Tuesday, November 7, 2017

HuffPo Yanks Article On Russiagate Hysteria By Award Winning Journalist Joe Lauria – So Here It Is

Award winning journalist and UN correspondent of 25 years, Joe Lauria, penned an outstanding article on the origins of “Russiagate” which he published to the liberal Huffington Post this week.

24 hours later, HuffPo yanked the article – leaving a dead link and a sad message in its place.

Perhaps the insights offered in the article didn’t quite conform to HuffPo’s approved narratives, or maybe it has something to do with Lauria’s new book “How I Lost By Hillary Clinton,” with a forward written by Julian Assange.

Considering Joe Lauria’s tenure as the Wall St. Journal’s UN correspondent of nearly seven years, as well as the Boston Globe’s for six – covering just about every major world crisis over the past quarter century, his unique perspective on the matter merits a read.

Reproduced below for your edification:

The Democratic Money Behind Russia-gate

As Russia-gate continues to buffet the Trump administration, we now know that the “scandal” started with Democrats funding the original dubious allegations of Russian interference, notes Joe Lauria.

By Joe Lauria

The two sources that originated the allegations claiming that Russia meddled in the 2016 election — without providing convincing evidence — were both paid for by the Democratic National Committee, and in one instance also by the Clinton campaign: the Steele dossier and the CrowdStrike analysis of the DNC servers. Think about that for a minute.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

We have long known that the DNC did not allow the FBI to examine its computer server for clues about who may have hacked it – or even if it was hacked – and instead turned to CrowdStrike, a private company co-founded by a virulently anti-Putin Russian. Within a day, CrowdStrike blamed Russia on dubious evidence.

And, it has now been disclosed that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for opposition research memos written by former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele using hearsay accusations from anonymous Russian sources to claim that the Russian government was blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump in a scheme that presupposed that Russian President Vladimir Putin foresaw Trump’s presidency years ago when no one else did.

Since then, the U.S. intelligence community has struggled to corroborate Steele’s allegations, but those suspicions still colored the thinking of President Obama’s intelligence chiefs who, according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, “hand-picked” the analysts who produced the Jan. 6 “assessment” claiming that Russia interfered in the U.S. election.

In other words, possibly all of the Russia-gate allegations, which have been taken on faith by Democratic partisans and members of the anti-Trump Resistance, trace back to claims paid for or generated by Democrats.

If for a moment one could remove the sometimes justified hatred that many people feel toward Trump, it would be impossible to avoid the impression that the scandal may have been cooked up by the DNC and the Clinton camp in league with Obama’s intelligence chiefs to serve political and geopolitical aims.

Absent new evidence based on forensic or documentary proof, we could be looking at a partisan concoction devised in the midst of a bitter general election campaign, a manufactured “scandal” that also has fueled a dangerous New Cold War against Russia; a case of a dirty political “oppo” serving American ruling interests in reestablishing the dominance over Russia that they enjoyed in the 1990s, as well as feeding the voracious budgetary appetite of the Military-Industrial Complex.

Though lacking independent evidence of the core Russia-gate allegations, the “scandal” continues to expand into wild exaggerations about the impact of a tiny number of social media pages suspected of having links to Russia but that apparently carried very few specific campaign messages. (Some pages reportedly were devoted to photos of puppies.)

‘Cash for Trash’

Based on what is now known, Wall Street buccaneer Paul Singer paid for GPS Fusion, a Washington-based research firm, to do opposition research on Trump during the Republican primaries, but dropped the effort in May 2016 when it became clear Trump would be the GOP nominee. GPS Fusion has strongly denied that it hired Steele for this work or that the research had anything to do with Russia.

Couple walking along the Kremlin, Dec. 7, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)

Then, in April 2016 the DNC and the Clinton campaign paid its Washington lawyer Marc Elias to hire Fusion GPS to unearth dirt connecting Trump to Russia. This was three months before the DNC blamed Russia for hacking its computers and supposedly giving its stolen emails to WikiLeaks to help Trump win the election.

“The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee retained Fusion GPS to research any possible connections between Mr. Trump, his businesses, his campaign team and Russia, court filings revealed this week,” The New York Times reported on Friday night.

So, linking Trump to Moscow as a way to bring Russia into the election story was the Democrats’ aim from the start.

Fusion GPS then hired ex-MI6 intelligence agent Steele, it says for the first time, to dig up that dirt in Russia for the Democrats. Steele produced classic opposition research, not an intelligence assessment or conclusion, although it was written in a style and formatted to look like one.

It’s important to realize that Steele was no longer working for an official intelligence agency, which would have imposed strict standards on his work and possibly disciplined him for injecting false information into the government’s decision-making. Instead, he was working for a political party and a presidential candidate looking for dirt that would hurt their opponent, what the Clintons used to call “cash for trash” when they were the targets.

Had Steele been doing legitimate intelligence work for his government, he would have taken a far different approach. Intelligence professionals are not supposed to just give their bosses what their bosses want to hear. So, Steele would have verified his information. And it would have gone through a process of further verification by other intelligence analysts in his and perhaps other intelligence agencies. For instance, in the U.S., a National Intelligence Estimate requires vetting by all 17 intelligence agencies and incorporates dissenting opinions.

Instead Steele was producing a piece of purely political research and had different motivations. The first might well have been money, as he was being paid specifically for this project, not as part of his work on a government salary presumably serving all of society. Secondly, to continue being paid for each subsequent memo that he produced he would have been incentivized to please his clients or at least give them enough so they would come back for more.

Dubious Stuff

Opposition research is about getting dirt to be used in a mud-slinging political campaign, in which wild charges against candidates are the norm. This “oppo” is full of unvetted rumor and innuendo with enough facts mixed in to make it seem credible. There was so much dubious stuff in Steele’s memos that the FBI was unable to confirm its most salacious allegations and apparently refuted several key points.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (right) talks with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, with John Brennan and other national security aides present. (Photo credit: Office of Director of National Intelligence)

Perhaps more significantly, the corporate news media, which was largely partial to Clinton, did not report the fantastic allegations after people close to the Clinton campaign began circulating the lurid stories before the election with the hope that the material would pop up in the news. To their credit, established media outlets recognized this as ammunition against a political opponent, not a serious document.

Despite this circumspection, the Steele dossier was shared with the FBI at some point in the summer of 2016 and apparently became the basis for the FBI to seek Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against members of Trump’s campaign. More alarmingly, it may have formed the basis for much of the Jan. 6 intelligence “assessment” by those “hand-picked” analysts from three U.S. intelligence agencies – the CIA, the FBI and the NSA – not all 17 agencies that Hillary Clinton continues to insist were involved. (Obama’s intelligence chiefs, DNI Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan, publicly admitted that only three agencies took part and The New York Times printed a correction saying so.)

If in fact the Steele memos were a primary basis for the Russia collusion allegations against Trump, then there may be no credible evidence at all. It could be that because the three agencies knew the dossier was dodgy that there was no substantive proof in the Jan. 6 “assessment.” Even so, a summary of the Steele allegations were included in a secret appendix that then-FBI Director James Comey described to then-President-elect Trump just two weeks before his inauguration.

Five days later, after the fact of Comey’s briefing was leaked to the press, the Steele dossier was published in fullby the sensationalist website BuzzFeed behind the excuse that the allegations’ inclusion in the classified annex of a U.S. intelligence report justified the dossier’s publication regardless of doubts about its accuracy.

