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US launches new 'ministry of truth'
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has set up a body to counter foreign ‘disinformation’
The US has established a Foreign Malign Influence Center to address foreign threats to elections as well as the “public opinion” within the country, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines revealed in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Thursday.
Operating under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FMIC has access to “all intelligence possessed or created pertaining to foreign malign information, including election security.” Its director, Jeffrey Wichman, was formerly chief of analysis for the CIA’s Counterintelligence Mission Center.
For the agency’s purposes, ‘foreign’ means originating in Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, or “any other foreign country that the Director of the Center” deems appropriate, while ‘foreign malign influence’ is defined as “any hostile effort undertaken by, or at the direction of, or on behalf of or with the substantial support of,” one of the named countries in order to influence, covertly or overtly, US government or state policy or the “public opinion within the United States.”
While the FMIC was apparently founded in September at the behest of recent legislation, Thursday’s hearing was the first public mention of its existence. Its establishment was controversial, as some senators and intelligence officers questioned the need for another agency with the same remit as the Global Engagement Center, the State Department subsidiary tasked with disseminating American propaganda to fight the foreign variety.
Haines addressed some of those concerns in Thursday’s hearing, insisting the FMIC was working to “support the Global Engagement Center and others throughout the US government in helping them to understand what are the plans and intentions of the key actors in this space: China, Russia, Iran, etc.”
Countering ‘foreign disinformation’ has become something of an obsession for government bureaucrats since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, with half a dozen agencies springing up since then. In addition to the GEC, launched in 2017, the Pentagon quietly launched an Influence and Perception Management Office last year, joining the Department of Homeland Security’s Foreign Influence and Interference Branch, Countering Foreign Influence Task Force, and the ill-fated Disinformation Governance Board, as well as the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force.
However, Pentagon contractor RAND Corporation recently acknowledged Russia’s role is probably overstated. The think tank warned in a study conducted last year that blaming Moscow for all information Washington doesn’t like is likely to backfire, urging the Defense Department to reduce “overattribution of disinformation on social media to Russia.”
“Pointing the finger at Russia in every instance of activity on social media resembling Russian interference distorts the understanding of the threat,” the report stated.
https://www.rt.com/news/575936-us-foreign-disinformation-intelligence-redundant/
CIA involved in JFK’s murder – Robert Kennedy Jr
US presidential candidate said the agency’s culpability in his uncle's murder was “beyond a reasonable doubt”
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has alleged that the CIA was behind the assassination of his uncle, US President John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1963, and likely involved in the murder of his father, US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who was shot dead in 1968.
Speaking during an interview with WABC radio host John Catsimatidis on Sunday, Kennedy Jr. said “There is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in [JFK's] murder,” describing it as “beyond a reasonable doubt at this point.”
“The evidence is overwhelming that the CIA was involved in the murder, and the coverup,” the candidate continued, describing efforts to discredit this theory as a “60-year coverup.” Kennedy cited the book “JFK and the Unspeakable” by James Douglas as the best compilation of evidence on the subject, though dozens if not hundreds of works have been written about the assassination and the CIA’s alleged role.
The official US government explanation, published as the Warren Commission report the following year, holds that US Marine veteran Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in shooting the president while his motorcade was passing through Dallas on November 22, 1963.
Oswald was famously murdered before he could stand trial, though he managed to tell journalists he was “just a patsy” shortly after his arrest. The alleged lone gunman was shot dead by nightclub owner Jack Ruby (real name Jacob Rubinstein) while being transported from Dallas Police Headquarters to the county jail.
Speaking to Catsimatidis, Kennedy added that there was “very convincing but circumstantial” evidence the CIA was involved in the 1968 assassination of his father, Attorney General and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. He described the official story of the assassination, which was pinned on Palestinian horse groomer Sirhan Sirhan, as physically impossible, arguing Thane Eugene Cesar, a security guard at the hotel who was concurrently employed by military contractor Lockheed, had actually fired the shots that killed Kennedy.
Four years after JFK’s murder, nearly half of the American public did not believe that Oswald had acted alone. The CIA was concerned enough about this fact that it issued a directive in 1967 on how to discredit the so-called “conspiracy theorists” questioning the conclusions of the Warren Commission. Modern use of the term “conspiracy theorist” as a pejorative is often traced back to this 1967 memo.
https://www.rt.com/news/575946-cia-killed-jfk-rfk-candidate/
What can China do in response to NATO’s foray into Asia?
