Tag: transparency

RFK Hearings – Why Are Politicians So Afraid of Transparency

Faith in anything related to public health is rightly at an all-time low and despite the incredible mandate that the election provided to MAHA, most Democrats and a handful of RINOs are dead set against the transparency Bobby has promised to provide. This is a man who has vaxxed his kids and promised not to ban anything. He’s not a radical. He’s promoting overall health and very sensible policies. He’s a lawyer and simply want’s people to have the evidence necessary to make good decisions. So why is a call for transparency such a threat? After all, who hides things unless there is something to hide?

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The answer is honestly similar across the board – money or political realities. Big pharma largely owns Congress (both parties) but the political reality of Trump embracing MAHA forces the hands of many. Despite this, there are a number of absolute RINOs and big pharma sellouts (I’m looking at you Elizabeth Warren, Lindsey Graham, and Mitch McConnell) but I’m not wasting space on them in this article. Instead, I want to talk about a few people we hope we can help to see truth.

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Will Fauci’s COVID-19 e-Mails Be Disclosed per RFK Jr.’s Call for Radical HHS Transparency?

Throughout today’s Senate confirmation hearings for Secretary of Health & Human Services (HHS), RFK Jr. called for radical transparency from the department of HHS, this includes the NIH, CDC, FDA, and the NIAID (the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease). Dr. Anthony Fauci was the former Director of the NIAID for 39 years, from 1984 to 2022.

Senator Johnson Expresses Frustration in Receiving 50-Pages of Fauci’s e-Mails as Blank Pages or Mostly Redacted

Senator Ron Johnson stated that he has written over 70 oversight letters to the Biden administration requesting copies of HHS communications around COVID-19 (including Fauci’s emails) and the COVID-19 injections. PLUS, Senator Johnson subpoenaed HHS for the myocarditis data of American adults and children who received the COVID-19 injections. In response, Senator and received heavily redacted or blank documents in response.

Senator Johnson Calls for Transparency from HHS Departments

Senator Johnson: “Will you honor these requests from Congress and will make HHS transparent?”

Robert F. Kennedy: “Yes. My approach to HHS, as I’ve said before Senator, is radical transparency. Democrats and republicans ought to be able to get information that was generated by taxpayer expense, that is owned by the American taxpayer. They shouldn’t get redacted documents. Public agencies should be transparent.”

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Senate Intel Panel Reportedly Considering HIDING Their Votes on Tulsi Gabbard from the American People Following News of Susan Collins’s Possible Opposition to Gabbard

The Senate Intel Committee may be poised to sink Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation for Director of National Intelligence (DNI) without an outside soul knowing how they voted.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, Senator Susan Collins (RINO-ME) may derail Gabbard’s confirmation as DNI due to concerns about Gabbard’s stance on Section 702 of the FISA which gives government permission to spy on supposed foreign targets without a warrant.

Gabbard previously proposed legislation to repeal section 702 due to the government violating the Fourth Amendment by abusing the warrantless spying program to spy on American citizens. She has since tried to reassure senators on the matter.

As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Collins holds considerable power. Gabbard cannot afford to lose one GOP defector since the vote is split along party lines at 9-8.

In addition to Collins, Senator Lindsey Graham (RINO-SC) is reportedly lukewarm on Gabbard due to her previously visiting Syria and calling for charges to be dropped against National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. While he is not on the intel committee, this underscores further hesitation regarding some GOP senators to Gabbard.

Now, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, who has close contacts on Capitol Hill, reports that the Senate Intel Committee may hide the vote tallies on Gabbard following Collins’ possible opposition.

If true, this would prove a despicable betrayal of the public trust.

“I’m told that the vote for Tulsi Gabbard might be done privately in a SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility), – with the vote tallies kept secret from the American people,” Kirk wrote.

“This is outrageous and wrong,” he added. “The American people deserve to know how THEIR Senators vote on Trump’s nominees!”

