Seeking Truth in a World of Propaganda. Links do not necessarily indicate agreement with stories or perspectives.
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
The Minneapolis Police Department announced Monday evening that they would be investigating allegations of 'vote harvesting' by supporters of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) following an explosive Project Veritas exposé.
"The MPD is aware of the allegations of vote harvesting," tweeted the Minneapolis PD. "We are in the process of looking into the validity of those statements. No further information is available at this time on this."
ALLEGATIONS OF VOTER FRAUD BEING EVALUATED. ✅ The MPD is aware of the allegations of vote harvesting. We are in the process of looking into the validity of those statements. No further information is available at this time on this.
— Minneapolis Police (@MinneapolisPD) September 28, 2020
O'Keefe's latest video features Minneapolis resident Liban Mohamed - who brags on tape about illegally collecting some 300 ballots from Somali immigrants in an effort to help his City Councilman brother, Jamal Osman.
What's more, the journalist teased a "cash-for-ballots financial transaction ON TAPE" in a Monday night Twitter poll.
We have the cash-for-ballots financial transaction ON TAPE.
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) September 29, 2020
Should we launch it tonight? #CashForBallots
Mohamed called O'Keefe "Fake News" in a Monday tweet, according to the Daily Mail.
The Veritas video also featured Somali political operative Omar Jamal - who said he believes ballot harvesters are hired to take advantage of elderly members of the Somali community.
Omar spokesman Jeremy Slevin said the claims were "amplifying a coordinated right-wing campaign to delegitimize a free and fair election this fall undermines our democracy."
President Trump took to Twitter late Monday evening, calling the allegations "totally illegal," and that he hopes that "the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota has this, and other of her many misdeeds, under serious review."
This is totally illegal. Hope that the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota has this, and other of her many misdeeds, under serious review??? If not, why not??? We will win Minnesota because of her, and law enforcement. Saved Minneapolis & Iron O Range! https://t.co/yete31P680
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 28, 2020
The Covid Deception
Paul Craig Roberts
We have been deceived by public health authorities about Covid, partly from public authorities’ ignorance of the virus, its spread and treatment, but mainly on purpose.
One reason we were intentionally deceived by public health authorities, and continue to be deceived by them, is to create a market for a Covid vaccination. There are billions of dollars of profits in this, and Big Pharma wants them. The financial connections between public health authorities and Big Pharma means that WHO, NIH, and CDC also desire mass vaccinations. If there are not enough people scared out of their wits to voluntarily seek vaccination, the chances are vaccinations will be made mandatory or your ability to travel, and so forth, will be made dependent on being vaccinated.
Another intentional reason for our deception is the Covid threat justifies voting by mail from the safety of one’s home. Voting by mail means that no winner can be declared on election night. The mail-in votes will have to be counted as they come in. The delay in declaring an election winner allows time for more propaganda that Trump has (1) fraudently rigged his reelection or (2) has lost and won’t step down. As the presstitutes speak with one orchestrated voice, whether Trump wins or not will be buried in reports that he lost and refuses to step down or that he won by fraud.
Even if Trump survives the color revolution planned for him, he will be under attack as an illegitimate president just as he was during his first term when he was allegedly elected by “Russian interference.” This will suffice to prevent a renewal of his attack on the Globalist Establishment—listen to his first inaugural address—and again sideline his desire to serve peace by reducing the dangerous tensions with Russia, a policy that deprives the military/security complex of its valuable enemy.
As presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan learned, reducing tensions with Russia threatens the budget and power of the military/security complex that President Eisenhower warned Americans against. This complex has more power than the president of the United States. As no one would any longer believe another “lone assassin” explanation, Trump is being assassinated with false accusations and a color revolution. For awhile Trump used Twitter to refute the false accusations, but now the President of the United States is censored by Twitter.
When the color revolution strikes, Trump will not be able to communicate with the American people through print, TV, NPR, or social media. There will only be charges against Trump, and no answers from him.
The Democrats are claiming that as the Postmaster General is appointed by Trump, he will rig the mail-in votes by not delivering votes from blue states. Yet polls show that the vast majority of Democrats are voting by mail and that hardly any Republicans are. This is because the postal union is a public-sector union and belongs to the Democrats. The postal workers already have their instructions: deliver no votes from red areas. Obviously, no Democrats would vote by mail if they thought the Postmaster General had any control over mail delivery. The Republicans know that the postal union will not deliver their votes and are voting in person. ( Thousands of undelivered, unopened votes from 2018 have been found in a trash dump–https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/09/exclusive-california-man-finds-thousands-unopened-ballots-garbage-dumpster-workers-quickly-try-cover-photos/ ).
This should mean that on election night Trump will have a tremendous victory, but the delay to count the mail-in votes gives the Democrats the time needed to figure out how large the mail-in vote has to be to win or contest the election.
It is not only mail-in voting but also absentee ballots that don’t get delivered: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/wisconsin-authorities-investigate-absentee-ballots-found-ditch-fbi-probes-discarded-pro?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter
A third reason for the intentional misrepresentation of the Covid threat is to build the growing police state on more intrusions into private life. The public health threat is used to mandate unconstitutional intrusions that close private businesses or force them to operate at 50 percent capacity, thus driving them into bankruptcy and destroying the lifework of people in the name of public health. The threat is also used to accustom the public to obey mandates to wear masks that provide zero protection. Although opposition to this harmful policy is rising in the US and is strong in Germany and the UK, the fear of Covid that has been indoctrinated has caused most populations to behave as lemmings. People are being trained to obey edicts that harm them.
Now, let’s look at the misrepresentation of the Covid Threat itself.
Many medical professionals have shown, with evidence, that the Covid threat has been greatly overstated. According to the CDC’s own data, of the alleged 200,000 Americans killed by Covid, only 9,000 actually were. The remainder had 2.6 co-morbidities that in fact killed them. The CDC reports that in only 6% of the reported Covid deaths was Covid the only cause. For 94% of the Covid deaths, there were on average 2.6 comorbidities or additional causes of death–https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm?fbclid=IwAR0LhME5kaVDj5hGFZ-G5ypGdMDaGlkPi0DF8aDKL_bUDi0hJsN_Fq5zPUQ#Comorbidities
( Examples of comorbidities: https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1308045036391727104 ).
The CDC concludes that the initial fatality rates were overestimated. If you have the virus, the CDC reports the survival rate by age group. As I read the report, the percentages are all Covid deaths including those with an average of 2.6 comorbidities.