The Western military bloc is reportedly opening its first office in Japan as the US pushes ‘bloc confrontation’ politics into the region
Japan is reportedly planning to open a NATO liaison office in Tokyo. The office will be the first of its kind in Asia, and is designated to “coordinate” with the alliance on security matters, and on the issue of China.
It is no secret that the US seeks to expand and institutionalize the military alliance into Asia and place its footprint on a global scale, a notion that has been encouraged by the conflict in Ukraine, and called for by many senior Western figures. This shows that the organization has long discarded its original purpose, and has become a tool of hegemony and domination, far from the so-called ‘defensive’ alliance that it once claimed to be, over one specific geographic area of the globe.
The administration of US President Joe Biden is arguably the most militarily aggressive US presidency in decades, even more so than the George W. Bush presidency given the circumstances. Biden has ramped up tensions with larger powers, as opposed to merely conducting smaller regime change operations after the horrors of 9/11. In doing so, Biden has aggressively sought to expand alliances such as NATO, creating new mechanisms such as AUKUS, brought Europe to the brink of war with Russia, and is going to place new nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula. While the previous president, Donald Trump, sought to downsize NATO and make it more financially self-reliant, the Biden administration is unapologetically attempting to ‘globalize’ it.
NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was once designed as a mechanism for collective regional self-defence amongst a fragile post-World War II Western Europe, which was equal in power to the Warsaw Pact. Following the end of the Cold War, after the US became the undisputed hegemon, NATO was transformed from a mere balance-of-power-focused military alliance into a tool for enforcing American interests and security objectives. In doing so, the US sought to transition the alliance into a ‘permanent order of things’ and betrayed promises to post-Soviet Russia that it would not expand it eastwards.
But now, as the US increasingly sees China as its largest adversary, it wants to ‘globalize’ NATO into Asia and interlock it with existing US alliances in the region, including Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia. Traditionally, the US has only ever pursued these alliances on a ‘bilateral scale’, this has typically been more manageable to US interests as Asian nations do not operate on the same universality as Western European countries, and are more fraught with nationalist conflict. For example, South Korea has little political space to cooperate with Japan. Although President Yoon Suk-yeol is attempting to do so, his ratings are sliding thanks to his perceived capitulation to Tokyo.
https://www.rt.com/news/575917-asia-nato-china-japan/
Covid can never be eradicated – WHO
Despite proclaiming the end of the pandemic, the World Health Organization has said that it will be “impossible” to eliminate the virus itself
Covid-19 will never be eliminated or eradicated, as it can jump from humans to animals and back, World Health Organization emergency director Dr. Mike Ryan told reporters on Saturday.
Speaking a day after WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus officially downgraded the status of the disease from a global health emergency to a “global health threat,” Ryan stressed that public health authorities still need to be “vigilant.”
Asked whether the virus itself would ever be eliminated, Ryan replied “no, I don’t believe so.”
“What we see here is a virus that's evolved quickly,” he elaborated. “It can move from humans to animals and from animals to humans, so it can hide in different spaces…not just in humans. It’s very hard to think about an eradication or elimination.”
Ryan added that vaccines and therapeutic drugs can eliminate “the public health threat associated with the virus,” but that wiping out the virus itself would be “very unlikely, if not impossible.”
The WHO has largely stuck to this line throughout the pandemic, even as vaccine proponents claimed that the jabs would stop the transmission of Covid-19, which turned out not to be true. “In the current situation it is unlikely we can eradicate this virus,” Ryan told a briefing in May 2020, four months after the WHO first declared the virus a public health emergency.
Ryan said on Saturday that he expects infections to continue to spike every winter in the northern hemisphere, much like the flu or any other seasonal illness. However, he did not rule out the possibility that new variants of the virus may crop up during the summer “and cause a lot of transmission.”
While most countries have dropped their pandemic control measures since early last year, the US still has a public health emergency in effect, which is not due to expire until next week. More than 1.1 million people died having Covid-19 in the US, more than in any other country, according to WHO statistics.
Globally, more than 765 million cases of Covid-19 have been recorded, and almost 7 million people have died while infected, the WHO claims. As of the end of April, a total of 13 billion vaccine doses have been administered.
https://www.rt.com/news/575900-covid-never-eradicated-who/
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