Tag: transparency

Biden was only told TODAY that Lloyd Austin, 70, had prostate cancer – a month after he was diagnosed: Details of communication failure over secret ICU trip spark more questions for the White House and Pentagon

President Joe Biden was told that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had prostate cancer on Tuesday – the same day the public was informed, sparking more questions about the transparency of the administration and whether the public can trust their government.

‘Nobody at the White House knew that Secretary Austin had prostate cancer until this morning and the President was informed immediately after we were,’ White House spokesman John Kirby said at the daily press briefing. 

Kirby got defensive as he was repeatedly queried about why the commander-in-chief didn’t know the conditions or the where abouts of his top military officer. Austin was diagnosised with cancer a month before his Dec. 22 surgery. He was released the next day and returned to the hosptial via ambulance on Jan. 1 for complications. Biden was told Austin was in the hospital on Jan. 4. 

‘We all recognize that this didn’t unfold the way it should, on so many levels, not just the notification process of the chain of command, but the transparency issue. We all recognize that. And I think we all want to make sure we learn from that,’ Kirby said. 

‘It’s certainly not good, which is why we want to learn from this and we want to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.’

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Congress members will receive secret UFO briefing next week from top spy chief amid growing demands for greater transparency

House Oversight Committee members are set to undergo a classified briefing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), commonly known as UFOs, next week.

The covert meeting, shrouded in mystery, underscores a surging interest among lawmakers from both ends of the spectrum that are demanding increased government transparency on the extraterrestrial front.  

The briefing, scheduled for next Tuesday morning in the Office of House Security, will be conducted by the Office of Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, Thomas A. Monheim. 

Previously, a bipartisan group of Oversight Committee members, led by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), had sought more details on UFOs, including potential programs for reverse engineering or recovering crashed UFOs.   

This initiative came after a bombshell revelation from former intelligence honcho David Grusch, hinting at the government harboring ‘nonhuman biologics’ from a recovered UFO.   

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What the Media’s Mainstreaming of UFOs Means for Government Transparency

After decades of secrecy and over-classification, the U.S. government is gradually beginning to reveal to the public what it knows about UFOs  —now known as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). In 2021, Congress directed the Department of Defense (DOD) to investigate UAP by establishing an office now called the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which recently published a report describing 274 observations of UAP by DOD units over the period from August 2022 to April 2023. Congress then doubled down on government transparency this year, with both the House and Senate drafting separate versions of the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, which is being considered this week as part of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.

This about-face on UAP by the government has resulted in a similar response by the media. Once a subject of skepticism and stigma, UAP reports are increasingly regarded as mainstream news. In 2017, the New York Times was the first to reveal a Defense program to collect and analyze data on UAP, including videos captured by U.S. Navy pilots of aerial objects whose flight characteristics were impossible to reproduce with modern military aircraft. These pilots also provided eyewitness accounts of UAP to other respected mainstream outlets, such as CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2021.

More recently, The Debrief broke the biggest development to date with its remarkable report about Pentagon whistleblower David Grusch, who claimed that the U.S. government has been covering up programs to retrieve crashed UAP materials and reverse-engineer them. Unable to resist such a sensational story, news networks nationwide have made the move to cover it regardless of the previous absurdity associated with the topic, in addition to the historic House hearing this year with Grusch and two former Navy pilots who testified on their astonishing observations of UAP while conducting training missions off the East and West Coasts and alleged the government was in possession of non-human “biologics” recovered from crash sites. Just this weekend, NBC’s Meet the Press even featured one of those pilots, Ryan Graves, who discussed his nonprofit, Americans for Safe Aerospace, which he established to investigate UAP and improve safety and awareness of the aerospace domain.

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Powerful members of Congress are dead-set on killing UFO transparency

Since 2020, no fewer than 10 former government officials, military officers and scientists, along with a former senate majority leader, have alleged (or suggested) publicly that the U.S. government has recovered advanced craft of unknown origin — that is, UFOs.

Nearly all of these individuals also claim that the government transferred multiple craft to defense contractors for scientific and technical analysis.

Key members of Congress, drawing on testimony from dozens of whistleblowers, appear to find these extraordinary allegations credible.

Bipartisan legislation sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) aimed to establish a process with the ostensible goal of revealing the existence of “non-human intelligence” to the public. But the legislation, which is co-sponsored by three Republican and two Democratic senators, is now in jeopardy.

In comments yesterday on the Senate floor, Schumer stated that “House Republicans are also attempting to kill another commonsense, bipartisan measure passed by the Senate, which I was proud to cosponsor… to increase transparency around what the government does and does not know about unidentified aerial phenomena.”

