Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Israel today substantially and dangerously elevated the risk of escalation in the Middle East, not only for itself, but also for the United States.
When it decided to bomb part of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, killing at least seven Iranian military officials, as Israel always does, it immediately claimed that its attack on the embassy was justified by the presence of irregular terrorist forces.
Converting, it said, what would otherwise be not only Iranian soil but also an inviolable diplomatic shelter into a legitimate military target.
The Iranians, by contrast, denounced this bombing as a classic act of war and vowed retaliation, which they will almost certainly be required to impose.
Now, At the start of the Israeli attack on Gaza back in October, you'll remember President Biden deployed significant U.S.
military assets, including aircraft carriers, in the region with the explicit aim of protecting Israel from escalation.
Therefore, any serious escalatory risk in the region threatens to involve not only Israel, but its chief sponsors in Washington, into this wider regional war.
One that the U.S.
is already involved in heavily through its bombing campaigns in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and more, all designed to protect Israel.
We will examine the implication of today's events then.
Washington is currently all aflutter in its fanatical efforts to ensure that another $60 billion be sent from the U.S.
Treasury to fuel the war in Ukraine.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has all but assured key factions in Washington that he will defy a major faction in his party and Donald Trump by bringing to the floor and then supporting a measure to ensure that Biden's $60 billion request for Ukraine is finally met.
Now that in turn requires that the level of fear and hysteria over Moscow be heightened even further.
And that is the critical context for understanding a very lengthy and very melodramatic 60 Minutes report on Sunday night that really has to be seen to be believed.
If you haven't seen it yet, it is really quite something.
The report attempted to resurrect the long discredited Havana Syndrome fairy tale.
The claim that the Russians had harnessed 23rd or 24th century secret technology to injure the brains of dozens of American diplomats and intelligence assets around the world and to do so, 60 Minutes put together a series of claims so flagrantly unhinged and featured several people so flagrantly unwell.
As always, the most extreme and destructive conspiracy theories come not from the darkest corners of the internet, but from the brightest and most well-financed sectors of corporate media.
And we will examine just this latest extreme example to demonstrate how that is done and the dangers that emerge from it.
But before we get to all that...
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Especially when wars break out between two countries, a lot of ethical and even legal constraints are often dispensed with.
That has, of course, been the case for a long time when it comes to what the Israelis are doing in Gaza.
We've long documented things like the deliberate imposition of mass famine through the blockade of food entering Gaza, the rather indiscriminate use of bombs, including the dropping of 2,000 pound bombs that have killed a greater rate of civilians than any conflict in the 21st century.
But even when that happens, one of the principles of international relations that is most sacrosanct that countries almost never violate is the inviolability of a country's embassy.
Obviously, embassies are something that every country uses.
They're what enables countries to have a diplomatic presence in every other country, which is an absolutely critical factor for preventing war.
Under the laws of every country, the embassies are technically part of not the countries where they're physically located, but the countries To which they belong.
So for example, the Peruvian embassy in South Korea is not South Korean territory, but it's the territory of Peru.
And that means that the countries that host those embassies have no right to enter them, to do anything to them.
And that has been something that even countries that aren't well known for respecting international law have long respected.
When Julian Assange was given asylum by the country of Ecuador, and all that the United States and the UK wanted more than anything was to get their hands on him, they knew exactly where he was.
He was inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
And it's not a very elaborate building.
It's not protected by anything more than a kind of hourly security guard.
It's basically a one or two bedroom apartment that Ecuador rents in order to have its embassy.
And yet there was no way even the British and the Americans would enter that embassy in order to snatch Julian Assange here from Brookings in August of 2012.
Why is Ecuador protecting WikiLeaks' Julian Assange?
So you had a tiny little country like Ecuador that was sitting in the middle of London, and it proclaimed that Julian Assange had the right to be in the embassy where he obtained asylum.
And even though the United States and the British government had insisted that Assange had committed major crimes, they were barred from entering the embassy in London, not by any physical force, obviously, they could just overwhelm the Ecuadorians just with a small police force.
