are the biggest donors to politicians, and to think tanks, and to other non-profits (these latter being also tax-write-offs to their donors, and so are tax-drains siphoning money away from the general public and paying the actual benefits, such as PR and increased control over the Government, to the billionaires) that are involved in the formation of the national government’s policies; and, of course, these billionaires also are owners of and/or advertisers in the propaganda-media, which sell the aristocracy’s core or most-essential viewpoints to the nation’s subjects, in order to persuade those voters to vote only for the aristocracy’s selected candidates, and not for any who oppose the aristocracy. These few, mainly but not exclusively billionaires, are the actual Deep State — the bosses over the dictatorship, the ultimate beneficiaries in any empire.

In order to maintain this system, of international dictatorship or empire, the most essential tool is deceit, of the electorate, by the aristocracy.   

The method of control is: the bought agents of the Deep State (including the major ‘news’-media, etc.) lie to the public about what their polices will be if they win, in order to be able to win power; and, then, once they have won power, they do the opposite, which is what they have always been paid by the Deep State (the aristocracy) to do. Thereby, elections aren’t “democratic” but instead ‘democratic’: they are mere formalities of democracy, without the substance of democracy, because there can be no democracy where truth is suppressed and lies are spread instead. All of the well-financed candidates for the top offices are actually the Deep State’s representatives, and virtually none are the representatives of the public, because the voters have been deceived, and were given (by the DNC and RNC) choices between two or more candidates, none of whom will represent the public, if and when elected. Individuals who want to represent the public instead of the aristocracy get drowned by the aristocracy’s campaign-money.

Here are some recent examples of this system — the imperial system, international dictatorship, in action — as shown by its results:

During Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign, he said, “The approach of fighting Assad and ISIS simultaneously was madness, and idiocy. They’re fighting each other and yet we’re fighting both of them. You know, we were fighting both of them. I think that our far bigger problem than Assad is ISIS, I’ve always felt that. Assad is, you know I’m not saying Assad is a good man, ’cause he’s not, but our far greater problem is not Assad, it’s ISIS. … I think, you can’t be fighting two people that are fighting each other, and fighting them together. You have to pick one or the other.” Assad is allied with Russia against the Sauds (who are the chief ally of the U.S. aristocracy), so the U.S. (in accord with a policy that George Herbert Walker Bush had initiated on 24 February 1990 and which has been carried out by all subsequent U.S. Presidents) was determined to overthrow Assad, but Trump said that he was strongly opposed to that policy.

Months before that, Trump had said: “I think Assad is a bad guy, a very bad guy, all right? Lots of people killed. I think we are backing people we have no idea who they are. The rebels, we call them the rebels, the patriotic rebels. We have no idea. A lot of people think, Hugh, that they are ISIS. We have to do one thing at a time. We can’t be fighting ISIS and fighting Assad. Assad is fighting ISIS. He is fighting ISIS. Russia is fighting now ISIS. And Iran is fighting ISIS. We have to do one thing at a time. We can’t go — and I watched Lindsey Graham, he said, I have been here for 10 years fighting. Well, he will be there with that thinking for another 50 years. He won’t be able to solve the problem. We have to get rid of ISIS first. After we get rid of ISIS, we’ll start thinking about it. But we can’t be fighting Assad. And when you’re fighting Assad, you are fighting Russia, you’re fighting — you’re fighting a lot of different groups. But we can’t be fighting everybody at one time.”

In that same debate (15 December 2015) he also said: “In my opinion, we’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly, if they were there and if we could’ve spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems; our airports and all of the other problems we’ve had, we would’ve been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now. We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East, we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away, and for what? It’s not like we had victory. It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized. A total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart.”

Did he do that? No. Did he instead intensify what Obama had been trying to do in Syria — overthrow Assad — yes. As the U.S. President, after having won the 2016 Presidential campaign, has Trump followed through on his criticism there, against the super-hawk, neoconservative, Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham? No. Did he instead encircle himself with precisely such super-hawks, such neoconservatives? Yes. Did he intensify the overthrow-Assad effort, as Graham and those others had advocated? Yes. Did America’s war against Syria succeed? Not yet. Did he constantly lie to the voters? Yes, without a doubt. Should that be grounds for impeaching him? A prior question to that one is actually: Would a President Mike Pence be any different or maybe even worse than Trump? If yes, then what would be achieved by removing Trump from office? Maybe it would actually make things a lot worse. But how likely would the U.S. Senate be to remove Trump from office if the House did impeach Trump? Two-thirds of the U.S. Senate would need to vote to remove the President in order for a President to be removed after being impeached by the House. A majority of U.S. Senators, 53 of them, were Republicans. If just 33 of them voted not to convict the President, then Trump wouldn’t be removed, and he wasn’t. In order to remove him, not only would all 47 of the Democrats and Independents have had to vote to convict, but 20 of the 53 Republicans would have needed to join them. That’s nearly 40% of the Republican Senators. How likely was that? Almost impossible. What would their voters who had elected them back home think of their having done such a thing? How likely would such Senators have then faced successful re-election challenges that would have removed those Senators from office? Would 20 of the 53 have been likely to take that personal risk? Why, then, were so many Democrats in the House pressing for Trump’s impeachment, since Trump’s being forced out of the White House this way was practically impossible and would only have installed a President Pence, even if it could have succeeded? Was that Democratic Party initiative anything else than insincere political theater, lying to their own gullible voters, Democratic Party voters, just being phonies who manipulated voters to vote for them, instead of who were actually serving them? Is that what democracy is, now: such insincere political theater? Is that “democracy”? America’s voters are trapped, by liars, so it’s instead mere ‘democracy’. It’s the new form of dictatorship. But it’s actually as ancient as is any empire. There’s nothing new about this — except for one thing: the U.S. regime is aiming to be the ultimate, the last, the final, empire, the ruler over the entire planet; so, it is trying especially hard, ‘to defend freedom, democracy and human rights throughout the world’, as Big Brother might say.

Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, was just as evil, and just as insincere, as Trump, but a far more skillful liar, who deceived his voters to think that he would fight corruption, work to improve relations with Russia, provide a public option in his health-insurance plan, and otherwise work to reduce economic inequality, to improve the economic situation for disadvantaged Americans, and to prosecute banksters. He abandoned each one of those stated objectives as soon as he won against John McCain, on 4 November 2008, and then yet more when he defeated Mitt Romney in 2012. And aren’t some of those promises the same ones that candidate Trump had also advocated and then abandoned as soon as he too was s‘elected’?

THE THREAT TO THE EMPIRE

Empire always depends upon lies; it is always built upon lies; and, so, the biggest threat to it is the truth, and especially the champions of truth, who are the whistleblowers. The whistleblowers are up against two enemies: the aristocracy, and the aristocrats’ agents who censor-out truth and leave only lies which the aristocracy’s agents spread to the public. Censorship always serves liars, because it is imposed from above and serves the aristocracy, against the public. Every dictatorship needs censorship. No democracy does.

The heroic fighters for the freedom of everyone in the world are the whistleblowers, who report to the public the corruption and evil that they see perpetrated by their superiors, their bosses, and perpetrated by people who are on the public payroll or otherwise obtaining increased income by virtue of being selected by the government to become government contractors to serve an allegedly public function. All liars with power hate whistleblowers, and want to make special examples of any part of the press that publishes their truths, their facts, their stolen documents. These documents are stolen because that’s the only way for them to become public and thereby known to the voters so that the voters can vote on the basis of truths as in a democracy, instead of to be deceived as in a dictatorship. Even if the truth is stolen from the liars, instead of being kept private (“Confidential”) for them, are the whistleblowers doing wrong to steal the truth from the liars? Or, instead, are the whistleblowers heroes: are they the authentic guardians of democracy, and the precariously thin wall that separates democracy from dictatorship? They are the latter: they are the true heroes. Unfortunately, the vast majority of such heroes are also martyrs — martyrs for truth, against lies. Every dictatorship seeks to destroy its whistleblowers. That’s because any whistleblower constitutes a threat to The System — the system of aristocratic control.

In all of U.S. history, the two Presidents who pursued whistleblowers and their publishers the most relentlessly have been Trump and Obama. The public are fooled to think that this is being done for ‘national security’ reasons instead of to hide the government’s crimes and criminality. However, not a single one of the Democratic Party’s many U.S. Presidential candidates is bringing this issue, of the U.S. government’s many crimes and constant lying, forward as being the central thing that must be criminalized above all else, as constituting “treason.” None of them is proposing legislation saying that it is treason, against the public — against the nation. Against the public.

Every aristocracy tries to deceive its public, in order to control its public; and every aristocracy uses divide-and-rule in order to do this; but it’s not only to divide the public against each other (such as between Republicans versus Democrats, both of which are actually controlled by the aristocracy), but also to divide between nations, such as between ‘allies’ versus ‘enemies’ — even when a given ‘enemy’ (such as Iraq in 2003) has never threatened, far less invaded, the United States (or whatever the given imperial ‘us’ may happen to be), and thus clearly this was aggressive war, and an international war-crime, though unpunished as such, because it was done by the empire. The public need to fear and hate some ‘enemy’ which is the ‘other’ or ‘alien’, in order not  to fear and loathe the aristocracy itself — the actual source of (and winner from) the systemic exploitation, of the public, by the aristocracy. It’s distract, and divide, and rule.

The pinnacle of the U.S. regime’s totalitarianism is its ceaseless assault against Julian Assange, who is the über-whistleblower, the strongest protector for whistleblowers, the safest publisher for the evidence that they steal from their employers and from their employers’ government. He hides the identity of the whistleblowers, even at the risk of his own continued existence. Right now, the U.S. regime is raising to a fever-pitch and twisting beyond recognition not only U.S. laws but the U.S. Constitution, so as to impose its will against him. President Trump is supported in this effort by the corrupt U.S. Congress, to either end Assange’s life, or else lock him up for the rest of his heroic life in a dungeon having no communication with the world outside, until he does finally die, in isolation, punishment for his heroic last-ditch fight for the public’s freedom and for democracy — his fight, actually, against our 1984 regime. What Jesus of Nazareth was locally to the Roman regime in his region, Assange is to the U.S. regime throughout the world: an example to terrify anyone else who might come forth effectively to challenge the Emperor’s authority.

A key country in this operation is Ecuador, which is ruled by the dictator Lenin Moreno, who stole office by lying to the public and pretending to be a progressive who backed his democratically elected predecessor, Rafael Correa, but then as soon as he won power, he reversed Correa’s progressive initiatives, including, above all, his protection of Assange, who had sought refuge in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London.