According to reports, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, are leading efforts to prevent any meaningful version of this provision from being added to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.

Members of Congress generally clamor for enhanced government oversight — a core function of the legislative branch — and transparency. So what could cause a small group of influential lawmakers to suddenly resist it?

Notably, the legislation calls for the U.S. government to reassert control over “recovered technologies of unknown origin” currently held by defense contractors. Some analysts suspect that corporations potentially holding such exotic technology are exerting undue pressure and influence to oppose the provision in Schumer’s legislation.

In his only public comments on the legislation to date, Turner denied “holding up” the measure, while adding, “I do think it’s a poorly drafted piece of legislation.”

A closer analysis of Schumer’s 64-page bill tells a starkly different, and intriguing, story.

At its core, the Schumer legislation strongly hints that elements of the U.S. government, in collaboration with defense contractors, have long operated surreptitious “legacy programs” to “reverse engineer” retrieved UFOs. Other secret programs supposedly “examine biological evidence of living or deceased non-human intelligence.”

The remarkable nature of Schumer’s bipartisan legislation is only trumped by revelations that key members of Congress appear intent on blocking or neutering it for what seems to be no good reason.

As Schumer and his co-sponsors suggest, “credible evidence and testimony indicates” that government records describing UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs have been concealed from Congress and the public for decades.

The legislation largely mirrors the allegations of David Grusch, a decorated former military officer and intelligence official. The intelligence community’s internal watchdog deemed Grusch’s whistleblower complaint “credible and urgent.” At the same time, an eyebrow-raising report citing multiple sources alleges that a secretive CIA unit is overseeing clandestine retrievals of “non-human craft.”  

A core objective of the Schumer legislation is to “restore proper oversight over [UFO] records by elected officials in both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government.”

As analysts have noted, there are only two elected officials in the executive branch. So one of the highest-ranking U.S. senators is implying that some presidents and vice presidents have not been informed of clandestine efforts to retrieve and reverse engineer “technologies of unknown origin” — UFOs — or examine “biological evidence of non-human intelligence.”

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DC Judge Refuses To Let Trump See Evidence In His Own J6 Trial

D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has denied former President Donald Trump’s motion to subpoena records from the House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 committee, arguing that his requests are like a fishing expedition.

Her seven-page decision criticized the scope and alleged vagueness of President Trump’s requests. It also argued that he was improperly applying Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 17 to information that could be obtained through other means.

“Defendant has not met his burdens with respect to his proposed Rule 17(c) subpoenas,” Judge Chutkan said.

“He has not sufficiently justified his requests for either the ‘Missing Materials’ themselves or the other five categories of documents related to them.”

Quoting the United States v. Cuthbertson, she added that the “broad scope of the records that defendant seeks, and his vague description of their potential relevance, resemble less ‘a good faith effort to obtain identified evidence’ than they do ‘a general fishing expedition that attempts to use the [Rule 17(c) subpoena] as a discovery device.'”

President Trump’s initial motion from Oct. 11 requested purportedly “missing materials” that the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 had allegedly failed to preserve and transfer to another congressional committee.

Fox News reported in August that Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight for the Committee on House Administration, accused the select committee of failing to provide certain communications with the Biden administration, as well as video recordings of depositions and interviews leveraged by the select committee.

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We Need To Make UAP Mainstream — In Scientific Research and Transparent Government Policy

While today’s headlines are dominated by the politically polarized 2024 U.S. election runup, an increasingly destabilized geopolitical landscape, as well as an accelerating tech revolution in artificial intelligence and space, a new epoch in human history is unfolding that warrants more attention than all these stories combined. I am talking about the recent revelation to the public about the reality of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP, formerly referred to as UFOs) and the reports of non-human intelligence (NHI) using them to visit our world.

If it sounds too astonishing to be true, let’s review what has come to light in the past few years. In 2017, the New York Times published a stunning piece about a U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) program to collect and analyze data on UAP, as well as materials recovered from them. Included in the article were videos captured by U.S. Navy pilots of aerial objects whose flight characteristics were impossible to reproduce with modern military aircraft. Over the next few years, these pilots provided eyewitness accounts of UAP to the media, including a remarkable appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes program in 2021.

Later that year, the U.S. Congress directed the DOD to investigate UAP by establishing an office now called the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which recently provided a report to Congress. Perhaps the most astounding development was a hearing earlier this year before the House Oversight Committee’s national security subcommittee, during which a former DOD intelligence official testified that the U.S. government was concealing from the public and Congress materials recovered from crashed UAP, as well as non-human “biologics” who presumably controlled them. Not only have these reports been confirmed by other former U.S. intelligence officials, but the U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y). and Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) have introduced bipartisan legislation to implement a controlled public disclosure program for the UAP materials in the U.S. government’s possession.