Like I said, the Ecuadorians had at most one or two guards dressed up in a little security outfit.
The British, the Americans, anybody could have just barged into there at any time.
The reason they didn't, however, is because embassies are considered sacred.
Because if the British can invade the Ecuadorian embassy in London by claiming, oh, there's someone inside who's a criminal that we want, who's an endangerment to our national security, which is what the British believe, then of course, any country could invade the British embassy or the American embassy or any other embassy anywhere in the world.
It's sacrosanct, this principle, and for good reason.
So here's, for example, what Brookings Institution, an arm of the U.S.
security state, if ever there was one, was saying about Assange's seeking of asylum in 2012.
in 2012, quote, Assange obviously chose Ecuador's embassy in London for two reasons.
First, because political and diplomatic asylum are a sacred institution among Latin American countries, and as a result, asylum requests are granted.
And secondly, given Ecuador's current government and a relatively hostile relationship with Washington, Assange correctly assumed that he would be granted asylum by a country not in the friendliest terms of the United States.
They're actually At the time the British government had actually threatened to go in there.
The British government's threats to withdraw diplomatic status from Ecuador's mission in London and enter the premises to arrest Assange created such a negative reaction Both inside the United Kingdom and abroad that London was forced to retract them over the weekend.
The British wanted to go in and get a sign, but they couldn't because it was an embassy.
Ecuador's embassy.
Who cares about Ecuador?
The point was this principle was so important, is so important to international relations.
And it's one that Israel decided to utterly obliterate today when it went to Syria and it bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus.
Now, just to underscore before we get to that, just again, the kind of sacrosanct nature of embassies.
In 1984, There was this fascinating event where the Libyan embassy in London had been seized by agents of the Libyan government and they actually used it in 1984 to target people who were both behind the wall and then actually shot people on the street.
Here's the telegraph in 1984.
On this day in 1984, the Libyan embassy seized, triggered by the murder of Yvonne Fletcher, ends.
Quote, on 17 April 1984, around 75 people were behind crowd barriers in St.
James Square.
They were waving placards and chanting slogans against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, President of Libya.
The protesters are mainly students and their demonstrations at the Libyan Embassy were fairly commonplace.
Shortly after 10.15 a.m., a Sterling submachine gun aimed out of the embassy's first floor window fired into the crowd of protesters.
One victim was a 25-year-old police officer, a British police officer.
She was the only fatality of the incident.
Scotland Yard immediately evacuated the area and deployed snipers and armed officers around the square.
Fences were erected to seal off the area and the police settled down for a siege.
On April 23rd, diplomatic relations with Libya were officially severed after a tense 10-day standoff.
On April 27th, the 30 residents of the Libyan embassy were permitted to leave, then immediately expelled from the country.
Their diplomatic immunity meant they could not be searched or questioned.
So again, you have a small country in Libya in the middle of the UK.
And this time you have people inside the embassy shooting at protesters outside.
They killed a British police officer.
Obviously, the British government wanted to go in and arrest them, but they couldn't because they technically weren't inside the United Kingdom.
They weren't on British soil.
They were in Libya, on the Libyan embassy.
And so they circled and circled the British embassy, but they never entered.
Meanwhile, in Libya, Colonel Gaddafi and soldiers loyal to him did the same to the British embassy.
They encircled the British embassy.
They wouldn't let the ambassador leave as collateral for the people inside the British embassy, the Libyan embassy in Great Britain, but both sides respected the sovereignty of that embassy.
Today, however, in Syria, this is from the Wall Street Journal, Israel is blamed for an attack killing an Iranian general in Damascus.
A missile strike hit the Iranian diplomatic building in Syrian capital, Syrian Aransay, risking an escalation of hostilities.
Quote, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard said that seven of its members were killed, including senior military advisors in Syria.
The strike also killed diplomatic staff.
Iran's Ambassador to Syria told reporters, Israel and Iran have engaged in a long-running covert war across the Middle East in which Israel has carried out hundreds of airstrikes targeting Iranian targets and their allies.
