Tag: cover ups

Crown cover-up? When the state turned on its victims

It was a short statement, uttered in the dry atmosphere of an international legal forum in Geneva 10 years ago. It passed unnoticed at the time. To many New Zealanders the statement would appear uncontroversial, even self-evident. But the statement was wrong. Badly wrong. And the person who uttered those words should have known better. If she’d briefed herself properly she quite likely would have.

The statement was made by the Minister of Justice at the time, Judith Collins, on behalf of New Zealand. She was appearing before the United Nations as part of New Zealand’s regular obligation to give an account of itself and its adherence to various UN conventions. Usually New Zealand takes an approach of nothing-to-see-here nonchalance.

But in 2014 a delegate from Iran had the temerity to challenge New Zealand’s casual attitude.

“We would like to express our concern over a number of human rights issues in the country as follows.

“Ensuring safeguards to protect the rights of minorities from discrimination and marginalisation which pose them a higher risk of torture and ill-treatment.”

The Iranian delegate continued to rattle off a bunch of other concerns, such as discrimination in the justice system.

After other countries gave their views, Collins gave a response for New Zealand, which she read from prepared notes. However, she paused for emphasis and looked up from her notes when responding to Iran, singling out the allegation of torture.

“In response to Iran, I can advise that there is no state torture in New Zealand.” 

The problem with this statement is that it wasn’t true.

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Facebook Faces Heat for Blocking Report on Arrest of US Journalist in Israel

Facebook has come under scrutiny for censoring an article by Matt Orfalea that reported on the arrest of American journalist Jeremy Loffredo in Israel. Loffredo was arrested shortly after publishing a detailed investigative report on Iranian missile strikes near significant Israeli military and intelligence locations, including an Israeli Air Force base and Mossad headquarters.

Loffredo has since been released pending an investigation and is not allowed to leave the country.

Orfalea’s article highlighted the circumstances surrounding Loffredo’s arrest and his findings that reportedly contradicted some official Israeli statements about the missile attacks.

According to the Times of Israel, as noted by Orfaela, “The exact locations of such impacts and damage are barred from publication by the IDF censor.”

Facebook’s censorship of Orfalea’s piece raises significant concerns about freedom of the press and the role of social media platforms in moderating content related to sensitive geopolitical issues. Orfalea questioned the transparency and fairness of Facebook’s content moderation processes, especially given the public interest in Loffredo’s arrest and the broader implications for press freedom.

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 IMMACULATE CONSTELLATION? Could The Government Really Hide a Secret UFO Program?  

Recently, independent journalist and author Michael Shellenberger published an article on his subscription news site, Public, alleging that a new, unnamed government whistleblower had come forward. 

The whistleblower asserts that a highly classified program exists dedicated to unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), including the potential recovery and reverse-engineering of UAP technologies. 

This isn’t the first time a former or current government official has made similar claims. 

In 2023, The Debrief was the first media outlet to report that David Grusch, a former Air Force officer and intelligence specialist with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), had filed an official complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) alleging a DoD cover-up of UAP information and the recovery of alien technologies. 

According to Grusch, the U.S. government has recovered several vehicles “of exotic origin—attributed to non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or otherwise unknown—based on their unique vehicle morphologies, material science analyses, and distinctive atomic arrangements and radiological signatures.” 

Grusch later reiterated these claims under oath in testimony before the Congressional Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs. 

However, in Shellenberger’s recent article, the purported whistleblower went a step further, revealing the name of a highly secretive Pentagon “Unacknowledged Special Access Program” (USAP) codenamed “IMMACULATE CONSTELLATION.” Reportedly, this program involves investigating, recovering, and attempting reverse engineering of alien technologies.

While interesting, in the grand scheme of things, this new whistleblower’s claims leave us in a familiar situation—a fascinating story that is nearly impossible to verify. However, this doesn’t mean the underlying theme of these whistleblower claims isn’t worth exploring. 

In his article, Shellenberger quotes the unnamed source as saying, “The Executive Branch has been managing UAP/NHI issues without Congressional knowledge, oversight, or authorization for some time, quite possibly decades.”

This statement raises a crucial question: is the U.S. government even capable of maintaining a program under such extreme secrecy, hidden even from Congressional oversight?

Given incidents like the Snowden leaks, the Vault 7 disclosures, and revelations about the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques“ during the war on terror, it seems likely that if conclusive evidence of “non-human intelligence“ existed, it would have surfaced by now. 

Furthermore, the sheer amount of bureaucracy involved in any government operation makes the idea of hiding a secret UFO program not only from the public but also from Congress seem nearly impossible.