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UAP DISCLOSURE ACT RECEIVES PUSHBACK FROM LAWMAKERS ON CAPITOL HILL, AS BIPARTISAN FIGHT FOR TRANSPARENCY CONTINUES

A bipartisan measure aiming to disclose U.S. government records related to UFOs has come under fire from top politicians in Washington, as advocates continue working against time to save the imperiled transparency effort, The Debrief has learned.

Earlier this year, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) united with Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) to introduce a 64-page proposal to bring about the disclosure of official information on what the U.S. government now calls unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). Dubbed the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2023 (UAPDA), the proposal was cut from the same mold of an earlier law in 1992, which outlined the disclosure of records related to the JFK assassination in 1963.

The act was introduced as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), an annual piece of legislation that authorizes funding for the U.S. Armed Forces and outlines the budget and operations for the Department of Defense in accordance with Article 1 Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. Among the key components included in the legislation is a provision concerning eminent domain, whereby the U.S. government could effectively confiscate and appropriate any UAP technologies that are revealed to exist, as well as the creation of a presidential records review board similar to the one outlined in the 1992 law.

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NYPD “TRANSPARENCY” SITE LEAVES OUT MISCONDUCT LAWSUITS SETTLED FOR MILLIONS

LAST YEAR, a series of headlines in New York City buzzed with excitement about a cop with the street nickname of “Bullethead.” 

New York Police Department Sgt. David Grieco — his actual name — had reached a milestone: Police misconduct lawsuits naming him as a defendant had exceeded $1 million in settlement payouts. Since the raft of news stories, Grieco has been named in at least two additional suits, according to publicly available information as of July, and payouts in complaints naming him have now reached $1,099,825. 

In the 13 years it took for Grieco to be named in 48 suits alleging police misconduct, he’s been promoted twice. In 2016, he was elevated from officer to detective and, a year later, to sergeant. 

The New York Police Department’s officer profile database, meanwhile, lists no applicable entries for disciplinary history in Grieco’s profile. 

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Tracking Orwellian Change – The Aristocratic Takeover of ‘Transparency’

“Transparency” was one of America’s great postwar reforms. In 1955, a Democratic congressman named John Moss from California — who served in the Navy in World War II, was nominated for office by both Democrats and Republicans, and was never defeated in any election for public office — introduced legislation that would become one of the great triumphs of late-stage American democracy.

The Freedom of Information Act took a tortuous path to becoming law, opposed from the start by nearly every major government agency and for years struggling to gain co-sponsors despite broad public support.

In a supreme irony, one of Moss’s first Republican allies was a young Illinois congressman named Donald Rumsfeld. After a series of final tweaks it eventually passed the House 307-0 in 1966, when it landed on the desk of Lyndon Johnson, who didn’t like the bill, either. Johnson signed it, but decided not to hold a public ceremony, electing instead to issue a public statement crafted by none other than Bill Moyers, which concluded, “I signed this measure with a deep sense of pride that the United States is an open society.”

The Freedom of Information Act gave reporters and citizens alike extraordinary power to investigate once-impenetrable executive agencies that conduct the business of government. FOIA requests gave windows into the affairs of the Hoover-led FBI, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the “Afghan logs” story made public after a bitter fight put up by the National Security Archive and the Washington Post. The irony alert here was this last FOIA lawsuit ultimately revealed behaviors unflattering to none other than Donald Rumsfeld.

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The NSA’s Intellipedia Decision: A Precedent for Reduced Transparency?

In a recent development that has raised eyebrows among transparency advocates, the National Security Agency (NSA) has taken a firm stance against the release of information from Intellipedia, the Intelligence Community’s collaborative platform. This decision comes as a stark departure from the agency’s previous protocol, which for over a decade allowed the release of records from this platform under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The Appeal and the NSA’s Response

As first reported by The Black Vault, this issue came to light when a series of FOIA requests were recently closed by the NSA, all seeking information from Intellipedia. The newly found stance produced a “GLOMAR Response” in each case where the agency could “neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of any responsive material contained within the Intellipedia collaborative platform.” However, for more than a decade, The Black Vault received a long list of Intellipedia entries released by the NSA.

There have been 130 appeals submitted by The Black Vault fighting this obfuscation.

The first of these 130 appeals has now had a decision rendered, and it was met with a response that has set a concerning precedent for future requests along with the remaining 129 appeals that are still being processed.

The NSA stated, “Based on my review, the appropriate response in this case is to neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of any responsive material contained within the Intellipedia collaborative platform.”

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