Iran has blamed Israel for killing Iranian nuclear scientists and military leaders.
Iran, meanwhile, has built up a network of militias arrayed against Israel in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq.
Quote, we're a new territory.
Israel and Iran have always been engaged in a shadow war, but this is no longer a shadow war.
This is coming out in the open, said Ali Vaiz, the Iran Project Director and Senior Advisor to the President of the International Crisis Group, a conflict resolution organization.
So it's one thing for Iran to kill Iranian soldiers on Syrian soil or Iraqi soil, as they've been doing.
But this was an attack on the Iranian embassy, which is basically an attack on Iran.
And not only does that mean that Iran is now obliged to retaliate, but it means that they're going to want to.
They killed seven Iranian senior soldiers.
Now, the argument of the Israelis, and of course the Israelis, the Americans can always invent theories to justify whatever they do.
The argument is that these weren't regular Iranian forces.
These were members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
Which are deemed to be supporters of terrorism and therefore Israel has the right to act against them, but they're just military soldiers of the sovereign country of Iran.
And the Iranian embassy is considered by everybody to be a legitimate diplomatic location.
So it's essentially as if Israel today bombed Iran.
Now remember, the United States is very much heavily involved in the Israeli war in Gaza.
Over the last week, the Israelis visited Washington and asked for and received billions of dollars more in some of the most sophisticated fighter jets, as well as 2,000 pound bombs of the kind that Israel has been dropping on Gaza that the United States doesn't even use in civilian areas because of how deadly they are.
So at the same time that Joe Biden is pretending for electoral purposes, To be so angry with Israel to have lost his patience with Netanyahu, all these other leaks that we're constantly being subjected to.
The Biden administration is quietly doing exactly what it vowed six months ago it would do, which is giving Israel all of the weapons it wants and needs and requests to carry out the war in Gaza.
And meanwhile, there are all kinds of American military assets deployed in that region explicitly To protect Israel in the event that there's a regional conflict.
And it's not just a theoretical deployment.
It's something that the United States has actually undertaken.
Since October 7th, the United States has bombed Iraq and bombed Syria and bombed Yemen, Iraq and Syria on the basis that there are Iranian forces there that have attacked the United States and of course Yemen because of the retaliatory strikes on commercial shipping.
So the United States is already involved in a regional escalation, as well as the Israeli war in Gaza.
And now, with this serious escalation, with the Israelis bombing the Iranian embassy in Damascus, killing seven senior Iranian military officials, that escalation is almost guaranteed.
And what is always so amazing to me,
It's very common to hear people in the United States, it's very common to hear this on the right, on the Trump-supporting populist right, obviously, it's very common to hear this on the left, for people to say, oh, I really am against endless war, I'm so tired of endless war, I hate the military-industrial complex, they always bring America to war, and yet, there seems to be an implicit belief on the part of a lot of people who say these things, well, I'm really against endless war, except
I want to be involved in the war in Gaza against Hamas.
I want to be involved in the bombing of Syria.
I believe in the bombing of Iraq.
I support the bombing of Yemen.
Joe Biden is the first ever American president to explicitly threaten China with war over Taiwan.
It caused very little objection in bipartisan Washington.
If anything, there's a sense in both parties that we need to be even more confrontational with Beijing.
We're a cold war if not a hot war seems inevitable we have bases essentially encircling China in places like South Korea and Japan and the Philippines and Guam all kinds of new nuclear-armed submarines in Australia and of course there's a lot of people who still believe that we ought to be financing the war in Ukraine so people love to say in principle I'm against endless war I'm tired of the U.S.
military industrial complex and yet the list of countries that people seem very comfortable bombing seems to be quite long.
And I don't think there's going to be much of an anger or objection to bombing the Iranian embassy in Damascus now that Israel did it.
Now, part of the crucial context for this is what's going on in Israel.
As most of you probably know, before October 7th, Benjamin Netanyahu had a serious There was a virtual civil war in Israel over the fact that the Israeli right was trying to remove the power from the Israeli Supreme Court to nullify laws enacted by the Knesset.
