https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/11/23/ap-editor-said-she-cant-imagine-a-us-intelligence-official-being-wrong/
AP Editor Said She “Can’t Imagine” A US Intelligence Official Being Wrong
The Associated Press journalist who reported a US intelligence official’s false claim that Russia had launched missiles at Poland last week has been fired.
As we discussed previously, AP’s anonymously sourced report which said “A senior U.S. intelligence official says Russian missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, killing two people” went viral because of the massive implications of direct hot warfare erupting between Russia and the NATO alliance. AP subsequently retracted its story as the mainstream political/media class came to accept that it was in fact a Ukrainian missile that had struck Poland.
AP’s firing of reporter James LaPorta looks at this time to be the end point of any accountability for the circulation of this extremely dangerous falsehood. AP spokesperson Lauren Easton says no disciplinary action will be taken against the editors who waved the bogus story through, and to this day the public has been kept in the dark about the identity of the US official who fed such extremely egregious misinformation/disinformation to the public through the mainstream press.
It is utterly inexcusable for AP to continue to protect the anonymity of a government official who fed them such a profoundly significant falsehood. This didn’t just affect AP staff, it affected the whole world; we deserve to know what happened and who was responsible, and AP has no business obstructing that knowledge from us.
LaPorta’s firing looks like this is yet another instance where the least powerful person involved in a debacle is being made to take the fall for it. A powerful intelligence official will suffer no consequences for feeding false information to the press — thereby ensuring that it will happen again — and no disciplinary action will be taken against LaPorta’s superiors, despite the absolute buffoonery that subsequent reporting has revealed on their part.
In an article titled “Associated Press reporter fired over erroneous story on Russian attack,” The Washington Post reports the following (emphasis added):
Internal AP communications viewed by The Post show some confusion and misunderstanding during the preparations of the erroneous report.
LaPorta shared the U.S. official’s tip in an electronic message around 1:30 p.m. Eastern time. An editor immediately asked if AP should issue an alert on his tip, “or would we need confirmation from another source and/or Poland?”
After further discussion, a second editor said she “would vote” for publishing an alert, adding, “I can’t imagine a U.S. intelligence official would be wrong on this.”
“I can’t imagine a US intelligence official would be wrong on this.”
Can you imagine not being able to imagine a US intelligence official being wrong? This would be an unacceptable position for any educated adult to hold, much less a journalist, still less an editor, and still less an editor of one of the most influential news agencies on earth.
These are the people who publish the news reports we read to find out what’s happening in the world. This is the baby-brained level of thinking these people are serving the public interest with.
Antiwar commentator Daniel Larison writes the following of the AP editor’s shocking quote:
Skepticism about official claims should always be the watchword for journalists and analysts. These are claims that need more scrutiny than usual rather than less. If you can’t imagine that an intelligence official could get something important wrong, whether by accident or on purpose, you are taking far too many things for granted that need to be questioned and checked out first.
Intelligence officials of many governments feed information to journalists and have done so practically ever since there was a popular press to feed information to, and that information certainly should not be trusted just because an official source hands it over. It is also always possible for intelligence officials to just get things wrong, whether it is because they are relying on faulty information or because they were too hasty in reaching conclusions about what they think they know.
Whether the AP’s source was feeding them a line or was simply mistaken, a claim as provocative and serious as this one should have been checked out much more thoroughly before it got anywhere near publication. The AP report in this case seems to have been a combination of a story that was “too good to check” and a culture of deference to official sources in which the editors didn’t feel compelled to make the effort to check.
Indeed, the only reason the press receive such explicit protections in the US Constitution is because they are supposed to hold the powerful to account. If the editors of a wildly influential news agency will just unquestioningly parrot whatever they are fed by government officials while simultaneously protecting those officials with anonymity, they are not holding the powerful to account, and are in fact not meaningfully different from state propagandists.
They are state propagandists. Which is probably why they are sipping lattes in the AP newsroom while Julian Assange languishes in prison.
As Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic observed, this is far from the first time AP has given the cover of anonymity to US government officials circulating bogus claims of potentially dangerous consequence, like the time it reported an official’s evidence-free assertion which later proved false that Iran had carried out an attack on four oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, or the time it let another one anonymously claim that “Iran may try to take advantage of America’s troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan.”