Age Group Probability of Survival
0-19: 99.997%
20-49: 99.98%
50-69: 99.5%
70+: 94.6%
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html
In addition to existing morbidities, many who died from Covid died from the ventilators or from being denied HCQ treatment. HCQ, a safe and certain cure, was demonized by public health officials in alliance with Big Pharma and the presstitutes, because it is inexpensive and in the way of vaccine profits. If there is a cure, there is no need for a vaccine that some experts believe will be more dangerous than Covid itself. (Doctors in Florida claim to have found a second cure–https://bgr.com/2020/09/26/coronavirus-cure-icam-protocol-florida/ )
The Covid threat is being kept alive by the presstitutes and public health officials until a vaccine can be developed. The latest claim is that the return of the young to colleges has reignited the contagation and spreading it to the adult population in a second wave. This “threat” is an orchestrated hoax. According to the data, the 48,299 Covid-19 cases reported at 37 US universities are associated with only two hospitalizations and zero deaths–https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/09/scam-48299-covid-19-cases-37-us-universities-2-hospitalizations-zero-deaths-likely-killed-dog/
There is talk of returning to lockdowns and more stringent mask requirements. All of this is to keep people, especially the elderly, frightened and supportive of vaccination. Proper testing of the vaccine is suspended in an effort to rush it to market before Covid disappears ( https://www.rt.com/news/501523-western-pharma-vaccines-rush-hypocrisy/ ).
Dr. Mike Yeadon, former Chief Science Officer for Big Pharma giant Pfizer says that the pandemic is over and that the Covid test produces “false positives” and does not indicate infection with Covid. Dr. Yeadon said that we are basing a government policy, an economic policy, and a civil liberties policy on “what may well be completely fake data on this coronavirus.” According to Dr.Yeadon, a “second wave” and “any government case for lockdowns, given the well-known principles of epidemiology, will be entirely manufactured” ( https://hubpages.com/politics/Pfizer-Chief-Science-Officer-Second-Wave-Based-on-Fake-Data-of-False-Positives-for-New-Cases-Pandemic-is-Over ).
It is clear that the Covid threat was overestimated at great cost–https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/09/23/covid-19-threat-was-greatly-overestimated-at-huge-cost/ . The Belgian medical profession has demanded a halt to the Covid propaganda–https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/09/18/belgian-medical-profession-demands-a-halt-to-covid-pandemic-propaganda/
Of course Big Pharma and its shills such as Fauci, Redfield, and the presstitutes, will continue to keep the “Covid Crisis” alive as it is essential to Big Pharma’s vaccine profits, the Democrats’ color revolution against President Trump, and the training of populations to accept more government control over their lives.
The post The Covid Deception appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org.
President Donald J. Trump talks to members of the press along the South Lawn driveway Thursday, Sept. 24, 2020, prior to boarding Marine One en route to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, to begin his trip to North Carolina and Florida. (Official White House photo by Tia Dufour)
With the first presidential debate scheduled for Tuesday, President Trump on Sunday pressed again for Democratic nominee Joe Biden to take a drug test either before or after the event.
"I will be strongly demanding a Drug Test of Sleepy Joe Biden prior to, or after, the Debate on Tuesday night," Trump tweeted. "Naturally, I will agree to take one also."
The president said of Biden, "His Debate performances have been record setting UNEVEN, to put it mildly. Only drugs could have caused this discrepancy???"
I will be strongly demanding a Drug Test of Sleepy Joe Biden prior to, or after, the Debate on Tuesday night. Naturally, I will agree to take one also. His Debate performances have been record setting UNEVEN, to put it mildly. Only drugs could have caused this discrepancy???
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 27, 2020
This is not the first time Trump has brought up the issue, having told "Fox & Friends" this month he believed Barack Obama's vice president was taking something to help his "mental clarity."
"I think he should take a drug test," Trump said at the time.
Biden fired back at the president's initial demand, saying: "I'm looking forward to the debate and he's a fool. The comments are just foolish."
"Get ready, Mr. President. Here I come," Biden added.
In response to the dispute, former Fox News contributor Dr. David Samadi said: "There's nothing wrong with both of you doing that. It should be done for all candidates running for office."
Follow Joe on Twitter @JoeKovacsNews
The post Trump 'strongly demanding' Biden take drug test before or after debate appeared first on WND.
Authored by Ben Norton via TheGrayZone.com,
Western government-funded intelligence cutouts trained Syrian opposition leaders, planted stories in media outlets from BBC to Al Jazeera, and ran a cadre of journalists. A trove of leaked documents exposes the propaganda network.
Leaked documents show how UK government contractors developed an advanced infrastructure of propaganda to stimulate support in the West for Syria’s political and armed opposition.
Virtually every aspect of the Syrian opposition was cultivated and marketed by Western government-backed public relations firms, from their political narratives to their branding, from what they said to where they said it.
The leaked files reveal how Western intelligence cutouts played the media like a fiddle, carefully crafting English- and Arabic-language media coverage of the war on Syria to churn out a constant stream of pro-opposition coverage.
US and European contractors trained and advised Syrian opposition leaders at all levels, from young media activists to the heads of the parallel government-in-exile. These firms also organized interviews for Syrian opposition leaders on mainstream outlets such as BBC and the UK’s Channel 4.
More than half of the stringers used by Al Jazeera in Syria were trained in a joint US-UK government program called Basma, which produced hundreds of Syrian opposition media activists.
Western government PR firms not only influenced the way the media covered Syria, but as the leaked documents reveal, they produced their own propagandistic pseudo-news for broadcast on major TV networks in the Middle East, including BBC Arabic, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and Orient TV.
These UK-funded firms functioned as full-time PR flacks for the extremist-dominated Syrian armed opposition. One contractor, called InCoStrat, said it was in constant contact with a network of more than 1,600 international journalists and “influencers,” and used them to push pro-opposition talking points.
Another Western government contractor, ARK, crafted a strategy to “re-brand” Syria’s Salafi-jihadist armed opposition by “softening its image.” ARK boasted that it provided opposition propaganda that “aired almost every day on” major Arabic-language TV networks.
Virtually every major Western corporate media outlet was influenced by the UK government-funded disinformation campaign exposed in the trove of leaked documents, from the New York Times to the Washington Post, CNN to The Guardian, the BBC to Buzzfeed.
The files confirm reporting by journalists including The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal on the role of ARK, the US-UK government contractor, in popularizing the White Helmets in Western media. ARK ran the social media accounts of the White Helmets, and helped turn the Western-funded group into a key propaganda weapon of the Syrian opposition.
The leaked documents consist mainly of material produced under the auspices of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. All of the firms named in the files were contracted by the British government, but many also were running “multi-donor projects” that received funding from the governments of the United States and other Western European countries.
In addition to demonstrating the role these Western intelligence cutouts played in shaping media coverage, the documents shine light on the British government program to train and arm rebel groups in Syria.
Other materials show how London and Western governments worked together to build a new police force in opposition-controlled areas.
