Is Totalitarianism 'The New Normal'?
Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
We cannot go back to the pre-coronavirus world, they tell us. Everything has changed and we must accept a "new normal." What does this "new normal" look like? It looks a lot like a dystopian horror film, where privacy is destroyed, property is subject to political whim, surveillance is to be accepted, medical treatments can be forced on people. Should we accept totalitarianism as our "new normal"? Plus in today's program: the real story of Houston's "round two hospital crisis." Tune in to today's Liberty Report: Is Totalitarianism 'The New Normal'? Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
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On Friday The New York Times featured a report based on anonymous intelligence officials that the Russians were paying bounties to have US troops killed in Afghanistan with President Donald Trump refusing to do anything about it. The flurry of Establishment media reporting that ensued provides further proof, if such were needed, that the erstwhile “paper of record” has earned a new moniker — Gray Lady of easy virtue. Over the weekend, the Times’ dubious allegations grabbed headlines across all media that are likely to remain indelible in the minds of credulous Americans — which seems to have been the main objective. To keep the pot boiling this morning, The New York Times’ David Leonhardt’s daily web piece, “The Morning” calls prominent attention to a banal article by a Heather Cox Richardson, described as a historian at Boston College, adding specific charges to the general indictment of Trump by showing “how the Trump administration has continued to treat Russia favorably.” The following is from Richardson’s newsletter on Friday: — On April 1 a Russian plane brought ventilators and other medical supplies to the United States … a propaganda coup for Russia;Historian Richardson added: All of these friendly overtures to Russia were alarming enough when all we knew was that Russia attacked the 2016 US election and is doing so again in 2020. But it is far worse that those overtures took place when the administration knew that Russia had actively targeted American soldiers. … this bad news apparently prompted worried intelligence officials to give up their hope that the administration would respond to the crisis, and instead to leak the story to two major newspapers.Hear the siren? Children, get under your desks! The Tall Tale About Russia Paying for Dead US Troops Times print edition readers had to wait until this morning to learn of Trump’s statement last night that he was not briefed on the cockamamie tale about bounties for killing, since it was, well, cockamamie. Late last night the president tweeted: “Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or the VP. …” For those of us distrustful of the Times — with good reason — on such neuralgic issues, the bounty story had already fallen of its own weight. As Scott Ritter pointed out yesterday: Perhaps the biggest clue concerning the fragility of the New York Times’ report is contained in the one sentence it provides about sourcing — 'The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals.' That sentence contains almost everything one needs to know about the intelligence in question, including the fact that the source of the information is most likely the Afghan government as reported through CIA channels. …And who can forget how “successful” interrogators can be in getting desired answers. Russia & Taliban React The Kremlin called the Times reporting “nonsense … an unsophisticated plant,” and from Russia’s perspective the allegations make little sense; Moscow will see them for what they are — attempts to show that Trump is too “accommodating” to Russia. A Taliban spokesman called the story “baseless,” adding with apparent pride that “we” have done “target killings” for years “on our own resources.” Russia is no friend of the Taliban. At the same time, it has been clear for several years that the US would have to pull its troops out of Afghanistan. Think back five decades and recall how circumspect the Soviets were in Vietnam. Giving rhetorical support to a fraternal Communist nation was de rigueur and some surface-to-air missiles gave some substance to that support. But Moscow recognized from the start that Washington was embarked on a fool’s errand in Vietnam. There would be no percentage in getting directly involved. And so, the Soviets sat back and watched smugly as the Vietnamese Communists drove US forces out on their “own resources.” As was the case with the Viet Cong, the Taliban needs no bounty inducements from abroad. Besides, the Russians knew painfully well — from their own bitter experience in Afghanistan, what the outcome of the most recent fool’s errand would be for the US What point would they see in doing what The New York Times and other Establishment media are breathlessly accusing them of? CIA Disinformation; Casey at Bat Former CIA Director William Casey said: “We’ll know when our disinformation program is complete, when everything the American public believes is false.” Casey made that remark at the first cabinet meeting in the White House under President Ronald Reagan in early 1981, according to Barbara Honegger, who was assistant to the chief domestic policy adviser. Honegger was there, took notes, and told then Senior White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, who in turn made it public. If Casey’s spirit is somehow observing the success of the disinformation program called Russiagate, one can imagine how proud he must be. But sustained propaganda success can be a serious challenge. The Russiagate canard has lasted three and a half years. This last gasp effort, spearheaded by the Times, to breathe more life into it is likely to last little more than a weekend — the redoubled efforts of Casey-dictum followers notwithstanding. Russiagate itself has been unraveling, although one would hardly know it from the Establishment media. No collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Even the sacrosanct tenet that the Russians hacked the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks has been disproven, with the head of the DNC-hired cyber security firm CrowdStrike admitting that there is no evidence that the DNC emails were hacked — by Russia or anyone else. How long will it take the Times to catch up with the CrowdStrike