So to recap —
- Powerful government official who fed AP a false story: Zero accountability
- AP editor who asked if a report should immediately be published upon receipt of the story: Zero accountability
- Second AP editor who says she can’t imagine a U.S. intelligence official would be wrong: Zero accountability
- Journalist who wrote the story: Singular accountability
In a sane society, power and responsibility would go hand in hand. A disaster would be blamed on the most powerful people involved in its occurrence. In our society it’s generally the exact opposite, with the rank-and-file taking all of the responsibility and none of the power.
Our rulers lie to us, propagandize us, endanger us, impoverish us, destroy journalism, start wars, kill our biosphere and make our world dark and confusing, and they suffer no consequences for it. We cannot allow them to continue holding all of the power and none of the responsibility. This is backwards and must end.
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https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/83784/whitney-webb--how-elites-will-create-a-new-class-of.html
How Elites Will Create a New Class of Slaves
In the video above, Glenn Beck interviews investigative journalist Whitney Webb about her book, “One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein,” Parts 1 and 2.
These books provide the necessary framework to understand not just Jeffrey Epstein’s geopolitical role and function, but also, more broadly, the deep connections between the U.S. intelligence community and organized crime.
The political corruption we see today grew out of this unholy alliance, which has led to blackmail and bribery being two key strategies by which the wealthy self-described “elites” maintain power and influence from behind the scenes.
As noted by Beck, Webb “is a massive threat to powerful people. If people will listen and ... explore what she's saying, the game is up.” I agree. People need to understand how the system we thought we knew actually works, how it’s been used against us, and what the end game is.
Organized Crime at the Highest Levels
Epstein’s pedophilia and sexual blackmail enterprise was a central cog in this network of corruption for decades. He was also involved in many other questionable and/or criminal enterprises, including financial crimes, but he wasn’t necessarily at the top level in any of them. Webb describes him more as a middle-management-type of character, carrying out orders from higher-ups, including U.S. intelligence.
Overall, these “higher-ups” are people who favor globalism and global governance, and who don’t want the United States to have a monopoly on power. This is part of why the power of the U.S. is now being dismantled before our eyes, but the undermining and infiltration have been going on for decades.
As noted by Beck and Webb, our government is basically being run by organized crime, and this organized crime ring is setting into place a technocratic form of feudalism, a digital slavery system.
The reason Epstein’s financial crimes matter is because they’re like a microcosm of what has been going on in the U.S. for decades. According to Catherine Austin Fitts and Mark Skidmore, an estimated $21 trillion of U.S. taxpayer money have already been looted, stolen and siphoned out. Where did all that money go? Who took it?
Against that background of having already been looted, we’re now facing a radical degradation of our standard of living, with rising inflation and manufactured energy and food crises piled on top of each other.
All of these things, Webb says, are part of a plan to coerce us into accepting the unacceptable. Making sure people are cold, hungry, destitute and desperate is a surefire way to get people to cooperate with the globalist takeover, which includes a radical transition into transhumanism.
Transhumanism Is Eugenics Rebranded
In the interview, Webb reviews the history of transhumanism, the roots of which go back to Julian Huxley, brother of the famous author Aldous Huxley. Julian was president of the British Eugenics Society.
When the United Nations was created after World War II, he was put in charge of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the stated aim of which is to promote world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture.
But in writing about his vision for UNESCO, Julian said about eugenics, “We need to make the unthinkable thinkable again.” Ten years later, in 1957, he coined the term “transhumanism,” and described it as eugenics through the merging of man with machine.
So, transhumanism is eugenics rebranded. This is also corroborated by the fact that the same people, families and organizations that in the past supported eugenics now support transhumanism. Likewise, the merger of Silicon Valley companies with Big Pharma is nothing other than eugenics framed as health care. And COVID has now shown us that this rebranded form of eugenics can be forced on us.
Transhumanism Is Not for Betterment of the Average Person
As noted by Webb, while transhumanism is sold to us as a way for all people to obtain health and longevity — health equity for all! — the reality will be far from equitable.
She points out that science fiction writer H.G Wells once described the transhumanist future as one in which there is a physically and intellectually augmented elite class, and squat, dwarf-like, slave underclass that eats bugs and doesn’t even have the cognitive capacity to rebel.
Sound familiar? The World Economic Forum and their allied networks are pushing for a transition from real meat to insects. One of the primary side effects of the bioweapon referred to as the “COVID-19 vaccine,” aside from early death, is neurological dysfunction, and the masking, lockdowns and shuttering of schools have resulted in children who are nonverbal, cognitively impaired and/or years behind on core reading and math skills.