Russian Fingerprints

The other source of blame about Russian meddling came from the private company CrowdStrike because the DNC blocked the FBI from examining its server after a suspected hack. Within a day, CrowdStrike claimed to find Russian “fingerprints” in the metadata of a DNC opposition research document, which had been revealed by an Internet site called DCLeaks, showing Cyrillic letters and the name of the first Soviet intelligence chief. That supposedly implicated Russia.

Dmitri Alperovitch, the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of CrowdStrike Inc., leading its Intelligence, Technology and CrowdStrike Labs teams.

CrowdStrike also claimed that the alleged Russian intelligence operation was extremely sophisticated and skilled in concealing its external penetration of the server. But CrowdStrike’s conclusion about Russian “fingerprints” resulted from clues that would have been left behind by extremely sloppy hackers or inserted intentionally to implicate the Russians.

CrowdStrike’s credibility was further undermined when Voice of America reported on March 23, 2017, that the same software the company says it used to blame Russia for the hack wrongly concluded that Moscow also had hacked Ukrainian government howitzers on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine.

“An influential British think tank and Ukraine’s military are disputing a report that the U.S. cyber-security firm CrowdStrike has used to buttress its claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election,” VOA reported. Dimitri Alperovitch, a CrowdStrike co-founder, is also a senior fellow at the anti-Russian Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.

More speculation about the alleged election hack was raised with WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 release, which revealed that the CIA is not beyond covering up its own hacks by leaving clues implicating others. Plus, there’s the fact that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has declared again and again that WikiLeaks did not get the Democratic emails from the Russians. Buttressing Assange’s denials of a Russian role, WikiLeaks associate Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, said he met a person connected to the leak during a trip to Washington last year.

And, William Binney, maybe the best mathematician to ever work at the National Security Agency, and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern have published a technical analysis of one set of Democratic email metadata showing that a transatlantic “hack” would have been impossible and that the evidence points to a likely leak by a disgruntled Democratic insider. Binney has further stated that if it were a “hack,” the NSA would have been able to detect it and make the evidence known.

Fueling Neo-McCarthyism

Despite these doubts, which the U.S. mainstream media has largely ignored, Russia-gate has grown into something much more than an election story. It has unleashed a neo-McCarthyite attack on Americans who are accused of being dupes of Russia if they dare question the evidence of the Kremlin’s guilt.

The Washington Post building in downtown Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Washington Post)

Just weeks after last November’s election, The Washington Post published a front-page story touting a blacklist from an anonymous group, called PropOrNot, that alleged that 200 news sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other leading independent news sources, were either willful Russian propagandists or “useful idiots.”

Last week, a new list emerged with the names of over 2,000 people, mostly Westerners, who have appeared on RT, the Russian government-financed English-language news channel. The list was part of a report entitled, “The Kremlin’s Platform for ‘Useful Idiots’ in the West,” put out by an outfit called European Values, with a long list of European funders.

Included on the list of “useful idiots” absurdly are CIA-friendly Washington Post columnist David Ignatius; David Brock, Hillary Clinton’s opposition research chief; and U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

The report stated: “Many people in Europe and the US, including politicians and other persons of influence, continue to exhibit troubling naïveté about RT’s political agenda, buying into the network’s marketing ploy that it is simply an outlet for independent voices marginalised by the mainstream Western press. These ‘useful idiots’ remain oblivious to RT’s intentions and boost its legitimacy by granting interviews on its shows and newscasts.”

The intent of these lists is clear: to shut down dissenting voices who question Western foreign policy and who are usually excluded from Western corporate media. RT is often willing to provide a platform for a wider range of viewpoints, both from the left and right. American ruling interests fend off critical viewpoints by first suppressing them in corporate media and now condemning them as propaganda when they emerge on RT.

Geopolitical Risks

More ominously, the anti-Russia mania has increased chances of direct conflict between the two nuclear superpowers. The Russia-bashing rhetoric not only served the Clinton campaign, though ultimately to ill effect, but it has pushed a longstanding U.S.-led geopolitical agenda to regain control over Russia, an advantage that the U.S. enjoyed during the Yeltsin years in the 1990s.

Time magazine cover recounting how the U.S. enabled Boris Yeltsin’s reelection as Russian president in 1996.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Wall Street rushed in behind Boris Yeltsin and Russian oligarchs to asset strip virtually the entire country, impoverishing the population. Amid widespread accounts of this grotesque corruption, Washington intervened in Russian politics to help get Yeltsin re-elected in 1996. The political rise of Vladimir Putin after Yeltsin resigned on New Year’s Eve 1999 reversed this course, restoring Russian sovereignty over its economy and politics.

That inflamed Hillary Clinton and other American hawks whose desire was to install another Yeltsin-like figure and resume U.S. exploitation of Russia’s vast natural and financial resources. To advance that cause, U.S. presidents have supported the eastward expansion of NATO and have deployed 30,000 troops on Russia’s border.

In 2014, the Obama administration helped orchestrate a coup that toppled the elected government of Ukraine and installed a fiercely anti-Russian regime. The U.S. also undertook the risky policy of aiding jihadists to overthrow a secular Russian ally in Syria. The consequences have brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

In this context, the Democratic Party-led Russia-gate offensive was intended not only to explain away Clinton’s defeat but to stop Trump — possibly via impeachment or by inflicting severe political damage — because he had talked, insincerely it is turning out, about detente with Russia. That did not fit in well with the plan at all.

Joe Lauria is a veteran foreign-affairs journalist. He has written for the Boston Globe, the Sunday Times of London and the Wall Street Journal among other newspapers. He is the author of How I Lost By Hillary Clinton published by OR Books in June 2017. He can be reached at joelauria@gmail.com and followed on Twitter at @unjoe.

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FROM WOUNDED KNEE TO SYRIA: A CENTURY OF U.S. MILITARY INTERVENTIONS by Dr. Zoltan Grossman

http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html

A Nation of Relentless Savagery

ORIGINAL LINK

You’ve been avoiding this for a long time.

You prefer to remember the times he took you to the park, that amazing camping vacation a few summers back, the funny things he often says at the dinner table, that beautiful dog he gave you on your 12th birthday.

But you can’t deny it any longer. The truth is painful. But . . .

Dad is an alcoholic and he beats mom.

Do you hate him? Do you reject him as your father?

No, but things have to drastically change and very soon.

This is not actually the story I wish to tell. I’m merely drawing a parallel. I’m talking about dealing with denial, facing reality, accepting responsibility, taking action.

There are many situations in life for which the above scenario is a metaphor.

The parallel I’m making is the relationship between a citizen and a government gone mad.

We’ve avoided it for a long time. We prefer to think of America as a beacon of hope in the world, the fountainhead of truth and justice, a purveyor of democratic values and human rights.

But we can’t deny it any longer. The truth is painful. But . . .

As Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his monumental, myth-shattering speech — the one that probably got him assassinated — at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967:

The greatest purveyor of violence in the world: My own government, I cannot be silent.

I won’t go into the long history of American aggression. Whole books have been written which detail our gruesome heritage of merciless wars, the most notable being Howard Zinn’s classics, A People’s History of the United States and the more recent A People’s History of American Empire. Nor will I indict the U.S. foreign policy apparatus for its gross deceptions and hypocrisies, elucidated with unparalleled clarity and candor in William Blum’s excellent work, America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy.

I won’t talk about the millions of human carcasses piled on top of more carcasses, the result of countless war crimes and merciless military strategies which place no value on human life, whether the victims are in uniform or innocent civilians. I’ve realized that the scale of the horror is such that it’s incomprehensible to most good decent citizens. I myself when confronted by figures like 3 million Vietnamese killed, 1.5 Iraqis killed, on and on, find my eyes glazing over in the deluge of zeroes. I literally cannot grasp these numbers and apply them meaningfully to the grief and physical suffering which they are supposed to somehow encapsulate.