Many of these Western-backed opposition groups in Syria were extremist Salafi-jihadists. Some of the UK government contractors whose activities are exposed in these leaked documents were in effect supporting Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and its fanatical offshoots.
The documents were obtained by a group calling itself Anonymous, and were published under a series of files entitled, “Op. HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] Trojan Horse: From Integrity Initiative To Covert Ops Around The Globe. Part 1: Taming Syria.” The unidentified leakers said they aim to “expose criminal activity of the UK’s FCO and secret services,” stating, “We declare war on the British neocolonialism!”
The Grayzone was not able to independently verify the authenticity of the documents. However, the contents tracked closely with reporting on Western destabilization and propaganda operations in Syria by this outlet and many others.
A leaked UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office report from 2014 reveals a joint operation with the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development to support “strategic communications, research, monitoring and evaluation and operational support to Syrian opposition entities.”
The UK FOC stated clearly that this campaign consisted of “creating network linkages between political movements and media outlets,” by the “building of local independent media platforms.”
The British government planned “Mentoring, training and coaching for enhanced delivery of media services, including digital and social media.”
Its goal was “to provide PR and media handling trainers, as well as technical staff, such as cameramen, webmasters and interpreters,” along with the “production of speeches, press releases and other media communications.”
An additional 2017 government document explains clearly how Britain funded the “selection, training, support and communications mentoring of Syrian activists who share the UK’s vision for a future Syria… and who will abide by a set of values that are consistent with UK policy.”
This initiative entailed British government funding “to support Syrian grassroots media activism within both the civilian and armed opposition spheres,” and was targeted at Syrians living in both “extremist and moderate” opposition-held territory.
In other words, the UK Foreign Office and military crafted plans to wage a comprehensive media war on Syria. To establish an infrastructure capable of managing the propaganda blitz, Britain paid a series of government contractors, including ARK, The Global Strategy Network (TGSN), Innovative Communication & Strategies (InCoStrat), and Albany.
The work of these firms overlapped, and some collaborated in their projects to cultivate the Syrian opposition.
One of the main British government contractors behind the Syria regime-change scheme was called ARK (Analysis Research Knowledge).
ARK FZC is based in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. It brands itself as a humanitarian NGO, claiming it “was created in order to assist the most vulnerable,” by establishing a “social enterprise, empowering local communities through the provision of agile and sustainable interventions to create greater stability, opportunity and hope for the future.”
In reality ARK is an intelligence cutout that functions as an arm of Western interventionism.
In a leaked document it filed with the British government, ARK said its “focus since 2012 has been delivering highly effective, politically-and conflict-sensitive Syria programming for the governments of the United Kingdom, United States, Denmark, Canada, Japan and the European Union.”
ARK boasted of overseeing $66 million worth of contracts to support pro-opposition efforts in Syria.
On its website, ARK lists all of these governments as clients, as well as the United Nations.
In its Syria operations, ARK worked together with another UK contractor called The Global Strategy Network (TGSN), which is directed by Richard Barrett, a former director of global counter-terrorism at MI6.
ARK apparently had operatives on the ground inside Syria at the beginning of the regime-change attempt in 2011, reporting to the UK FCO that “ARK staff are in regular contact with activists and civil society actors whom they initially met during the outbreak of protests in spring 2011.”
The UK contractor boasted an “extensive network of civil society and community actors that ARK has helped through a dedicated capacity building centre ARK established in Gaziantep,” a city in southern Turkey that has been a base of intelligence operations against the Syrian government.
ARK played a central role in developing the foundations of the Syrian political opposition’s narrative. In one leaked document, the firm took credit for the “development of a core Syrian opposition narrative,” which was apparently crafted during a series of workshops with opposition leaders sponsored by the US and UK governments.
ARK trained all levels of the Syrian opposition in communications, from “citizen journalism workshops with Syrian media activists, to working with senior members of the National Coalition to develop a core communications narrative.”
The firm even oversaw the PR strategy for the Supreme Military Council (SMC), the leadership of the official armed wing of Syria’s opposition, the Free Syrian Army (FSA). ARK created a complex PR campaign to “provide a ‘re-branding’ of the SMC in order to distinguish itself from extremist armed opposition groups and to establish the image of a functioning, inclusive, disciplined and professional military body.”
ARK admitted that it sought to whitewash Syria’s armed opposition, which had been largely dominated by Salafi-jihadists, by “Softening the FSA Image.”
ARK took the lead in developing a massive network of opposition media activists in Syria, and openly took credit for inspiring protests inside the country.
In its training centers in Syria and southern Turkey, the Western government contractor reported, “More than 150 activists have been trained and equipped by ARK on topics from the basics of camera handling, lighting, and sound to producing reports, journalistic safety, online security, and ethical reporting.”
The firm flooded Syria with opposition propaganda. In just six months, ARK reported that 668,600 of its print products were distributed inside Syria, including “posters, flyers, informative booklets, activity books and other campaign-related materials.”
In one document spelling out the UK contractors’ communications operations in Syria, ARK and the British intelligence cutout TGSN boasted of overseeing the following media assets inside the country: 97 video stringers, 23 writers, 49 distributors, 23 photographers, 19 in-country trainers, eight training centers, three media offices, and 32 research officers.
ARK emphasized that it had “well-established contacts” with some of the top media outlets in the world, naming Reuters, the New York Times, CNN, the BBC, The Guardian, the Financial Times, The Times, Al Jazeera, Sky News Arabic, Orient TV, and Al Arabiya.
The UK contractor added, “ARK has provided regular branded and unbranded content to key pan-Arab and Syria-focused satellite TV channels such as Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, BBC Arabic, Orient TV, Aleppo Today, Souria al-Ghadd, and Souria al-Sha’ab since 2012.”
“ARK products promoting HMG (Her Majesty’s Government) priorities by fostering attitudinal and behavioural change are broadcast almost every day on pan-Arab channels,” the firm bragged. “In 2014, 20 branded and un-branded Syria reports were produced on average by ARK each month and broadcast on major pan-Arab television channels such as Al Arabiya, Al Jazeera, and Orient TV.”
“ARK has almost daily conversations with channels and weekly meetings to engage and understand editorial preferences,” the Western intelligence cutout said.
The firm also took credit for placing 10 articles per month in pan-Arab newspapers such as Al Hayat and Asharq Al-Awsat.
The Syrian opposition media war was organized within the framework of a project called Basma. ARK worked with other Western government contractors through Basma in order to train Syrian opposition activists.
With funding from both the US and UK governments, Basma developed into an enormously influential platform. Its Arabic Facebook page had over 500,000 followers, and on YouTube it built up a large following as well.
Mainstream corporate media outlets misleadingly portrayed Basma as a “Syrian citizen journalism platform,” or a “civil society group working for a ‘liberatory, progressive transition to a new Syria.’” In reality it was a Western government astroturfing operation to cultivate opposition propagandists.