The Transhumanist Plan Is Being Fast-Tracked
As detailed in “The Plan to Turn You Into a Genetically Edited Human Cyborg,” a 2021 report by the U.K. Ministry of Defense and the German Bundeswehr Office for Defense Planning offers shocking insights into the dystopian cybernetics future that global technocrats are pushing us toward.
The report, “Human Augmentation — The Dawn of a New Paradigm, a Strategic Implications Project,”1 reviews the scientific goals of the U.K. and German defense ministries, and they are precisely what the title suggests. Human augmentation is stressed as being a key area of development.
It’s worth noting that anything released to the public is a decade or more behind current capabilities, so everything in this report can be considered dated news, even though it reads like pure science fiction.
Importantly, the report notes that “Human augmentation has the potential to ... change the meaning of what it means to be a human.” This is precisely what Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), has stated is the goal of The Fourth Industrial Revolution.2
Schwab has stated that “the Fourth Industrial Revolution will lead to a fusion of our physical, our digital and our biological identities.”3 Beyond your own “enhanced” 5G cloud-connected self, the WEF foresees a near future in which everyone’s digital identity is connected to each other through an “Internet of Bodies” (IoB).4,5
The fact that we’re moving at lightning speed into the transhumanist future envisioned by the WEF and militaries around the world is also evidenced by President Biden’s September 2022 Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology, which places development of genetic engineering techniques “to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology” on the fast-track.
US Defense Department Is Also Working on Human Cyborgs
In a September 14, 2022, Substack article,6 Dr. Robert Malone also reviewed the U.S. DoD’s plans for an army of human cyborgs. Certain report titles alone tell the story, such as the Biotechnologies for Health and Human Performance Council’s report7 “Cyborg Soldier 2050: Human/Machine Fusion and the Implications for the Future of the DOD.” According to the assessment abstract:
“The primary objective of this effort was to forecast and evaluate the military implications of machines that are physically integrated with the human body to augment and enhance human performance over the next 30 years.
This report summarizes this assessment and findings; identifies four potential military-use cases for new technologies in this area; and assesses their impact upon the DOD organizational structure, warfighter doctrine and tactics, and interoperability with U.S. allies and civil society.”
Human augmentation technologies deemed technically feasible by 2050 at the latest include ocular enhancements to improve sight and situational awareness, optogenetic bodysuit to restore or improve muscular strength and control, auditory enhancements, and neural enhancement of the brain for two-way data transfers and brain-to-brain communication.
With H.G. Wells’ description of our transhumanist future in mind (the two-tiered society of augmented super humans and bug-eating devolved slaves), it’s worth noting that both the DoD’s “Cyborg Soldier” report and the British/German “Human Augmentation” report address the fact that human augmentation will inevitably widen already existing disparities, inequalities and inequities — not close them! — and therefore, “efforts should be undertaken to reverse negative cultural narratives of enhancement technologies.”8
In other words, don’t let people come to the conclusion that human “borgs” are a bad idea, because at worst that might prevent their development, and at best, it’ll pitch regular people against the augmented elite, making their efforts to rule more difficult. Combating negative narratives about the borgification of mankind is also necessary in order to maintain the lie that transhumanism is about leveling the playing field and allowing everyone to live longer and have lifelong health.
Final Thoughts
I don’t know what it will take to prevent the dystopian post-human world envisioned by technocratic transhumanist elitists, but I suspect education would be a cornerstone of such an endeavor. In order for there to be a resistance, enough people need to be aware of what the plan is, and where we’re actually being led with all these novel therapies and inventions.
In the shorter term, it’s crucial to realize that the fast-tracking of “genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers” means they’re going to cut corners. Loads of them.
Testing is basically going to be done on the population at large, just as they’ve done with the COVID jabs. The results of such experimentation are relatively predictable. People will be seriously injured and many will die.
We also still don’t know what the legal standing of people whose genetics are altered by RNA might be, now or in the future, since that has yet to be established.
So please, think long and hard before you agree to take any of these forthcoming gene therapies, be they COVID boosters or any other “vaccines.” They’re not vaccines. They’re gene transfer technologies that alter your DNA.9,10 They’re part of the transhumanist agenda, the Fourth Industrial Revolution — and remember, transhumanism is a eugenics agenda. Same agenda, just new tools.