And the Israeli center and the Israeli left were saying that that would be to defang the Israeli constitution, to give no checks, to take away all the checks on majoritarian power.
And the Israeli right has been saying that the Supreme Court is an anti-democratic force in Israel because it overrides laws that the majority of people want based on very vague standards, not Like in the U.S., where the Supreme Court does it based on a 250-year body of constitutional law.
But of course, in the U.S., a lot of people believe the Supreme Court is overturning democratic laws, striking down democratic laws unjustly as well.
But in Israel, there's even more of a division.
And on top of that, Netanyahu has a serious corruption or series of corruption trials that he's facing that he's only not involved with because he's currently in power.
And this has always been the concern of a lot of people is that Netanyahu has a heavy personal incentive to continue this war as long as possible because polls overwhelmingly show that the minute the Israelis can, they will remove him from office with a new election.
They hate Netanyahu.
They blame him, remember, for October 7th.
There's still the question of how Israel allowed October 7th to happen without even detecting it.
And of course, the Netanyahu government still bears the blame of that and much else.
So hear from yesterday the New York Times, quote, replace him, thousands rally against Netanyahu's government in Tel Aviv, quote, it was one of the largest demonstrations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government since the start of the war in October.
Just this last week, two very pro-Israel journalists from an Israeli newspaper funded by Miriam Adelson, who is Sheldon Adelson's widow, the billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who was a huge funder of pro-Israel causes before he died, and now his wife is, and she inherited the pro-Israel newspaper they had, dispatched two journalists to Mar-a-Lago to go interview Donald Trump about the war in Israel.
And they walked away extremely concerned by things that Trump said, basically saying, look, the world has turned against you.
This war needs to end.
And then quickly, almost similar to things that they're claiming Joe Biden has been saying.
But the difference, and the New York Times even quoted a One of the most fanatical pro-Israel neocons, John Podoretz, in saying this is while Biden's rhetoric isn't great on Israel from a pro-Israel perspective, his actions are.
He's been giving the Israelis everything they want and need.
Whereas Trump, according to this article and according to the reaction, the pro-Israel Journalists were almost critical of the Israeli government and the Israeli war.
Now, of course, because of how politically damaging that could be, the Trump campaign rushed to clarify that of course Trump supports the war in Gaza and supports whatever the Israeli government is doing, but clearly his instinct was to say this war needs to end.
Now tomorrow we're going to have one of the best experts on all geopolitical questions, Professor John Mearsheimer, who we've had on the show several times before.
He's always one of our most popular guests, and it's the perfect time to have him on to talk about these escalatory risks of what's going on in Israel and Iran, also with the Netanyahu government, also with what's going on in Ukraine.
So tune in tomorrow.
But the concern here really is that Netanyahu, and really Netanyahu alone, has an incentive to prolong this war as much as possible.
And it almost doesn't matter the extent to which the US and the rest of the world wants Israel to end this war finally, because of how catastrophic it is just today.
And I think the facts are a little bit unclear.
But what's not unclear is the fact that aid workers were killed in Gaza, including a British citizen, an Australian citizen, a couple of other foreign nationals.
And you have aid workers who are being killed in famine setting on Gaza.
The entire world wants this war over, except for Netanyahu.
And he has a very personal motive not to want this war to end.
And the fact that the Israelis went and bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus almost ensures some kind of retaliation by Hezbollah in Lebanon, some possible extension of the war into Lebanon, some further reason why this war can't yet end.
And of course, it would be one thing, pretty dangerous, if it were just Israel involved.
But because the United States has, as always, decided to attach itself to the hip with the Israelis, any escalation and escalatory risk involves greater U.S.
involvement as well.
It isn't just the war in Gaza that is continuing to flare with no end in sight, but also the war in Ukraine.
And the most important thing in Washington over the last four or five months has been the difficulty that Joe Biden has had, really six months, in getting approved in Congress another $60 billion.
Joe Biden, before the war in Gaza began, requested $60 billion on top of the $120 billion the U.S.
has already sent.