On 11 April 2019, RT headlined “Who is Lenin Moreno and why did he hand Assange over to British police?” and reported that:

Following his 2017 election, Moreno quickly moved away from his election platform after taking office. He reversed several key pieces of legislation passed under his predecessor which targeted the wealthy and the banks. He also reversed a referendum decision on indefinite re-election while simultaneously blocking any potential for Correa to return.

He effectively purged many of Correa’s appointments to key positions in Ecuador’s judiciary and National Electoral Council via the CPCCS-T council which boasts supra-constitutional powers.

Moreno has also cozied up to the US, with whom Ecuador had a strained relationship under Correa. Following a visit from Vice President Mike Pence in June 2018, Ecuador bolstered its security cooperation with the US, including major arms deals, training exercises and intelligence sharing.

Following Assange’s arrest Correa, who granted Assange asylum in the first place, described Moreno as the “greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history” saying he was guilty of a “crime that humanity will never forget.”

Despite his overwhelming power and influence, however, Moreno and his family are the subject of a sweeping corruption probe in the country, as he faces down accusations of money laundering in offshore accounts and shell companies in Panama, including the INA Investment Corp, which is owned by Moreno’s brother. 

Damning images, purportedly hacked from Moreno’s phone, have irreparably damaged both his attempts at establishing himself as an anti-corruption champion as well as his relationship with Assange, whom he accused of coordinating the hacking efforts.

On 14 April 2019, Denis Rogatyuk at The Gray Zone headlined “Sell Out: How Corruption, Voter Fraud and a Neoliberal Turn Led Ecuador’s Lenin to Give Up Assange

Desperate to ingratiate his government with Washington and distract the public from his mounting scandals, Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno has sacrificed Julian Assange – and his country’s independence”, and he described some of the documentation for the accusations that Moreno is corrupt. 

On 12 April 2019, Zero Hedge headlined “Facebook Removes Page Of Ecuador’s Former President On Same Day As Assange’s Arrest”, and opened: “Facebook has unpublished the page of Ecuador’s former president, Rafael Correa, the social media giant confirmed on Thursday, claiming that the popular leftist leader violated the company’s security policies.”

On 16 April 2019, Jonathan Turley bannered “‘He Is Our Property’: The D.C. Establishment Awaits Assange With A Glee And Grudge”, and opened:

They will punish Assange for their sins

The key to prosecuting Assange has always been to punish him without again embarrassing the powerful figures made mockeries by his disclosures. That means to keep him from discussing how the U.S. government concealed alleged war crimes and huge civilian losses, the type of disclosures that were made in the famous Pentagon Papers case. He cannot discuss how Democratic and Republican members either were complicit or incompetent in their oversight. He cannot discuss how the public was lied to about the program.

A glimpse of that artificial scope was seen within minutes of the arrest. CNN brought on its national security analyst, James Clapper, former director of national intelligence. CNN never mentioned that Clapper was accused of perjury in denying the existence of the National Security Agency surveillance program and was personally implicated in the scandal that WikiLeaks triggered.

Clapper was asked directly before Congress, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

Clapper responded, “No, sir. … Not wittingly.” Later, Clapper said his testimony was “the least untruthful” statement he could make.

That would still make it a lie, of course, but this is Washington and people like Clapper are untouchable. In the view of the establishment, Assange is the problem.

On 11 April 2019, the YouGov polling organization headlined “53% of Americans say Julian Assange should be extradited to America”.

On 13 April 2019, I headlined “What Public Opinion on Assange Tells Us About the US Government Direction”, and reported the only international poll that had ever been done of opinions about Assange. Its findings demonstrated that, out of the 23 nations which were surveyed, U.S. was the only one where the public were anti-Assange, and that the difference between the U.S. and all of the others was enormous and stark. The report opened:

The only extensive poll of public opinion regarding Julian Assange or Wikileaks was Reuters/Ipsos on 26 April 2011, “WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is not a criminal: global poll”, and it sampled around a thousand individuals in each of 23 countries — a total of 18,829 respondents. The Reuters news-report was vague, and not linked to any detailed presentation of the poll-findings, but it did say that “U.S. respondents had a far more critical view” against Wikileaks than in any other country, and that the view by Americans was 69% “believing Assange should be charged and 61 percent opposing WikiLeaks’ mission.” Buried elsewhere on the Web was this detailed presentation of Ipsos’s findings in that poll. Here are what those findings were:

https://www.slideshare.net/mediapiac/julian-assange-and-wiki-leaks

Oppose Wikileaks:

61% U.S.

38% UK

33% Canada

32% Poland

32% Belgium

31% Saudi Arabia

30% Japan

30% France

27% Indonesia

26% Italy

25% Germany

24% Sweden

24% Australia

22% Hungary

22% Brazil

21% Turkey

21% S. Korea

16% Mexico

16% Argentina

15% Spain

15% Russia

15% India

12% S. Africa

Is the U.S. a democracy if the regime is so effective in gripping the minds of its public, as to make them hostile to the strongest fighter for their freedom and democracy?

On 13 April 2019, washingtonsblog headlined “4 Myths About Julian Assange DEBUNKED”, and here was one of them:

Myth #2: Assange Will Get a Fair Trial In the U.S.

14-year CIA officer John Kiriakou notes:

Assange has been charged in the Eastern District of Virginia — the so-called “Espionage Court.” That is just what many of us have feared. Remember, no national security defendant has ever been found not guilty in the Eastern District of Virginia. The Eastern District is also known as the “rocket docket” for the swiftness with which cases are heard and decided. Not ready to mount a defense? Need more time? Haven’t received all of your discovery? Tough luck. See you in court.