However, the truth might be more surprising… 

In the last two years, I received unsolicited phone calls from two different high-ranking government officials. Since these conversations were mutually agreed to be “off the record“ and this is an opinion piece, I’m not bound by The Debrief’s formal editorial policy requiring attribution that preserves their anonymity while confirming their credibility. 

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Oregon Democratic Congressional Candidate Accused of Not Disclosing Child Sex Abuse Allegations: Report

A Democratic politician and candidate running for the House of Representatives in Oregon is accused of assisting in covering up child sex abuse allegations related to one of her former campaign staff members.

A complaint states that Janelle Bynum is accused of not disclosing allegations that a campaign field organizer reportedly sexually assaulted a volunteer, who was a minor while campaigning in 2022.

Bynum, who is running in Oregon’s most competitive district and is a Democratic representative, dismissed the claims when an unidentified individual informed her of their concerns. She also allegedly threatened them, according to the complaint, which was obtained by Fox News recently.

The new report disclosed that Bynum is not the only politician mentioned in the controversy. Democratic Speaker of the House Julie Fahey and Democratic Attorney General Dan Rayfield were also accused of not reporting the reported abuse to authorities.

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Fact-Checking or Fact-Shielding? Twitter Files Journalist Slams PolitiFact’s Defense of Government Pressure on Big Tech

Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact, a Meta fact-checking partner, has decided that the Biden-Harris administration is not engaged in censorship at an industrial scale.

This claim made by vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is false, PolitiFact has asserted, because the Biden-Harris White House “contacting” (according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, they were contacted to be pressured) social media companies to flag content for removal “didn’t cross the line into coercion.”

Not only that but pressuring these companies (yet allegedly never coercing) to censor online speech is not a threat to democracy, PolitiFact was told by a Colombia professor – if the censors decide that speech is disinformation about Covid or election results.

The scale and nature of the way the US government leaned on tech companies to stifle speech that did not suit its political agenda is, to date, best revealed in the Twitter Files.

One of the journalists who worked on publishing the internal documents, Michael Shellenberger, now examined this PolitiFact “verdict” and the arguments the organization used. He rejects the notion that suppressing voters’ free speech is somehow “not a threat to democracy.”

Shellenberger was equally unimpressed by PolitiFact trying to explain its opinion regarding Vance’s claim by referring to the Supreme Court, which they said ruled it was not unconstitutional for the government to exert the kind of pressure it did.

“But the Court did not consider the US government’s pressure of Meta or many other cases of government demands for censorship,” Shellenberger writes and notes that the ruling (in the Murthy v Missouri case) was based on the judges deciding there were no legal grounds to bring the case.

To the question – as old as the rise of the fact-checking industry – why did a fact-checker (in this case, PolitiFact) get things wrong, the journalist suggests it’s more a case of “playing on the same team”.

PolitiFact, he writes, is “part and parcel of the Censorship Industrial Complex.”

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Report names ‘Immaculate Constellation’ UAP program: Journalist

A leaked whistleblower report says the Pentagon is operating a secret UFO retrieval program called “Immaculate Constellation,” according to independent journalist Michael Shellenberger.

The report revealed for the first time the name of an alleged UAP program, stating that the executive branch has been managing UAP issues without congressional knowledge or oversight, possibly for decades.

Department of Defense spokesperson Sue Gough denied records of the alleged program in a statement to NewsNation Tuesday evening.

“The Department of Defense has no record, present or historical, of any type of SAP called ‘IMMACULATE CONSTELLATION,’” she wrote.

Shellenberger told NewsNation’s Ross Coulthart he has been in touch with the whistleblower, whose exact role and other identifying details, including gender, he has withheld because they fear what could happen if they were publicly known.

“I don’t think that they’re faking it or that they’re lying about their fear,” he said. “This person discovered this material accidentally. This was not something they had expected to encounter.”

That fear is why Shellenberger said the whistleblower did not share intelligence imagery showing UAPs.

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Disinformation Isn’t the Problem — Government Coverups and Censorship Are the Problem

“What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”—Hannah Arendt

In a perfect example of the Nanny State mindset at work, Hillary Clinton insists that the powers-that-be need “total control” in order to make the internet a safer place for users and protect us harm.

Clinton is not alone in her distaste for unregulated, free speech online.

A bipartisan chorus that includes both presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has long clamored to weaken or do away with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which essentially acts as a bulwark against online censorship.

It’s a complicated legal issue that involves debates over immunity, liability, net neutrality and whether or not internet sites are publishers with editorial responsibility for the content posted to their sites, but really, it comes down to the tug-of-war over where censorship (corporate and government) begins and free speech ends.

As Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes for Reason, “What both the right and left attacks on the provision share is a willingness to use whatever excuses resonate—saving children, stopping bias, preventing terrorism, misogyny, and religious intolerance—to ensure more centralized control of online speech. They may couch these in partisan terms that play well with their respective bases, but their aim is essentially the same.”

In other words, the government will use any excuse to suppress dissent and control the narrative.

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Pentagon Is Illegally Hiding Secret UFO Program From Congress, Whistleblowers Allege

There is no evidence that any non-human or extra-terrestrial intelligence has visited Earth, according to a May 2024 report by the office the Pentagon created in 2022 to study unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), formerly called UFOs.

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) “assesses that the inaccurate claim that the USG is reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology and is hiding it from Congress is, in large part,” the report concluded, “the result of circular reporting from a group of individuals who believe this to be the case, despite the lack of any evidence.”

The former Director of AARO has since resigned his position and has repeatedly dismissed and ridiculed the topic, claiming that talk of the phenomenon is due mainly to a small group of individuals in the grip of a rumor-based religion.

But critics say that AARO’s 63-page history of the US government’s investigation into UAPs since the end of World War II was riddled with factual errors and poor referencing, including to Wikipedia. And the document was missing historical information that appeared in the 117-page “UAP Timeline” document created by a former or existing US government intelligence officer that Public published last year.

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How FEMA got into the illegal immigrant business, and who is covering it up

In the midst of the last major budget crisis in Washington, Democrats diverted money and the legal authority to put the nation’s disaster relief agency into the business of caring for the millions of illegal immigrants who crossed the border on the Biden-Harris administration’s watch. And now both parties seem to be trying to obfuscate the truth.

White House spokeswoman Karine-Jean Pierre took the lead in trying to suggest it was a “conspiracy theory” to suggest the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was using its resources to aid illegal aliens. Republicans countered with surprise and shock that FEMA had routed $640.9 million in grants to nonprofits aiding immigrants, many of whom have crossed into the U.S. illegally. 

But the truth is both parties signed off on a budget deal earlier this year that increased funding for the new mission authorized in 2023 for FEMA, which is now reeling from a double-barreled hurricane crisis that has led to frustration over alleged missteps by the agency as millions of stranded and needy Americans in the Southeast await help. 

“FEMA, as well as this whole Biden administration has is here to protect Americans, our citizens, and hurricane Helene has put a tremendous burden on us, but, get this, follow these funds that have been directed at anything but Americans: $110 million in FEMA funds went to the emergency food and shelter program to assist migrants,” Congressman Ralph Norman, R-S.C., told the “Just the News, No Noise“ TV show Monday. 

Norman partly blamed the broken budget process in Congress for giving funds to FEMA  for immigrants rather than American citizens suffering from a disaster. 

“If we don’t get back to regular order, John, then there’s no hope for ever having a fiscal sanity plan in place,” he said. “They, the Democrats, play us like a drum waiting to the end of the year.”

FEMA has disputed the Republican characterizations in recent days that disaster relief money was diverted to fund illegal immigrants, instead pointing out that Congress appropriated funding for the immigrant programs separately during the budget process. 

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Grieving North Carolina families forced to bury dead in backyards as they blast FEMA for hurricane ‘cover up’

Grieving families in North Carolina have been forced to bury their dead in their backyards – and are accusing authorities of downplaying the damage caused by Hurricane Helene.

The official death toll rose to 227 over the weekend – half of whom were from North Carolina – but state and federal officials told The Spectator that this number is woefully inaccurate. 

Many bodies haven’t even been recovered amid debris and flooding. There are also piles of deceased people who have yet to be identified. They are being transported all over the state in hopes of finding open morgue space.

‘According to folks on the ground – fire, medical, law enforcement officials – they’re way underreporting the numbers. All the morgues are full and they’ve hauled a ton [of bodies] to Greensboro,’ the state official said. ‘People are starting to bury them in their yards because they have no place to put them.’

One individual who was in Asheville when Helene hit told The Spectator: ‘It’s so much worse than they’re saying…I think there’s a massive cover-up.’

The destruction from Helene, and the immense multi-state death toll, comes just days before Category 5 Hurricane Milton is set to barrel into Florida’s coastline.  

Helene made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida at night on September 26 before laying waste to Georgia and the Carolinas with record storm surges and tornados.

North Carolina alone had six confirmed tornados on the morning of September 27, two days before 500 members of state’s national guard were deployed to help with rescue efforts.

Locals say they are ‘pissed’ at General Major Todd Hunt, director of the North Carolina National Guard, for waiting a whole 48 hours to get boots on the ground.

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