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How Israeli Spyware Endangers Activists Across the Globe

Posted by M. C. on June 15, 2023

Israeli surveillance technology is empowering antidemocratic governments to track journalists and human rights activists. Regulation is virtually nonexistent.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/how-israeli-spyware-endangers-activists

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN 

The following is an excerpt from The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (2023, Verso Books). It has been edited for length and clarity.

Griselda Triana is a Mexican journalist, and human rights activist whose husband, Javier Valdez Cárdenas, was slain by a drug cartel on May 15, 2017, in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state. Valdez was the cofounder of the media outlet Riodoce, which investigated corruption and crime, and wrote about the bloody drug war. He paid the ultimate price — a grenade was thrown into his office in 2009. He had received death threats in the months before his murder, but he bravely continued his groundbreaking work despite the threats.

Ten days after his killing, Triana started receiving unexpected text messages on her mobile phone. She had no idea that they were suspicious until almost one year later, when it was discovered that there had been attempts to infiltrate her phone with the Pegasus system, a phone-hacking tool sold by Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, almost certainly by elements within the Mexican state. ​“Before Javier’s murder I did not know that we were being monitored,” she told me. Javier had never informed her about the possibility of phone hacking, and she presumed that he was taking precautions for his safety. ​“Javier knew about the risks of reporting criminal activities, but even so he was aware that someone had to document the atrocities of criminal organizations,” she said.

The murder of Valdez devastated Triana. ​“He was my husband and father of my two children. I was really shocked because Javier didn’t want to leave Sinaloa even though he knew they [the cartels] could kill him.” I asked her why she thought she had been targeted by Pegasus. She said she believed it was because ​“they thought that by tapping the phones they could get data from various sources of information or listen to calls related to Javier’s crime investigations.” To this day, Triana has never been told by the Mexican state why it spied on her — and there’s been no court case for the man accused of masterminding her husband’s death.

Both the Mexican government and NSO claim that Pegasus is used solely for the purposes of fighting crime and terrorism, but Triana’s case proves that this claim is false. Mexico has been a major testing ground for NSO technology. ​“The problem is that it has been used to spy on people who do not represent a danger to the country,” Triana said.

After Valdez’s death, Triana moved to Mexico City, where she works as a journalist and activist. The fear has never gone away, however — the feeling of being violated by both her husband’s gruesome death and the state’s intrusion on her communications. ​“I am afraid every time I visit Culiacán,” she said. ​“It is something that I have not been able to overcome.”

Israel’s surveillance apparatus is a competitor and ally of Washington’s National Security Agency (NSA), the most powerful eavesdropping network in the world. While outmatched in terms of manpower, Israel has a long history of spying on its closest ally, a fact that does not appear to publicly bother the superpower. Some estimates suggest that around 350 American intelligence officials spend their days spying on Israel. Despite this, the NSA partners with Israel and has passed on data-mining and analytical software. In turn, says a former NSA intelligence official, Bill Binney, Israel transfers this technology to private Israeli companies, which allows them to gather a massive amount of sensitive military, diplomatic, and economic information to be shared with Israeli officials.

This is the frame around which to see the role of NSO Group, the world’s most successful cyber-surveillance company, and other Israeli high-tech outfits. NSO works with the Israeli state to further its foreign policy goals, and is used as an alluring carrot to attract potential new friends. Since its inception, NSO has been funded by a range of global players, including London-based equity firm Novalpina Capital. One of the biggest investors in Novalpina, to the tune of US$233 million in 2017, before NSO was on the company’s books, was the Oregon state employees’ pension fund. In 2019 pension money for the British gas provider Centrica was also invested in Novalpina.

Former Haaretz tech reporter Amitai Ziv, who has done some of the most insightful work uncovering NSO, told me that the power of NSO is not in the money that it makes but in diplomacy: ​“When Israel is selling cyber-surveillance to some African country, they can assure their vote at the United Nations. Since there’s an occupation, we need the votes.”

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“Nightmare Scenario”: US Government Has Been Secretly Stockpiling Dirt On Americans Via Data Brokers

Posted by M. C. on June 15, 2023

“The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits. Yet smartphones, connected cars, web tracking technologies, the Internet of Things, and other innovations have had this effect without government participation,” reads the report.

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/nightmare-scenario-us-government-has-been-secretly-stockpiling-dirt-americans-data

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

The US Government has been purchasing troves of information on American citizens from 3rd party data providers, according to Wired, which cites privacy advocates who say this constitutes a “nightmare scenario.”

