Tag: secrecy

FDA must disclose more COVID-19 vaccine records, US judge rules

A federal judge has ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to publicly disclose more information underpinning its authorization of COVID-19 vaccines, after failing to persuade the court to end the public records lawsuit.

In a ruling, opens new tab on Friday, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman in Fort Worth, Texas, ordered the agency to produce its “emergency use authorization” file to a group of scientists who wanted to see licensing information that the FDA relied on to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is long passed and so has any legitimate reason for concealing from the American people the information relied upon by the government in approving the Pfizer vaccine,” wrote Pittman, appointed in 2019 by then-President Donald Trump.

The lawsuit, filed in late 2021, attracted attention after the FDA said it could take decades to process and disclose records to Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, the group that brought the case.

The FDA declined to comment.

Attorney Aaron Siri, representing the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, welcomed Pittman’s order.

“The FDA clearly lacks confidence in the review that it conducted to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine because it is doing everything possible to prevent independent scientists from conducting an independent review,” Siri said.

He said the agency was “hiding from the court and the plaintiff one million pages of clinical trial documents from the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials.”

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Bank of England announces it will keep the names of non-bank financial institutions it bails out a secret

On Monday, the Bank of England announced it will hide the identities of any pension funds, insurers or hedge funds bailed out to avoid the stigma.  This new policy of secrecy to protect banks’ identity will begin in 2025 when the central bank launches its Contingent NBFI Repo Facility.

Also in 2025, the final parts of Basel III will be implemented.  Basel III introduces bail-ins, where account holders rather than the government bail out a failing bank.

But that’s not all. In the “second half of this decade,” i.e. any time from 2025, is “the earliest” the Bank of England would issue a central bank digital currency.

In the past, wars and oil embargoes have been used to justify implementing new global financial systems.  Could we be seeing signs they are preparing for a crisis that they won’t let go to waste?

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The US government must come clean about UFOs 

Last month’s congressional hearings on unidentified anomalous phenomena — UAP, the government’s new name for UFOs — could be characterized as a tale of two testimonies.  

The first hearing was before two subcommittees of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee and included sworn statements by myself, a former NASA official, an investigative journalist and Luis Elizondo, a former senior leader of the Pentagon’s secret UAP office, known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

Elizondo was unequivocal about UAP: They are real, of nonhuman origin, represent advanced technologies that are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe, and information about them is being withheld by the U.S. government from members of Congress and the public.

In my testimony, I backed up Lue’s statement and commended his courage and that of other former government UAP witnesses and whistleblowers who have spoken out. I also described my personally witnessing a now-declassified UAP video captured by the infrared sensor on a Navy fighter jet during a training event off the East Coast in 2015.  

The second UAP hearing took place a week after the first and featured Jon Kosloski, the director of the Pentagon’s UAP Office. Kosloski testified before the chairwoman and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. He too spoke in no uncertain terms, stating that his office, also known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, has discovered no verifiable evidence of activity, technology or beings of extraterrestrial origin. 

Additionally, Kosloski provided the results of a technical analysis of the very UAP video I described during my testimony a week prior. The UAP in the video has been called the “Go Fast” due to the relatively high apparent velocity it exhibited. Kosloski, however, concluded that the UAP was in fact not traveling very fast, therefore inferring that it was not anomalous in nature.  

Such a conclusion is suspect: not only did Kosloski’s office fail to interview the Navy aviator who captured the video, but the office’s director also neglected to address the context of this UAP observation, which I provided to the House subcommittees. Namely, the object’s speed was not of primary concern — the real issue was that it was one of a “fleet” of many UAP causing multiple near mid-air collisions with the Navy aircraft in the area.  

Moreover, the Department of Defense has yet to identify the origin, intent and physical mechanisms of these anomalous objects. This is concerning because these UAP presented such a significant flight safety threat that the four-star admiral overseeing the exercise nearly shut it down. Given these gaps in information and the timing, one must wonder if Pentagon’s analysis of the “Go Fast” video was presented in an attempt to directly debunk my testimony only days earlier.

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Supreme Court Stunner: Secret Gender Transitions at Schools Allowed to Continue

Lower court said parental rights were not affected when teachers in stealth encouraged children to be transgender.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let stand a ruling that subjugates parental rights to school politics.

The ruling that had come out of the 7th U.S. District Court of Appeals in a Wisconsin fight claimed that parental rights were not affected when schools secretly encouraged children to be transgender, so the parents had no standing to bring the case.

Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas would have granted the petition, according to the court announcement, as it’s an issue that is coming up more and more.

