Tag: corruption

US Military Thanks And Praises Retiring CNN “Journalist” For Her Service

The US military has been showering CNN’s retiring Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr with effusive thanks and praise for her lifetime of service, giving some insight into the cozy working relationship between the media and the war machine inside the US empire.

“Today closes a remarkable career for CNN’s Barbara Starr, a leader in the Pentagon Press Corps,” reads a post by the Twitter account for US Central Command. “Her aggressive reporting and tireless commitment to the truth brought this Nation closer to its military. She will forever be missed.”

Starr received a standing ovation at a Pentagon press briefing on Tuesday after Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder sang her praises and thanked her for two decades on the job.

“I’d like to take this opportunity to say farewell to our media colleague, Miss Barbara Starr,” Ryder said. “Barbara has reported for CNN for over 20 years, and has been a fixture in the Pentagon Press Corps, and today marks her final day with CNN after a storied and fully-impressive — excuse me — truly impressive career.”

“So Barbara, on behalf of Secretary of Defense Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley and the entire Department of Defense, I would like to extend a special congratulations and thank you for your many years of timely, insightful and important reporting on our nation’s most pressing defense issues,” Ryder continued. “And as someone who has worked with you for many of those last 20 years and someone who has had to take your late-night phone calls and emails and answer your tough, but fair questions, I can say from personal experience that the U.S. public and audiences worldwide have been well served by your in-depth reporting from the Pentagon, your journalistic integrity and your determination to tell the stories of service members worldwide, and to ensure the government and DOD remain transparent and accountable to the taxpayers and the American public they serve. Congratulations again, and we wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.”

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Elon Musk endorses Church-style committee to probe FBI’s engagement in social media censorship

New Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday endorsed the idea of creating a commission, similar to the historic Church Committee, to probe why the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community are involved in online censorship.

“Hear, hear!!” Musk tweeted in response to a tweet from venture capitalist David Sacks, who said: “We need a new Church Commission to investigate why the FBI and Intelligence Community are engaged in social media censorship, including the suppression of the Hunter Biden story.”

The so-called Twitter Files have revealed federal law enforcement’s questionable involvement in suppressing news stories, such as the one about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Sacks’ tweet was in response to a video from 1975 posted by Blaze Media CEO Tyler Carditis. The video showed Idaho Sen. Frank Church telling NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “The United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. … Now that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies we must know. At the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left.”

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FBI Paid Twitter $3.4 Million in US Tax Dollars for Administration Costs Related to the Staff’s Time Spent Working with the FBI

The FBI paid Twitter millions in tax dollars to censor, suspend and harass Twitter users who only wanted to share the truth. 

Earlier today, Twitter released another traunch of tweets, this one focused on the FBI and Hunter Biden’s laptop.

In one of the tweets, Twitter reports that the FBI paid Twitter millions for their work censoring free speech.

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‘Brilliant’ Space Force director who oversees space combat planning brought sex toys to work and wore a ‘mankini’ to his work Christmas party – but still has his job and six-figure salary

A top Space Force director kept sex toys at work, work a ‘mankini’ on top of his clothes at a staff Christmas party, and reveled in innuendo and lewd comments, according to a damning internal report made public this week.

Andrew Cox, director of the Space Force’s Space Warfighting Analysis Center, has retained his job and his six-figure salary despite the report, which was launched in the fall of 2020 and completed in April 2021.

Cox was described in the report, obtained by Air Force Times, as being ‘technically brilliant’ but ‘acting like a 13-year-old boy’.

The Air Force – under whose umbrella Space Force falls – said that the matter had been dealt with internally, but did not provide details.

‘Mr. Cox remains the director of the Space Warfighting Analysis Center,’ said Ann Stefanek, Air Force spokesperson, on Friday.

‘The matter was addressed through established civilian personnel processes.’

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U.S. Defense Contractors Sponsor D.C. Party for Ukrainian Forces Amid Ongoing War

Four major U.S. defense contractors sponsored a Washington, D.C., party for the 31st anniversary of the Ukrainian armed forces as they stand to gain billions from the ongoing war in Ukraine, according to a report.

Vox reported Saturday that the celebration, hosted by the Ukrainian Embassy last week, took place in downtown D.C. at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, located less than a mile from the White House, and that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was in attendance.

The invitation said the event was “supported by” Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Pratty & Whitney, and Lockheed Martin — their logos emblazoned on the invite, reportedly prompting some observers to “laugh out loud.”

“It’s really bizarre to me that they would put that on an invitation,” a think-tank expert told Vox’s Jonathan Guyer. An academic also told Guyer, “The fact that they don’t feel sheepish about it, that’s interesting.”

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FBI Whistleblower Slams Ted Lieu, Says He Was Moved Off Child Porn Cases To Focus On J6

Following the latest ‘TWITTER FILES‘ drop, which revealed that “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” journalist Matt Taibbi commented that “Instead of chasing child sex predators or terrorists, the FBI has agents — lots of them — analyzing and mass-flagging social media posts.”

In response, California Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu lashed out – telling Taibbi: “I’m on the House Judiciary Committee that has oversight over the @FBI and you are lying,” adding “The FBI has lots of agents chasing child sex predators and terrorists. Please stop undermining and lying about federal law enforcement.”

To which researcher Tracy Beanz asked FBI whistleblower Steve Friend to chime in.