Nine of the 16 stringers used by Al Jazeera in Syria were trained through the US/UK government’s Basma initiative, ARK boasted in a leaked document.
In an earlier report for the UK FCO, filed just three years into its work, ARK claimed to have “trained over 1,400 beneficiaries representing over 210 beneficiary organisations in more than 130 workshops, and disbursed more than 53,000 individual pieces of equipment,” in a vast network that reached “into all of Syria’s 14 governorates,” which included both opposition- and government-held areas.
The Western contractor published a map highlighting its network of stringers and media activists and their relationships with the White Helmets as well as newly created police forces across opposition-controlled Syria.
In its trainings, ARK developed opposition spokespeople, taught them how to speak with the press, and then helped arrange interviews with mainstream Arabic- and English-language media outlets.
ARK described its strategy “to identify credible, moderate civilian governance spokespeople who will be promoted as go-to interlocutors for regional and international media. They will echo key messages linked to the coordinated local campaigns across all media, with consortium platforms able to cover this messaging as well and encourage other outlets to pick it up.”
In addition to working with the international press and cultivating opposition leaders, ARK helped develop a massive opposition media super-structure.
ARK said it was a “key implementer of a multi-donor effort to develop a network of FM radio stations and community magazines inside Syria since 2012.” The contractor worked with 14 FM stations and 11 magazines inside Syria, including both Arabic- and Kurdish-language radio.
To propagate opposition broadcasts across Syria, ARK designed what it called “Radio in a Box” (RIAB) kits in 2012. The firm took credit for providing equipment to 48 transmission sites.
ARK also circulated up to 30,000 magazines per month. It reported that “ARK-supported magazines were the three most popular in Aleppo City; the most popular magazine in Homs City; and the most popular magazine in Qamishli.”
A Syrian opposition propaganda outlet directly run by ARK, called Moubader, developed a huge following on social media, including more than 200,000 likes on Facebook. ARK printed 15,000 copies per month of a “high-quality hard copy” Moubader magazine and distributed it “across opposition-held areas of Syria.”
The British contractor TGSN, which worked alongside ARK, developed its own outlet called the “Revolutionary Forces of Syria Media Office (RFS),” a leaked document shows. This confirms a 2016 report in The Grayzone by contributor Rania Khalek, who obtained emails showing how the UK government-backed RFS media office offered to pay one journalist a staggering $17,000 per month to produce propaganda for Syrian rebels.
Another leaked record shows that in just one year, in 2018 – which was apparently the final year of ARK’s Syria program – the firm billed the UK government for a staggering 2.3 million British pounds.
This enormous ARK propaganda operation was directed by Firas Budeiri, who had previously served as the Syria director for the UK-based international NGO Save the Children.
40 percent of ARK’s Syria project team were Syrian citizens, and another 25 percent were Turkish. The firm said its Syria team staff had “extensive experience managing programmes and conducting research funded by many different governmental clients in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Turkey, the Palestinian Territories, Iraq and other conflict-affected states.”
The Western contractor ARK was a central force in launching the White Helmets operation.
The leaked documents show ARK ran the Twitter and Facebook pages of Syria Civil Defense, known more commonly as the White Helmets.
ARK took credit for developing “an internationally-focused communications campaign designed to raise global awareness of the (White Helmets) teams and their life saving work.”
ARK also facilitated communications between the White Helmets and The Syria Campaign, a PR firm run out of London and New York that helped popularize the White Helmets in the United States.
It was apparently “following subsequent discussions with ARK and the teams” that The Syria Campaign “selected civil defence to front its campaign to keep Syria in the news,” the firm wrote in a report for the UK Foreign Office.
“With ARK’s guidance, TSC (The Syria Campaign) also attended ARK’s civil defence training sessions to create media content for its #WhiteHelmets campaign which launched in August 2014 and has since gone viral,” the Western contractor added.
In 2014, ARK produced a long-form documentary on the White Helmets, titled “Digging for Life,” which was repeatedly broadcast on Orient TV.
While it was running the White Helmets’ social media accounts, ARK bragged that it was boosting followers and views on the Facebook page for Idlib City Council.
The Syrian city of Idlib was taken over by al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, which then went on to publicly execute women who were accused of adultery.
While effectively aiding these al-Qaeda-aligned extremist groups, ARK and the British intelligence cutout TGSN also signed a document with the FCO hilariously pledging to follow “UK guidance on gender sensitivity” and “ensure gender is considered in all capacity building and campaign development.”
Another leaked document shows the Western government-backed firm ARK revealing that, back in 2011, it worked with another government contractor called Tsamota to help develop the Syrian Commission for Justice and Accountability (SCJA). In 2014, SCJA changed its name to the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA).
The Grayzone exposed CIJA as a Western government-funded regime-change organization whose investigators collaborated with al-Qaeda and its extremist allies in order to wage lawfare on the Syrian government.
ARK noted that the project initially worked “with seed funding from the UK Conflict Pool to support investigative and forensic training for Syrian war crimes investigators” and has since “grown to become a major component of Syria’s transitional justice architecture.”
Since the US, European Union, and their Middle East allies lost the military phase of their war on Syria, CIJA has taken the lead in trying to prolong the regime-change campaign through lawfare.
In the leaked documents, another UK government contractor called Innovative Communications Strategies (InCoStrat) boasted of building a massive “network of over 1600 journalists and key influencers with an interest in Syria.”
InCoStrat stressed that it was “managing and delivering a multi donor project in support of UK Foreign Policy objectives” in Syria, “specifically providing strategic communication support to the moderate armed opposition.”
Other funders of InCoStrat’s work with the opposition in Syria, the firm disclosed, included the US government, the United Arab Emirates, and anti-Assad Syrian businessmen.
InCoStrat served as a liaison between its government clients and the Syrian National Coalition, the Western-backed parallel government that the opposition tried to create. InCoStrat advised senior leaders of this Syrian shadow regime, and even ran the National Coalition’s own media office from Istanbul, Turkey.
The Western contractor took credit for organizing a 2014 BBC interview with Ahmad Jarba, the then-president of the opposition National Coalition.
The firm added that “journalists have often reached out to us in search of the appropriate people for their programmes.” As an example, InCoStrat said it helped plant its own Syrian opposition activists in BBC Arabic reports. The firm then added, “Once making the initial connections we encouraged the Syrians to maintain the relationships with the journalists in the BBC instead of using ourselves as the conduit.”
Like ARK, InCoStrat worked closely with the press. The firm said it had “extensive experience in engaging Arab and international news media,” adding that it worked directly with “heads of regional news in major satellite TV networks, press bureaus and print media.”
“Key members of InCoStrat have previously worked as Middle East correspondents for some of the world’s largest news agencies including Reuters,” the Western contractor added.