Alito explained, “This case presents a question of great and growing national importance: whether a public school district violates parents’ ‘fundamental constitutional right to make decisions concerning the rearing of’ their children…when, without parental knowledge or consent, it encourages a student to transition to a new gender or assists in that process.”

Thomas joined in the statement that added, “We are told that more than 1,000 districts have adopted such policies.”

It is the transgender ideology, which puts its faith in the science-defying concept that boys can become girls and girls can become boys, that has been promoted literally around the globe by the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris regime in Washington. Actually, being male or female is embedded in the human body down to the DNA level and does not change.

The situations involving schools, activist employees, teachers and administrators repeatedly getting caught encouraging children to pursue the transgender ideology and keeping those actions secret from parents.

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Judicial Bombshell: Federal Judge Forces FDA to Release Over a Million Pages of Pfizer’s COVID-19 Trial Documents They Wanted to Keep Hidden for 75 Years

The United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in a high-profile case brought by the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT).

The decision mandates the FDA to release the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) file for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine no later than June 30, 2025.

The case stemmed from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the PHMPT, which sought comprehensive data related to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

The FDA initially claimed it would need up to 75 years to process and release the requested documents. However, the Court, presided over by Judge Mark Pittman, rejected this argument, citing the importance of government accountability.

In late 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) faced significant public scrutiny after proposing a timeline that would extend the full release of documents related to the approval of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine over several decades.

This proposal emerged following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT), a group of scientists and public health professionals seeking comprehensive data on the vaccine’s approval process.

The FDA initially suggested releasing 500 pages per month from a collection exceeding 300,000 pages, effectively delaying complete disclosure until around 2097. The agency cited limited staffing and the extensive volume of documents as reasons for this prolonged timeline.

In response to the backlash, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman in Fort Worth, Texas, issued a ruling in January 2022 that significantly shortened the FDA’s proposed timeline.

Judge Pittman ordered the agency to release 55,000 pages per month, ensuring that all documents would be made public by the end of September 2022.

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Secrecy and the Divine Right to Deceive

Secrecy and lying are two sides of the same political coin. The Supreme Court declared in 1936, “An informed public is the most potent of all restraints upon misgovernment.” Thus, conniving politicians have no choice but to drop an Iron Curtain around Washington.

Politicians guarantee that Americans are left clueless on the most controversial or dangerous federal policies. The government is creating trillions of pages of new secrets every year. The total is equivalent to “20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with double-spaced text on paper,” according to The Washington Post. If those cabinets were laid end to end, they would stretch almost to the moon. The feds have accumulated the equivalent of hundreds of pages of secrets for each American, blighting any hope for citizens to learn of their rulers’ rascality.

“All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers,” George Orwell wrote in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is where government classification—i.e., secrecy—comes in handy. The more information government classifies, the easier it becomes for politicians to dupe the American people. In Washington, deniability is better than the truth.

Secrecy was usually not a grave peril to most Americans’ rights, liberties, and safety until the U.S. government began warring in the 1940s and on into this century.

Secrecy helped deliver a death warrant for tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. President Lyndon Johnson fabricated claims about an alleged North Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin to sway Congress to give him unlimited authority to attack North Vietnam. Johnson assumed he was entitled to deceive Americans to vastly expand the war he decided to fight to boost his 1964 presidential election campaign. But other federal officials claimed a prerogative to blindfold the American people. When Assistant Defense Secretary Arthur Sylvester visited Saigon in 1965, he hectored American correspondents covering the Vietnam War: “Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that? Stupid!” Sylvester declared that he expected the American press to be “the handmaidens of government.” Most of the American media has followed orders regarding foreign reporting most of the time since then.

In March 1972, President Richard Nixon, as part of his “pledge to create an open Administration,” ordered radical changes in how Uncle Sam kept secrets. Nixon announced that the classification system “failed to meet the standards of an open and democratic society, allowing too many papers to be classified for too long a time. Classification has frequently served to conceal bureaucratic mistakes or to prevent embarrassment to officials and administrations.” He promised “to lift the veil of secrecy which now enshrouds” federal documents. Nixon’s campaign against secrecy faltered after the Watergate coverup destroyed his presidency.   

In 1978,  President Jimmy Carter created the Information Security Oversight Office to oversee classification but secrecy regime continued and grew. In 1989, former Solicitor General of the United States Dean Erwin Griswold complained that “there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another.” In 1991, former National Security Council official Rodney McDaniel estimated that “only 10% of classification was for legitimate protection of secrets.” In 1997, a federal commission headed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) lamented that “secrets in the federal government are whatever anyone with a stamp decides to stamp secret.”