Let’s instead look at a few simple very recent facts and try to put them in perspective.

Fact 1: The U.S. is not officially at war with any other country at this time.

Fact 2: The U.S. has not been attacked in any sense of the word in the last 16 years.

Fact 3: Last year the U.S. military dropped 26,171 bombs on seven different countries.

Mind you, these are the official figures. Who knows what the real totals are?

These were not water-filled balloons or July 4th fireworks. At the end of every explosion, there were body parts strewn all over the surrounding area. Survivors were being crushed in collapsed buildings, or crawling along the ground with limbs torn off, leaving a trail of blood squirting out of severed arteries. Innocent people, men, women, and children just going about the everyday business of living, were mangled by a lethal mix of high-velocity shrapnel, and chunks of rubble created by ton after ton of high-yield explosives dropped anonymously from the sky.

Rigorous studies have made it very clear that well over half of the casualties of current warfare are civilians. In what are called ‘internal conflicts’ — like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia — which now are by far the most prevalent form of military conflict, the percentages can be as high as 90% civilians. These violent clashes are typically fought by proxies. In all of the countries just listed, the aggressors are mercenaries paid by the U.S. and its allies to enter and destroy a country in what is then deceptively characterized as a civil war or “people’s uprising”. There is very disturbing recent evidence, for example, that the U.S. through CIA back channels has been funding ISIS, Al Nusra, as well as other extremely barbarous terrorist groups in Iraq and Syria.

By the way, that money they withhold from your paycheck? Or that quarterly tax payment you regularly make? Think about it. This is where a big chunk of your tax dollars is going. You’re paying for this.

Does any of this make my point a little more comprehensible?

26,171 bombs . . . funding terrorism . . . innocent civilians murdered . . . all in a days work.

America can say with great pride that what it does, it usually does very well.

When we put our minds to something, we pull out all the stops.

Now we can put cold-blooded killing right up there in the Top 10.

We kill efficiently. We kill without remorse. We kill without hesitation.

NOTICE TO THE WORLD . . .

Beware! We are a nation of relentless savagery!

Then again, a lot of countries already know that.

I’ve said this many times before and I’ll keep saying it until people get it . . .

Peace will not come from the top. There are too many incentives and rewards in our corrupt corporate kleptocracy to keep the wars going and the wheels of the defense industry churning out more mechanisms of death and destruction.

It is only when we everyday citizens finally have had enough of the carnage, enough of the military waste, enough of the chest-beating imperialism which makes us less safe, enough of the empty rhetoric which claims to embrace the noble virtues but is just more deception in the name of war and imperial conquest, it is only then that America will turn around.

Maybe there are detailed plans out there somewhere to mobilize the good decent citizens of this country. I haven’t personally seen any. So here is mine. Yes, it is outside-the-box, some would say radical, extreme. But if we are the nation we claim to be in the world and in the eyes of God, isn’t cruelly and senselessly dropping 26,171 bombs on mostly innocent people extreme and radical?

My plan demands very little of us individually. We don’t have to march on the capital or mount a revolutionary insurrection. Despite that, it could make all the difference in the future we leave to our children and our children’s children. All that is really required is that we listen to the voice of reason and stand strong.

At least take a look. Open your mind up to the possibility of a future without the madness. Of a future without endless war. Of a future when our hard-earned tax dollars don’t go to fund the relentless savagery of a military gone mad.

THE PEACE DIVIDEND

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Monday, November 6, 2017

RONAN FARROW: HARVEY'S SPY ARMY REVEALED...

ORIGINAL LINK

RONAN FARROW: HARVEY'S SPY ARMY REVEALED...

(Second column, 2nd story, link)

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Four Viral Claims Spread By 'Journalists' On Twitter In The Last Week Alone That Are False

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Glenn Greenwald via The Intercept,

There is ample talk, particularly of late, about the threats posed by social media to democracy and political discourse. Yet one of the primary ways that democracy is degraded by platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is, for obvious reasons, typically ignored in such discussions: the way they are used by American journalists to endorse factually false claims that quickly spread and become viral, entrenched into narratives, and thus can never be adequately corrected.

The design of Twitter, where many political journalists spend their time, is in large part responsible for this damage. Its space constraints mean that tweeted headlines or tiny summaries of reporting are often assumed to be true with no critical analysis of their accuracy, and are easily spread. Claims from journalists that people want to believe are shared like wildfire, while less popular, subsequent corrections or nuanced debunking are easily ignored. Whatever one’s views are on the actual impact of Twitter Russian bots, surely the propensity of journalistic falsehoods to spread far and wide is at least as significant.

Just in the last week alone, there have been four major factually false claims that have gone viral because journalists on Twitter endorsed and spread them: three about the controversy involving Donna Brazile and the DNC, and one about documents and emails published by WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. It’s well worth examining them, both to document what the actual truth is as well as to understand how often and easily this online journalistic misleading occurs:

Viral Falsehood #1: The Clinton/DNC agreement cited by Brazile only applied to the General Election, not the primary.

On Wednesday, Politico published a blockbuster accusation from Donna Brazile’s new book: that the DNC had “rigged” the 2016 primary election for Hillary Clinton through an agreement that gave Clinton control over key aspects of the DNC, a claim that Elizabeth Warren endorsed on CNN. The Clinton camp refused to comment publicly, but instead contacted their favorite reporters to publish their response as news.

The following day, NBC published an article by Alex Seitz-Wald that recited and endorsed the Clinton camp’s primary defense: that Brazile was wrong because the agreement in question (a copy of which they provided to Seitz-Wald) applied “only to preparations for the general election,” and had nothing to do with the primary season. That defense, if true, would be fatal to Brazile’s claims, and so DNC-loyal journalists all over Twitter instantly declared it to be true, thus pronouncing Brazile’s accusation to have been fully debunked. This post documents how quickly this claim was endorsed on Twitter by journalists and Democratic operatives, and how far and wide it therefore spread.

The problem with this claim is that it is blatantly and obviously false. All one has to do to know this is read the agreement. Unlike the journalists spreading this DNC defense, Campaign Legal Defense’s Brendan Fischer bothered to read it, and immediately saw, and documented, how obviously false this claim is:

The NBC article itself that was originally used to spread this claim now includes what amounts to a serious walk back, if not outright retraction, of the DNC’s principal defense:

DNC and Clinton allies pointed to the fact that the agreement contained self-justifying lawyer language claiming that it is “focused exclusively on preparations for the General,” but as Fischer noted that passage “is contradicted by the rest of the agreement.” This would be like creating a contract to explicitly bribe an elected official (“A will pay Politician B to vote YES on Bill X”), then adding a throwaway paragraph with a legalistic disclaimer that “nothing in this agreement is intended to constitute a bribe,” and then have journalists cite that paragraph to proclaim that no bribe happened even though the agreement on its face explicitly says the opposite.

The Clinton/DNC agreement explicitly vested the Clinton campaign with control over key matters during the primary season: the exact opposite of what journalists on Twitter caused hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, to believe. Nonetheless, DNC loyal commentators continue to cite headlines and tweets citing the legalistic language to convince huge numbers of people that the truth is the exact opposite of what it actually is:

Viral Falsehood #2: Sanders signed the same agreement with the DNC that Clinton did.

To make the Clinton/DNC agreement appear benign and normal, the claim was quickly and widely circulated that Sanders had signed the same agreement with the DNC as Clinton had. This, too, was false – in the most fundamental way possible.