Also like ARK, InCoStrat established a vast media infrastructure. The firm set up Syrian opposition media offices in Dera’a, Syria; Istanbul and Reyhanli, Turkey; and Amman, Jordan.
InCoStrat worked with 130 stringers across Syria, and said it had more than 120 reporters working inside the country, along with “an additional five official spokesmen who appear several times a week on international and regional TV.”
InCoStrat also established eight FM radio stations and six community magazines across Syria.
The firm reported that it penetrated the armed opposition by developing “strong relationships with 54 brigade commanders in Syria’s southern front,” that involved “daily, direct engagement with the commanders and their officers inside Syria,” as well as defected officers Free Syrian Army (FSA) units in government-held Damascus.
In the leaked documents, InCoStrat boasted that its reporters organized interviews with many armed opposition militias, including the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra.
In its media war on Damascus, InCoStrat pursued a two-pronged campaign that consisted of the following: “a) Guerrilla Campaign. Use the media to create the event. b) Guerrilla Tactics. Initiate an event to create the media effect.”
The intelligence cutout therefore sought to use the media as a weapon to advance tangible political demands of the Syrian opposition.
In one case, InCoStrat took credit for a successful international campaign to force the Syrian government to lift its siege of the extremist-held opposition stronghold of Homs. The Grayzone contributor Rania Khalek reported on the crisis in Homs, which was besieged by Damascus after the far-right Sunni fundamentalists that controlled it began carrying out sectarian massacres against religious minorities and kidnapping Alawite civilians.
“We connected international journalists with Syrians living in besieged Homs,” InCoStrat explained. It organized an interview between Britain’s Channel 4 and a doctor in the city, which helped raise international attention, ultimately leading to an end to the siege.
In another instance, the UK contractor said it “produced postcards, posters and reports” comparing the secular government of Bashar al-Assad to the fundamentalist Salafi-jihadists in ISIS. Then it “provided a credible, Arabic-English speaking Syrian spokesperson to engage the media.”
The campaign was very successful, according to InCoStrat: Al-Jazeera America and The National published the firm’s propaganda posters. The British contractor also organized interviews on the topic with The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The Guardian, The Times, Buzzfeed, Al-Jazeera, Suriya Al-Sham, and Orient.
InCoStrat has apparently been involved in numerous Western-backed regime-change operations.
In one leaked document, the firm said it helped to train civil society organizations in marketing, media, and communications in Afghanistan, Honduras, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. It even trained a team of anti-Saddam Hussein journalists inside Basra, Iraq after the joint US-UK invasion.
In addition to contracting for the United Kingdom, InCoStrat disclosed that it has worked for the governments of the United States, Singapore, Latvia, Sweden, Denmark, and Libya.
After NATO destroyed the Libyan state in a regime-change war in 2011, InCoStrat was brought in in 2012 to conduct similar communications work for the Libyan National Transitional Council, the Western-backed opposition that sought to take power.
The leaked documents shed further light on a UK government contractor called Albany.
Albany boasted that it “secured the participation of an extensive local network of over 55 stringers, reporters and videographers” to influence media narratives and advance UK foreign policy interests.
The firm helped create an influential Syrian opposition media outfit called Enab Baladi. Founded in 2011 in the anti-Assad hub of Daraya, at the beginning of the war, Enab Baladi was aggressively marketed in the Western press as a grassroots Syrian media operation.
In reality, Enab Baladi was the product of a British contractor that took responsibility for its evolution “from an amateur-run entity into one of the most prominent Syrian media organizations.”
Albany also coordinated communications between opposition media outlets and extremist Islamist opposition groups by hiring an “engagement leader (who) has deep credibility with key groups including (north) Failaq ash-Sham, Jabha Shammiyeh, Jaysh Idleb al Hur, Ahrar ash-Sham, (center) Jaysh al Islam, Failaq al Rahman, and (south) Jaysh Tahrir.” Many of these militias were linked to al-Qaeda and are now recognized by the US Department of State and European governments as official terrorist groups.
Unlike other Western government contractors active in Syria, which often tried to feign a semblance of balance, Albany made it clear that its media reporting was nothing more than propaganda.
The firm admitted that it trained Syrian media activists in a unique “newsroom process” that called to “curate” news by “collecting and organising stories and content that support and reinforce the core narrative.”
In 2014, Albany boasted of running the Syrian National Coalition’s communications team at the Geneva Peace talks.
Albany also warned that revelations of Western government funding for these opposition media organizations that were being portrayed as grassroots initiatives would discredit them.
When internal emails were leaked showing that the massive opposition media platform Basma Syria was funded by the United States and Britain, Albany wrote, “the Basma brand has been compromised following leaks about funding project aims.”
The leaks on social media “have damaged the credibility and trustworthiness of the existing branded platform,” Albany wrote. “Credibility and trust are the key currencies of the activities envisaged and for this reason we consider it essential to refresh the approach if the content to be disseminated is to have effect.” The Basma website was taken down soon after.
These files provide clear insight into how the Syrian opposition was cultivated by Western governments with imperial designs on Damascus, and was kept afloat with staggering sums of cash that flowed from the pockets of British taxpayers – often to the benefit of fanatical militiamen allied with Al Qaeda.
While Dutch prosecutors prepare war crimes charges against the Syrian government for fighting off the onslaught, the leaked files are a reminder of the leading role that Western states and their war-profiteering companies played in the carefully organized destruction of the country.
History-the-trickster has paradoxically anointed the Great Disrupter, Mr. Trump, as the agent of order while the Democrats seek to bring chaos into every quarter of American life, a party of shrieking “Karens” and men acting like women. Such as: Tom Friedman of The New York Times mewling like a little girl to Anderson Cooper on CNN Thursday night that he was “living in terror,” that “everybody should be terrified,” because Mr. Trump “refuses to commit to accepting the election results.”
Is that so? I think it was Hillary Clinton who declared just a few weeks ago that “Joe Biden should not concede the election under any circumstances” — for instance, the circumstance that he loses the election. Of course, Mr. Trump, troll supremo, is simply punking his adversaries by proposing to play fair, that is, to play by the same rules they play by. And this only causes the Democrats to retreat into the chaos that is their comfort zone, where they hop up and down like fourteen-year-old girls in a tantrum.
They are provoked, you understand, because Mr. Trump actually represents the thing they hate most: Daddy! Daddy’s in da house, the White House, as a matter of fact, and this baleful symbolic circumstance has driven the Democrats out of their gourds for four years, turning them into a party of hysterical women and men acting like hysterical women. Would you want to get on an airplane in bad weather piloted by a crew of hysterical women? That’s kind of the Big Question going into this national election 2020.