In the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the percentage of Americans who trusted the federal government doubled. The George W. Bush administration exploited the new credulity to boost the number of classified government documents almost tenfold. The New York Times reported in 2005 that federal agencies were “classifying documents at the rate of 125 a minute as they create new categories of semi-secrets bearing vague labels like ‘sensitive security information.’” William Leonard, former chief of the federal Information Security Oversight Office, complained of seeing information “classified that I’ve also seen published in third-grade textbooks.”

But secrecy again signed a death warrant for thousands of Americans. President George W. Bush persuaded Americans to support invading Iraq by blaming Saddam Hussein for the 9/11 attacks, among other pretexts. Bush could vilify Iraq thanks to a sweeping coverup of the role of the Saudi government in bankrolling and directly assisting the 9/11 hijackers.

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Head of Pentagon’s UAP office to testify to Senate Armed Services subcommittee

The new director of the Defense Department’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) is scheduled to meet with lawmakers in closed-door and open sessions Tuesday to discuss his organization’s activities investigating “unidentified anomalous phenomena” that have raised national security concerns.

The hearing with the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities comes on the heels of the release of the Pentagon’s fiscal 2024 consolidated annual report on UAP.

UAP, an acronym that refers to unidentified anomalous phenomena, is a modern term for UFOs and mysterious transmedium objects.

AARO leader Jon Kosloski told DefenseScoop and other reporters last week that his organization has received over 1,600 UAP reports to date, stating that officials have “taken meaningful steps to improve data collection and retention, bolster sensor development, effectively triage UAP reports and reduce the stigma of reporting a UAP event.”

A new AARO-related technology that could be discussed in Tuesday’s hearing is a prototype system called Gremlin that the Defense Department is deploying. The Georgia Tech Research Institute developed the Gremlin sensor architecture, according to the report that was publicly released last week. The technology has “several sensing modalities to detect, track, characterize and identify UAP in areas of interest,” officials wrote.

The document contained a diagram of an architecture that included a Gremlin “network stack” connected to long-range electro-optical/infrared sensors, 2D search radar, 3D radar and an RF spectrum monitor. It also included ADS-B, NAS, GPS, satellite communications, and cellular and copper/fiber links.

The Gremlin capability “demonstrated functionality and successfully collected data” during a test event earlier this year, per the report.

The department is now using the technology to conduct what officials are calling “pattern of life collection” at a “national security” site. Kosloski declined to identify the location during his recent meeting with reporters.

Lawmakers have raised concerns that some UAP could be advanced capabilities possessed by U.S. foes.

Kosloski told reporters that his office hasn’t confirmed that any UAP activities are attributable to foreign adversaries, or discovered any evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology.

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Navy Blocks Release of UAP Photos Amid Capitol Hill Hearing on Government Secrecy

The U.S. Navy has formally denied access to 78 “documents” containing photos marked as “unidentified aerial [anomalous] phenomena” (UAP). The denial, issued yesterday in response to a FOIA request filed by The Black Vault in 2022 and given case number DON-NAVY-2022-012661, highlights the Navy’s continued use of national defense and intelligence exemptions to keep UAP data classified. The response arrived less than an hour before a highly anticipated UAP hearing on Capitol Hill, where members of Congress heard testimony about the government’s lack of transparency on the issue.

The hearing, titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” was led yesterday by Chairwoman Nancy Mace and Congressman Glenn Grothman, heads of various Congressional subcommittees on cybersecurity, government innovation, and national security. This marked the second time Congress has convened specifically on UAP matters, with the hearing aimed at addressing the classified veil surrounding government-held UAP data. The witness panel included Navy Rear Admiral Dr. Tim Gallaudet, former Department of Defense official Luis Elizondo, NASA Associate Administrator Michael Gold, and journalist Michael Shellenberger. Each expressed concerns about the DoD’s ongoing reluctance to disclose UAP information.

The Navy’s response to the FOIA request, ironically timed alongside the Capitol Hill session, raises significant questions about the scope and depth of information kept from public scrutiny.

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Trump Should Immediately Stop Federal Agencies From Hiding Documents By Needlessly Marking Them Classified

Early in his third presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed to establish a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to “declassify and publish all documents on Deep State spying, censorship, and abuses of power.” The phrase “Truth and Reconciliation” recalls bodies established to investigate abuses by toppled Communist regimes such as East Germany’s, or the former apartheid government of South Africa. The framing suggests that Trump views the entire past decade, from “Russiagate” to the “lawfare” cases entangling himself and his advisers, as the fruits of an illegitimate regime that threw the rule of law out the window.