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https://stephenlendman.org/2022/11/22/is-ww-iii-inevitable/
Is WW III Inevitable?
Has global war 3.0 already begun unannounced?
After reaching peak power and influence post-WW II, hegemon USA has been declining.
Offshored to low-wage countries, its once mighty industrial base no longer exists.
China, Russia and India have been growing in prominence on the world stage as hegemon USA and European vassal states decline.
Instead of industrial goods, the US mainly produces debt and wars on invented enemies.
According to analyst Jeff Thomas, “the last play of a dying empire (is launching a) major war…to buy time.”
At this time, China-led Asia is rising.
Non-Western countries like oil-rich Saudi Arabia are increasingly trading with Asian nations at the expense of the empire of lies and forever wars.
By allying with hegemon USA’s war on Russia by hot and other means, Britain and EU nations are in economic decline, what appears irreversible as long as they continue their self-destructive course.
Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) once said the following:
“There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion.”
“The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”
Over a decade ago, economist Michael Hudson explained the following:
“The (US) economy reached its debt limit and is entering its insolvency phase.”
“We are not in a cycle but (at) the end of an era.”
“The old world of debt pyramiding to a fraudulent degree cannot be restored,” only delayed to postpone a painful day of reckoning.
Economist Hyman Minsky (1919 – 1996) slammed what he called “Ponzi finance.”
And this from Russian academic, Igor Panarin, years earlier, saying:
US/Western “economic and moral collapse” is inevitable.
He compared the US to the Titanic after hitting an iceberg.
Political scientist, Emmanuel Todd predicted Soviet Russia’s dissolution in 1976.
In his 2002 book, titled: “After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order,” he noted the following:
US militarism and forever wars show weakness, not strength.
America is parasitic, relying on voluntary or extracted “tributes” from exploited states.
Global terrorism is perpetrated by the US in pursuit of its imperial aims.
China, Russia, India and other nations reject US adventurism.
It reflects terminal corruption, decay and eventual demise.
The US relies on debt, consumption and imports with its industrial base relocated offshore.
If debt expansion and capital inflows cease, the dollar is doomed as the world’s reserve currency.
Before the euro became official EU currency on January 1, 1999, British economist Bernard Connolly called the combination of dissimilar countries under one monetary/fiscal system a harebrained idea doomed to fail, saying:
The scheme combines “duplicity, skullduggery, conflict (and) economic harm” to nations under the control of Brussels.
“(I)ncreasing globalization of economic activity and mobility of production has been purposely implemented in such a way as to render already destroyed ‘nation-state(s)’ meaningless entit(ies) in economic terms.”
Days earlier, Jeff Thomas said the following:
“The EU is already on the ropes.”
“It was a misconceived experiment from the start and has now begun to splinter.”
“Although no major breakup has begun, the rot is already beyond any possible salvage, and the dictates of Brussels are encountering refusals by some member countries.”
It’s just a matter of time before the ill-conceived project dissolves.
It erringly hitched its wagon to the empire of lies and forever wars on invented enemies.
And by so doing, hastened its demise.
Most EU nations are NATO members.
Austria, Cyprus, Ireland, Malta, Finland and Sweden are exceptions to the rule — the latter two countries in process of joining the war-making alliance.
On Monday, NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly adopted a nonbinding resolution.
In support of Ukrainian Nazis, representatives of its member regimes falsely called Russia a “terrorist” state (sic), adding:
The pro-war/anti-peace alliance should “accelerat(e) deliveries of weapons…for as long as it takes for Ukrain(ian) (Nazis) to prevail.”
While the resolution is unrelated to NATO policy, a state of war exists between the alliance for perpetual war-making and nonthreatening Russia.
The empire of lies and forever wars is militantly hostile toward nations free from its hegemonic control.
While unlikely, the risk of possible nuclear war is greater today than ever before throughout the post-WW II period.
Thomas believes that the only remaining option for the empire of lies is major war, adding:
“(L)ike a cornered rat, it will make a last attempt to take down as many others as it can on its way out.”
“That should give us pause.”
“Those who wish to avoid becoming collateral damage as the behemoth falls would be advised to extricate themselves, economically and even geographically, from the dying empire.”
Instead of breaking with hegemon USA in their own self-interest, Western regimes seem hellbent to sink aboard the USS Titanic.
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