… I have long predicted that Assange would face Judge Leonie Brinkema were he to be charged in the Eastern District. Brinkema handled my case, as well as CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling’s. She also has reserved the Ed Snowden case for herself. Brinkema is a hanging judge.

On 20 May 2019, former British Ambassador Craig Murray (who had quit so that he could blow the whistle) headlined “The Missing Step” and argued that the only chance that Assange now has is if Sweden refuses to extradite Assange to the U.S. in the event that Britain honors the Swedish request to extradite him to Sweden instead of to the U.S. (Sweden, however, subsequently dropped its charge against Assange, and so now only Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are keeping him imprisoned until he will die.)

How can it reasonably be denied that the U.S. is, in fact (though not nominally) a dictatorship? All of its allies are thus vassal-nations in its empire. This means acquiescence (if not joining) in some of the U.S. regime’s frequent foreign coups and invasions; and this means their assisting in the spread of the U.S. regime’s control beyond themselves, to include additional other countries. It reduces the freedom, and the democracy, throughout the world; it spreads the U.S. dictatorship internationally. That is what is evil about what in America is called “neoconservatism” and in other countries is called simply “imperialism.” Under American reign, it is now a spreading curse, a political plague, to peoples throughout the world. Even an American whistleblower about Ukraine who lives in the former Ukraine is being targeted by the U.S. regime.

This is how the freedom of everyone is severely threatened, by the U.S. empire — the most deceitful empire that the world has ever experienced. The martyrs to its lies are the canaries in its coal mine. They are the first to be eliminated.

Looking again at the top of that rank-ordered list of 23 countries, one sees the U.S. and eight of its main allies (or vassal-nations), in order: U.S., UK, Canada, Poland, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Japan, France, Indonesia. These are countries whose subjects (‘citizens’) are already well-controlled by the empire. They already are vassals, and so these nations are ordained (accepted by America’s aristocracy) as being ‘allies’.

At the opposite end (as of 2011, when that poll was taken), starting with the most anti-U.S-regime, were: S. Africa, India, Russia, Spain, Argentina, Mexico, S. Korea, Turkey. These were countries where the subjects were not yet well-controlled by the empire, even though the current government in some of them is trying to change its subjects’ minds so that the country will accept U.S. rule. Wherever the subjects reject U.S. rule, there exists a strong possibility that the nation will become placed on the U.S. regime’s list of ‘enemies’ and be subjected to at least attempts at “regime-change.” Consequently, wherever the residents are the most opposed to U.S. rule, the likelihood of an American coup or invasion is real. The first step toward a coup or invasion is the imposition of sanctions against the nation. Any such nation that is already subject to them is therefore already in severe danger. Any such nation that refuses to cooperate with the U.S. regime’s existing sanctions — such as against trading with Russia, China, Iran, or Venezuela — is in danger of becoming itself a U.S.-sanctioned nation, and therefore officially an ‘enemy’ of today’s version of nazism (as Nuremberg defined it: imperialistic fascism).

And this is why freedom and democracy are ending.

Unless and until the U.S. regime itself becomes conquered — either domestically by a second successful American Revolution (this one to eliminate the domestic aristocracy instead of to eliminate a foreign one), or else by a World War III in which the U.S. regime becomes destroyed even worse than the opposing alliance will — the existing insatiable empire will continue to be on the war-path to impose its dictatorship to everyone on this planet.

The force that is ending freedom is empire, and it’s now being wielded by the U.S.A. Like all empires, it thrives on lies, and therefore its biggest enemies are whistleblowers.

Project Venezuela: Right-wing activists push Wikipedia to blacklist MintPress, other alternative media

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A group of right-wing Venezuelans has managed to ban the use of a range of alternative media outlets covering Venezuela, including MintPress News.

By Alan MacLeod

Source: Intrepid Report

Still unable to convince a sufficient number of their countryfolk to support them, the Venezuelan opposition has turned their efforts towards convincing an international audience—primarily Americans—to support their cause. Part of that is spending inordinate amounts of time online, arguing in English on social media, creating bot networks, and editing Wikipedia articles. Many Wikipedia articles on Venezuela are particularly biased towards the opposition, containing numerous inaccuracies, falsehoods and non-sequiturs.

Now, according to The Grayzone, a group of right-wing Venezuelans has managed to ban the use of a range of alternative media outlets that do not comport with their views. These include MintPress (already blackballed by Wikipedia), The Grayzone, and the much-lauded independent news site Venezuelanalysis, the most extensive English-language resource on the country available. One user in particular, ZiaLater, a member of a group called “Project Venezuela” who control and moderate content related to the country, was the catalyst for the banning of the sites taking an anti-imperialist stance. Some members of Project Venezuela spend long hours changing Venezuela-related pages so they are more critical of the government and sympathetic to the opposition.

Policing the narrative

Wikipedia suggests using corporate-funded mainstream sources who they feel are “generally reliable.” However, on Venezuela, these same outlets closely resemble and parrot U.S. regime change propaganda. For example, CNN, the BBC, and the Daily Telegraph all reported the blatant falsehood that the Venezuelan government burned aid trucks trying to enter the country last year. In reality, it was the opposition themselves that burned their own trucks, as immediately reported by The Grayzone, MintPress News, and other outlets who were actually there. Multiple well-circulated live streams also showed the event in real-time. However, that was all ignored. The New York Times, a site recommended by Wikipedia for citation, currently employs a journalist covering Venezuela who openly admitted to me on tape that he considers himself a “mercenary” and deliberately plants outrageously exaggerated stories into Western media to push his goals. Other journalists told me that their colleagues consider it their number one mission to overthrow the Maduro government.