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The Coming Sea Change at Trump’s FDA: Towards an Era of Safety and Public Transparency for Medical Devices

It has been over a decade since my late-wife, Dr. Amy Josephine Reed, was harmed and killed by a poorly regulated medical device, known as the Power Morcellator. The sheer force of Dr. Reed’s voice, as a Harvard Medical School faculty member and a physician-scientist — and the injustice it uncovered to countless other women like her — became a bellwether case that demonstrates an ongoing and severe safety failure operational in the medical device regulatory space at FDA.

Of course, this safety failure in the FDA’s medical device regulatory arm, the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), is hardly unique to that center. Industry and conflicted academic “experts,” not patients, play an outsized role in governing and corrupting almost all of the FDA’s centers. But, certainly, the source of the safety failure at CDRH is crystallized in the dangerous regulatory regime that the agency center utilizes to clear the vast majority of medical devices for the US healthcare marketplace: The 510(k).

At a legislative level, CDRH’s 510(k) regulatory regime was not designed to ensure the safety or efficacy of the medical devices it regulates — a fact that is well known to most public health experts and FDA regulators themselves. CDRH’s 510(k) does not use anything even remotely resembling an “evidence-based” framework to provide clearance to thousands of new medical devices annually used in the care of patients across the US and abroad.

Even more problematic is that the medical device industry pays the FDA for the 510(k) clearances obtained. In other words, almost the entire 510(k) clearance apparatus at CDRH is literally funded by the medical device industry — the very industry that stands to gain the most from the 510(k) clearances it funds. This is a serious conflict of interest in the healthcare space, and should not pass ethical muster — even when the argument is that such payments from industry to government are saving taxpayer dollars. The moment the industry starts paying to keep the FDA’s centers’ lights on is when the industry, not the people, will have an outsized voice in governing the agency that is regulating it.

Worse yet, the CDRH personnel whose 510(k)-related activities are funded by medical device makers exert virtually no real scrutiny over the manufacturer’s claims in their 510(k) applications for market clearance — either because their “reviews” are deliberately superficial and nominal, or because they are grossly incompetent from an expert perspective. It is literally true that the overwhelming majority of medical devices that seek 510(k) clearance for use in the US marketplace are granted them, without difficulty and at mach speed, by any reasonable standard — and although these devices are literally directly engaging the most vulnerable of America’s citizens: patients who trust American healthcare at their most vulnerable!

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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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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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Canadian Lawmaker Calls for Increased Transparency After Images Surface of UAP Shot Down Over Yukon

New details have recently surfaced regarding an incident involving an unidentified object shot down over Canada’s Yukon territory in February 2023, including imagery obtained through a Canadian freedom of information act.

One of several shoot-downs that occurred in the days following an incident last year involving a Chinese spy balloon that traversed American airspace, Daniel Otis, a freelance investigative reporter writing for CTV News in Canada, revealed last month that he had successfully obtained images of the mysterious object obtained by pilots shortly before it was shot down. 

Following the widely-reported incident, Canadian Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre initially suggested the image should be released publicly, although the Canadian military did not officially approve such actions at that time. 

Despite pilot accounts that described the object as a metallic, cylindrical shape that appeared to possess a wire-tethered payload, secrecy on part of the Canadian government has only fueled public curiosity, giving rise to speculations about the object’s origin. 

Now, the release of the grainy, black and white image of the object adds a new layer of intrigue to the puzzling incident.

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FEMA Public Affairs Chief Locks Her X Account Amid Outrage Over Agency’s Disastrous Hurricane Response

FEMA Public Affairs Director Jaclyn Rothenberg locked her X account Saturday amid widespread outrage over the agency’s disastrous hurricane response in affected states.

How ironic, given Rothenberg is the agency’s “seasoned on-the-record spokesperson” whose only task is media relations and crisis communications.