The United States government has been secretly amassing a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” on its own citizens, a group of senior advisers informed Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, more than a year ago. 

The size and scope of the government effort to accumulate data revealing the minute details of Americans’ lives are described soberly and at length by the director’s own panel of experts in a newly declassified report. Haines had first tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members. -Wired

“This report reveals what we feared most,” according to attorney Sean Vitka of the Demand Progress nonprofit. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.”

The government has been using ‘craven interpretations of aging laws’ to bypass privacy rights, as prosecutors have increasingly ignored limits traditionally imposed on domestic surveillance.

“I’ve been warning for years that if using a credit card to buy an American’s personal information voids their Fourth Amendment rights, then traditional checks and balances for government surveillance will crumble,” according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).

During a March 8 hearing, Wyden pressed Haines to release the panel’s report – after Haines said it should “absolutely” be read by the public. On Friday, that’s exactly what happened after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released it amid a battle with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) over various related documents.

“This report makes it clear that the government continues to think it can buy its way out of constitutional protections using taxpayers’ own money,” said EPIC law fellow, Chris Baumohl. “Congress must tackle the government’s data broker pipeline this year, before it considers any reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” he said (referring to the ongoing political fight over the so-called “crown jewel” of US surveillance, per Wired).

The ODNI’s own panel of advisers makes clear that the government’s static interpretations of what constitutes “publicly available information” poses a significant threat to the public. The advisers decry existing policies that automatically conflate, in the first place, being able to buy information with it being considered “public.” The information being commercially sold about Americans today is “more revealing, available on more people (in bulk), less possible to avoid, and less well understood” than that which is traditionally thought of as being “publicly available.”

Perhaps most controversially, the report states that the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information. Were the government to simply demand access to a device’s location instead, it would be considered a Fourth Amendment “search” and would require a judge’s sign-off. But because companies are willing to sell the information—not only to the US government but to other companies as well—the government considers it “publicly available” and therefore asserts that it “can purchase it.” -Wired

What’s more, the report notes that it’s relatively easy to “deanonymize and identify individuals” based on data that was originally been anonymized prior to its commercial sale. According to the report, the data can do things like “identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad-tracking records,” posing serious civil liberty concerns over how “large quantities of nominally ‘public’ information can result in sensitive aggregations.”

The report goes on to say that in times past, access to sensitive information about a person was part of a “targeted” and “predicated” investigation. That’s no longer the case.

“Today, in a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, [commercially available information] includes information on nearly everyone,” it reads, adding that both the “volume and sensitivity” of information available for the government to purchase has exploded in recent years thanks to “location-tracking and other features of smartphones” as well as the “advertising-based monetization model” that underpins much of the internet.

According to the ODNI, this data “in the wrong hands” could be used against Americans “facilitate blackmail, stalking, harassment, and public shaming” – all offenses that have been committed by intelligence agencies and the White House in the past.

“The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits. Yet smartphones, connected cars, web tracking technologies, the Internet of Things, and other innovations have had this effect without government participation,” reads the report.

Read the report below:

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WATCH: Waco Cops Go to Wrong Home, Kill Innocent Couple’s Dog

Posted by M. C. on June 15, 2023

There must not have been children at the home. Cops usually wait until the children are present before they shoot the family pets.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/watch-waco-cops-go-to-wrong-home-kill-innocent-couples-dog/

by Matt Agorist

A horrific turn of events unfolded in Texas when Waco Police officers, responding to a 911 call, arrived at the wrong address and fatally shot an innocent couple’s dog. Bodycam footage of this gross incompetence has been released by the Waco Police, which provides a harrowing view of the entire incident.

The act of puppycide occurred when the police dispatch system unwittingly autocorrected the original address reported in the 911 call—from the 3200 block of North 20th A Street to North 20th Street—sending officers to the wrong home. A tragic case of technology failing humanity at a critical moment.

Finn, the victim of this egregious error, was a black Labrador owned by the innocent residents Cassandra Page and Matt Vasquez. The officers claimed the dog “acted aggressively” and lunged at them, a statement the distraught couple adamantly disputes.

The bodycam footage presents two perspectives. The video captures how the officers, without knowing if a suspect was present or armed, approached the house and came across several dogs.

Following their standard protocol, the officers announced their arrival, and, shortly afterward, were confronted by multiple dogs. One officer claimed Finn lunged at him twice, provoking him to discharge his weapon. The footage also shows the second officer tasing one of the dogs.

