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Eagle

Former NSA chief General Keith Alexander is now on Amazon's board

Devin Coldewey
Tech Crunch
Wed, 09 Sep 2020 19:17 UTC
General Keith Alexander
General Keith Alexander, who oversaw the National Security Agency when Edward Snowden revealed the shocking extent of its illegal wiretapping and data collection programs, has joined Amazon's board as a director.

Gen. Alexander's duties on the audit committee and anywhere else he might be needed are not spelled out anywhere. He is currently co-CEO of IronNet Security, the firm he founded six years ago. Before that he was head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command.


Comment: A 'revolving door' of government intelligence and the much for profit Technocracy? You betcha!


He is perhaps best remembered by the general public as having helped build and operate an enormous set of secret programs for domestic surveillance in the security-first post-9/11 era. There's a bit more to running the country's cybersecurity infrastructure than that, of course, but the Snowden leaks ended up defining the end of his career in government intelligence.

Comment: The implications of Amazon's new hire is not lost on some:
[...] Edward Snowden, [was] were less than "thrilled" about the appointment.

Snowden - who in 2013 blew the whistle on a secret NSA surveillance program, leaking a massive trove of documents proving the bulk and warrantless collection of Americans' telephone records by the government - was one of the first to call out Amazon for hiring Alexander.

"It turns out 'Hey Alexa' is short for 'Hey Keith Alexander.' Yes, the Keith Alexander personally responsible for the unlawful mass surveillance programs that caused a global scandal," tweeted the whistleblower, who remains in exile in Russia.


Snowden noted that while Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosts nearly 6 percent of all websites, the figure looks even more damning "if you measure it by traffic instead of number of sites."

Journalist Glenn Greenwald, a Snowden ally who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the US intelligence machine's global mass surveillance program, tweeted that Alexander's appointment only revealed Amazon's true colors.

"Gen. Keith Alexander was head of NSA when it secretly built a massive domestic surveillance system aimed at Americans - the one an appellate court just ruled likely illegal. Amazon just appointed him to its Board of Directors, again showing who they are," Greenwald said.




Last week, a federal appeals court ruled that the "bulk collection" of data used by the NSA was illegal, with Snowden hailing the decision as a milestone in the fight against government-sanctioned snooping.

Even without an ex-spy chief with a less-than-stellar reputation in terms of privacy protection on its board, Amazon has faced growing pushback over its intrusive high-tech devices. Its virtual assistant Alexa was caught red-handed passively recording intimate conversations of unsuspecting family members, while its new fitness tracker 'Halo' promises to scan users' bodies and track emotions in their voice.

It has been suggested that Alexander's addition to the board may raise Amazon's chances to win government contracts, as it is still reeling after losing out on the $10 billion JEDI 'war cloud' contract with the Pentagon, which was awarded to Microsoft last October. Amazon has attempted to stall the deal, filing a lawsuit alleging that US President Trump's bias against the company robbed it of the lucrative deal.



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Heart - Black

WHO admits Gates-backed vaccine caused recent polio outbreak in Africa

Joaquin Flores
Fort Russ News
Thu, 10 Sep 2020 00:00 UTC
polio vaccine in Africa
In a major development, the World Health Organization (WHO) is finally admitting that the vaccines pushed by the likes of oligarch Bill Gates and similar globalist technocrats have caused a polio outbreak in Sudan.

As a result, this polio outbreak is now spreading outside of Sudan to neighboring countries.

In the confession, they say that several children - one from South Darfur and another from Gedarif - had already been paralyzed as a result of being administered the oral polio vaccine. The outbreak reportedly is spreading to Chad and Cameroon now.

"Sequencing of viruses isolated in Sudan so far reflects that the viruses are related with viruses reported earlier in neighboring Chad from where there were multiple separate introductions into Sudan from Chad. There is local circulation in Sudan and continued sharing of transmission with Chad," the WHO wrote in their official statement.

It was the same WHO which just last week was boasting about eradicating the wild polio virus from the African continent. But in their latest confession, they concluded that their own vaccines are responsible for the rapid spread of the virus throughout Africa.
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Star of David

Trump's diplomatic coup with Serbia and Kosovo curdles quickly

Jonathan Ofir
Mondoweiss
Thu, 10 Sep 2020 12:00 UTC
Vucic trump
Serbian President Aleksander Vucic was further embarrassed when this photo of his meeting with Donald Trump circulated with commentary that he looked like a school boy.
Just six days after US President Trump proudly announced another diplomatic breakthrough with Serbia and Kosovo, saying both will be opening embassies in Jerusalem, there came a spoiler: Serbia is apparently backing out of the deal, because Israel is to recognize the breakaway republic of Kosovo in reciprocity.