And that was when there was a fight over the Speaker of the House, and Mike Johnson was elected Speaker of the House, but barely.
And when he was elected, he sent a signal that he would do the bidding of the majority of, not the majority, but certainly a significant portion of the people in the Republican House Congress who don't want any more money going to Ukraine, consistent with what polls show as well.
And it has been a major problem in Washington.
I cannot remember the last time that the United States government, the executive branch, the majorities of all parties wanted to finance a war, a foreign war, and they didn't get their way.
And yet they haven't gotten their way for the last six months, largely because the populist and pro-Trump wing of the Republican Party, led by Trump himself, who says he's opposed to further funding, has held up funding for this war.
And for a long time, the Ukrainians were claiming, oh, we have to get this money or we're going to be run over by the Russians.
There was all kind of propaganda about how poor Ukrainian soldiers And they are poor Ukrainian soldiers, they're people who are being sent to a war in a front line that they cannot win no matter what, are desperately looking at their phones seeing if the 60 billion dollars is coming because they're running out of ammunition, if not drowning in propaganda to get their 60 billion dollars approved.
And now the New York Times says today that Speaker Johnson, and we've reported this before, that he's been telling people in foreign capitals, inside Washington, that he has to be very careful with how he does it because he only has a one-vote margin now as House Speaker.
But there's a very good likelihood that this money is coming soon because he, Mike Johnson, is working, despite the views of his base, to ensure that that $60 billion gets to Ukraine.
And the weapon that Republicans have against this is to say, if you do that, we will withdraw our support for you as House Speaker, and we'll bring you down like we did Kevin McCarthy, and we won't elect another House Speaker.
The problem is that Democrats have made it their priority to get this $60 billion to Ukraine.
That is the Democratic Party's priority.
Not helping American citizens, not working on the border, not improving any of the plagues that are descending upon American communities, but making sure another $60 billion goes to Ukraine.
To the point that they have made clear that even if people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and that wing of the Republican Party withdrew its support for House Speaker Mike Johnson over his willingness to send $60 billion to Ukraine, that they would vote for Johnson and keep him in place as House Speaker anyway, undermining the leverage of The anti-Ukraine war wing of the Republican Party, and as a result, Mike Johnson is now going ahead.
Quote, Johnson outlines plan for Ukraine aid.
The House could act within weeks.
The Republican speaker's proposed conditions for sending a fresh infusion of military assistance to Kiev are the strongest sign to date that he plans to defy critics in his own party and push through the aid package.
Speaker Mike Johnson has begun publicly laying out potential conditions for extending a fresh round of American military assistance to Ukraine, the strongest indication yet that this is about to happen.
That strongly suggests that the aid package for Ukraine, which has been stalled on Capitol Hill for months amid Republican resistance, could clear within weeks.
It enjoys strong support among Democrats and a large coalition of mainstream Republicans.
Isn't it always interesting when it comes to war?
It always enjoys strong support among Democrats and a large coalition of mainstream Republicans constantly told that the two parties can't agree on anything and yet...
As is always true, it's the majority of mainstream Republicans and all Democrats working together in unison to get the $60 billion to fuel this war in Ukraine.
Now they have Mike Johnson willing to do it.
Quote, the main obstacle standing in its way in the House had been Mr. Johnson's refusal to bring it up in the face of vehement hard right opposition in the GOP to sending more aid to Kiev.
Now the question appears to be not whether Mike Mr. Johnson will allow aid to come to the floor, but in what form and when.
As I've always said whenever I've talked about this, I've never seen the military-industrial complex lose in Washington.
Never!
In all the time I've been reporting on what's been going on in Washington.
And it seems clear they're not going to lose here either, because as the New York Times says, it's not a question of whether Mike Johnson will get that $60 billion to Ukraine as Joe Biden wants, but just merely when and how.
Here's one way they're actually considering doing this, just to give you a sense for how desperate they are for how much of a top priority this is to them.