Simply put, the agreement Sanders signed with the DNC – which the Sanders camp appears to have provided ABC News in order to debunk the claim – did not contain any of the provisions vesting control over the DNC that made the Clinton agreement cited by Brazile so controversial. As ABC News put it (emphasis added):

A joint fundraising agreement between the Bernie Sanders campaign and the Democratic National Committee — obtained Friday by ABC News and signed at the start of the primary campaign for the 2016 presidential election — does not include any language about coordinating on strategic decisions over hiring or budget, unlike a fundraising memo between the Hillary Clinton team and the DNC.

It’s possible that had Sanders wanted to invoke his funding arrangement with the DNC, and then signed a second agreement, it might have included similar control provisions. But it’s also possible that it would not have. We’ll never know, because it never happened. What we actually know for certain – what exists in reality – is that Sanders never signed any agreement with the DNC that contained the control provisions that were given in 2015 to the Clinton campaign. In other words, the provisions cited by Brazile in her “rigging” allegation did not exist in any contract signed with the DNC by the Sanders campaign.

Needless to say, a tiny fraction of those who were exposed to the original falsehood (Sanders signed the same agreement as Clinton) ended up seeing this fundamental reversal, because the journalists who promoted the original falsehood felt no compunction, as usual, to provide the less pleasing correction.

Viral Falsehood #3: Brazile stupidly thought she could unilaterally remove Clinton as the nominee.

Yesterday, the Washington Post published an article reporting on various claims made in Brazile’s new book. The headline, which was widely tweeted, made it seem as though Brazile delusionally believed she had a power which, obviously, she did not in fact possess: “Donna Brazile: I considered replacing Clinton with Biden as 2016 Democratic nominee.” The article said Brazile considered exercising this power after Clinton’s fainting spell made her worry that Clinton was physically debilitated, and her campaign was “anemic” and had taken on “the odor of failure.”

But Brazile – as a result of her stinging criticisms and accusations of Clinton, Obama and the DNC – is currently Public Enemy Number One among Democrats in the media. So they seized on this headline to pretend that she claimed the power to unilaterally remove Clinton on a whim, and then used this claim to mercilessly vilify her – the chair of Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, last year’s interim head of the DNC, and a long-time Democratic Party operative – as a deluded, insane, dishonest, profiteering, ignorant fabulist who lacks all credibility.

But the entire attack on Brazile was false. She did not claim, at least according to the Post article being cited, that she had the power to unilaterally remove Clinton. The original Post article, buried deep down in the article, well after the headline, made clear that she was referencing a complicated process in the DNC charter that allowed for removal of a nominee who had become incapacitated.

The Post then amended its story to reflect that she made no such absurd claim in her book, but rather noted that “the DNC charter empowered her to initiate replacement of the nominee” and that “if a nominee became disabled, she explains, the party chair would oversee a complicated process of filling the vacancy that would include a meeting of the full DNC.” The Post then added this note to the top of the article:

Journalists on Twitter spent hours yesterday mocking, maligning and attacking the reputation of Brazile for a claim that she simply never made – all because a tweeted headline, which they never bothered to read past or evaluate, made them think they were justified in doing so in order to malign someone who has, quickly and bizarrely, become one of the Democrats’ primary enemies.

Viral Falsehood #4: Evidence has emerged proving that the content of WikiLeaks documents and emails was doctored.

From the time WikiLeaks began last year publishing emails and documents from the DNC and John Podesta’s email inbox, Clinton officials and their media supporters have constantly insinuated, and sometimes outright stated, that the WikiLeaks documents were frauds because they had been altered. What was most notable about this accusation was how easy it would have been proven had it really been true: all anyone had to do was show the actual, original email that they sent or received, and then compare it to the altered WikiLeaks version, and that would have been proof that WikiLeaks archive was unreliable.

But that never happened. Never once did any of the dozens of Democratic Party operatives who sent or received the emails published by WikiLeaks point to a single specific case of an alteration – something that, obviously, they would have eagerly done had they been able to. As Politico noted last year (emphasis added):

Clinton’s team hasn’t challenged the accuracy of even the most salacious emails released in the past four days, including those featuring aides making snarky references to Catholicism or a Bill Clinton protégé describing Chelsea Clinton as a “spoiled brat.” And numerous digital forensic firms told POLITICO that they haven’t seen any proof of tampering in the emails they’ve examined — adding that only the hacked Democrats themselves could offer that kind of conclusive evidence.

Similarly, when PolitiFact tried last year to fact-check the Clinton campaign’s claims that the documents were doctored, they noted: “The Clinton campaign, however, has yet to produce any evidence that any specific emails in the latest leak were fraudulent.”

Nonetheless, the desire to believe this persisted. And this week, AP published a report that countless journalists seized upon to claim that proof finally had emerged that the WikiLeaks documents had been altered. The claim in the AP report is incredibly simple and limited. It does not involve any claim that WikiLeaks altered any documents, or that any of the emails it published were frauds; rather, the claim is that Guccifer, on one of the documents that he published, placed a “CONFIDENTIAL” watermark that did not appear on another version:

The first document Guccifer 2.0 published on June 15 came not from the DNC as advertised but from Podesta’s inbox, according to a former DNC official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

The official said the word “CONFIDENTIAL” was not in the original document .

Guccifer 2.0 had airbrushed it to catch reporters’ attention.

There are so many reasons to question whether this actually happened. To begin with, the fact that one version of the document is without a “Confidential” watermark doesn’t mean no version has one; it’s common to add watermarks of that sort for different purposes and different recipients. Moreover, AP’s only basis is an anonymous source claiming the document has been altered, along with the version that lacks the watermark. This is very far from proof that Guccifer “airbrushed it to catch reporters’ attention.”

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that Guccifer did, in fact, add a “Confidential” watermark to this document, and did so to entice journalists to view the document as more appetizing. This does not remotely justify the claim that any of the documents and emails published by WikiLeaks were materially altered and were thus unreliable.

First, Guccifer adding a watermark to a document he circulated does not mean that any of the emails published by WikiLeaks in its archive was altered. It’s long been known that Guccifer altered the documents’ metadata to hide its path, but nobody ever tried to cite that as proof that anything published by WikiLeaks was fraudulent (indeed, PolitiFact cited Guccifer’s alteration of metadata when concluding there was no evidence that the WikiLeaks documents themselves had been altered).

Second, this has no bearing on the content of the emails or documents themselves published by WikiLeaks, which to date nobody has demonstrated have been altered in the slightest. Third, if it were the case that any of the emails or documents published by WikiLeaks were fraudulent, it would still be incredibly easy to prove: all anyone would have to do is produce the original and show how the WikiLeaks version was altered; why – a full year after WikiLeaks began publishing these documents – has nobody done this, despite the overwhelming incentive that exists to expose this?

In sum, evidence that the content of any of the WikiLeaks emails was altered is nonexistent, while there is overwhelming reason to believe none has been (beginning with the fact that, as easy it would be to do so, no proof has been provided after all this time). Nonetheless, as a result of journalists’ conduct on Twitter this week, the false claim that emails and documents in the WikiLeaks archive were proven to be altered is now viral and will remain fixed in people’s belief system forever:

There’s no way to prove the negative: that no emails or documents published by WikiLeaks were altered. But one should demand actual evidence before affirming this claim. And despite the ease of providing that proof, and the long period of time that has elapsed, none has been provided. But, unsurprisingly, that did not stop the claim that it had been proven from going viral this week on Twitter – all based on the tenuous claim that Guccifer added a “Confidential” watermark to one of the documents he circulated.