The Times of Israel reported yesterday:

Comment: See also:

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Health

Woodward says Trump consciously 'downplayed coronavirus', Fauci didn't see it that way, Trump says his goal was to reduce panic

Virginia Kruta
Daily Caller
Wed, 09 Sep 2020 21:17 UTC
trump i fauci
Dr. Anthony Fauci responded Wednesday to claims that President Donald Trump had downplayed the threat of the coronavirus pandemic, saying that he "didn't get any sense" that was happening.

Fauci spoke with Fox News White House correspondent John Roberts about audio recorded by Rage author Bob Woodward that appeared to reveal Trump intentionally downplaying the seriousness of the virus.

Fauci began by saying that it as very common for him and other members of the Coronavirus Task Force to meet with Trump prior to press conferences, and he did not recall instances when the president said things publicly that they had not discussed in the private meetings.

"I may not be tuned in to the right thing they're talking about, but I didn't see any discrepancies what he told us and what we told him and what he ultimately came out publicly and said," Fauci added.

"So did you get a sense that he was or wasn't playing this down?" Roberts asked directly.

"No. No, no, I didn't. I didn't get any sense that he was distorting anything," Fauci replied. "In my discussions with him, they were always straightforward about the concerns that we had. We related that to him. And when he would go out, I'd hear him discussing the same sort of things."

Comment: The funny thing is, in retrospect people will look back and see that Trump was right. In fact, he could have gone even further and still have been right... The amount of cheap propaganda and blatant lies being spread and believed worldwide about this 'pandemic' is staggering.

Trump dealt with the new controversy of the day during a press conference:


And on Twitter:




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Umbrella

Democrats, Republicans agree: Politicians and corporations should be spared from prosecution over killer Covid-19 care homes


RT
Wed, 09 Sep 2020 19:14 UTC
Healthcare protesters
© Reuters/Mike BlakeCalifornian healthcare workers protesting for safer working conditions
Republican and Democrat politicians have both embraced legislation to immunize themselves and their deep-pocketed corporate donors from legal liability for ill-thought-out pandemic policies blamed for the deaths of thousands.

Republicans in the Senate have all but plagiarized a controversial provision from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo that will offer legal immunity to corporations that ran the care homes in which hundreds of thousands of elderly Americans died with the coronavirus over the last six months, according to a trio of progressive journalists who compared the texts and interviewed some of the lobbyists who wrote the polarizing passages for the politicians in their pockets.

When Cuomo's corporate immunity provisions first resurfaced in Senate Republicans' Covid-19 stimulus package in July, some thought it was a fluke. The legislative package protected elder care homes from lawsuits over "resource or staffing shortage" and classed hospital administrators as caregivers for the purpose of that immunity. Cuomo himself criticized the bill, even as journalists noted the similarity of its language to his own legislation.

The bill in question was actually written by the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA), a lobbying group that paid Cuomo over $1 million for the privilege of walling its members off from legal action in the midst of a pandemic that has seen tens of thousands of Americans die in nursing homes across the nation. Careful to cover all its bases, the GNYHA also spread over a quarter of a million dollars among Democratic legislative committees, ensuring the provision would be passed.

Comment: Immunity for Senate Democrats was worth $2M in payoff irrespective of the consequences to care facilities, human tally or sworn duty to the charge it de-serves.

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Hammer

The real goal of US sanctions on ex-Lebanese ministers is to weaken Hezbollah and combat Iranian influence, not corruption

Bradley Blankenship
RT
Thu, 10 Sep 2020 05:06 UTC
Beirut tribute
© Reuters/Mohamed AzakirObserving a minute of silence to mark one month since the massive explosion at Beirut's port area, September 4, 2020.
US sanctions against ex-Lebanese ministers are an attempt to weaken Hezbollah, cast out "Iranian influence" and keep protests lukewarm in terms of their anger toward America which helped construct the corrupt Lebanese government.

On September 8, the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed sanctions on two former Lebanese government ministers, Yusuf Finyanus and Ali Hassan Khalil, who the office claims have ties to Hezbollah. Washington said the sanctions are an effort to assist the Lebanese people in restructuring their government to fit the demands of protests that have raged across the country since October of 2019.