Quote, American officials had previously been skeptical of the idea, namely that what Speaker Johnson is saying they want to do is to seize the assets of wealthy Russians that are held in the international banking system, so that he can tell House members, oh don't worry, we're not paying for the war, we're going to take the money, we're going to seize the assets of wealthy Russians.
Just think about that.
to Ukraine to pay for it.
American officials had been skeptical of the idea, warning that there was no precedent for seizing large sums of money from another sovereign nation, and that the move could set off unpredictable legal ramifications and economic consequences.
Just think about that.
What the United States is about to do to make sure that we send another $60 billion to keep that word going, very well could set off unpredictable legal ramifications and economic consequences.
Meaning, obviously, if the United States and Europe decide to just go around seizing the assets of individual wealthy Russians in the name of financing this war, then the entire economic system is in jeopardy.
Who's going to trust their assets in Western financial institutions?
And that, as the New York Times puts it with great understatement, could set off unpredictable legal ramifications and economic consequences.
But everybody in Washington, more or less, in the mainstream, is willing to have the United States Confront possible economic harm in order to keep this war going.
Quote, only about $5 billion or so of Russian assets are in the hands of US institutions.
More than $300 billion in Russian central bank assets are stashed in Western nations.
But the Biden administration has quickly come around on the idea amid waning financial support for Ukraine.
So they're so desperate, they're now willing to just take money from wealthy Russians to seize their assets with no legal process.
And then say, oh, we're going to use that to pay.
Now, obviously, in order to keep this war going, you have to convince Americans that Russia is really a grave threat to them.
You have to.
Just like when the United States wanted to invade Iraq, it wasn't enough just to convince Americans that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were bad.
They had to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein had actually done something bad to the United States.
In order to get Americans to want to do something bad back to Iraq.
And that was where people like Jeffrey Goldberg came into play when they started publishing articles strongly suggesting that Saddam Hussein had been in an alliance with Al Qaeda and therefore participated in the planning of the 9-11 attack.
And in September of 2003, six months after the war began, 70% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein.
I planned the 9-11 attacks because obviously they were subjected to that kind of propaganda for so long from the very people who are still in power in media and political circles.
On Sunday night, 60 Minutes ran a segment that, you know, I heard about this segment and I watched it this morning and when I watched this morning I said to my colleagues here, you know, we have to show this.
We have to do this.
It's so shockingly deranged.
It's intended to resuscitate a long debunked conspiracy theory called the Havana Syndrome, which was a claim that arose during the Trump administration that the Russians had somehow developed in secret this like 25th century technology from the future that allowed them to direct energy waves into the brains of American citizens, specifically diplomats and intelligence officials stationed in Cuba.
To direct energy waves into their brain through their ears and that they had catastrophic brain injuries.
And the more the media talked about this, the more people deployed overseas began convinced that they had these symptoms because that's how mass psychosis works.
That's how social contagion works.
The more people claim that they're experiencing something, the more other people will convince themselves that they're also experiencing that.
It happens in many, many instances.
And starting back in the Trump administration, NBC News and others started claiming that Russia, as part of this Russia-Fuhrman campaign, had developed this miraculous weapon and that they were using it to attack the brains of these people.
And the more these people heard it in the State Department and the CIA and overseas, the more people started claiming that they have these similar symptoms.
And even the U.S.
government Investigated for years.
The obvious idea was, oh look, Trump is allowing Russia to attack American service members and intelligence officials and State Department officials.
Attacking their brains and he refused to do anything about it because he's in bed with Russia.
But then even the US government investigated it and found that the whole thing was a fiction.
That there were no brain injuries that any of these people had experienced.
They gave them MRIs and every other exam known to modern science.
They concluded that they were creating these symptoms psychosomatically.
It began when a couple of State Department officials heard what they said were very strange high-pitched noises and they ended up matching it perfectly to the sounds emitted by crickets who are common to the Caribbean and Cuba.
But from there, it just snowballed.
But even the U.S.
government has given up on this.
The CIA, the FBI, the State Department all investigated and all concluded that it was a hoax.
And yet 60 Minutes went back last night as the $60 million needs to get to Ukraine over Russia, but also as the U.S.
intelligence agency is gearing up To demanding greater and greater controls over the Internet in the name of Russian disinformation against the 2024 election.
