Tag: secrecy

Biden’s ghostwriter deleted recordings, special counsel’s transcript confirms

The ghostwriter of President Biden‘s memoir told federal investigators he deleted many recordings of his conversations with Biden after a special counsel was appointed to investigate the president, according to a partial transcript of the interview obtained by Axios.

  • Writer Mark Zwonitzer said he erased the recordings because he was afraid of being hacked, the transcript says.

Why it matters: Biden’s transcribed conversations with Zwonitzer were among the most damaging evidence in special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.

  • In his final report, Hur highlighted Biden telling Zwonitzer in February 2017 — just after he left office as vice president — that he “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”
  • Hur wrote that “evidence supports…[Biden] was referring to the same marked classified documents about Afghanistan that FBI agents found in 2022 in his Delaware garage.”

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California Senate Approves Ban on Schools Informing Parents of Student’s Gender Identity

California lawmakers voted June 13 to advance legislation to ban school districts from notifying parents about social gender transitions at school without the student’s permission.

The state Senate voted 29–8 to approve Assembly Bill 1955 and send it back to the Assembly for final approval of amendments.

Sen. Susan Eggman (D-Stockton), who presented the bill on behalf of its author, Assemblyman Chris Ward (D-San Diego), and the 13-member California Legislative LBGTQ Caucus, said before the vote the bill would “put some guardrails” on the “forced outing” policies passed recently by some California school boards.

“We know some of those policies have not been able to go into effect. We know some of those school board members have since been recalled,” she said.

One such California school board member, Temecula Valley Unified School District Board President Joseph Komrosky, is set to be recalled after a June 4 special election in which 51 percent of voters supported his removal. The district currently requires school staff to notify parents if their children change their name, pronouns, or other such information in their school records.

The new bill codifies in law guidance from the California Department of Education that “schools must consult with a transgender student to determine who can or will be informed of the student’s transgender status, if anyone, including the student’s family.”

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Why Did 56 Countries Sign a Treaty to Stay Out of Antarctica?

Imagine a land of icy silence where the snow stretches blank like the pages of an untouched diary. This is Antarctica, the coldest, windiest, and perhaps most mysterious continent on Earth. But behind its icy facade lies a story not fully told to the public—one that involves a treaty signed by 56 nations, promising never to venture into certain parts of this icy wilderness for military uses. What could possibly be so important, so hidden, that makes Antarctica a ‘no-go’ area for these powerful countries? Let’s delve into the depths of this chilly mystery.

The Antarctic Treaty Explained

In 1959, a group of countries came together to sign a remarkable agreement now known as the Antarctic Treaty. Principal among its provisions is that Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only. Military activity, including weapons testing and nuclear explosions, is forbidden. Furthermore, the treaty encourages scientific research, and aims to protect the continent’s eco-zone.

But why the need for such an accord? The unanimous decision to keep military claws retracted seems guided not only by a spirit of international scientific cooperation but perhaps by deeper, unspoken reasons. Could there be something under the ice—resources, ancient artifacts, or even alien bases—that everyone wants but no one can have?

The Conspiracy Theory: What Lies Beneath?

This is where things get interesting — and where mainstream explanations might not satisfy a curious mind. Why would such an array of powerful nations all agree to limit their rights and opportunities unless there was something incredibly valuable and perhaps dangerous concealed by the Antarctic ice?

Conspiracy theorists argue that there might be ancient technology or alien life forms buried under the ice. Some even claim these could be remnants of ancient civilizations far advanced beyond our current understanding. Such discoveries could potentially offer new forms of energy, unknown minerals, or even new medical breakthroughs.

Secret Bases and Forbidden Zones

Despite the treaty’s stipulation for openness and scientific freedom, certain areas of Antarctica are shrouded in secrecy, with restricted access even for international scientists. This fuels belief in secret bases operating under a cloak of research—bases that could be hiding activities not sanctioned by the treaty.

Could these facilities be testing experimental tech or coordinating with extraterrestrial entities? The idea isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds when you consider the inexplicable resignation from norms that the continent forces upon global powers.

The Environment or The Cover-Up?

Another angle often discussed is the environmental protection clause in the Antarctic Treaty. At face value, this is a commitment to preserve one of the last unspoiled places on earth. However, under a lens of skepticism, could environmental concern be a convenient pretense for keeping prying eyes away from a more sinister agenda?

Why emphasize ecological stability in a region with no indigenous human population unless disclosing the true nature of the continent would lead to irreversible environmental damage—or perhaps the disclosure of top-secret information that could cause mass chaos?