Tantrums, tantrums everywhere! The hysterical women (including men) of the Democratic Party have enlisted Black Lives Matter as their official agents of chaos. It must be so, because every time chaos erupts in an American city, and buildings catch on fire, and businesses are looted and burnt down, and police are bushwhacked, the local Democrats in charge where these things happen do not offer a peep of objection. And neither Kamala Harris nor her sidekick Joe Biden send any message aimed at quelling the violent hysteria. One must conclude that they’re on-board with rioting, arson, looting, and bushwhacking. Like I said: chaos = their comfort zone.
The Democrats like chaos because it works as an effective smokescreen to conceal the dirty secrets of their private behavior, namely 1) the fantastic international web of grift among the Biden family that was just this week detailed in a report issued jointly by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the Senate Finance Committee (none of which was reported by The New York Times, CNN, or MSNBC); 2) the widening gyre of John Durham’s investigation into the origins of RussiaGate and now, surprise surprise, also into the suspicious doings of the Clinton Foundation; and 3) the financing and orchestration of BLM /Antifa riot mobs by Democratic Party-affiliated non-profit orgs.
So then, there is the key matter at hand: The Democratic Party’s open promise to bring their trademark chaos to the November 3 election, based on the tactical plan drawn up in “war gaming” by the shady Transition Integrity Project this past summer. The idea is to swamp the country with harvested mail-in ballots in order to confound a resolution of the vote and sow chaos in the electoral college — to which they will bring an army of Lawfare attorneys who will engineer the desired outcome in the swing statehouses with Democratic governors, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If Mr. Trump objects to these shenanigans, he’ll be labeled a “tyrant.”
It’s just the kind of election strategy that a gang of middle-school girls would dream up. Because they are hysterical fourteen-year-olds with undeveloped brains, it would never occur to them that Daddy might have a notion what they are up to, and a counter-plan to frustrate their scheme. They are in such a fugue of rage that they can’t think one play ahead on the gameboard. Well, as the wily Bonaparte once remarked, “never interrupt the enemy while he is making a mistake.”
The death of Justice RBG has amplified the hysteria. The Democrats are not just having a tantrum, now they’re chewing up the furniture, ululating, beating their flanks, discharging gobs of snot, peeing their panties, and foaming at the mouth. If he was anyone else but Daddy, Mr. Trump might have to take them out and have them shot.
Instead, the President is going to nominate a sane and reasonable Mommy to the Supreme Court, and Uncle Cocaine Mitch is going to see that she is confirmed, and there is an excellent chance that together they will bring order back to this deranged household — and then perhaps we can turn our attention to the real existential problems of financial crisis and economic collapse.
Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.
The post Female Problems appeared first on LewRockwell.
Last week a locked-down pizza house across my street put up a banner: “Unlock hospitality now”. That same night the restaurant’s glass door was smashed — after curfew, mind you.
It was a vivid illustration of Victoria’s descent into moral confusion, a state where law-breaking vigilantes are the ones shutting down dissent.
The anti-lockdown sentiment is becoming harder to contain, and the concerns of a restless population were hardly appeased when last week premier Daniel Andrews rebuffed concerns that lockdown rules infringe basic human rights.
Human rights, he said, “are not the first consideration”.
It was a galling brush-off, coming from the leader of the same Victorian Labor that enacted Australia’s first state-based human rights charter.
Even more galling was Andrews’ comment: “It’s not about human rights; it’s about human life.”
Galling because this is the party that put “abortion rights” ahead of human life with its 2008 Abortion Law Reform Act, a law that legalised ending the life of an unborn infant up until birth, and stripped doctors of their right to conscientiously refuse to participate.
It’s the party that put those same abortion rights ahead of human life when it outlawed peaceful protests by those who by their presence outside abortion clinics seek to save the lives of unborn children and offer expecting mums an alternative choice.
And it’s the same party whose “Voluntary Assisted Dying” laws put “the right to die” ahead of human life by legislating that some lives aren’t, in fact, worth living, and sometimes when a Victorian wants to take their own life, we should let them — even give them a final nudge.
In this context, Andrews’ protestations of “life before rights” reflect a brazen — and convenient — deviation from Labor’s modus operandi.
For many Victorians who have long thought Dan was the man, lockdowns have highlighted just how inconsistent and fickle Labor’s respect for human life and rights really is.
For anyone who has been following the score, it’s no surprise at all.
Remember the 2015 and 2016 attempts to force faith-based adoption agencies and faith-based schools to violate principles of their faith?
What about last year’s laws forcing priests to violate solemn vows and incur excommunication by breaching the confessional seal?
And in advocating LGBT rights, Andrews has declared he will make it illegal for same-sex-attracted people to seek help to change their orientation, even where they freely choose to — a policy that seems to reject the notion of fluidity in sexuality and gender — while in the same breath avidly supporting the “Safe Schools” program, which encourages children towards gender fluidity, even against parents’ wishes.
Each of these initiatives contravenes essential aspects of universal standards of ethics, including the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the consistent natural law teachings of all mainstream religions, the Hippocratic Oath (which for two millennia bound the conduct of doctors), the Declaration of Geneva, and the aforementioned Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities.
A government that rejected these moral and ethical standards in favour of purely populist or utilitarian principles might be a dangerous thing, but at least you’d know where you stand.
But one of the hallmarks of Victorian Labor’s reign has been its incessant insistence that it is doing what’s “right”, even while jettisoning the moral and ethical heritage many of its constituents still hold dear.
Google “Dan Andrews” and “it’s the right thing to do” and you won’t just get hundreds of hits — you’ll find parody websites explaining how to craft the perfect Dan Andrews speech or social media post by incorporating this exact phrase.
No matter what he does, it’s always the right thing to do. Fancy that.
Yet as Andrews’ arbitrary treatment of human life and human rights shows, this strong sense of moral rectitude is unmoored from any objective standard.
It is a reminder that the role of government is not to decide what is ethical. The most dangerous demagogues, dictators, oligarchies, communist and fascist states of history have all arrogated to themselves the power of defining morality.
“They shall be like Gods, knowing right and wrong,” has been the deadly aspiration of Adam and Eve, Adolf Hitler, Lukashenko and every other ruler who has sought not just to legislate, but to redefine right and wrong.
We can add the 2020 Victorian government to this list, facilitated by an all-too-compliant opposition, and a radical crossbench.
This is not just a Victorian thing. It is part of a broader trend in liberal democracies to deny the existence of objective right and wrong, and reject the tenets of the “natural law” upon which the legal and political systems of modern liberal states were founded.
This heritage is what keeps societies like ours on an even keel. It offers a standard against which all of us may be judged — from monarchs to prime ministers to premiers, down to the lowliest among us — and that gives us confidence that those who govern us will do so fairly, respecting equally the dignity each of us shares.