It can certainly be menacing for Russian bots to disseminate divisive messaging on Twitter. But it’s at least equally menacing if journalists with the loudest claim to authoritative credibility are using that platform constantly to entrench falsehoods in the public’s mind.

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The attack on “fake news” is really an attack on alternative media

ORIGINAL LINK
Computer on Fire

(Credit: Shutterstock/Salon)
These are tough days to be a serious journalist. Report a story now, with your facts all lined up nicely, and you’re still likely to have it labeled “fake news” by anyone whose ox you’ve gored — and even by friends who don’t share your political perspective. For good measure, they’ll say you’ve based it on “alternative facts.”
Historians say the term “fake news” dates from the late 19th-century era of “yellow journalism,” but the term really took off in 2016, a little over a year ago during Donald Trump’s run for the presidency. It described several different things, from fact-free, pro-Trump online media to sensationalistic and largely untrue stories whose only goal was eyeballs and dollars. During the primary season, Trump himself began labeling all mainstream media stories about him as “fake news.” The idea that there could be different truths, while dating at least back to the administration of President George W. Bush, when his consigliere Karl Rove claimed that the administration “made its own” reality, gained currency when Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, caught making stuff up in a TV interview, claimed that she was relying on “alternative facts.”
That dodge would be fine, on its own. Most people are primed to believe that politicians lie — whatever party or persuasion they represent — so their attempts to deny it when called a conjurer of falsehoods posing tend to be recognized as such.
The corporate media — the New York Times, the Washington Post, the network news programs and even National Public Radio — have all responded to being called liars and “fake news” fabricators of by promoting themselves as “the reality-based community” (NPR), or claiming they are fighting the good fight against ignorance, as demonstrated by the Post’s new masthead slogan “Democracy dies in darkness.” The Times has stuck with its hoary “All the news that’s fit to print”slogan, but has added a page-three daily feature listing “noteworthy facts from today’s paper” and has taken to calling out Trump administration whoppers as “lies.”
Last December Congress passed a new law, promptly signed by then-President Barack Obama, that enacted an Orwellian amendment to the Defense Authorization Act of 2017. Called the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, this measure tasks the State Department, in consultation with the Department of Defense, the director of national intelligence and an obscure government propaganda organization called the Broadcasting Board of Governors, to establish a “Center for Information Analysis and Response.” The job of this new center, funded by a $160 million, two-year budget allocation, would be to collect information on “foreign propaganda and disinformation efforts” and “proactively advance fact-based narratives that support United States allies and interests.”
What is “fake news”? The target keeps moving
This might all seem laughable, but as a journalist who has worked in this field for 45 years, in both mainstream newspapers and television and in the alternative media, and as a long-time freelancer who has written for publications as widely varied as Business Week, the Nation, the Village Voice and a collectively run news site called ThisCantBeHappening.net, I have watched as this obsession with “fake news” has turned into an attack on alternative news and alternative news organizations.
Last Nov. 24, the Washington Post published a McCarthyite-style front-page article declaring that some 200 news sites on the web were actually witting or unwitting “purveyors of pro-Russian propaganda.” The article, by Post national security reporter Craig Timberg, was based on the work of a shady outfit called PropOrNot, whose owner-organizers were kept anonymous by Timberg, and whose source of funding was left unexplained. PropOrNot, Timberg wrote, had developed a list of sites which it had determined to be peddling “pro-Russia propaganda.”
For one of the sites on the list, the prominent left-wing journal Counterpunch, founded decades ago by former Village Voice and Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, PropOrNot offered up two articles as justification for its designation. One of those articles was by me. It was a piece I’d actually written for ThisCantBeHappening, which had been republished with credit by Counterpunch. The reviewer, a retired military intelligence officer named Joel Harding (who I discovered is linked to Fort Belvoir outside Washington, home to the U.S. Army’s Information Operations Command, or INSCOM), labeled my article “absurdly pro-Russian propaganda.”
In fact, the article was a pretty straightforward report on the Sept. 29, 2016, findings by the joint Dutch-Australian investigation into the July 2014 shoot-down of a Malaysian jumbo passenger jet over Ukraine, which concluded that Russia was the culprit. I noted in the article that this investigation was not legitimate, because two nations — Russia and Ukraine — were known to possess the Buk missiles and launchers that had brought down the plane, but only one of them, Ukraine, was permitted to offer evidence. Russian offers of evidence in the case were repeatedly rebuffed. The report also failed to mention that the Ukrainian government had received veto power over any conclusions reached by the investigators.
Was my report “fake news” or propaganda? Not at all.
The fake news in this case has been what has been written and aired by virtually all of the U.S. media, including the Times, the Post and all the major networks, about that horrific tragedy. They all continue to state as fact that a Russian Buk missile downed that plane, though no honest investigation has been conducted. (Technically it is true that the Buk missiles are all “Russian,” in that they were all manufactured in Russia. Left unsaid is that Ukraine’s military had Buk launchers since their nation was part of the Soviet Union, and continued to purchase them after independence.)
Laziest form of media criticism
“Labeling news reports that you don’t like as ’fake news’ is the laziest form of media criticism,” says Jim Naureckas, editor of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, a New York-based journalism review. “It’s like putting your fingers in your ears and going ‘la la la’ really loudly. Both the government and the corporate media have reasons for not wanting the public to hear points of view that are threats to their power.”
While Kellyanne Conway claimed her right to offer “alternative facts” as a way to justify getting caught in a lie, there are also alternative facts which are real but don’t get reported in the corporate media. A classic example was in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the entire corporate media reported as fact that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was attempting to develop a nuclear bomb.
There were plenty of alternative news organizations who quoted UN inspectors saying that none of that was true and there were no WMDs or WMD programs in Iraq, but they were simply blacked out by the corporate media like the Times, the Post and the major news networks.
These days another dubious story is that the Russians “hacked” the server of the Democratic National Committee. It may have happened that way, but in fact the vast intelligence system the US has constructed to monitor all domestic and foreign telecommunications has offered up no hard evidence of such a hack. National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney and retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern have suggested that some evidence indicates a DNC insider must have been involved.
There is certainly fake news all over the internet, and baseless conspiracies run rampant on both the left and the right. But all too often, articles like mine cited by PropOrNot (a genuine purveyor of fake news!) are being labeled as propaganda in what Naureckas says is simply “the use of irony as a defense mechanism” by news organizations that themselves are actually guilty of publishing really fake news, as the Post did with its PropOrNot blacklist “scoop.”
“What the government and the corporate media are trying to do, with the help of the big internet corporations,” argues Mickey Huff, director of the Project Censored organization in California, “is basically to shut down alternative news sites that question the media consensus position on issues.”
A wide threat to online media
That’s a threat to any online news organization, including this one, that depend upon equal access to the internet and to fast download speeds. Already, Huff charges, there are reports that Facebook is slowing down certain sites that have links on its platform, in a misguided response to charges that it sold ad space to Russian government-linked organizations accused of trying to influence last November’s presidential election.
An end to internet neutrality, the equal access to high-speed internet for surfing and downloading that has been guaranteed to all users — but that is now under attack by the Trump administration, its Federal Communications Commission and a Republican-led Congress — would make it that much easier for such a shutdown of alternative media to happen.
The real answer, of course, is for readers and viewers of all media, mainstream or alternative, to become critical consumers of news. This means not just looking at articles critically, including this one, but going to multiple sources for information on important issues. Relying on just the Times or the Post, or on Fox News or NPR, will leave you informationally malnourished — not just uninformed but misinformed. Even if you were to read both those papers and watch both those networks, you’d often be left with an incomplete version of the truth.
To get to the truth, we need to also check out alternative news sources, whether of the left, right or center — and we need to maintain the critical distinction between unpopular or unorthodox points of view and blatant lies or propaganda. Without such a distinction, and the freedom to make such decisions for ourselves, maintaining democracy will be impossible.