The Silence and Isolation of Antarctica

The sheer isolation of Antarctica also works perfectly for anyone needing privacy on a grand scale. With no permanent residents and an environment that is harsh and life-threatening, few people question the happenings on this icy land. The few who visit—scientists, researchers, and the occasional tourist—are often monitored closely, kept on guided paths far from any so-called “sensitive” areas.

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Rand Paul Rips Fauci Testimony: NIH ‘More Secretive than the CIA’

In an appearance on The Hill’s “Rising” on Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) took aim at Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Monday.

Paul addressed Fauci’s responses, suggesting they contradicted known facts about how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — the agency Fauci led for 38 years — and its parent agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“NIH is actually more secretive than the CIA, and that’s alarming and disturbing and really should not be tolerated,” Paul told co-hosts Robby Soave and Briahna Joy Gray.

Paul addressed Fauci’s efforts to distance himself from his longtime aide David Morens, who in emails boasted that he could evade Freedom of Information Act requests by deleting any potential “smoking guns.”

Paul criticized gain-of-function research, which he said occurred under Fauci’s leadership of NIAID, and called for it to be banned. He also suggested COVID-19 emerged from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in late 2019.

Paul’s interview came on the heels of revelations that the NIAID received $690 million of $710 million in NIH royalty income between 2022 and 2023.

It also came days after the release of the transcripts of Fauci’s two-day closed-door House interview in January and a House memorandum with key takeaways from that interview.

Paul has long been a critic of Fauci. In October 2021, he claimed Fauci was “spreading mistruths.” In August 2023, he said Fauci committed perjury and called on the U.S. Department of Justice to launch an investigation. In October 2023, he accused Fauci of leading the “great COVID cover-up.”

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NIH scientists made $710M in royalties from drug makers — a fact they tried to hide

During the pandemic, the American people started to feel that Big Government was very cozy with Big Pharma.

Now we know just how close they were.

New data from the National Institutes of Health reveal the agency and its scientists collected $710 million in royalties during the pandemic, from late 2021 through 2023. These are payments made by private companies, like pharmaceuticals, to license medical innovations from government scientists.

Almost all that cash — $690 million — went to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the subagency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and 260 of its scientists.

Information about this vast private royalty complex is tightly held by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). My organization, OpenTheBooks.com, was forced to sue to uncover the royalties paid from September 2009 to October 2021, which amounted to $325 million over 56,000 transactions.

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Bilderberg 2024: CEOs, billionaires, and govt officials meet behind closed doors in Madrid

The CEOs of Microsoft AI, Google DeepMind, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, BP, Shell, Pfizer, Spotify, Palantir and more are meeting in private with an international cadre of high-level government officials and billionaires like Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel this week.

A huge story if ever there was one, but don’t expect to read about it on the front page – or any other page – of most newspapers.

It’s the 70th annual Bilderberg meeting, and – as has been the case for seven decades and counting now – the mass media is largely refusing to cover it, leaving most of its readership ignorant of the fact that it’s even taking place at all.

Participants will be discussing China, Russia, AI, the “changing faces of biology,” the “future of warfare”… and whatever the hell else they want — it’s off-the-record and the public is not invited.

“Journalists” like Fareed Zakaria (CNN), Bret Stephens (NYT), Zanny Minton Beddoes (The Economist), and John Micklethwait (Bloomberg) will also be present, but not to hold power to account; they’re there to share in it.

The event is taking place from May 30 — June 2 at Eurostars Suites Mirasierra, a luxury hotel in Madrid, Spain.

The group waited until Thursday to publish a partial list of attendees for public consumption.

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Despite progress in data transparency, the FDA still keeps its data secret

History shows that hiding clinical trial data can be deadly.

Vioxx is a well-known example of how the US drug regulator withheld important information about the harms of the drug for over three years, before it was withdrawn from the market and tens of thousands of people died as a consequence.

Numerous initiatives have been launched over the past two decades to improve access to trial data after it became evident that what was reported in peer-reviewed journals was often cherry-picked and misleading.

Eminent scientists have succeeded in gaining access to trial data from the European and Canadian drug regulators, but a recent analysis published in the Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics, found that the US FDA still lags behind others when it comes to data transparency.

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Top senators believe the US secretly recovered UFOs

Has the U.S. government secretly retrieved exotic craft of “non-human” origin? Newly declassified documents, along with extraordinary legislation, illustrate how two successive Democratic Senate majority leaders appear to have believed so.