The pandemic lockdowns have awakened many Victorians to the prospect that their government might not be quite as committed to these ideals as you’d expect.
Voters shouldn’t stand for it. Unethical rulers forfeit their right to rule, lest, as Plato wrote, “Democracy passes into despotism.”
Victorians deserve a government that really does try to do the right thing, not one that claims the authority to rewrite the rules of right and wrong at the expense of its own people.
This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
The post Something is rotten in the State of Victoria appeared first on MercatorNet.
It is hard to believe, but Judge Baraitser on Friday ruled that there will be no closing speeches in the Assange extradition hearing. She accepted the proposal initially put forward by counsel for the US government, that closing arguments should simply be submitted in writing and without an oral hearing. This was accepted by the defence, as they need time to address the new superseding indictment in the closing arguments, and Baraitser was not willing for oral argument to take place later than 8 October. By agreeing to written arguments only, the defence gained a further three weeks to put together the closing of their case.
But this entire hearing has been conducted in effective secrecy, a comprehensive secrecy that gives sharp insight into the politico-economic structures of current western society. Physical access to the courtroom has been extremely limited, with the public gallery cut to five people. Video link access has similarly been extremely limited, with 40 NGOs having their access cut by the judge from day 1 at the Old Bailey, including Amnesty International, PEN, Reporters without Borders and observers from the European Parliament, among many others. The state and corporate media have virtually blacked out this hearing, with a truly worrying unanimity, and despite the implications of the case for media freedom. Finally, the corporations that act as internet gatekeepers have heavily suppressed social media posts about Assange, and traffic to those few websites which are reporting.
I am reminded of the words of another friend of mine, Harold Pinter, in accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. It seems perfectly to fit the trial of Julian Assange:
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
Harold sent me a copy of that speech printed for the ceremony, with a kind dedication that I knew was by then painful for him to write as lines of ink shot uncontrollably across the page. After he died, I had it framed and it hangs on my study wall. That was a mistake. When I get back home to Edinburgh, I will break the frame and get the pamphlet out. It needs to be read, often.
The closing arguments are the part of any trial which the media is most likely to report. They sum up all the evidence heard on both sides and what might be drawn from the evidence. To have these simply submitted on paper, without the drama of the courtroom, is to ensure that the hearing will continue to be a media non-event.
The timetable which has been accepted is that the defence will lodge their closing arguments in writing on 30 October, the prosecution will reply on 13 November, with the defence able to make a further response by 20 November purely on any legal questions; Baraitser will then deliver her judgement in January. She made plain that she would not accept any further submissions based on developments in the interim, including the US Presidential election.
Friday was yet another day when the process was as important to the result as the evidence heard, if not more so. The day had started with discussion over a defence attempt to submit two new statements from two new witnesses. Both were psychiatrists with expert knowledge of the US prison system. Previous witnesses, both psychiatrists and US attorneys, who had testified for the defence had been criticised by the prosecution as not having direct knowledge of the specific prison, ADX Florence, Colorado, in which Julian would serve his sentence if convicted.
The prosecution had provided two affidavits on conditions in the prison, one from US Assistant Attorney Gordon Kromberg dated 20 August 2020 and one from a prison psychiatrist named Lukfeld (as heard) dated 3 September 2020. Now it is a very strange feature indeed of these extradition hearings that the defence have no right to cross-examine witnesses who are US federal employees. Gordon Kromberg has submitted five separate affidavits, containing much which is disputed hotly as to fact, but he cannot be cross-examined. Nor may Lukfeld be cross-examined.
Fitzgerald made the point that the defence had to respond to this prosecution evidence somehow, as it could not be cross-examined. He stated that as it had been submitted by the prosecution with the last four weeks, it had taken the defence a little time to find expert witnesses who were in a position to contradict, and then to take their evidence. The defence now had two excellent witnesses with personal knowledge of ADX Florence, and wished to enter their evidence. The defence accepted that because Baraitser had stated the trial will end next week, there would not be time to cross-examine these new witnesses. But then, the prosecution witnesses could not be cross-examined either. As Fitzgerald put it “the prosecution do not have a divine right to cross-examine our witnesses when we do not have any right to cross-examine their witnesses.”
For the US government, James Lewis QC “strongly objected” to this new evidence being submitted. He said the defence had more than a year to prepare these statements and kept trying to prolong the hearing. He said that the defence witnesses did not have the authority of the US government witnesses, and they needed to be cross-examined because many of the defence “experts” were not really expert at all. If these witnesses were called, he would insist on the right to cross-examine and that would extend the hearing.
Having heard the lawyers, Judge Baraitser yet again read out a ruling from her laptop which had been written before she heard either Lewis or Fitzgerald speak. Entirely predictably, she ruled that the defence statements were not admissible, as being too late. The defence “had had a fair opportunity to investigate”. Defence witnesses must be liable to cross-examination. These proceedings had lasted too long already and there must be an end to new evidence. “As a matter of fairness a line must be drawn”, she intoned. She seemed particularly pre-occupied with the notion of “fairness”, which apparently almost always entails ruling against the defence.
For the first time in the course of these hearings, Baraitser did look up briefly from her pre-prepared judgement to insert a reference to something Fitzgerald had said in court, that one possible approach might be that the new defence evidence could simply be cited as though it were an academic article. But only to dismiss it.
So, no closing speeches and two key witnesses not admitted.
We then moved on to the next leg of this very peculiar procedure, in which “case management” always trumps justice, with another defence evidence statement of which an agreed “gist” is simply read into the record, with no cross-examination. Under this procedure, which Baraitser expressly initiated to save time, where the defence will agree, witness statements are whittled down simply to those facts which are uncontested, and a “gist” or edit of that edit is read out, with the whole redacted statement entered into the court record.
The defence have allowed themselves to be too easily browbeaten into submission on all of this “time saving”, which is of course pursued by the judge and the US government in the interests of having as little embarrassing information aired in public as possible, and closing down the hearing quickly. One consequence of the rather hangdog defence approach to this is that, after the first very effective reading of key passages from el-Masri’s evidence, subsequent “gists” read into the record have been raced through, as though the defence realise this evidence has been reduced to a pointless formality, with no expression or weight in the reading and at a speed that far exceeds my ability to take an accurate note.
Like Thursday’s evidence from John Young of Cryptome, the witness statement of Jakob Augstein was important evidence that went to the fact that it was not Assange or Wikileaks who first published the unredacted material, and Augstein added additional information that Assange had tried to prevent it. Before Der Freitag had published its article of 25 August 2011, which revealed that both the password key and the file were out there, Assange had telephoned Augstein, editor of Der Freitag:
This evidence negates the main thrust of the prosecution case, so much so that I cannot understand why the defence have agreed to having it slipped into the record in a manner nobody notices.