Comment: There is more to the false assignment of blame for the explosion than meets the eye. Thus heavy sanctions and 'corrections' will let the trail go cold as distraction infiltrates local efforts of recovery. The US, led by the nose to bolster Israel's ring of deflection and absolution, is thereby complicit.

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Dollar

US needs $3T in fiscal stimulus to support coronavirus-hit economy, says economist William Lee

Yen Nee Lee
CNBC
Wed, 09 Sep 2020 11:20 UTC
store closing scene
© Noam galai/Getty Images
The U.S. needs around $3 trillion in fiscal stimulus to support its pandemic-hit economy, an economist said Thursday as Congress and the White House remain in a stalemate over what to include in the next relief package.

William Lee, chief economist at Milken Institute, said the $3 trillion should be spent on programs such as incentivizing businesses to increase remote working capabilities and helping the unemployed find jobs in companies with viable business models. He told CNBC's Squawk Box Asia:
"I think the one thing that everyone ... agrees with is we have to get in there and get in big. The issue is how do you get big without a permanent increase in fiscal deficit. That's why the programs that are put in place have to be targeted and designed in a way so that they disappear once the economy comes back online again."
But disagreements between Democrats and Republicans on what programs to fund have contributed to the impasse over passing another stimulus bill in the U.S.


Comment: Americans won't get financial stimulus until the US government gets brain stimulus. What are the chances of that?!!!

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Briefcase

Julian Assange extradition hearing: Why justice must not only be done, but be 'seen' to be done - literally

Neil Clark
RT
Mon, 07 Sep 2020 17:57 UTC
Assange supporters
© Reuters/Peter NichollsSupporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hold placards outside the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court London, Britain September 7, 2020.
The denial of remote access to the newly resumed Assange extradition hearing of 40 civil society and political monitors has been strongly criticized given the importance of the case, and it's easy to see why people are concerned.

"It is not merely of some importance, but is of fundamental importance that Justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done," Lord Chief Justice Hewart's famous dictum goes.

Sadly that's not the case - literally - with the extradition hearing of Julian Assange which resumed today in London. Amnesty International and Reporters Sans Frontieres were just two of the 40 civil society and political monitoring groups who have had their remote access to the hearings denied, having, it is claimed, been invited to apply for such access only last week.
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Question

French pundit queries Western narrative on Navalny 'poisoning' with 'CIA' comments, gets bashed by establishment


RT
Thu, 10 Sep 2020 14:58 UTC
Zemmour/Navalny
© AFP/Philippe Wojazer/Reuters/Kevin Lamarque/Evgenia NovozheninaEric Zemmour (L) and Alexey Navalny (R)
A French pundit has questioned the Western narrative that Moscow played a role in the alleged poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny. Yet, the 'deviation' did not go down well with some of the French establishment.

German military scientists claim that Navalny, a prominent activist in Russia, was poisoned by a potent military-grade nerve agent last month. Berlin said that it had "a lot of evidence" that the Russian state was involved but has so far failed to provide this evidence to Moscow. Nevertheless, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has threatened Russia with sanctions over the alleged attack, while his G7 colleagues have condemned the "confirmed poisoning" in the "strongest terms."

However, prominent French essayist Eric Zemmour sees things differently. Though Western media are coalescing around the idea that Navalny was poisoned by the Russian state, Zemmour departed from that narrative in dramatic style. He told France's Cnews channel on Wednesday night:
"I'm trying to understand, and there are things that confuse me. If Putin gave the order to poison this political opponent, then why did Russian doctors save his life and transport him to Germany for treatment by the Germans, at the risk of exposing the crime? This is strange."
Zemmour even hinted that the US Central Intelligence Agency may have had a hand in the case. "Some people fantasize about the KGB, which has become the FSB, I fantasize about the CIA, which is still the CIA."

Comment: Handing over Navalny's test results to OPCW will further false suspicions rather than qualify accuracy and source.

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Dollar

UN's Guterres calls for $35 BILLION more for WHO COVID-19 program

John Miller
Reuters
Thu, 10 Sep 2020 19:02 UTC
World Health Organization
© Reuters / Denis Balibouse
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for $35 billion more, including $15 billion in the next three months, for the World Health Organization's "ACT-Accelerator" programme to support vaccines, treatments and diagnostics against COVID-19.

Some $3 billion has been contributed by countries so far, Guterres told an online event on Thursday, calling it "seed funding".

"But we now need $35 billion more to go from 'start up' to 'scale up and impact'," he said. "There is real urgency in these numbers. Without an infusion of $15 billion over the next three months, beginning immediately, we will lose the window of opportunity."
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