Both of those goals require high levels of fear on the part of American citizens when it comes to Russia.
And so this 60 minute segment.
That was in this tone like they had broken some huge story that they were blowing the lid off of some big cover up in the United States government that in reality.
This crazy weapon existed was broadcast on Sunday night and I watched it and I couldn't believe it as just even just as propaganda.
It is so crazy that it's hard to overstate and I want to show it to you.
But before I do, I just want to show you what the US government's response is.
Obviously the U.S.
security state is eager to ratchet up fears about Russia.
They have no interest in hiding scandals about Russia.
They're constantly leaking fear-mongering about Russia, and yet even they said, in response to 60 Minutes, quote, in response to inquiries from 60 Minutes, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Referred to the intelligence community's annual threat assessment commentary on quote, anomalous health incidents.
Quote, we continue to closely examine anonymous health incidents, AHIs, particularly in areas we have identified as requiring additional research and analysis.
Most intelligence agencies have concluded that it is very unlikely, very unlikely, a foreign adversary responsible For the reported AHIs.
So obviously the intelligence community would love to blame this on Russia.
And even they're saying it's extremely unlikely that this has anything to do with Russia.
And so 60 Minutes has to figure out a way to try and convince people that they should not only be scared of Russia but hate Russia for attacking the United States.
And here's what they came up with.
Tonight, we have important developments in our five-year investigation of mysterious brain injuries reported by U.S.
national security officials.
The injured include White House staff, CIA officers, FBI agents, military officers, and their families.
Many believe that they were wounded by a secret weapon that fires a high-energy beam of microwaves or ultrasound.
This is our fourth story, and for the first time, we have evidence of who might be responsible.
Ooh, who might be responsible for this secret weapon that has injured the brains of American diplomats and CIA operatives overseas, according to them.
The first time we figure out who's to blame, you're never going to guess.
And by the way, I hate April Fool's jokes.
I don't even like to recognize them at the top of the show.
And I said, Good evening, it's April 1st.
You'll notice I didn't even refer to the fact that it's April Fool's.
I hate April Fool's jokes.
So this is not an April Fool's joke, even though it really does seem like it should be.
Let's listen to the rest.
There you see targeting Americans.
Most of the injured have fought for America, often in secret, and they're frustrated that the U.S.
government publicly doubts that an adversary is targeting Americans.
Irresponsible.
She spoke with the FBI's permission, but wasn't allowed to discuss the cases she was on when she was hit.
We have learned from other sources one of those cases involved this Mustang.
Going 110 miles an hour.
In 2020, near Key West, Florida, deputies tried to stop the Mustang for speeding.
It ran 15 miles until it hit spike strips laid in its path.
A search of the car found notes of bank accounts.
Citibank.
Discover Savings.
My God, bank accounts.
Very, very suspicious.
This speeding car.
This whole thing is supposed to be an explanation for how we know that Russia is to blame for this very secret weapon that injured the brain Of this crazy woman who works for the FBI and they're saying she was one of the cases she was assigned to work on was this case of the speeding car and they stopped the speeding car and among the papers were notations of bank accounts and listen to what else.
Five thousand.
And this device that looks like a walkie-talkie can erase the car's computer data including its GPS record.
There was also a Russian passport.
What's your first name?
Vitaly.
V-I-T-A-L-I-I.
Vitaly Kovalev was the driver from St.
Petersburg, Russia, not Florida.
Why did you run?
Let me be honest with you.
I don't know.
You don't know why you ran?
I don't know.
And we don't know why he ran.
But what we learned suggests he was a Russian spy.
What we see here is Vitaly Kovalev fitting... Now, again, this is all supposed to be proof that Russia has a secret weapon that it developed that injured that woman's brain.
Obviously there was nothing in this car that had anything to do with the secret weapon like that.
He was speeding.
He was, he was speeding.
They're like, I'm Russian.
I'm Vitaly.
And that's it.