Friend was suspended and stripped of his gun and badge in September for refusing to participate in SWAT raids against January 6th subjects accused of misdemeanor offenses, according to the NY Post.

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Israeli Ministry of Health claimed in court they were unable to locate a signed agreement with Pfizer

The Israeli Ministry of Health (“MoH”) stated before the court that it was unable to locate the agreement signed with Pfizer regarding the sharing of epidemiological information on coronavirus vaccines.  He also said that he did not know if the agreement had even been signed.

In 2020, Israel struck a deal with Pfizer, promising to share vast troves of medical data with Pfizer in exchange for the continued flow of its “hard-to-get vaccine.”  The agreement document was made public in January 2021 with large parts of it redacted. The MoH claimed last week that this agreement could not be found.

As part of an application to the Jerusalem District Court, the Ministry of Health admitted that, although an extensive search had been carried out, the agreement signed with Pfizer concerning vaccines could not be found. “We did not find a signed agreement,” said lawyer Ahava Berman of the prosecutor’s office, on behalf of MoH. “We searched all places, including the CEO’s office and the legal department”.

The claim that an agreement could not be found was made in response to a court petition after the MoH failed to respond to a request made by the Human Rights Association under the Freedom of Information Act.  The Association was attempting to establish the authenticity of the document published in January 2021 and whether or not it was signed by MoH CEO Hazi Levy and another Pfizer official whose name had been redacted.  Their signatures did not appear in the document previously released.

In a written response to the court, an MoH representative claimed that “a comprehensive inquiry has been made with many officials at the Ministry of Health to clarify whether the agreement was signed or not. Because of the government exchange and the relevant bodies in the office, the Ministry did not find out whether the agreement was signed or not.”

The petition documents were sent to Kan News and Kan News requested the information from the MoH.  Within less than a day the MoH found the signed agreement and submitted it to the court.

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FBI flagged jokes and satirical accounts to Twitter for censorship

The sixth batch of Twitter Files, published on Twitter by journalist Matt Taibbi, has revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were regularly flagging content to Twitter for censorship between January 2020 and November 2022 and that some of the flagged content contained jokes and satirical comments.

According to Taibbi, there were more than 150 emails between the FBI and former Head of Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth and a “surprisingly high number” of these emails were FBI requests for Twitter to “take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.”

Taibi noted that the the FBI’s social media-focused task force is known as FTIF and was created in the wake of the 2016 election. Since its inception, this task force has grown to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to “identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.”

Taibbi shared several examples of the FBI’s censorship requests and said Twitter employees would often look for reasons to suspend accounts after receiving these requests.

These censorship request emails reveal that the FBI would target both large and small accounts and sometimes issue preservation letters and request location information for the flagged accounts. Some of the large accounts that were flagged include those of Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) (which has over 873,000 followers) and actor Billy Baldwin (which has over 204,000 followers). However, accounts with as few as 15 followers were also flagged to Twitter by the FBI.

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Twittergate deepens: FBI REFUSES to reveal how many social media firms it is secretly influencing – amid accusations it broke the law by pushing Twitter to remove accounts and hand over user location details, new trove reveals

The FBI has refused to say how many social media companies it works with, defending their actions after it emerged that agents from the bureau regularly met with Twitter executives and handed over lists of accounts they found questionable.

Officials from the bureau even asked for Twitter to hand over the locations from where the Twitter accounts were being operated, in a disturbing move that many saw as an attack on the First Amendment.

One user targeted by the FBI, who goes by @Lexitollah, said: ‘Seems like prima facie 1A violation.’

Charlie Hurt, the opinion editor of The Washington Examiner, said it was ‘a clear violation of the First Amendment.’ 

He told Tucker Carlson: ‘They were actually opening up new back channels on platforms I’ve not heard of before, in order to keep in touch with one another.

‘If this was happening during the Pentagon Papers, and we were seeing this level of collusion between the federal government and news, there would rightly be an outcry.’

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FBI whistleblower: Bosses cooked books on Jan. 6 inquiry to snooker feds for more funding

An FBI whistleblower has accused bureau officials of cooking the books to conceal the number of man-hours devoted to the Jan. 6 investigation and inflate time spent on other cases.

According to the anonymous whistleblower, the subterfuge is intended to bolster the bureau’s budget requests to Congress when House Republicans control the purse strings next year.

According to a whistleblower disclosure submitted to Congress, a top official in the FBI’s counterterrorism unit at the Washington headquarters pressured the bureau’s field offices to stop agents from clocking hours when they are working on investigations related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

The supervisors in the field offices were told the agents should instead claim they were working on international terrorism and other investigations when recording hours in the FBI’s time and attendance system, known as WebTA.

The Washington Times has reviewed a draft of the whistleblower disclosure.

The FBI told The Times that the allegations were inaccurate but did not elaborate.

The new allegations add to a flood of FBI whistleblower disclosures to Congress in recent months about widespread misconduct, mismanagement and politicized investigations at the bureau. As The Times has reported, the more than a dozen whistleblower disclosures will fuel congressional inquiries regarding the FBI and Department of Justice when Republicans take over the House in January.

The FBI has poured resources into investigations of crimes stemming from the pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Nearly two years later, at least 964 people have been charged.

One of the most high-profile cases resulted in the conviction last month of Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers militia, and his top lieutenant, Kelly Meggs, on rarely used charges of seditious conspiracy.

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