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Sunday, November 5, 2017

Hillary Clinton Just Told Five Blatant Lies About WikiLeaks

ORIGINAL LINK

As part of her ongoing “Thank God You Didn’t Elect Me” tour, Hillary Clinton made her debut on Australian television last night in an interview with the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson. Though she didn’t repeat her infamous “17 intelligence agencies” lie, which she’d continued to regurgitate long after that claim had been conclusively debunked, there were still plenty of whoppers to be heard.

From her ridiculous claim that the aggressively protested DNC convention was “very positive” to her completely baseless assertion that Bernie Sanders “couldn’t explain his programs” during the primaries, Clinton did a fine job of reminding us all why the average American finds her about as trustworthy as a hungry crocodile. But while she has blamed her loss on James Comey and Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders and self-hating women and the media and uninformed voters and voter suppression and her campaign staff and the DNC and campaign finance laws and Jill Stein and the Electoral College and Anthony Weiner and sexism and Vladimir Putin, Hillary Clinton reserved the lion’s share of her deceit for the organization she hates most of all: WikiLeaks.

Here are five lies that Clinton told about the outlet during her ABC interview:

Hillary Clinton: The Interview

Lie 1: Claims WikiLeaks never publishes anything about Russia

WikiLeaks Spy Files Russia, Part 1 #SORM #FSB #SpyFilesRU https://t.co/CJMQVrNXef

— @wikileaks

THREAD: 2 yrs ago, I wrote an article highlighting the then 647,208 @wikileaks docs relating to Russia. https://t.co/WvdD2wB8ph #SpyFiles

— @Suzi3D

“And if he’s such a, you know, martyr of free speech, why doesn’t WikiLeaks ever publish anything coming out of Russia?” Clinton asks of WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, mere weeks after WikiLeaks published a massive leak drop on Russian domestic surveillance. Prior to that WikiLeaks had published hundreds of thousands of critical documents pertaining to Russia. She lied, and there’s no way she didn’t know she was lying.

Lie 2: Podesta leaks were timed to eclipse the Access Hollywood “grab them by the pussy” October surprise.

On Clinton's "timing" conspiracy theory. That we had a pending publication about to launch on the election was everywhere in the media for days. We were meant to launch that morning. It is the Trump tape that was moved forward from Monday to Friday. https://t.co/Mo6PbJoTpV

— @JulianAssange

Assange to release 'one million' documents before US election

“WikiLeaks, which in the world in which we find ourselves promised hidden information, promised some kind of secret that might be of influence, was a very clever, diabolical response to the Hollywood Access [sic] tape,” said Clinton in response to a question by Ferguson about the fact that WikiLeaks dropped the first Podesta emails shortly after the “grab them by the pussy” audio leak surfaced on October 7.

This is another blatant lie. Assange had been promoting an incoming leak drop for days prior to October 7, as evidenced in articles like this one by Reuters titled “WikiLeaks’ Assange signals release of documents before U.S. election”. Everyone knew the leaks were coming. According to NBC sources who spoke with TMZ, it was the release of the Access Hollywood tape that was moved forward to the 7th.

Lie 3: Implying that there was nothing incriminating in the Democratic party emails that WikiLeaks published.

RELEASE: 19,252 emails from the US Democratic National Committee https://t.co/kpFxYDoNyX #Hillary2016 #FeelTheBern

— @wikileaks

RELEASE: the first 2050 of well over 50000 emails from Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta https://t.co/rpK9rbJ8ah #Podesta #imWithHer

— @wikileaks

Throughout the interview, Clinton babbled about the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, babbled about Russian propaganda, babbled about the content of the leaked emails being twisted into something false — babbled about everything except the undeniably incriminating things found in those documents. Whenever you get Clinton talking about WikiLeaks, she insists that the problem wasn’t the revelation of an appalling amount of corruption, but a Kremlin-backed propaganda campaign to make perfectly innocuous emails look bad.

This has been a longstanding tactic by the Democratic establishment in response to the embarrassing 2016 leak drops. The absurd narrative that the DNC and Podesta emails were squeaky clean and only painted to look incriminating by Russian propaganda is required in order for the Democrats to have their “WikiLeaks cost us the election” narrative while also keeping their “we did absolutely nothing wrong” narrative. It’s the only way they can have their cake and eat it too.

In reality, the conspiring and “us vs. them” language between DNC officials in their leaked emails unquestionably reveals a blatant violation of Article 5, Section 4 of the DNC Charter, which promises the American people that the DNC Chairperson (who was included in and participated in many of these emails) “shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process.” This plainly did not happen, as a glance at some of the nastiest emails reveals. The DNC Charter was revised with this promise to prevent a DemExit after the 1968 fiasco in Chicago, and in 2016 they undeniably broke this promise.

And as bad as the DNC Leaks were, the later leak drops were far more incriminating. From Donna Brazile serving as a mole against the Sanders campaign and passing multiple debate questions in advance to Hillary Clinton, to an email from a CitiGroup executive instructing Obama what cabinet picks (who would then go on the shape policy for dealing with Wall Street crooks after they caused the 2008 global financial crisis) he was permitted to choose from prior to his election in 2008, to the Clintons taking bribes from Qatar and Morocco and knowingly accepting funds from political bodies that arm ISIS, to evidence that the DNC was stacking the deck for Clinton as early as 2014, to a suggestion that the Clinton campaign had some sort of “leverage” over Bernie Sanders, to Clinton promising a group of Goldman Sachs executives that she would lie to the American people for their benefit by assuring them that she understood the importance of having both a “public position and a private position” when it comes to economic matters, there was more than enough shocking data there to rightly hurt Clinton’s approval rating.

So this notion that fake news and Russian propaganda were needed in order for the WikiLeaks releases to hurt the Clinton campaign are blatantly deceitful. Clinton wasn’t hurt by fake news and Russian propaganda, Clinton was hurt by the truth.

Lie 4: Julian Assange is “a tool of Russian intelligence” who “does the bidding of a dictator.”

Hillary Clinton has a friend in her war against WikiLeaks perfect authentication record. Vladimir Putin. https://t.co/90Q1DjSEFG

— @JulianAssange

Russia 'mafia state' - Wikileaks

Intelligence officials for the Obama administration, including Obama himself, have been clear that there is no clear tie between WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence. In reality, WikiLeaks has been publishing dirt on Russia for many years, has stood in solidarity with dissident Russian activists, and is not doing the bidding of Kremlin intelligence anywhere outside the psychotic delusions of Clintonists whose cognitive comfort depends on seeing Darth Putin lurking in every shadow.

The Only People Who Still Believe In Russiagate Are Those Who Desperately Need To

Lie 5: Claiming WikiLeaks helped spread lies and is therefore not protected by the First Amendment.

SARAH FERGUSON: Isn’t he just doing what journalists do, which is publish information when they get it?

HILLARY CLINTON: I don’t think so.

I think for number one, it’s one stolen information, ah and number two, if all you did was publish it, that would be one thing.

But there was a concerted operation ah between ah WikiLeaks and Russia and most likely people in the United States to, as I say, weaponise that information, to make up stories, outlandish, often terrible stories that had no basis in fact, no basis even in the emails themselves, but which were used to ah denigrate me, my campaign, ah people who supported me, and to help Trump.