In 2017, The Washington Post published an article openly calling for a violent coup in the country, and currently employs a Venezuelan journalist who resigned from The New York Times, saying, “Too much of my lifestyle is bound up with opposition activism” that he “can’t possibly be neutral.” Meanwhile, The Guardian described Oscar Perez, a local ex-soldier who hijacked a helicopter and used it to bomb parliament buildings as a “patriot,” and even pushing the debunked conspiracy theory that Perez was a “government plant.” They have not retracted it, nor apologized. This is just a minor sampling of the opposition propaganda disguised as objective reporting pumped out constantly by corporate media.

“The media coverage of Venezuela is about as terrible as for any country in the world, except possibly for Palestine. It is utterly biased, misleading and distorted,” said Dan Beeton, an economist and Latin America specialist from the Center for Economic Policy Research. “The gap between the image and the reality of Venezuela,” said professor William I. Robinson of the University of California, Santa Barbara, “is so enormous that it is unfathomable.”

In contrast, MintPress has a number of experienced contributors based in Latin America, including Camila Escalante and Ollie Vargas. I myself have published a Ph.D., book, and five peer-reviewed studies in academic journals on the country and find myself in the mainstream of academic thought. Yet the chasm between how specialists see the country and how it is reported in media is so large that we appear ultra-partisan in comparison to the corporate monolith.

A tool to propagate the biases of the ruling elite

While the popular view of Wikipedia is that it is a collective public undertaking that anyone and everyone can add to, in reality, the online encyclopedia has come to mirror the inequalities present in society. The more edits you do, the more power, prestige and influence you accrue, allowing individuals to wield unreasonable power over the world’s 13th most visited website. A class of powerful editors has emerged, who spend hours every day editing and changing content how they see fit. There are strong suspicions that governments and other wealthy organizations are paying people—or teams of people using the same account—to moderate the site full-time, and these power users openly advertise their services to corporations or other groups who want to sanitize or promote their image by changing their pages. Because these users have climbed the Wikipedia hierarchy, their edits become law and are very difficult to overrule.

The CIA has been exposed changing the pages of politically sensitive topics, such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, an FBI computer was spotted editing the entry on Guantanamo Bay, while the NYPD amended Eric Garner’s page and even tried to remove pages focussing on police brutality. Israeli groups are also active on the site, conducting an information war, trying to improve the country’s image. The Guardian revealed they even gave out awards and prizes like free balloon rides for those selected as the “best Zionist editor.”

Thus, the site has effectively been turned into “a tool to propagate the reigning ideology and biases of the ruling elites,” in the words of former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges. As Wikipedia has shown little interest in opposing the site being slowly taken over by organized groups, it is unlikely that the mass blacklisting will be overturned.

What Did U.S. Intel Really Know About the ‘Chinese’ Virus?

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By Pepe Escobar

Source: Information Clearing House

Hybrid War 2.0 on China, a bipartisan U.S. operation, is already reaching fever pitch. Its 24/7 full spectrum infowar arm blames China for everything coronavirus-related – doubling as a diversionist tactic against any informed criticism of woeful American unpreparedness.

Hysteria predictably reigns. And this is just the beginning.

A deluge of lawsuits is imminent – such as the one in the Southern District of Florida entered by Berman Law Group (linked to the Democrats) and Lucas-Compton (linked to the Republicans). In a nutshell: China has to shell out tons of cash. To the tune of at least $1.2 trillion, which happens to be – by surrealist irony – the amount of U.S. Treasury bills held by Beijing, all the way to $20 trillion, claimed by a lawsuit in Texas.

The prosecution’s case, as Scott Ritter memorably reminded us, is straight out of Monty Python. It works exactly like this:

“If she weighs the same as a duck…

…she’s made of wood!”

“And therefore…”

“A witch!!!!!”

In Hybrid War 2.0 terms, the current CIA-style narrative translates as evil China never telling us, the civilized West, there was a terrible new virus around. If they did, we would have had time to prepare.

And yet they lied and cheated – by the way, trademark CIA traits, according to Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo himself. And they hid everything. And they censored the truth. So they wanted to infect us all. Now they have to pay for all the economic and financial damage we are suffering, and for all our dead people. It’s China’s fault.

All this sound and fury forces us to refocus back to late 2019 to check out what U.S. intel really knew then about what would later be identified as Sars-Cov-2.

“No such product exists”

The gold standard remains the ABC News report according to which intel collected in November 2019 by the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), a subsidiary of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was already warning about a new virulent contagion getting out of hand in Wuhan, based on “detailed analysis of intercepted communications and satellite imagery”.

An unnamed source told ABC, “analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event”, adding the intel was “briefed multiple times” to the DIA, the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even the White House.

No wonder the Pentagon was forced to issue the proverbial denial – in Pentagonese, via one Col. R. Shane Day, the director of the DIA’s NCMI: “In the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists.”