In the aftermath of this tragic event, the officers interacted with a shocked Cassandra Page, explaining their monumental blunder, offering an apology, and assuring her that it was a case of mistaken location.

“We got a call that someone was breaking and entering,” the officer says. “Your door was wide open. It doesn’t look good in our situation. That’s why we’re here.”

The officer then informs Page that he shot Finn.

“The dog charged me, so I shot it,” the officer says.

“You shot my dog?” Page asks. “With a gun?”

Page then runs over to Finn, and screams when she finds him.

By the time Matt Vasquez rushed home after receiving Page’s frantic call, Finn was en route to an emergency animal clinic. Tragically, due to Finn’s age and the severity of his injuries, he couldn’t be saved.

Upon realizing their error, the Waco Police Department extended their sympathies, offering to cover Finn’s veterinary expenses, and pledged to conduct an internal investigation. They have issued an apology for the incident and promised to “work diligently” to rectify the root cause of the location discrepancy to prevent a recurrence of such heartbreaking incidents.

While these actions are appreciated, they can never compensate for the loss of Finn, a casualty of a tragic miscommunication and a grim reminder of how even minor errors can lead to devastating outcomes.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vVeLrw0yXwY?enablejsapi=1

This article was originally featured at The Free Thought Project 

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Space Force General Admits She’d Prioritize Gender Surgery Access Over Qualified Officers

Posted by M. C. on June 15, 2023

Space Force veteran Lt. Col Matt Lohmeier — who was relieved of command after he said on a conservative podcast that Marxism was infiltrating the U.S. military — argued in a tweet that Burt had actually done what he was fired for doing.

“I was once fired from command in the @SpaceForceDoD for allegedly ‘being politically partisan while acting in an official capacity.’ That allegation was totally false,” he said. “Lt. Gen. Burt here demonstrates what being politically partisan while acting in an official capacity really looks like.”

This person is in command of nukes floating over your head. Feeling safer?

https://www.dailywire.com/news/space-force-general-admits-shed-prioritize-gender-surgery-access-over-qualified-officers

By  Virginia Kruta

United States Space Force Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt admitted during a recent Department of Defense (DoD) LGBTQ+ PRIDE event that she would allow access to “gender-affirming care” to take priority over qualifications when assigning officers.

Burt referenced several states that have passed laws banning transgender surgeries — and in some cases, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones — for minors, and said that while she would normally consider job performance and qualifications before selecting officers for certain jobs, she had to also consider whether her troops and their families would feel safe in those assignments.

“Transformational cultural change requires leadership from the top, and we do not have time to wait,” Burt began. “Since January of this year, more than 400 anti-LGBTQ+ laws have been introduced at the state level. That number is rising and demonstrates a trend that could be dangerous for service members, their families, and the readiness of the force as a whole.”

“When I look at potential candidates, say for Squadron command, I strive to match the right person to the right job,” she continued, adding, “I consider their job performance and relevant experience first. However, I also look at their personal circumstances, and their family is also an important factor. If a good match for a job does not feel safe being themselves and performing at their highest potential at a given location, or if their family could be denied critical health care due to the laws in that state, I am compelled to consider a different candidate, perhaps less qualified.”

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Inflation

Posted by M. C. on June 14, 2023

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Licensing Laws Deepen South Africa’s Electricity Crisis | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on June 14, 2023

The Electricity Regulation Act of 2006 is a textbook example of licensing laws that ultimately serve incumbents at the expense of not only prospective competitors but also customers who can benefit from innovations made by these competitors. In the case of South Africa’s electricity crisis, licensing laws are making South Africa’s electricity crisis unnecessarily more difficult to solve because NERSA has the last word on who can compete and how competitors can compete in the electricity market.

https://mises.org/wire/licensing-laws-deepen-south-africas-electricity-crisis

Since 2007, South Africa has been experiencing an electricity crisis. Eskom (a South African state-owned company) cannot produce enough electricity to meet increasing demand, so Eskom has implemented rolling blackouts, which is also called “load shedding” by the South African government. Rolling blackouts involve Eskom periodically and intentionally stopping the delivery of electricity to certain parts of South Africa to avoid a total blackout.

The severity of rolling blackouts increases as Eskom’s capacity to produce electricity decreases, and the severity of the rolling blackouts are categorized into stages—where “stage 1” is the least severe and “stage 8” is the most severe for now. Energy experts and even government officials have suggested solutions but to no avail because the South African government ignores them.