story, available since May 7? The media is left with one sacred cow: the misnomered “Intelligence Community” Assessment of Jan. 6, 2017, claiming that President Putin himself ordered the hacking of the DNC. That “assessment” done by “hand-picked analysts” from only CIA, FBI and NSA (not all 17 intelligence agencies of the “intelligence community”) reportedly is being given close scrutiny by US Attorney John Durham, appointed by the attorney general to investigate Russiagate’s origins. If Durham finds it fraudulent (not a difficult task), the heads of senior intelligence and law enforcement officials may roll. That would also mean a still deeper dent in the credibility of Establishment media that are only too eager to drink the Kool Aid and to leave plenty to drink for the rest of us. Do not expect the media to cease and desist, simply because Trump had a good squelch for them last night — namely, the “intelligence” on the “bounties” was not deemed good enough to present to the president. (As a preparer and briefer of The President’s Daily Brief to Presidents Reagan and HW Bush, I can attest to the fact that — based on what has been revealed so far — the Russian bounty story falls far short of the PDB threshold.) Rejecting Intelligence Assessments Nevertheless, the corporate media is likely to play up the Trump administration’s rejection of what the media is calling the “intelligence assessment” about Russia offering — as Rachel Maddow indecorously put it on Friday — “bounty for the scalps of American soldiers in Afghanistan.” I am not a regular Maddow-watcher, but to me she seemed unhinged — actually, well over the top. The media asks, “Why does Trump continue to disrespect the assessments of the intelligence community?” There he goes again — not believing our “intelligence community; siding, rather, with Putin.” In other words, we can expect no let up from the media and the national security miscreant leakers who have served as their life’s blood. As for the anchors and pundits, their level of sophistication was reflected yesterday in the sage surmise of Face the Nation’s Chuck Todd, who Aaron Mate reminds us, is a “grown adult and professional media person.” Todd asked guest John Bolton: “Do you think that the president is afraid to make Putin mad because maybe Putin did help him win the election, and he doesn’t want to make him mad for 2020?” “This is as bad as it gets,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday, adding the aphorism she memorized several months ago: “All roads lead to Putin.” The unconscionably deceitful performance of Establishment media is as bad as it gets, though that, of course, was not what Pelosi meant. She apparently lifted a line right out of the Times about how Trump is too “accommodating” toward Russia. One can read this most recent flurry of Russia, Russia, Russia as a reflection of the need to pre-empt the findings likely to issue from Durham and Attorney General William Barr in the coming months — on the theory that the best defense is a pre-emptive offense. Meanwhile, we can expect the corporate media to continue to disgrace itself. Vile Caitlin Johnstone, typically, pulls no punches regarding the Russian bounty travesty: All parties involved in spreading this malignant psyop are absolutely vile, but a special disdain should be reserved for the media class who have been entrusted by the public with the essential task of creating an informed populace and holding power to account. How much of an unprincipled whore do you have to be to call yourself a journalist and uncritically parrot the completely unsubstantiated assertions of spooks while protecting their anonymity? How much work did these empire fluffers put into killing off every last shred of their dignity? It boggles the mind.Reprinted with author's permission from ConsortiumNews. Russiagate’s Last Gasp Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute With tensions between the US and China at an all-time high, experts warn the two powers are closer to a military confrontation than ever before. A war with China should be unthinkable in Washington since the conflict could be catastrophic to the entire world as the threat of it erupting into a full-blown nuclear war is very real. But with a deteriorating trade relationship, tension over the Covid-19 pandemic, increased US Navy activity in the Pacific, new sanctions aimed at Chinese officials, and hostile rhetoric coming from the Trump administration, the unthinkable is becoming more and more likely. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced new sanctions on Friday aimed at “current and former” Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials, accusing them of violating Hong Kong’s autonomy. Hong Kong has served as a stage for recent US meddling, with Washington openly supporting the protests that rocked the city since March 2019. The Trump administration accused Beijing of violating Hong Kong’s autonomy with a new national security law made for the city, a bill designed to quell protests. Some Chinese officials justified passing the law by pointing to the foreign interference in the demonstrations – that interference included Congress hosting protest leaders and passing legislation to confront Beijing over the former British colony. China’s concern with foreign interference is clearly outlined in the national security bill, which includes “collusion with foreign and external forces” on a list of criminal offenses the bill aims to combat. The Senate just passed the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, which would sanction “foreign individuals and entities that materially contribute to China’s failure to preserve Hong Kong’s autonomy.” The new legislation is the Senate’s response to the Hong Kong national security law. Congress is also keen on confronting China militarily, with lawmakers working out a plan to give the Pentagon funds to increase its footprint in the region, a plan dubbed the “Indo-Pacific Deterrence Initiative.” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has repeatedly identified China as the Pentagon’s number one priority. President Trump signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act into law on June 17th, a bill that will enable even more sanctions against Chinese officials over China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang province. The Trump administration published a document last week that listed 20 Chinese companies and accused them of being arms of China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Although nothing in the document substantiated the claim, it opens the possibility of Washington taking actions against the companies listed, like sanctions, which have become a staple of the administration. The telecommunications company Huawei was included in the list of companies allegedly run by the PLA. Huawei, a major player in 5G technologies, has been banned from the US. The Trump administration is working hard to prevent other countries from doing business with Huawei and continues to pressure its allies into not accepting the company’s 5G technology. The common accusation against Huawei is that its equipment could be used to spy on other countries, an accusation that rings hollow coming from the US, a country that can track cell phones all over the world, as revealed by the leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. These latest economic provocations came after the US and China signed the Phase One trade deal in January. According to The Wall Street Journal, when Mike Pompeo met with China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi in Hawaii on June 18th, Yang warned Washington’s recent meddling in Beijing’s affairs could jeopardize the trade deal. Yang listed Hong Kong and Taiwan as areas where the US meddles and expressed “strong dissatisfaction” with President Trump’s signing of the Uyghur Human Rights Act. The increase in tensions between the US and China is due in large part to the Covid-19 pandemic. Top officials in the White House, including the president, have accused Beijing of a cover-up in the early days of the outbreak. In an interview with Fox News last week, White House trade advisor Peter Navarro was asked if the phase one trade deal was over. Navarro responded, “it’s over,” his reasoning being the fact that the Chinese officials who signed the agreement in Washington on January 15th did not mention the pandemic. Navarro claims the White House first heard of the pandemic after the Chinese diplomats’ plane took off, although Covid-19 was already in the news days before. Navarro quickly recanted his statement on the trade deal and said he was taken “wildly out of context” in the interview. “I was simply speaking to the lack of trust we now have of the Chinese Communist Party after they lied about the origins of the China virus and foisted a pandemic upon the world,” Navarro said. President Trump took to Twitter to ensure that the trade deal is still “fully intact.” In the early days of the Trump administration, Navarro and former White House strategist Steve Bannon fought hard to push President Trump to put tariffs on Chinese goods, a battle they won. Bannon, a self-described ultra-hawk when it comes to China, has been crusading against the CCP since he left the White House. In a recent interview with Asia Times, when asked if Washington should pursue regime change in Beijing, Bannon said, “I don’t think Asia can be free, until we’ve had regime change in Beijing. And I am an absolute advocate of that.” Bannon denied rumors that he was joining the Trump campaign for 2020 but ensured many of his friends and colleagues will be on the president’s team. “One hundred and twenty percent of my time right now is spent on taking down the Chinese Communist Party, with the Committee on the Present Danger,” Bannon said. The Committee on Present Danger: China (CPD) is an incredibly hawkish think-tank started by Bannon and neoconservative Frank Gaffney in 2019. On June 5th, the CPD published an essay titled “To the Americans Who Are on Their Knees,” which Gaffney and CPD chair Brian Kennedy called “the single most important call in a generation aimed at enabling our countrymen and women to recognize and respond appropriately to a present danger.” The essay addresses the protests that erupted across the US in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. The author claims the American left leading the movement is the “catspaw” of foreign powers. “First, the police will be defunded; second, the Revolution will defund the US military; third, the Chinese and Russians will bomb and invade the country,” the essay reads. This tirade could be dismissed as the ramblings of a crazed hawk, but a link to the essay remains in prominence on the CPD’s front page, and the think-tank’s message gets through to the White House. The group recently sent a letter to President Trump, praising him for releasing the list of 20 companies that are allegedly run by the PLA and gave the president advice on possible steps forward. Some of the tamer rhetoric coming from the CPD and right-wing populists like Bannon resonates with many Americans. There are real concerns regarding US reliance on Chinese manufacturing, something that was exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic when the US faced shortages of personal protective equipment. The loss of American jobs to China is another talking point that gets through to people on the right and the left. There is a consensus among both groups that corporations sold out the American people when they exported manufacturing to China. Despite the rhetoric, the fact that the US and China are each other’s largest trading partners has its benefits. This fact is enough to discourage officials on both sides from turning this Cold War into a hot one. But as trade relations sour, and President Trump openly considers completely “decoupling” from China, the risk of a shooting war is much higher. The prophetic Justin Raimondo put it best in a March 2008 column titled, “Why They Hate China.” Justin wrote: “If goods don’t cross borders, then armies soon will – a historical truism noted by many before me, and with good reason. Let it be a warning to all those anti-free trade, antiwar types of the Right as well as the Left – you’ll soon be jumping on the War Party’s bandwagon when it comes China’s turn to play the role of global bogeyman. The way things are going, that day may come soon enough.” Justin’s words are something to reflect on while the US and China are careening towards war and people on the left and the right continue to demonize Beijing. While there are real concerns to be had with China’s human rights abuses, US intervention will undoubtedly make the situation worse. And hawks like Steve Bannon disguise their neocon hopes of regime-change in a country of 1.4 billion people as populist rhetoric to fool Americans into consenting to this new Cold War. Washington has a history of stumbling into catastrophe in East Asia. From Manila to Pyongyang, US adventurism in the region has left millions dead in its wake, a war with China will kill millions more — a potential catastrophe that must be avoided. Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com. Stumbling Towards Catastrophe: The New Cold War With China Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute Foreign aid to Ukraine helped spur the Democrats’ effort to impeach and remove President Trump earlier this year. Ukraine was supposed to be on the verge of great progress until Trump pulled the rug out from under the heroic salvation effort by US government bureaucrats. Unfortunately, Congress has devoted a hundred times more attention to the timing of aid to Ukraine than to its effectiveness. And most of the media coverage pretended that US handouts abroad are as generous and uplifting as congressmen claim. US foreign aid has long fueled the poxes it promised to eradicate — especially kleptocracy, or government by thieves. A 2002 American Economic Review analysis concluded that “increases in [foreign] aid are associated with contemporaneous increases in corruption” and that “corruption is positively correlated with aid received from the United States.” Windfalls of foreign aid can make politicians more rapacious, which economists have dubbed the “voracity effect.” Early in his presidency, George W. Bush promised to reform foreign aid, declaring, “I think it makes no sense to give aid money to countries that are corrupt.” Regardless, the Bush administration continued delivering billions of dollars in handouts to many of the world’s most corrupt regimes. Barack Obama proclaimed at the United Nations in 2010 that the US government was “leading a global effort to combat corruption.” The Los Angeles Times noted that Obama’s “aides said the United States in the past has often seemed to just throw money at problems,” while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that “a lot of these aid programs don’t work” and lamented their “heartbreaking” failures. But Obama promised during his 2008 campaign to double foreign-aid spending, which obliterated efforts to reform failed programs. In 2011, congressional Republicans sought to restrict foreign aid going to fraud-ridden foreign regimes. Secretary of State Clinton wailed that restricting handouts to nations that fail anti-corruption tests “has the potential to affect a staggering number of needy aid recipients.” Regardless, the Obama administration continued pouring tens of billions of US tax dollars into sinkholes such as Afghanistan, which even its president, Ashraf Ghani, admitted in 2016 was “one of the most corrupt countries on earth.” The governor of Kandahar denounced his own government officials and police officers as “looters and kidnappers.” John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), declared that “US policies and practices unintentionally aided and abetted corruption” in Afghanistan. Since the end of the Soviet Union, the United States has provided more than $6 billion in aid to Ukraine. At the House impeachment hearings late last year, a key anti-Trump witness was acting US ambassador to Ukraine William B. Taylor Jr. The Washington Post hailed Taylor as someone who “spent much of the 1990s telling Ukrainian politicians that nothing was more critical to their long-term prosperity than rooting out corruption and bolstering the rule of law, in his role as the head of US development assistance for post-Soviet countries.” A New York Times editorial lauded Taylor and State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent as witnesses who “came across not as angry Democrats or Deep State conspirators, but as men who have devoted their lives to serving their country.” Their testimony spurred Eric Rubin, president of the American Foreign Service Association, to bewail that “this is the most fraught time and the most difficult time for our members” since Sen. Joe McCarthy’s accusations of communism in the 1950s. A Washington Post headline echoed him: “The diplomatic corps has been wounded. The State Department needs to heal.” But not nearly as much as the foreigners supposedly rescued by US bureaucrats. The Wall Street Journal reported on October 31 that the International Monetary Fund, which has provided more than $20 billion in loans to Ukraine, “remains skeptical after a history of broken promises [from the Ukrainian government]. Kiev hasn’t successfully completed any of a series of IMF bailout packages over the past two decades, with systemic corruption at the heart of much of that failure.” The IMF concluded that Ukraine continued to be vexed by “shortcomings in the legal framework, pervasive corruption, and large parts of the economy dominated by inefficient state-owned enterprises or by oligarchs.” That last item is damning for US benevolent pretensions. If a former Soviet republic cannot even terminate its government-owned boondoggles, then why was the US government bankrolling them? While many members of Congress could not find Ukraine on a map, far fewer could have offered any coherent explanation of what US aid bought in Ukraine. Transparency International, which publishes an annual Corruption Perceptions Index, shows that corruption surged in Ukraine in the late 1990s (after the United States decided to rescue that country) and remains at abysmal levels. Ukraine now ranks in the bottom tier on the list of most corrupt nations, with a worse rating than Egypt and Pakistan, two other major US aid recipients notorious for corruption. Actually, the best gauge of Ukrainian corruption is the near-total collapse of its citizens’ trust in government or in their own future. Since 1991, the nation has lost almost 20 percent of its population as citizens flee abroad like passengers leaping off a sinking ship. But as long as Kiev was not completely depopulated, US bureaucrats could continue claiming to be on the verge of achieving great things. The House impeachment hearings and much of the media gushed over those career US government officials despite their strikeouts. It was akin to a congressional committee’s resurrecting Col. George Custer in 1877 and fawning as he offered personal insights in dealing with uprisings by Sioux Indians (while carefully avoiding awkward questions about the previous year at the Little Bighorn). Foreign aid is virtue-signaling