Notably, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the late Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) were not alone in their focus on UFOs. The Democratic heavyweights received critical support and encouragement from a bipartisan group of high-profile senators over the years, including former fighter pilot and famed astronaut John Glenn (D-Ohio); Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who observed a UFO as a  World War II pilot; Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), then-chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense; 2008 GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.); Senate Intelligence Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Fla.); Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.).

In late 2011, for example, the top scientist at the Department of Homeland Security met with Lieberman, then chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Reid to discuss the establishment of an ultra-secret UFO program.

As outlined in remarkable detail in newly released documents, the intent of the proposed program was to “gain access to and inventory” UFOs secretly under “investigation in National Laboratories, government organizations and/or contractors.”

From there, the program would engage in “laboratory experimentation” and “scientific investigation” to foster “technology exploitation” of the recovered materials.

In short, Reid and Lieberman were advocating, “with some sense of urgency,” for the establishment of a formal UFO reverse-engineering program.

Startling as it may be, the notion that shadowy elements of the U.S. government or defense contractors secretly possess retrieved UFOs is treated as fact in the documents.

Notably, the Reid- and Lieberman-backed proposal included an “Oral History Initiative” to interview a pre-identified “list of retired, previously highly placed government, armed services, contractor, and intelligence community individuals” with knowledge of the “location of advanced aerospace technology and biological samples.”

Even though the Department of Homeland Security’s top scientist was advocating for the establishment of the UFO program and the “very serious science involved with” it, department leadership ultimately quashed the proposal in late 2011.

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War, Secrecy, and Lies

You know an American war is going poorly when the lies come swiftly, as with the Afghan War, or when it’s hidden under a cloak of secrecy, which is also increasingly true of the Afghan War.

This is nothing new, of course.  Perhaps the best book I read in 2019 is H. Bruce Franklin’s Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War.  Franklin, who served in the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s before becoming an English professor, cultural historian, and an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, is devastating in his critique of the military-industrial complex in this memoir.  I recommend it highly to all Americans who want to wrestle with tough truths.

Let’s consider one example: Franklin’s dismissal of the “stab-in-the-back” myth (or Rambo myth) that came out of the Vietnam War.  This was the idea the U.S. military could have won in Vietnam, and was indeed close to winning, only to be betrayed by weak-kneed politicians and the anti-war movement.

Franklin demolishes this argument in a paragraph that is worth reading again and again:

One widespread cultural fantasy about the Vietnam War blames the antiwar movement for forcing the military to “fight with one arm tied behind its back.”  But this belief stands reality on its head.  The American people, disgusted and angry about the Korean War, were in no mood to support a war in Vietnam.  Staunch domestic opposition kept Washington from going in overtly.  So it went covertly.  It thereby committed itself to a policy based on deception, sneaking around, and hiding its actions from the American people.  The U.S. government thus created the internal nemesis of its own war: the antiwar movement.  That movement was inspired and empowered not just by our outrage against the war [but] also by the lies about the war, lies necessitated by the war, coming from our government and propagated by the media.  Although it was the Vietnamese who defeated the United States, ultimately it was the antiwar movement, especially within the armed forces, that finally in 1973 forced Washington to accept, at long last, the terms of the 1954 Geneva Accords, and to sign a peace treaty that included, word for word, every major demand made by the National Liberation Front (the so-called Viet Cong) back in 1969…

The truth was that for three decades our nation had sponsored and then waged a genocidal war against a people and a nation that had never done anything to us except ask for our friendship and support [during and after World War II].

This is well and strongly put.  The American people had no interest in intervening in Vietnam in the 1950s; the Korean debacle had been enough.  But the U.S. government intervened anyway, lying about its involvement until it could no longer lie.  Then a bigger lie was concocted, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, to justify a larger commitment of troops in the mid-1960s, which led to near-genocidal destruction in Vietnam.

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Proof aliens exist? Federal agencies must now deliver all UFO reports for public disclosure – including classified material

Federal agencies have until October 20th to deliver every document, audio and video they have about UFOs to the US government for distribution to the public.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) issued the instructions this month — putting into action the UFO disclosure amendment to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), as signed into law last December.

The guidelines reveal the latest strategy to compel unwilling parts of the US military and the intelligence community into revealing everything they know about the mysterious airborne events, now called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). 

The move comes two months after the Pentagon‘s UFO office issued a controversial report to Congress, claiming it ‘found no verifiable evidence that the US government or private industry has ever had access to extraterrestrial technology.’

NARA archivists have issued guidelines mandating that all UFO or UAP documents be delivered in electronic formats with detailed metadata for inclusion a new searchable database to be made available to the public. 

The database will include classified material that the NARA will store independently, safe keeping the records until they can be declassified for the public.

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