In this piece, I argue two points. First, I argue that South Africa’s electricity licensing laws need to be eliminated or amended. Second, I argue that those same licensing laws prevent effective and affordable electricity supply solutions from being implemented, deepening South Africa’s electricity crisis.

Here are some facts about South Africa’s electricity crisis. According to data from Statistics South Africa, Eskom’s yearly average electricity production share is 94 percent, and South Africa’s electricity production decreased by 11 percent while Eskom’s electricity production decreased by 18 percent since the beginning of the rolling blackouts in 2007.

The decrease in South Africa’s electricity production is attributed to Eskom’s aging infrastructure and corruption. According to data from EskomSePush, South Africa experienced 311 days (over seven thousand hours) of rolling blackouts in 2022. Rolling blackouts have negatively affected businesses and livelihoods to the point where businesses have experienced significant decreases in profits and also had to cut jobs as a consequence. On the lighter side—and I say this sarcastically—the rolling blackouts have assisted South Africa in beating its climate goals, since less production in electricity leads to less emissions of greenhouse gasses.

Eskom’s domination in South Africa’s electricity market is no accident. Legislation has given Eskom unique privileges and protection from outside competition ever since its inception in 1922. Anton Eberhard writes:

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Britain Poses as Uncle Sam’s War Enforcer in Return for Much-Needed Trade Deal

Posted by M. C. on June 14, 2023

Laughably, Biden referred to his meeting with Sunak as akin to the first encounter between Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the White House to plan the D-Day invasion of Europe. The arrogance and delusional distortion of history are astounding.

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/06/11/britain-poses-as-uncle-sam-war-enforcer-in-return-for-much-needed-trade-deal/

Finian Cunningham

Reality check: warmongering Britain and the U.S. are leading the world to the abyss.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak went to Washington last week cap-in-hand hawking a nefarious deal. Post-Brexit Britain is seeking a much-coveted bilateral trade pact with the United States, and to avail of Uncle Sam’s favor the British are offering to step up its role as provocateur-in-chief in the proxy war against Russia.

U.S. President Joe Biden and Sunak hailed the usual platitudes about their nations’ “special relationship” during the British premier’s two-day trip to Washington. Sunak added a new unctuous epithet, referring to the U.S. and Britain as the world’s “indispensable alliance”.

Topping their agenda in the White House summit was the conflict in Ukraine, Russia, China and trade issues.

Biden and Sunak unveiled an “Atlantic Declaration” promising closer cooperation on economics, security, military and artificial intelligence between the United States and Britain.

But crucially missing from the U.S. side was any concrete commitment to a new bilateral trade deal. When Britain left the European Union in 2020, the historic departure from that trade bloc was calculatedly made with the aspiration of securing an alternative special trading arrangement with the United States.

The Conservative government made the securing of a U.S.-UK trade pact a commitment to British voters at the last general election in 2019. Nearly four years on, however, London is no closer to tying itself to the American raft after cutting itself loose from the EU. That drifting situation has caused unprecedented economic and political turmoil in Britain.

Sunak is the third British prime minister that Biden has had dealings with as president, reflecting the unstable politics in Britain provoked by its post-Brexit tribulations.

Securing a trade agreement with the United States is a priority need for London. As Washington under the Biden administration adopts more protectionist economic policies, Britain is keen to obtain concessions for accessing the American economy.

This fraught juncture is what makes London’s role as Washington’s global henchman more dangerous than usual. In order to win economic favors, Britain is more disposed than ever to escalate U.S. imperial hostilities toward Russia and China. Those hostilities are impelled by Washington’s own imperial decline as the once presumed “sole superpower” and “global hegemon”.

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Why JFK Was Deemed a Threat to National Security

Posted by M. C. on June 14, 2023

What would have happened if Kennedy had lived? The national-security establishment would have immediately become irrelevant and immaterial. They would have been left twiddling their thumbs, with nothing to do. Remember, after all, that the supposed threat from the Russian Reds was why the federal government was converted to a national-security state in the first place. Peaceful coexistence with the communist world would have meant no more justification for a national-security state. The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA would have been dismantled and America’s founding system of a limited-government republic would have been restored.