with other people’s money. As long the aid spawns press releases and photo opportunities for presidents and members of Congress and campaign donations from corporate and other beneficiaries, little else matters. Congress almost never conducts thorough investigations into the failure of aid programs despite their legendary pratfalls. As the Christian Science Monitor noted in 2010, AID “created an atmosphere of frantic urgency about the ‘burn rate’ — a measure of how quickly money is spent. Emphasis gets put on spending fast to make room for the next batch from Congress.” Martine van Bijlert of the nonprofit Afghanistan Analysts Network commented, “As long as you spend money and you can provide a paper trail, that’s a job well done. It’s a perverse system, and there seems to be no intention to change it.” The “burn rate” fixation produced endless absurdities, including collapsing school buildings, impassable roads, failed electrification projects, and phantom health clinics. SIGAR’s John Sopko “found a USAID lessons-learned report from 1980s on Afghan reconstruction but nobody at AID had read it.” Perverse incentives “Fail and repeat” was also AID’s motto in Iraq. After the 2003 invasion, AID and the Pentagon paired up to spend $60 billion to rebuild Iraq. As long as projects looked vaguely impressive at ribbon-cutting ceremonies, AID declared victory. Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), listed some of the agency’s farcical Iraq success claims at a 2011 hearing: “262,482 individuals reportedly benefited from medical supplies that were purchased to treat only 100 victims of a specific attack; 22 individuals attended a five-day mental-health course, yet 1.5 million were reported as beneficiaries; … and 280,000 were reported as benefitting from $14,246 spent to rehabilitate a morgue.” Ali Ghalib Baban, Iraq’s minister of planning, denied in 2009 that US aid for relief and reconstruction had benefitted his country: “Maybe they spent it, but Iraq doesn’t feel it.” An analysis by the Center for Public Integrity noted that, according to top Iraqi officials, the biggest impact of US aid was “more corruption and widespread money-laundering.” After driving around the world, investment guru Jim Rogers declared, “Most foreign aid winds up with outside consultants, the local military, corrupt bureaucrats, the new NGO [nongovernmental organizations] administrators, and Mercedes dealers.” Mercedes-Benz automobiles became so popular among African government officials that a new Swahili word was coined: wabenzi — “men of the Mercedes-Benz.” After the Obama administration promised massive aid to Ukraine in 2014, Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, jumped on the gravy train — as did legions of well-connected Washingtonians and other hustlers around the nation. Similar largesse ensures that there will never be a shortage of overpaid people and hired think tanks ready to write op-eds or letters to the editor of the Washington Post whooping up the moral greatness of foreign aid or some such hokum. Bribing foreign politicians to encourage honest government makes as much sense as distributing free condoms to encourage abstinence. Rather than encouraging good governance practices, foreign aid is more likely to produce kleptocracies. As a Brookings Institution analysis observed, “The history of US assistance is littered with tales of corrupt foreign officials using aid to line their own pockets, support military buildups, and pursue vanity projects.” Both US politicians and US bureaucrats are prone to want to continue the aid gravy train regardless of how foreign regimes waste the money or use it to repress their own citizens. US government leaders are far more concerned with buying influence than with safeguarding purity. Foreign aid is often little more than a bribe for a foreign regime to behave in ways that please the US government. One large bribe naturally spawns hundreds or thousands of smaller bribes, and thereby corrupts an entire country. The impeachment of Trump was driven by the specific favor that Democrats claimed he had requested from the Ukrainian president, not from seeking favors per se. When it comes to the failure of US aid to Ukraine, almost all of Trump’s congressional critics are like the “dog that didn’t bark” in the Sherlock Holmes story. The real outrage is that Trump and prior presidents, with Congress cheering all the way, delivered so many US tax dollars to Kiev that any reasonable person knew would be wasted. Foreign aid will continue to be toxic as long as politicians continue to be politicians. There is no bureaucratic cure for the perverse incentives created by flooding foreign nations with US tax dollars. If Washington truly wants to curtail foreign corruption, ending US government handouts aid is the best first step. Counting on foreign aid to reduce corruption is like expecting whiskey to cure alcoholism. Impeachment Reminder of Our Toxic Foreign Aid Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
Tens of thousands marched in a joint BLM/'Pride' rally over the weekend in Chicago (and elsewhere) with the blessing of the same officials who are threatening churches, forcing face masks, and ripping liquor licenses from bars that won't shut their doors (again). Claiming that "cases" are skyrocketing, officials from Texas and across the country are trying to return us to devastating lockdown. But why aren't they talking about the falling death rate? Watch today's Liberty Report: Lockdown Hypocrisy: Why Are BLM And 'Pride' Exempt? Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute The New York Times published an article claiming that Russia was paying out monetary bounties to the Taliban to kill US troops in Afghanistan. There’s just one problem — none of what they reported was true. As news reporting goes, the New York Times article alleging that a top-secret unit within Russian military intelligence, or GRU, had offered a bounty to the Taliban for every US soldier killed in Afghanistan, was dynamite. The story was quickly “confirmed” by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers, and went on to take social media by storm. Twitter was on fire with angry pundits, former officials, and anti-Trump politicians (and their respective armies of followers) denouncing President Trump as a “traitor”and demanding immediate action against Russia. There was just one problem — nothing in the New York Times could be corroborated. Indeed, there is no difference between the original reporting conducted by the New York Times, and the “confirming” reports published by the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. All of the reports contain caveats such as “if confirmed” and “if true,” while providing no analysis into the potential veracity of the information used to sustain the report — alleged debriefs of Afghan criminals and militants — or the underpinning logic, or lack thereof, of the information itself. For its part, the Russian government has vociferously denied the allegations, noting that the report “clearly demonstrates low intellectual abilities of US intelligence propagandists who have to invent such nonsense instead of devising something more credible.” The Taliban have likewise denied receiving any bounties from the Russians for targeting American soldiers, noting that with the current peace deal, “their lives are secure and we don’t attack them.” Even more telling is the fact that the current Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has come out to contradict a key element of the New York Times’ report—that the president was briefed on the intelligence in question. “I have confirmed that neither the president nor the vice president were ever briefed on any intelligence alleged by the New York Times in its reporting yesterday,” Ratcliffe said in a statement. “The New York Times reporting, and all other subsequent news reports about such an alleged briefing are inaccurate.” And one more tiny problem: Trump confirmed there was no such briefing, too. Perhaps the biggest clue concerning the fragility of the New York Times’ report is contained in the one sentence it provides about sourcing — “The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals.” That sentence contains almost everything one needs to know about the intelligence in question, including the fact that the source of the information is most likely the Afghan government as reported through CIA channels. There was a time when the US military handled the bulk of detainee debriefings in Afghanistan. This changed in 2014, with the signing of the Bilateral Security Agreement. This agreement prohibits the US military from arresting or detaining Afghans, or to operate detention facilities in Afghanistan. As a result, the ability of the US military to interface with detainees has been virtually eliminated, making the Pentagon an unlikely source of the information used by the New York Times in its reporting. The CIA, however, was not covered by this agreement. Indeed, the CIA, through its extensive relationship with the National Directorate of Security (NDS), is uniquely positioned to interface with the NDS through every phase of detainee operations, from initial capture to systemic debriefing. Like any bureaucracy, the CIA is a creature of habit. Henry ‘Hank’ Crumpton, who in the aftermath of 9/11 headed up the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan, wrote that [t]he Directorate of Operations (DO) should not be in the business of running prisons or temporary detention facilities. The DO should focus on its core mission: clandestine intelligence operations. Accordingly, the DO should continue to hunt, capture, and render targets, and then exploit them for intelligence and ops leads once in custody. The management of their incarceration and interrogation, however, should be conducted by appropriately experienced US law enforcement officers because that is their charter and they have the training and experience.After 2014, the term “US law enforcement officers” is effectively replaced by “Afghan intelligence officers”— the NDS. But the CIA mission remained the same — to exploit captives for intelligence and operational leads. The Trump administration has lobbied for an expanded mission for the CIA-backed NDS and other militia forces to serve as a counterterrorism force that would keep Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) and Al-Qaeda from gaining a foothold in Afghanistan once US and foreign troops completed their planned withdrawal in 2021. But the CIA has raised objections to such a plan, noting that the NDS and other CIA-controlled assets were completely dependent upon US military air power and other combat service support resources, and that any attempt to expand the CIA’s covert army in Afghanistan following a US military withdrawal would end in disaster. Having the NDS fabricate or exaggerate detainee reports to keep the US engaged in Afghanistan is not beyond the pale. Which brings up the issue of Russian involvement. In September 2015, the Taliban captured the northern Afghan city of Konduz, and held it for 15 days. This sent a shockwave throughout Russia, prompting Moscow to reconsider its approach toward dealing with the Afghan insurgency. Russia began reaching out to the Taliban, engaging in talks designed to bring the conflict in Afghanistan to an end. Russia was driven by other interests as well. According to Zamir Kabulov, President Vladimir Putin's special representative for Afghanistan, “the Taliban interest objectively coincides with ours” in the fight against Islamic State, which in the summer of 2014 had captured huge tracts of land in Syria and Iraq, including the city of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest. By 2017, Afghan and US intelligence services had assembled a narrative of Russian assistance to the Taliban which included the provision of advanced weaponry, training, and financial support. While Russia denied providing any direct military support to the Taliban, it maintained that the Taliban were the best way to deal with the growing threat of Islamic State. But even if the US reports were correct, and Russia was angling for a Taliban victory in Afghanistan, the last policy Russia would logically pursue would be one that had the US remain in Afghanistan, especially after pushing so hard for a negotiated peace. Russia’s interests in Afghanistan were — and are — best served by Afghan stability, the antithesis of the Afghan reality while the US and NATO remain engaged. Getting the US out of Afghanistan — not keeping the US in Afghanistan — is the Russian position, and any CIA officer worth his or her salt knows this. It does not take a rocket scientist to read between the lines of the New York Times’ thinly sourced report. The NDS, with or without CIA knowledge or consent, generated detainee-based intelligence reports designed to create