The other interesting point about Augstein’s evidence is that it pointed squarely at the possibility that it has been Daniel Domscheit-Berg who, in defecting from Wikileaks, had been responsible for the emergence of the encrypted but unredacted cache on the net.
We then came on to the only witness who was actually heard in person on Friday, Patrick Eller, by videolink from the States. He was to address the accusation that Assange conspired with Chelsea Manning to crack a hash key password and obtain the documents which Manning leaked, and/or to help Manning cover his tracks. Securing Eller was rather a coup for the defence as there could not be a better expert witness on this particular subject. Eller is CEO of Metadata Forensics and a Professor teaching forensic evidence at the US Army Law School. A 25 year veteran, he was commander of the US Army digital forensic investigations unit at US Army Criminal Investigation Command in Virginia.
I am not going to use my usual technique of reporting through Eller’s evidence and cross-examination chronologically, because the subject matter does not lend itself to that, being both highly technical and delivered in a very disjointed fashion. This was partly due to the approach by James Lewis QC, counsel for the US government, who adopted a policy of asking long runs of technical questions about the operation of the computer systems, most of which were basic, irrelevant, and both required and got the simple answer “yes”, and then after a run of a dozen to twenty “yeses”, Lewis would throw in a more dubious proposition. This did once work when he got a “yes” to the proposition that “a great hacker can crack a great cypher” by this system of inducing impulsive repetition of “yes”. Lewis went on to claim that Assange had once self-described as “a fantastic hacker”.
I am not attempting to hide the fact that there were passages of Eller’s testimony in court which I simply did not understand. When I get a new laptop, it takes me days to work out how to turn it on and I am yet to find how to transfer any information from an old one. There are very definitely readers who would have done a much better job than me of reporting this, but then I was there and you were not. So these, for me, were the key points of Eller’s evidence.
With respect to the Jabber conversations between Chelsea Manning and “Nathaniel Frank”, which form the basis of the charge of aiding the commission of computer intrusion, there is no forensic evidence that “Nathaniel Frank” is Julian Assange, or indeed any single individual.
The “Hash key”, or encrypted half of a password, which Manning had requested assistance with cracking could not have been cracked with the technology available in 2010. It was “impossible” and “computationally infeasible”, according to Eller. This could not have been done with a brute force attack, dictionary attack or rainbow table. In cross-examination Lewis explored this at great length and read from a 2009 article on a vulnerability in Windows XP precisely with regard to the hash key system. Eller replied this was well known, but Microsoft had fixed it with a patch well before the events in question. That made it in practice impossible for the code to be cracked using one half of the hash key. Lewis did not query this and quickly moved on; it appeared he knew of the patch all along.
Perhaps Eller’s most telling evidence was that Manning had in fact already downloaded the bulk of the material passed to the Wikileaks dropbox before initiating the conversation with Frank at all. Manning had full access to the SIPRnet, or classified infranet of material up to secret, under her own username, and had already been downloading using a program called wget. Furthermore, Manning had already been taking steps to protect her identity by rebooting from a Linux CD thus evading several Windows security features. That would have been at least as effective as downloading from the FTP account if preventing detection were the goal.
Manning therefore had no need of help from “Nathaniel Frank”, either to obtain the classified documents or to cover her tracks, although the problem of downloads being traceable to the IP address would remain. But this would not have been solved anyway by Manning’s interest in logging in to a File Transfer Protocol account. There was much discussion as to whether the FTP account would or would not have admin privileges, but as Eller was insistent it would neither have increased her access to classified material nor have better enabled her to cover her tracks, and that they could not have cracked the password with the hash key half anyway, I did not quite understand where that discussion was leading.
One particularly jolting bit of information from Eller was that the SIPRnet from which Manning had downloaded all the material was open to “millions” of users. Eller’s final key point was that all of his evidence was consistent with the findings of the prosecution at Manning’s court martial, and presumably thus with the investigations of his old forensic team. Some of the lines taken by Lewis – including that it was in fact possible to crack the password from the half hash key – are inconsistent with the US prosecution’s own forensic evidence at the Manning court martial.
Eller’s evidence is an example of those occasions where I know the comments below the line will be much more informed than my own efforts!
Finally and ominously, Baraitser heard arguments on whether the full medical records of Assange from the doctors and psychiatrists who had given evidence should their public be released to the media. They have been requested by the press. The records contain a huge amount of background and many intimate details of Julian’s childhood and relationships which are in evidence but were not given in open court by the doctors. Both defence and prosecution opposed release, but Baraitser kept referring to “open justice”. You will remember that earlier this year, Baraitser decided that it was in the interests of “open justice” to release to the media the identity of Julian’s partner Stella Moris and her children. That too was against the wishes of both prosecution and defence.
That a judge so intent on shutting down or refusing to hear defence evidence is suddenly so preoccupied with “open justice” when it comes to hurting Assange by release of his deeply personal information, is a great irony. Baraitser will rule on this on Monday and I hope humanity has prevailed with her.
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The post Your Man in the Public Gallery: Assange Hearing Day 18 appeared first on Craig Murray.
Submitted by Mark Glennon of Wirepoints
What’s are the real chances of dying if you are infected with COVID-19? You’ll probably be surprised how low they are according to new numbers from the Center for Disease Control. We’ll state those numbers simply for those of you who aren’t crazy about math.
The CDC’s new estimate, for the first time, is broken down by age groups. Here is what the CDC calls its “current best estimate” of chances of dying from the virus if you get infected:
1 out of 34,000 for ages 0 to 19;
1 out of 5,000 for ages 20 to 49;
1 out of 200 for ages 50 to 69; and
1 out of 20 for ages 70 and up.
Here’s another way to look at the same numbers. If you get infected, your chances of surviving are as follows:
Age Group Probability of Survival
0-19: 99.997%
20-49: 99.98%
50-69: 99.5%
70+: 94.6%
The CDC’s numbers are actually published as what’s called the “Infection Fatality Ratio” or IFR. The relevant portion of their chart is reproduced below. We’ve just stated their numbers a different way and rounded a bit. IFR includes, as those who were “infected,” those who got the virus but never got sick or displayed symptoms.
The CDC’s “best estimate” may be off and it offered other scenarios, also shown in the chart below. They are all very low, however, as you can see. For those age 20-49, for example, even under the worse case scenario, the IFR is only .0003. That means your chances of dying even if you got infected would be 1 out of 3,333.
Estimates of COVID’s lethality have been dropping regularly. In March, when most of the nation went into lockdown, Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated the mortality rate at about 2% and the World Health Organization pegged it at about 3.4%. Both are far higher than the current CDC estimate.
Those earlier numbers, which were far more frightening, got extensive press coverage. Very little media attention, however, has gone toward the new numbers.
Source: CDC,