Well, if such “product” existed, Pentagon head and former Raytheon lobbyist Mark Esper would be very much in the loop. He was duly questioned about it by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

Question: “Did the Pentagon receive an intelligence assessment on COVID in China last November from the National Center for Medical Intelligence of DIA?”

Esper: “Oh, I can’t recall, George,” (…) “But, we have many people who watch this closely.”

Question: “This assessment was done in November, and it was briefed to the NSC in early December to assess the impact on military readiness, which, of course, would make it important to you, and the possible spread in the United States. So, you would have known if there was a brief to the National Security Council in December, wouldn’t you?”

Esper: “Yes (…) “I’m not aware of that.”

So “no such product exists” then? Is it a fake? Is it a Deep State/CIA concoction to trap Trump? Or are the usual suspects lying, trademark CIA style?

Let’s review some essential background. On November 12, a married couple from Inner Mongolia was admitted to a Beijing hospital, seeking treatment for pneumonic plague.

The Chinese CDC, on Weibo – the Chinese Twitter – told public opinion that the chances of this being a new plague were “extremely low.” The couple was quarantined.

Four days later, a third case of pneumonic plague was identified: a man also from Inner Mongolia, not related to the couple. Twenty-eight people who were in close contact with the man were quarantined. None had plague symptoms. Pneumonic plague has symptoms of respiratory failure similar to pneumonia.

Even though the CDC repeated, “there is no need to worry about the risk of infection”, of course there was plenty of skepticism. The CDC may have publicly confirmed on November 12 these cases of pneumonic plague. But then Li Jifeng, a doctor at Chaoyang Hospital where the trio from Inner Mongolia was receiving treatment, published, privately, on WeChat, that they were first transported to Beijing actually on November 3.

The key point of Li Jinfeng’s post – later removed by censors – was when she wrote, “I am very familiar with diagnosing and treating the majority of respiratory diseases (…) But this time, I kept on looking but could not figure out what pathogen caused the pneumonia. I only thought it was a rare condition and did not get much information other than the patients’ history.”

Even if that was the case, the key point is that the three Inner Mongolian cases seem to have been caused by a detectable bacteria. Covid-19 is caused by the Sars-Cov-2 virus, not a bacteria. The first Sars-Covid-2 case was only detected in Wuhan in mid to late December. And it was only last month that Chinese scientists were able to positively trace back the first real case of Sars-Cov-2 to November 17 – a few days after the Inner Mongolian trio.

Knowing exactly where to look

It’s out of the question that U.S. intel, in this case the NCMI, was unaware of these developments in China, considering CIA spying and the fact these discussions were in the open on Weibo and WeChat. So if the NCMI “product” is not a fake and really exists, it only found evidence, still in November, of some vague instances of pneumonic plague.

Thus the warning – to the DIA, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and even the White House – was about that. It could not possibly have been about coronavirus.

The burning question is inevitable: how could the NCMI possibly know all about a viral pandemic, still in November, when Chinese doctors positively identified the first cases of a new type of pneumonia only on December 26?

Add to it the intriguing question of why the NCMI was so interested in this particular flu season in China in the first place – from plague cases treated in Beijing to the first signs of a “mysterious pneumonia outbreak” in Wuhan.

There may have been subtle hints of slightly increased activity at clinics in Wuhan in late November and early December. But at the time nobody – Chinese doctors, the government, not to mention U.S. intel – could have possibly known what was really happening.

China could not be “covering up” what was only identified as a new disease on December 30, duly communicated to the WHO. Then, on January 3, the head of the American CDC, Robert Redfield, called the top Chinese CDC official. Chinese doctors sequenced the virus. And only on January 8 it was determined this was Sars-Cov-2 – which provokes Covid-19.

This chain of events reopens, once again, a mighty Pandora’s box. We have the quite timely Event 201; the cozy relationship between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the WHO, as well as the World Economic Forum and the Johns Hopkins galaxy in Baltimore, including the Bloomberg School of Public Health; the ID2020 digital ID/vaccine combo; Dark Winter – which simulated a smallpox bio-attack on the U.S., before the 2001 anthrax attack being blamed on Iraq; U.S. Senators dumping stocks after a CDC briefing; more than 1,300 CEOs abandoning their cushy perches in 2019, “forecasting” total market collapse; the Fed pouring helicopter money already in September 2019 – as part of QE4.

And then, validating the ABC News report, Israel steps in. Israeli intel confirms U.S. intel did in fact warn them in November about a potentially catastrophic pandemic in Wuhan (once again: how could they possibly know that on the second week of November, so early in the game?) And NATO allies were warned – in November – as well.

The bottom line is explosive: the Trump administration as well as the CDC had an advance warning of no less than four months – from November to March – to be properly prepared for Covid-19 hitting the U.S. And they did nothing. The whole “China is a witch!” case is debunked.

Moreover, the Israeli disclosure supports what’s nothing less than extraordinary: U.S. intel already knew about Sars-Cov-2 roughly one month before the first confirmed cases detected by doctors in a Wuhan hospital. Talk about divine intervention.

That could only have happened if U.S. intel knew, for sure, about a previous chain of events that would necessarily lead to the “mysterious outbreak” in Wuhan. And not only that: they knew exactly where to look. Not in Inner Mongolia, not in Beijing, not in Guangdong province.

It’s never enough to repeat the question in full: how could U.S. intel have known about a contagion one month before Chinese doctors detected an unknown virus?

Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo may have given away the game when he said, on the record, that Covid-19 was a “live exercise”. Adding to the ABC News and Israeli reports, the only possible, logical conclusion is that the Pentagon – and the CIA – knew ahead of time a pandemic would be inevitable.

That’s the smokin’ gun. And now the full weight of the United States government is covering all bases by proactively, and retroactively, blaming China.

Why You Should Oppose The Censorship Of David Icke (Hint: It’s Got Nothing To Do With Icke)

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Waking Times

Within 48 hours both Facebook and then Youtube have deleted the accounts of David Icke for posting “content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO and the NHS.” Other platforms may soon fall in suit, as they did with Alex Jones in 2018.

This article is not about David Icke. I will say it again in italics for the especially dense: this article is not about David Icke. This article is about why we shouldn’t be okay with monopolistic billionaire-owned Silicon Valley tech giants with extensive ties to US government agencies controlling human communication.

I know next to nothing about David Icke, and I have done exactly zero research into his views for this article; for all I know he’s every bit the raving lunatic the narrative managers say he is. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re seeing a consistent and accelerating pattern of powerful plutocratic institutions collaborating with the US-centralized empire to control what ideas people around the world are permitted to share with each other, and it’s a very unsafe trajectory. Making this conversation about Icke and his views distracts from the very important topic we need to actually focus on discussing.

Journalist Matt Taibbi recently wrote an excellent essay about the dangers inherent in the increased demand we’ve been seeing for more censorship and deplatforming during the coronavirus pandemic, correctly arguing that more authoritarian control over the ideas people are allowed to discuss is vastly more dangerous than the ideas themselves.

“The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant,” Taibbi writes. “It’s astonishing that they don’t see this.”

“Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less restrictive Swedish crisis response has merit, or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis might have been off, we’re denouncing the questions themselves as infamous,” says Taibbi.

Taibbi argues against the increasingly normalized trend of elevating “authoritative” content while silencing content which does not wear that magical label in an attempt to fight disinformation. If you examine which content is considered “authoritative”, you’ll find a bunch of outlets who have consistently lied to the world about war after war, who spent years promoting the baseless conspiracy theory that Vladimir Putin had infiltrated and secured control over the executive branch of the US government, who consistently normalize a status quo which is wholly incompatible with the surviving and thriving of life on this planet.

Google, who owns Youtube, has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has called on the government to take “a more active role” in regulating “harmful content”, and has been actively collaborating with government agencies and government-funded think tanks to decide what content to remove. Social media executives are now routinely called before government hearings and lectured about the need to increase censorship under the implicit threat of antitrust cases being brought to bear. These massive corporations now consistently censor with an extreme bias against governments which refuse to bow to the demands of the US government and its allies.

In 2017, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.”

“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

Whenever anyone objects to censorship on these massive platforms they’re always told that those platforms are private companies who are free to do what they like on their private property, but how “private” is a corporation that is interlaced with government power with increasing inseparability? The reality is that in a corporatist system of government with vanishingly few meaningful distinctions between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship.

Proponents of increased internet censorship have already openly conceded this point. A recent Atlantic article by two legal professors subtitled “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong”, the case is made that western internet censorship will necessarily involve a collaboration with “private” corporations and government power.

“As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China,” the article’s authors favorably argue. “Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.”

Apart from the fact that they are here claiming that increasingly authoritarian speech control is good and necessary, these two bootlickers are absolutely correct. Human communication is indeed being controlled using the so-called “private sector” to circumvent constitutional limitations which prohibit the government from censoring speech directly.

These Silicon Valley tech corporations have ensured their continued monopolistic dominance by demonstrating their willingness to collaborate with establishment power structures, so there are no platforms of anywhere near the same size and influence that people can move to if they don’t feel like letting government-tied plutocrats police what thoughts are permitted to enter into their minds. This has given this corporate-government alliance the ability to control the thoughts that people are allowed to share, discuss and think about in the same way totalitarian governments can, with the false mask of freedom plastered over it.

A truly free being does not need an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to protect their mind from David Icke. A truly free being does not want an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to exert any control whatsoever over what ideas they are permitted to share and what thoughts they are permitted to think. A truly free being opposes with all their might any attempt to lock in a paradigm where human communication (and thereby thought) is controlled by vast unaccountable power structures which benefit from the absence of dissent.

Be a truly free being. Oppose this intrusion into your mental sovereignty.

COVID-19 and the CIA’s Biological Warfare on Cuba

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Maybe it was a plan that went horribly wrong, something they could no longer control. Was the Corona virus or COVID-19 spread intentionally? What if this virus was used against China as a weapon of choice to destabilize China’s economy and push back against China’s growing influence? We don’t know for sure, but it is possible. Investigations are ongoing. Nothing has not been confirmed. But what has been confirmed is what history has taught us given the facts on how the use of biological warfare for various purposes, against many peoples and nations has been happening for some time. One of the most well-known incidents of biological warfare occurred in 1763, the British Empire had planned and successfully managed to spread smallpox virus to the Native Americans during the Pontiac Rebellion in Pennsylvania. Chief Pontiac of the Ottowa launched an attack on Fort Detroit, a British military base. Other nations joined the rebellion including the Senecas, the Hurons, Delawares, and Miamis. As the war raged, an Indian delegation asked the British to surrender, but they refused, however, the British offered gifts including food, alcohol and material items that included two blankets and a handkerchief from people who had smallpox. Although the American Indians had experienced the disease in the past, the idea was to spread the disease among the Native American populations in an attempt to push back the rebellion or to defeat it once and for all. Another example of biological warfare was when Imperial Japan before and during World War II had a bio-weapons program that managed to drop numerous bombs on a number of Chinese cities from airplanes killing an estimated 580,000 Chinese people with bombs that were made of infected fleas, some even contained cholera and shigella during the Sino-Japanese war between the 1930′s and 1940′s.