and sustain a narrative that would be supportive of US military forces remaining in Afghanistan past 2021. The CIA case officer(s) handling these reports dutifully submit cables back to CIA Headquarters which provide the gist of the allegations — that Russia has placed a bounty on US soldiers. But there is no corroboration, nothing that would allow this raw “intelligence” to be turned into a product worthy of the name. This doesn’t mean that someone in the bowels of the CIA with an axe to grind against Trump’s plans to withdraw from Afghanistan, or who was opposed to Trump’s efforts to normalize relations with Russia, didn’t try to breathe life into these detainee reports. Indeed, a finished “product” may have made its way to the National Security Council staff — and elsewhere — where it would have been given the treatment it deserved, quickly discarded as unsubstantiated rumor unworthy of presidential attention. At this point in time, frustrated by the inattention the “system” gave to the “intelligence,” some anonymous official contacted the New York Times and leaked the information, spinning it in as nefarious a way as possible. The New York Times blended the detainee reports and its own previous reporting on the GRU to produce a completely fabricated tale of Russian malfeasance designed to denigrate President Trump in the midst of a hotly contested reelection bid. Too far-fetched? This assessment is far more fleshed out with fact and logical than anything the New York Timesor its mainstream media mimics have proffered. And lest one thinks the GrayLady is above manufacturing news to sustain support for a war, the name Judith Miller, and the topic of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, should put that to rest. The reporting by the New York Times alleging the existence of a Russian bounty on the lives of US troops in Afghanistan is cut from the same piece of cloth as its pre-war Iraq drivel. As was the case with Iraq, the chattering class is pushing these new lies on an American audience pre-programmed to accept at face value any negative reporting on Russia. This is the state of what passes for journalism in America today, and it’s not a pretty sight. Reprinted with permission from RT. New York Times takes anti-Russian hysteria to new level with report on Russian ‘bounty’ for US troops in Afghanistan Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute The Golden State Warriors basketball team name is not being changed to the Golden State Social Justice Warriors, at least not yet. But, it does look like National Basketball Association (NBA) players may soon have the option, as related in a Sunday nba.com article, to put “social justice messages” on their jerseys. “The NBA is collaborating with the National Basketball Players Association to allow players to wear jerseys with personalized social justice messages on the backs instead of their last names during the season comeback in Orlando, according to Oklahoma City Thunder guard and union president Chris Paul,” begins the article. Hmm, what qualifies as a social justice message? From the article: While players will not be forced to wear a message, Paul says they will provide a list of suggestions for players looking for a cause to support. According to ESPN, these messages could include phrases (like "Black Lives Matter" or "I Can't Breathe"), names of social justice organizations, or the names of individuals who were killed by the police.“Black Lives Matter” made the list. So it would seem “All Lives Matter” or “White Lives Matter” should also be fine on NBA players’ jerseys, right? The answer would be “yes” if this were really a move to enable people to express their views. But, instead, expect the display of slogans to be strictly controlled by thought police behind the scenes, as well as by players’ desire to look out for their own well-being. Even if players are allowed to place on their jerseys phrases that run counter to the “social justice” orthodoxy, would any player take that risk? Doing so could end a player’s career. Doing so would probably also very much reduce or eliminate his endorsement payments. In the current environment, with groups of people routinely verbally and even physically attacking individuals they decide are racist or just against “the cause,” a player may even risk his life by putting on his jersey a deviating phrase. Some players would put suggested “social justice messages” on their jerseys because they genuinely want to express something through doing so. Others would be like the unfortunate fellow required to march in a parade in a communist country who hopes that, by helping carry a banner displaying some phrase he is indifferent about or even detests, he can make it through the day without trouble and maybe even improve the situation of himself and his family. How About ‘All Lives Matter’ or ‘White Lives Matter’ on an NBA Jersey? Click on the headline to read the full story from Peace and Prosperity For months, the Washington Post and the rest of the mainstream media kept a morbid Covid-19 “death count” on their front pages and at the top of their news broadcasts. The coronavirus outbreak was all about the number of dead. The narrative was intended to boost governors like Cuomo in New York and Whitmer in Michigan, who turned their states authoritarian under the false notion that destroying people’s jobs, freedom, and lives would somehow keep a virus from doing what viruses always do: spread through a population until eventually losing strength and dying out. The “death count” was always the headline. But then all of a sudden early in June the mainstream media did a George Orwell and lectured us that it is all about “cases” and has always been all about “cases.” Death, and especially infection fatality rate, were irrelevant. Why? Because from the peak in April, deaths had decreased by 90 percent and were continuing to crash. That was not terrifying enough so the media pretended this good news did not exist. With massive increases in testing, the “case” numbers climbed. This is not rocket science: the more people you test the more “cases” you discover. Unfortunately our mainstream media is only interested in pushing the “party line.” So the good news that millions more have been exposed while the fatality rate continues to decline - meaning the virus is getting weaker - is buried under hysterical false reporting of “new cases.” Unfortunately many governors, including