FEMA’s website explains Rothenberg’s role in the agency:

Jaclyn is an appointee in the Biden-Harris Administration and was sworn in as the Director of Public Affairs at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in July 2021. Jaclyn is a public affairs, media relations, crisis communications strategist and seasoned on-the-record spokesperson. She has advised C-suite executives, high-profile elected officials, and political leaders operating on national and local stages. With nearly 15 years of experience, she understands the varying perspectives media, state, local and congressional leaders have on key issues and approaches her work with anticipation of how each stakeholder will react. 

However, Rothenberg’s official government account remains open.

Rothenberg’s move comes as the agency faces heavy criticism for its delayed response to the devastation left by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida, with over 220 dead, hundreds missing, and millions of people still left without power over a week after the storm ripped through the South.

FEMA has not only been slow to respond, but according to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the agency doesn’t even have the funding to adequately address the crisis.

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Censorship and Transparency Issues in “Anti-Terror” Tech Alliance

Big Tech’s Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) alliance, often accused of censorship of legal content, continues to face allegations about an ongoing lack of transparency regarding its operations.

Founded two years ago by Meta, Microsoft, then Twitter, and YouTube (Google), it now has 25 members, and the stated goal is to flag and remove violent content from the internet.

The latest development regarding to controversial group – other than the ongoing transparency issues – is X deciding to leave the GIFCT board.

Two major problems have emerged around GIFCT’s activities and influence on the web: transparency, including around funding, and having a system in place that makes sure legal, non-violent content – such as that actually opposing terrorism, satire, media reports, etc – doesn’t get caught in the GIFTC net as well, resulting in censorship.

But, not one of the 25 members publicly shares how much content is removed (due to hash matches). Yet some idea of the size of the operation can be gleaned from YouTube’s contribution to the GIFCT database last year alone: 45,000 hashes.

There is also no information available about the number of appeals users lodge against content removal resulting from this process. It’s also unknown how many hashes are added by the companies themselves, and how many come from the government or researchers.

And apparently, GIFCT itself isn’t sure how many companies automate hash-sharing or flagging and removing content based on matches, and how many employ humans to do it.

The obscurity in which GIFCT labors is quite extraordinary, even by Big Tech standards: it is not known how many companies use the said database, and there is no independent auditing or internal review of the alliances’s work. In 2021, the BSR consultancy was hired to produce “a human rights impact assessment.”

47 changes were recommended, but the GIFCT board has not yet implemented any. And while at it – not even the founding four have always accepted suggestions coming from an independent advisory committee within GIFCT.

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Police reveal 10 years of Wiltshire UFO sightings first time

Police have revealed all the UFO sightings in Wiltshire over the last 10 years for the first time.

Following a freedom of information request, Wiltshire Police published all the reports they have received mentioning UFOs, UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena), aliens and more.

The results are both bizarre and intriguing, telling of mysterious and largely unreported experiences of the unknown.

As well as your common and garden UFO sightings there are alleged physical interactions with aliens, even inside people’s own homes.

The first log from September 11, 2016, describes a UFO in the sky and an alien in someone’s living room in Swindon.

Further information on why an alien would visit a living room in Swindon is not known, as the logs provided in the FOI are brief.

Down in Salisbury, a woman reported she was abducted by aliens the very same month.

There were a quiet three years with no incidents before another abduction was reported in Chippenham on April 5, 2019 – this time a man, naked.

Six months later a UFO was sighted in Trowbridge.

The last log is from January 17, 2021, again in Chippenham, and is not so much a sighting as a hearing. It simply states: “Ex-friend talking about aliens”.

Wiltshire Police’s slogan is “Keeping Wiltshire safe”, but it is not known what actions the local force take to tackle extraterrestrial tampering.

Wiltshire is not alien to unexplained phenomena as the county is famed for its crop circles which some people think are the result of otherworldly interference.

It had the most crop circles in England in 2023 and Honey Street, near Pewsey, is the home of the Crop Circle Centre.

Until 2009 the British government published an annual report on UFO sightings.

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