In 1981, the CIA with help from U.S. military had launched an operation against Cuba by unleashing a strain of Dengue Fever also known as “hemorrhagic fever’ effecting more than 273,000 people killing 158 including 101 children. On September 6, 1981, The New York Times reported on Fidel Castro’s comments regarding the U.S. government in particularly, blaming the CIA for the outbreak when he said that ”we urge the United States Government to define its policy in this field, to say whether the C.I.A. will or will not be authorized again- or has already been authorized – to organize attacks against leaders of the revolution and to use plagues against our plants, our animals and our people.” The report said that the “epidemic of dengue fever that has made 340,000 people ill and has killed about 150″ but the State Department under-then President Ronald Reagan stated that “Mr. Castro’s charges of possible United States involvement in the epidemic were ”totally without foundation.” The State department quickly blamed the Castro’s revolution as a failure:

The Cuban Government has always tried to blame the United States for its failures and its internal problems,” the department said. ”The Cuban revolution is a failure, and it is obviously easier to blame external forces like the United States than to admit those failures

Dr, Ronald St. John, chief of communicable diseases for the Pan American Health Organization was interviewed by the New York Times said that “for the first time, so-called dengue-2 spread to Cuba.” Dr. St. John claimed that it is common in Southeast Asia and that it produces “the same symptoms as the other three” and that ”if you get a wave of dengue-1, dengue-3 or dengue-4 and then another wave of type 2, this is a bad combination.” Dengue-2 causes you too loose body fluids causing shocks that can lead to eventually death. Convenient for the CIA who saw it as an opportunity to cause panic on Cuba which is located in one of the most hot and humid regions in the world. However, The New York Times managed to downplay Cuba’s accusation’s by ending the story by blaming the spread of the disease on returning Cuban troops from Africa and other people from other parts of the Caribbean who might have brought Dengue fever into Cuba:

Some State Department officials believe the introduction of dengue-2 into Cuba is a result of the return to Cuba of troops who had been stationed in Angola or elsewhere in Africa, where the strain is found. But Dr. St. John said dengue-2 had been found in other parts of the Caribbean and might have been carried to Cuba from there or elsewhere overseas

Reports suggested that Cuba had a very small number of cases in 1944, and again in 1977. The 1981 outbreak was blamed on covert flyover operations conducted by the CIA with military owned airplanes, you know, the same airplanes that were most probably used against Nicaragua’s Sandinistas to transport weapons and other materials to the Contras around the same time. Since the 20th century, the U.S. has been the leader in developing various biological and chemical weapons through the U.S. Army’s Biological Warfare Laboratories based at Fort Detrick, Maryland since the late 1940′s, around the start of the Cold War. The U.S. biological warfare program that supposedly ended in 1969 developed a handful of biological weapons ready for use including anthrax, Q-fever and botulism and conducted research in hopes of weaponizing diseases including smallpox, Hantavirus, Lassa fever, yellow fever, typhus, dengue fever and the bird flu among them. An article from August 6, 2019 on Fort Detrick from the UK’s ‘The Independent’ titled ‘Research into deadly viruses and biological weapons at US army lab shut down over fears they could escape’ last August. Ironically, Secretary of State and Neocon Mike Pompeo called it the “Wuhan virus” since they blame China for the outbreak, but it seems that the U.S. had its own problems when it comes to their own labs who conduct research with the most deadly viruses:

America’s main biological warfare lab has been ordered to stop all research into the deadliest viruses and pathogens over fears contaminated waste could leak out of the facility. Fort Detrick, in Maryland, has been the epicentre of the US Army’s bioweapons research since the beginning of the Cold War. But last month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – the government’s public health body – stripped the base of its license to handle highly restricted “select agents”, which includes Ebola, smallpox and anthrax

The story was basically about the CDC who inspected Fort Detrick and found problems with new procedures used to decontaminate waste water. The article says that Fort Detrick continued its research for defensive purposes to “protect the warfighter from biological threats” although the U.S. declared that it abandoned their biological weapons program since 1969:

Although the United States officially abandoned its biological weapons programme in 1969, Fort Detrick has continued defensive research into deadly pathogens on the list of “select agents”, including the Ebola virus, the organisms that cause the plague, and the highly toxic poison ricin. The army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, based at Fort Detrick, says its primary mission today is to “protect the warfighter from biological threats” but its scientists also investigate outbreaks of disease among civilians and other threats to public health. In recent years it has been involved in testing possible vaccines for Ebola, after several epidemics of the deadly virus in Africa 

Sooner or later, the truth will come out. I believe that the U.S. government knows how COVID-19 began and where it was going. The U.S. government and major corporate arms manufacturers and the rest of the Military-Industrial Complex is no stranger to biological weapons adding to their arsenal of nuclear and chemical weapons at their disposal which makes them, much more dangerous. The truth about COVID-19 will eventually come out. In the meantime, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, a war against Russia, China, Iran or Venezuela is in the works and a coming economic crisis with an election coming this November seems like 2020 will be the year of a perfect storm.