…

A total outright lie! So, I think that, you know, I have no objection to accurate information being ah published; I mean that’s what a First Amendment, that’s what freedom of information is.

Contrary to lies circulated by establishment propagandists like Malcolm Nance, WikiLeaks has a pristine record for publishing authentic documents and has never had to retract any of its material due to inauthenticity. If Clinton’s claim that WikiLeaks influenced “the perceptions and views of millions of voters” is true, then those perceptions and views were influenced by truth.

CIA Director Pompeo Doesn't Understand the First Amendment

WikiLeaks, like the New York Times or the Washington Post or any other outlet which publishes leaked documents, is indeed protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. This extends to international outlets because the Constitution does not bestow rights upon US citizens but actually forbids the US government from restricting any press. Contrary to what CIA scumbucket Mike Pompeo has suggested, free speech is an inalienable human right that every human being is naturally entitled to, not something the government magnanimously grants some people but not others.

As we’ve discussed previously, Hillary Clinton needs to keep coming back in and lying her ass off because her campaign promised the end of the world if she lost. Since they can’t just admit that Trump is actually just a garden variety Republican hack like any Bush or Reagan, and that they lied about the entire thing to scare everyone into supporting her, she needs to keep lying to everyone so they don’t blame her for helping to elect a walking armageddon. People are scared, and Clinton is legacy-minded, so she needs to keep lying to stave off the embarrassment of being blamed for losing to Trump.

That’s all this is. That’s all this has ever been.

— — —

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Update on the Orchestrated Attacks to Eliminate Vaccine Safety Exemptions

ORIGINAL LINK

By Dr. Mercola

I've written many articles discussing vaccine safety and freedom of choice. The encouraging news is that while we've faced more than 180 legislative attempts in the states to add more vaccine mandates and restrict or eliminate vaccine choices in the U.S. in the past two years, we've successfully defeated all but a few. As noted by Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC):

"What we've seen in the last few years is a very orchestrated attack on vaccine laws that allow people to have choice … We've had some of the most restrictive and oppressive vaccine laws. We do have exemptions in the laws and that's what they want to eliminate. They want to eliminate all choice.

We have organized, and — through the NVIC advocacy portal, which people can sign onto — we've kept people informed by monitoring all the bills in the States. We have been able to generate enough opposition to not lose, despite more than 180 bills this last legislative session trying to add more vaccine mandates, trying to monitor vaccine status of everyone, trying to restrict or eliminate exemptions — we defeated all of those bad vaccine bills.

The only bill that passed was a meningococcal vaccine mandate in Indiana for college students. This is an incredible accomplishment, but the heat is on. We're going to see another mass attempt in 2018 to take away exemptions."

Vaccine Safety and Freedom of Choice Have Become International Issues

Americans are no longer alone in our fight for medical freedom of choice, as the aggressive push for mandatory vaccinations has gone international. Part of the problem is that governments are making business deals with vaccine makers. The Gates Foundation is also very much involved in the global mass-vaccination agenda.

Australian parents now forfeit child care and nontaxable child benefit payments unless their children receive all government-mandated vaccines.¹ As in California, they also cannot attend day care or preschool unless fully vaccinated.²

Italy suddenly added 10 vaccines to the mandated vaccination schedule for children,³ whereas before they had none. Noncompliance will result in a hefty fine, and unvaccinated children will be barred from attending preschool. France is also threatening to add more vaccine mandates.

"There's this global push to take away all vaccine exemptions," Barbara says. "I think people need to take it seriously because they're not going to stop. Why? Because the global vaccine market is a $27 billion business right now. The projection is $55 billion by 2021 and $70 billion by 2024, which means they aim to double the market within eight years. It's a serious situation.

The big four are Pfizer and Merck, which are U.S. companies; GlaxoSmithKline, which is a U.K. company; and then there's Sanofi-Pasteur [in] France. They've had the lion's share of the market. They clearly have all gotten together. They made deals with governments around the world.

Right now, in the U.S., it's 'No shots, no school.' It's 'No shots, no medical care,' because there are pediatricians who refuse to provide medical care to children who have not gotten all the government recommended vaccines. Then there's the 'No shots, no job for health care workers.'

I predict that what we're going to see is 'No shots, no driver's license; no shots, no passport; no shots, no ability to get into, for example, a stadium to watch a football game.' Anywhere you go out in public, you're going to have to prove that you've had the vaccines. That's what I think is going to happen if we don't hold the line here."

The Big Squeeze

People are waking up (and standing up) to these issues, and because of that, the vaccine industry is really ramping up attempts to quench opposition as quickly and as firmly as possible. Tens of thousands of people demonstrated against the new vaccine mandates in Italy, for example. "They know they're in trouble if they don't make the laws restrictive so that people can't function in society unless they have all the government recommended vaccines," Barbara says.

It's also worth remembering that while we talk about protecting informed consent rights and freedom of choice when it comes to vaccination, this concern does not end there. The far broader issue is the process by which corporations are trying to achieve their means, which ultimately entails giving them unlimited power. Barbara explains:

"In 2015, I called it the 'Vaccine Culture War.' Truly, I believe that's what it is. The vaccination issue is at the center of a larger culture war. The outcome of this culture war — which is an attack on autonomy, on privacy, on freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion — will determine how we're going to live not just in this country, but around the world in the 21st century.

If the governments and the big corporations, which have gotten together financially, continue down this path where they limit individual freedom, we're going to have a situation that's very much reminiscent of Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' and George Orwell's '1984.' You look at the apocalyptic visions that are coming out of Hollywood. Often, entertainment and literature are harbingers — they sense something.

You see a lot of apocalyptic type movies coming out. People can sense there's something that's not right, and they're anxious. You can feel the sort of collective angst not just in this country but around the world, particularly in developed countries where there's a high education status.

We've seen the media — which seems to be increasingly controlled by governments and by large institutions — come down on the idea … that you cannot dissent from what you're supposed to be believing and how you're supposed to act.

Certainly, the holistic health care movement is also at the center of this. They do not want anyone to be able to take control of their own health, because this would diminish the profit-making of the corporations that are wed to the [medical model]. The medical model now is very wed to drugs, vaccines and use of products that have a lot of serious side effects. They don't want people to talk about that."

Biological Integrity of the Human Race Is at Stake

In the late 1990s through the early 2000s, Fisher was a consumer representative on the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Vaccine Advisory Committee, which reviews new vaccines being licensed by the FDA. Through the years, she took notice of the slow erosion of licensing standards pharmaceutical companies have to meet to prove safety and effectiveness of their vaccines. "In the last decade, it's just gotten worse," she says.

With Congress' passing of the 21st Century Cures Act in December 2016 — which was a huge assault on FDA licensing regulations — the floodgates for next-generation genetically engineered vaccines in the research pipeline opened wide. These vaccines, Fisher believes, will "profoundly change the way our immune systems function."

"They're going to change our DNA. They're going to, in my opinion, compromise the biological integrity of the human race. This is a serious issue when you have almost no standards in place to make sure these very different types of vaccines (with novel adjuvants that hyperstimulate the immune system) are safe. To not have proper regulations in place is a tragedy.

For those who want to use all the government recommended vaccines, it is a tragedy. It is a tragedy for those who cannot withstand the process of vaccination because of genetic, epigenetic and environmental risk reasons. The Institute of Medicine has acknowledged that there is individual susceptibility.