Why JFK Was Deemed a Threat to National Security

by Jacob G. Hornberger

Three days ago — June 10 — was the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s Peace Speech at American University. Reading or listening to the speech today, it is not difficult to see why the U.S. national-security establishment deemed Kennedy to be a grave threat to national security, just as it did with certain foreign leaders, such as Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, Congo leader Patrice Lumumba, Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz and, later, President Salvador Allende of Chile. 

For some 150 years, the federal government had been a limited-government republic. After World War II, however, the federal government was converted to a national-security state. 

The difference was day and night.

With a limited-government republic, there was openness and transparency in governmental operations. Moreover, there was only a relatively small, basic military force. No Pentagon, no vast military-industrial complex, no CIA, no NSA, and no empire of foreign military bases. Governmental powers were limited and tightly constrained. No power to assassinate, kidnap, torture, or indefinitely detain people. No power to initiate coups or regime-change operations in foreign countries. No power of mass secret surveillance. 

With a national-security state, dark-side secrecy became everything. “National security” became the two most important words in the American political lexicon. A large, permanent military establishment, along with the CIA and the NSA, came into existence. This vast national-security establishment vested itself with omnipotent, totalitarian-like powers, including assassination, torture, coups, secret surveillance, kidnapping, and indefinite detention. It established a vast empire of military bases, both foreign and domestic, and initiated a program of regime change in foreign nations. Foreign wars in faraway lands, such as Korea and Vietnam, became the norm.

The Cold War was actually one great big racket, one that became a cash cow for the vast military-intelligence complex and its ever-growing army of “defense” contractors who loved feeding at the public trough. This enormous racket was justified under the rubric of keeping America safe from a supposed vast communist conspiracy that supposedly was based in Moscow, Russia. Yes, that Russia!

There was no possibility whatsoever of a peaceful resolution of the forever war between the United States and Russia, U.S. oficials said. There could never be peaceful coexistence, they maintained. The war against the Russian Reds, U.S. national-security officials held, was a war to the death. That was why the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended to Kennedy that the United States initiate a surprise nuclear attack against the Russians, a recommendation that Kennedy indignantly rejected.

Having achieved a “breakthrough” after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy had decided that he was going to lead America in an entirely different direction from that of the national-security establishment. In his Peace Speech, Kennedy threw down the gauntlet against what had now become his enemy — the national-security establishment. Kennedy essentially declared an end to the Cold War racket and announced that henceforth Russia and the United States would live in peaceful coexistence. He declared an end to to the extreme anti-Russia hostility that the national-security establishment had inculcated in the American people, and he even praised the Soviet Union.

The very next night — June 11 — Kennedy delivered a nation-wide speech expressing support for the civil-rights movement, which the national-security establishment was convinced was controlled by the Russian Reds. That’s why the FBI wiretapped Martin Luther King and used blackmail with the aim of inducing him to commit suicide.

Kennedy then followed up his words with actions.

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Unmasking The CDC’s Medical CIA

Posted by M. C. on June 14, 2023

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/unmasking-cdcs-medical-cia

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

Authored by Lloyd Billingsley via American Greatness,

The swampy origins and foreign interests of the Epidemic Intelligence Services of the CDC need to be exposed…

CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky is departing at the end of June and Joe Biden has tapped former North Carolina health boss Dr. Mandy Cohen to replace her. More important than the identity of the CDC director is what goes on behind the scenes, and hints have been emerging. 

In April of 2021, the CDC reassigned Dr. Nancy Messonnier, longtime director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD). In a May 7, 2021 White House briefing, Walensky suddenly announced that Messonnier was stepping down.

“Dr. Messonnier has been a true hero,” Walensky told reporters. “And through her career, in terms of public health, she’s been a steward of public health for the nation. Over this pandemic and through a many-decade career, she’s made significant contributions, and she leaves behind a strong, strong force of leadership and courage in all that she’s done.”

Walensky neglected to mention Messonnier’s series of telebriefings in early 2020, conducted on January 17, January 24, January 29, January 30, February 3, February 5, February 12, February 25, and March 10.

In these sessions, not shown to the public, Messonnier warned that a “novel coronavirus” had emerged from the “Wuhan market” and the highly contagious new virus would “gain a foothold” in the United States. According to Messonnier, many people would be infected, and there was “no immunity.” Some reporters were curious about people traveling to the United States from Wuhan.

“That’s something I’m not at liberty to talk about today,” Messonnier said in the February 5 briefing, without revealing why that was so, or who was laying down the rules. On January 24, reporters who asked about China were told, “CDC has a team that’s been in China for many years where we work closely with the Department of Health in China.” There was information “from China” but Messonnier wasn’t giving it out.