our own here in Texas, are incapable of resisting the endless lies of the mainstream media. They are putting Americans again through the nightmare of forced business closures, mandated face masks, and restrictions of Constitutional liberties based on false propaganda. In Texas the “second wave” propaganda has gotten so bad that the leaders of the four major hospitals in Houston took the extraordinary step late last week of holding a joint press conference to clarify that the scare stories of Houston hospitals being overwhelmed with Covid cases are simply untrue. Dr. Marc Boom of Houston Methodist said the reporting on hospital capacity is misleading. He said, “quite frankly, we’re concerned that there is a level of alarm in the community that is unwarranted right now.” In fact, there has been much reporting that the “spike” in Texas cases is not due to a resurgence of the virus but to hospital practices of Covid-testing every patient coming in for any procedure at all. If it’s a positive, well that counts as a “Covid hospitalization.” Why would hospitals be so dishonest in their diagnoses? Billions of appropriated Federal dollars are being funneled to facilities based on the number of “Covid cases” they can produce. As I’ve always said, if you subsidize something you get more of it. And that’s why we are getting more Covid cases. Let’s go back to the original measurements used to scare Americans into giving up their Constitutional liberties: the daily death numbers. Even though we know hospitals have falsely attributed countless deaths to “Covid-19” that were deaths WITH instead of FROM the virus, we are seeing actual deaths steadily declining over the past month and a half. Declining deaths are not a great way to push the “second wave” propaganda, so the media and politicians have moved the goal posts and decided that only “cases” are important. It’s another big lie. Resist propaganda and defend your liberty. That is the only way we’ll get through this. The Media is Lying About the ‘Second Wave’ Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute Hospitals in the US are getting money for diagnosing Covid19. They get more money if those patients are then put on ventilators. It’s time we really started thinking about what that means. Early on in the launch of the Sars-Cov-2/Covid19 “pandemic”, it was revealed by Dr Scott Jensen that hospitals in the US were getting paid bonuses for diagnosing Covid19 in their patients, and then larger bonuses again if those patients were put on ventilators. We’re not fact-checking that. We don’t need to. It’s already been done. As soon as his words were aired, the “independent fact checkers” descended upon them in an effort to prove him wrong. They could not. Resorting instead to weasel words and obfuscations. Snopes found his assertions “plausible”, Politifact called it “half true”, and FactCheck said it was true, writing: Recent legislation pays hospitals higher Medicare rates for COVID-19 patients and treatment…Before adding: …but there is no evidence of fraudulent reporting.”Which is funny because, to that point, nobody had suggested anything fraudulent. Jensen himself went out of his way to say he didn’t think there was any fraud, but there was an “avenue” for it. Obviously the “fact checkers” agreed, because they all felt the need to add very similar qualifications. The very fact they rushed to pre-emptively defend the practice illustrates how potentially corrupt it is. The key fact here, established and unchallenged, is that the CARES act does direct a 20% bonus Medicaid payment to hospitals for every diagnosis of Covid19, and a greater payment again for the use of a ventilator. As I said, we’re not fact-checking that. And we can’t fact-check whether or not there is “fraudulent reporting”, but there’s no denying that these payouts potentially incentivise artificially inflating case numbers. How big an incentive are we talking about? The CARES act channelled $175bn dollars into the “fight” against coronavirus, including $15 billion purely for treating COVID patients without insurance. 15 BILLION dollars. That’s a lot of extra money. You couldn’t blame a doctor for gaming the system to get a little for his struggling, under-funded clinic. For labelling some unknown respiratory illness “Covid19”, or re-ordering a test known to create false-positives until he gets the result which may pay a nurse’s salary, or re-stock a pharmacy. If a few thousand doctors do that a few hundred times each, you’ve created a “pandemic” out of nowhere, with a comparatively small outlay and 99% of those involved believing they’re doing the right thing. The American medical system is broken, of course. Has been for decades, and Dr Jensen’s revelations received a comparatively large amount of coverage which people in the UK and Europe largely filed away as “just American healthcare doing American healthcare things”. Fair Use Excerpt. Read the article here. Cash4Covid – How hospitals are making money off the coronavirus Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
It is bad enough that many people across America are living, working, and visiting in places where state or local governments have mandated that people wear masks or, instead, have mandated that businesses mandate that people wear masks when they go about their daily activities away from home. The masks are mandated in the name of countering coronavirus even though there is no clear evidence they create a net reduction in coronavirus transmission from person to person and there is plenty of reason to believe they impair health. Further, what people wear or do not wear on their faces is none of governments’ business to control. Will governments next mandate we wear big bubbles around us to protect us? While the current mask mandates are terrible, things could be worse. There could be a countrywide mask mandate. Presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden, in a Thursday interview with Ken Rice at KDKA-TV of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, declared that, if he were president, he would support just that. Said Biden, “I would do everything in my possible [sic] to make it required that people had to wear masks in public.” Watch Biden’s interview here: It Could Be Worse: Presidential Candidate Joe Biden Wants a National Mask Mandate Click on the headline to read the full story from Peace and Prosperity |
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