The problem is they haven't done the research to find out who the high-risk people are. This mandatory one-size-fits-all approach to vaccination, I have always said, is a de facto state-sanctioned selection of the genetically and biologically vulnerable for sacrifice. That is an immoral policy. It should not stand in any government in any country, and yet we have that."

The Medical Vaccine Exemption Almost Nonexistent

Californians were promised there would be a flexible medical exemption available if the religious and philosophical exemptions were removed, yet that promise was not kept. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) limited the medical exemption to the point that 99.99 percent of people simply cannot qualify.

The medical exemption does not even recognize regression after a vaccination as justification to qualify for a medical exemption for subsequent vaccines. Doctors giving medical exemptions to at-risk patients are also being harassed and threatened with medical license removal.

"If you insist that doctors take away their professional judgment and insist they conform to government policy, nobody gets a medical exemption. What is that? That's tyranny. That is fascism. When you can't even have a doctor exempt a child they believe is at risk, that is tyranny.

That is taking away a basic freedom, the right to life, the right to autonomy. It's a violation of informed consent rights. Informed consent has been defined as a human right since 1947, after The Doctors Trial at Nuremberg. This is a very serious assault on basic human rights. People have got to get involved," Barbara says. "They've got to talk to their legislators and say, 'We will not have these kinds of laws. Not in America.'"

'The Greater Good' — An Immoral Pseudo Ethic Rejected by the Nuremburg Tribunal

The justification by public health officials for enforcement of mandatory mass-vaccination laws is a utilitarian one that individuals can be forced without their consent to risk their lives or the lives of their children for "the greater good." However, buying into this concept is dangerous indeed, as it ignores an important historical lesson.

At the Doctor's Trial at Nuremberg after World War II, the Nuremberg Tribunal concluded that the state, science, and the medical community cannot sacrifice some individuals "for the greater good" of the rest. The utilitarian philosophy maintains that for the greater happiness of the majority, a minority can be sacrificed. The Nuremberg Tribunal said this is not a moral public policy and issued the Nuremberg Code, which defined the ethical principle of informed consent to medical risk-taking affirming the individual's natural right to autonomy.

Informed consent to medical risk-taking is a human right. Vaccines carry risks that can be greater for some people. To force everyone — particularly when there's no way of knowing who might be at risk — that's utilitarianism, and it should not be allowed to anchor public health policy. It's a pseudo ethic and an inhumane and immoral policy.

The Supreme Court decision that cemented utilitarianism as an anchor of public health policy in the U.S. was the 1905 case of Jacobson vs. Massachusetts. Jacobson thought he was genetically predisposed to having a reaction to the small pox vaccine, and was refusing the mandate to get vaccinated.

The court decided the state did have the right to insist on mandatory vaccination, without exceptions. The U.S. government is now applying that more than century-old utilitarian Supreme Court decision to every vaccine that pharmaceutical companies produce and the Centers for Disease Control adds to the childhood vaccination schedule.

"It's not just small pox vaccine that has been mandated. They went on to all the rest of the vaccines — diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles-mumps-rubella, pneumococcal, meningococcal and influenza. All the vaccines now are supposed to adhere to the small pox model that was decided in Jacobson vs. Massachusetts," Barbara says. "Who gave them the right? …

My family could be wiped out because we have autoimmunity in my family. We are vulnerable. We have severe allergies. My father had to wear a penicillin bracelet. My mother died of lupus. What they're doing is they're going to wipe out whole families if they continue to force people to use all the vaccines that the drug companies produce."

There's No Legal Accountability for Vaccine Injuries

The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 shielded doctors and other medical workers giving vaccines from lawsuits when individuals are injured or die from government recommended and mandated vaccines, and drug companies selling vaccines also received partial liability protection under the 1986 law.

Then, in 2011, the Supreme Court effectively removed all remaining civil liability from vaccine manufacturers, which means Americans are now in a situation where there is forced vaccination with extremely few medical exemptions, and zero liability for those manufacturing, selling and administering vaccines that are required for school attendance and, in the case of day care and health care workers, for employment.

Without personal and spiritual belief vaccine exemptions in public health laws allowing parents to take a more cautious approach, children are absolutely going to be sacrificed. This is why we cannot allow informed consent protections to be stripped from vaccine policies and laws.

Two-thirds of those seeking compensation for vaccine injuries or death from the federal National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) are dismissed — in large part because the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice do not want to admit how many people are being harmed by vaccines.

They consider every award made to the vaccine injured in the federal compensation program to be an admission that vaccines can cause harm, which they believe leads to a loss of public confidence in the safety of vaccines.

Today, many fewer children are compensated for their vaccine injuries, which includes permanent brain and immune system damage, because government officials responsible for developing, licensing, recommending and promoting vaccination, don't want to admit children are being hurt by the vaccination program. Today, the majority of payouts in the VICP are to adults injured by the flu vaccine. Despite these limitations, the program has paid out nearly $4 billion for vaccine injuries and deaths since 1988.

For the past two years with the leadership of NVIC and grassroots organizing through the online NVIC Advocacy Portal at NVICAdvocacy.org, we've successfully held the line, preventing further erosion of vaccine exemptions in the U.S. But the assault on our freedoms continues.

Fortunately, we have two levels of government in the U.S. — state and federal. Many other nations do not have this kind of check and balance on centralized government authority. The federal government regulates vaccines and makes vaccine use recommendations; however, most vaccine laws in the U.S. are state laws, Americans have the ability to work with their state legislators and educate them about the importance of protecting flexible medical, religious and conscientious belief vaccine exemptions.

Legislators who have been educated about vaccine issues are more likely to vote the right way when vaccine-related bills come up. If we all actively participate in the legislative process, "we can retain at least some degree of freedom in most of the states," Barbara says.

Join the Vaccine Freedom Movement

If you have remained uninvolved thus far, I urge you to join the NVIC's Vaccine Advocacy Portal. The reason I urge you to do this is because in the past decade, the majority of the corporate-controlled mainstream media have ceased to include NVIC's knowledgeable perspective in public discussions about vaccine safety and choice.

So, it's really going to be incumbent upon us to spread the word. Surveys in the U.S. show more than 90 percent of parents are worried about vaccine safety, and the primary reason for this is personal experience.

It's rare to find a person who doesn't know someone — either a child or an adult — who has been adversely affected by a vaccine these days. Side effects are not rare. They're happening daily. These are powerful experiences, and when added together with others sharing similar stories, they become increasingly difficult to dismiss, no matter what the official response is.

"I believe it will be the mothers across the world who will stop this. They are the ones who are, by and large, demonstrating in Italy. Although, thankfully, 21st century fathers have really stepped forward. They're joining now. That, to me, is so exciting, because I do believe that we can turn this around.

But we have to be awake and we have to take action. [The NVIC portal] lets everybody know what's going on in the country about vaccines and vaccine laws, and tells them how they can get involved," Barbara says.

The Price of Freedom Is Not Free — Your Action Is Required

As mentioned, the vaccine issue is merely the tip of the iceberg. If we lose all rights to make decisions about vaccination, then other freedoms will be taken away shortly after that. There's absolutely no reason to think a corporate-controlled government wouldn't continue eroding personal freedoms. Mandatory vaccinations are just one profit stream; there are many others that would require the removal of the right to self determination, which includes being free to make independent health choices.

So, if you're a fan of personal autonomy, then you'll want to be really active in this issue. Resistance is also necessary if we're going to have any hope of securing the possibility of health for future generations. So, in addition to joining the NVIC Vaccine Advocacy Portal, please consider making a donation to the NVIC. During Vaccine Awareness Week, I will double-match your donations to this crucial cause. In other words, for every $1 you donate, I will match it with $2.

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