“I think we should be clear to compliment the Chinese,” Messonnier said, “on the early recognition of the respiratory outbreak center in the Wuhan market, and how rapidly they were able to identify it as a novel coronavirus.” And so on, a veritable recitation of China’s talking points, but there was more to it.

In May of 2021, Walensky also failed to mention that “true hero” Nancy Messonnier was an officer of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), the CDC’s elite team of “disease detectives,” patrolling the world to prevent epidemics from arriving on American soil.

“EIS officers serve on the front lines of public health, protecting Americans and the global community,” the CDC claims. When diseases and public health threats emerge, “EIS officers investigate, identify the cause, rapidly implement control measures, and collect evidence to recommend preventive actions.”

In practice, as Peter Duesberg noted in Inventing the AIDS Virus, the EIS functions as a “medical CIA,” a support network for the CDC in government, academia, and media. For example, EIS veteran Lawrence Altman became a medical writer for the New York Times and in 2010 rendered a worshipful account of the intelligence service.

In 1995, after completing her residency in internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Nancy Messonnier went straight into the EIS. She shows up in the 2013 EIS conference report as a co-author of two studies on vaccine effectiveness, one in Burkina Faso and one in Washington, “among adolescents vaccinated with acellular pertussis vaccines.”

Messonnier’s Wikipedia profile shows the EIS officer in a jacket emblazoned with medals. According to the site, she was born Nancy Ellen Rosenstein, sister of Rod Rosenstein, the Justice Department official who launched the investigation of President Trump for allegedly colluding with Russia. 

Messonnier’s connection to Rosenstein, and her experience with the EIS, did not emerge at the outset of 2020. By October, the EIS did briefly expose itself. 

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Examing the Foreign Policy Establishment’s ‘British Connection’

Posted by M. C. on June 14, 2023

Of course, apart from world encompassing imperialist frameworks and Russophobia, the British also introduced their American counterparts to the central banking and government propaganda apparatuses necessary to expanding Washington’s cheaply won contiguous land empire of the nineteenth century abroad in the twentieth. Having adopted these methods, Washington could, when Britain’s strength was finally exhausted, “Pick up the torch of empire from our [Britain’s] still cooling fingers.”8

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/examing-the-foreign-policy-establishments-british-connection/

by Joseph Solis-Mullen

cecil rhodes

In 1877, before he had made his fortune via the founding of De Beers Consolidated Mines and the British South Africa Company, the imperialist par excellence Cecil Rhodes had dictated a part of his will thusly: “[To make provision] for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world.” This was to include, “The ultimate recovery of the United States of America.”1

This grandiose vision was pragmatically tempered in the final version of his will (1902), which instead set up an eponymous scholarship, the stated intention of which was to, “promote unity among English speaking nations.” Thus was the Rhodes Scholarship, which sees a handful of America’s future leaders shipped off to Oxford each year, conceived of and brought into being.2

Just looking over a list of some of those selected, the influence of British thinking on American grand strategy in the century that followed becomes all too explicable: From Stanley Hornbeck, special advisor to FDR’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the longest serving Secretary of State in U.S. history, to J. William Fullbright, senator and longest tenured Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1945-1974), to JFK and LBJ’s Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Walt Rostow, LBJ’s National Security Advisor: these men were among the most influential hands steering U.S. foreign policy from the 1930s onward.

Later architects of U.S. policy to pass through Oxford via the program include Richard Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations and Director of Policy Planning for George W. Bush (2001-2003), Joseph Nye, chair of the National Intelligence Council and Deputy Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton3 (1993-1995), Strobe Talbot, Deputy Secretary of State and lead architect of Clinton’s Russia and NATO expansion policies (1994-2001), Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor (2013-2017), Ash Carter, Secretary of Defense under Obama (2015-2017), and arguably the worst U.S. Ambassador to Russia ever, Michael McFaul (2012-2014).

As an aside, given the catastrophic performance of these later figures it is worth noting that apart from absorbing British principles of imperial strategy—the work of the Oxonian Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) clearly having influenced that of the foundational American realist Nicholas Spykman (1893-1943), who in turn greatly influenced John Foster Dulles (Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of State from 1953-1959)—American policy architects seem to have also imbibed the abiding British suspicion of the Russians, as well as their tactics for dealing with the “barbarians,” as the aforementioned ex-Ambassador McFaul described them on Twitter a week ago.

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