This interpretation of recent history, surely viewed as partisan by Trump’s opponents, will be tested by the facts, once they become better known and documented. But the president-elect’s suggestion that the workings of the U.S. government must be more transparent is long overdue.

According to Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, who introduced a bipartisan “Classification Reform for Transparency Act” last July, the U.S. government spends $18 billion every year classifying information. “Over-classification,” they argue, “undermines national security by limiting information sharing between federal agencies,” as in the notorious intelligence failures before 9/11. American taxpayers, we might add, fork over billions every year in order to help their government hide information from them.

Like so many now-encrusted practices in Washington, the classification monster is of dubious constitutional provenance, born of the metastasizing of the U.S. security apparatus during the Cold War. Just as foreign military interventions denied taxpayers a genuine “peace dividend” after the fall of the USSR in 1991, the intelligence agencies created to oppose the Soviet threat, instead of disbanding after its disappearance, spread their tentacles ever wider.

In 2016, we were told that no fewer than “17 U.S. intelligence agencies” agreed on alleged Russian election interference — apparently an undercount, as the website of the Director of National Intelligence now lists 18. This averages out to a neat $1 billion spent annually by each of these 18 agencies to classify about three million documents apiece. Are there really that many secrets worth preserving from the public?

None of this is to reckon with the enormous back catalog of older documents still classified by the U.S. government, some nearly a century old. The CIA claims to have released the last classified World War I documents, but millions of World War II files remain closed. While researching my book Stalin’s War, I discovered that many of the files on Lend-Lease aid to the USSR were declassified only in the 1970s. While I was not surprised, owing to long experience with Russian archival restrictions, that Soviet files concerning the scale of American military and material aid are tightly guarded — undermining as they do cherished myths about the “Great Patriotic War” (the Russian government recently shut down its only Lend-Lease museum) — I could not fathom why information about U.S. generosity had been classified in Washington.

Frustrating as Russia’s recent nationalist turn and the shutting off of archival access has been for Western historians, most of us expect secrecy from Moscow. But we have a right to expect better from our own government. True, U.S. citizens have the right, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) passed in 1967, to request access to classified government files — but the government can reject these requests under nine “exemption categories,” covering everything from reasonable privacy concerns (bank and medical data) and trade secrets to open-ended concerns about “national security” and nebulous “legal privileges.”

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Startling claims made at UFO hearing in Congress, but lack direct evidence

US government employees have been injured by UFOs and the US government has conducted a secret UFO retrieval program, a former department of defense official told a congressional committee on Wednesday, though the hearing lacked any direct evidence to back up the startling claims.

The hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), which has become the more accepted term for UFO, also heard that the government has a “huge amount” of secret information on UAPs, including “photos, video, photos, other information”. But it also learned, following a query from Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert, that there is no evidence of aliens having a secret underwater “base” on this planet.

The hearing came more than a year after the Pentagon was accused of running a secret UFO retrieval program by whistleblower David Grusch, though no physical evidence has also ever emerged to back up these claims.

The lack of concrete proof has been a consistent thorn in the side of those who believe the government is harboring UAPs, with Wednesday’s hearing again focussing on testimony from people who said they were aware of secret government programs, rather than witnesses presenting actual hard evidence.

It followed a blockbuster congressional hearing last year in which Grusch, a former American intelligence official, claimed that the US government conducted a “multi-decade” program which collected and attempted to reverse-engineer, crashed UAPs, as members of Congress investigate allegations the government is hiding knowledge of alien craft and beings from lawmakers.

The two hearings reveal the remarkable extent to which discussions around UAPs – previously mostly the domain of conspiracy theorists and believers in aliens – have now penetrated the US military and the corridors of Congress.

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Department of Defense agency which investigates UAPs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the Pentagon has previously denied the existence of any secret government programs to retrieve alien spacecraft and no evidence of these programs has ever emerged.

A standout moment on Wednesday came when Nancy Mace, the chair of the hearing, questioned Luiz Elizondo, a former department of defense official who this year claimed in a memoir that the US is “in possession of advanced technology made off-world by non-human intelligence”.

“Has the government conducted secret UAP crash retrieval programs? Yes or no?” Mace asked. Elizondo, who was speaking under oath, said yes.

“Were they designed to identify and reverse engineer alien craft? Yes or no?” Mace said. Elizondo said yes.

Mace continued: “In your book, you mentioned government employees who’ve been injured by UAPs placed on leave and receiving government compensation for their injuries. Is that correct?” Elizondo said it was correct.

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