And now they're about to show you somebody whose credentials they hype up as some great investigator.
And what he actually is, is he's an operative from Bellingcat.
Bellingcat is the outlet that we've reported on many times.
It's funded by The agency is very closely linked to the CIA, from foreign governments as well.
And the U.S. corporate media has decided that Bellingcat is a trustworthy news operation, even though they're funded by the CIA or by agencies very closely linked to the CIA.
This person's name is Krzysztof Grozev.
He's really the only supposedly independent expert that they cite.
And here you see him from his page at Bellingcat when he was a member of Bellingcat Productions, which looks to translate Bellingcat investigations into a range of new media products.
He was the lead Russia researcher at Bellingcat until February 2023 Now what they do always is they have these like exiles or former citizens of countries that hate those countries so when they wanted for example to fabricate intelligence about Saddam Hussein they relied on exiles of Iraq, people who hated the Iraqi government and wanted the United States to overthrow it because that would mean that they would come to power.
They have Iranian dissidents as well that the West loves to use because they hate the government in Tehran and want to overthrow it and reinstall the Shah of Iran, the dictator that the United States and the West implanted and supported for decades.
So they always had these exile communities of people who serve as intelligence agents against America's enemies and they have a kind of ex-Soviet, ex-Russian community of which this person is a part.
And he used to work at Bellingcat and he's their expert.
And listen to his explanation about why it is that we're supposed to now believe that this person is linked to the Russian government and had something to do with this secret weapon.
What we see here is Vitalik Kovalev fitting exactly this formula.
Kristo Grozev is a journalist legendary for unmasking Russian plots.
In 2020, he uncovered the names of the Russian secret agents who poisoned Vladimir Putin's rival, Alexei Navalny.
Grozev is lead investigator for our collaborator on this story, The Insider, a magazine by Russian exiles.
So, he's with this outlet of Russian exiles that obviously is devoted to doing everything possible to undermine the Russian government in the West.
That's, again, the kind of people who manufactured the false intelligence to overthrow the, get the U.S.
to overthrow their arch enemies in Iraq.
Obviously these people want the U.S.
to do everything possible to undermine the Russian government and he used to work at Bellingcat.
And he's now their expert that they're turning to to explain, even though the US government itself has said this whole thing is concocted, as to why it is that we're supposed to believe this guy is connected, or this whole thing is connected to this 25th century secret weapon that the Russians have created.
Trace Vitaly Kovalev.
He studied in a military institute.
He studied radio electronics with a particular focus on use within the military of microelectronics.
He had all the technology know-how that would be required for somebody to be assisting an operation that requires high technology.
And then all of a sudden, after working for two years in a military institute, he up and decides to become a chef.
Kovalev immigrated to the U.S.
and worked as a chef in New York and Washington, D.C., even appearing at Far Left in a TV cooking segment.
But Kovalev was actually a Russian military electrical engineer with a top secret security clearance.
Do you see how these people traffic in the most flagrant conspiracy theories?
Imagine If there was some guy in Russia who decided to move to Russia and he used to work for the U.S.
military in like maintenance, electronic maintenance or something and they were like, oh, it's completely impossible that somebody once they're in the U.S.
military or the U.S.
intelligence could go to a foreign country and then be somehow uninvolved this whole thing is based on this conspiracy that because this guy worked as an engineer with russian in the russian military it's impossible that he decided to move to the united states and become a chef he must be an agent for the russian government and even if you want to believe that we're still not at the point of how any of this has to do with a secret weapon that this chef somehow developed
the u.s government claims it has the russians under extreme intelligence to the point that we know for sure that it was vladimir putin who personally ordered the hacking of the dnc was We know for sure it was Vladimir Putin who personally ordered the killing of Aleksandr Navalny.
We're constantly claiming we know every single thing the Russians are doing and somehow a guy like this and his colleagues under our noses created some secret weapon.
That enables the Russians anywhere in the world to direct energy through the ears into people's brains?
A technology we didn't even know existed?
Here's the rest of their explanation.
Can someone like Kovalev simply decide to drop all of that and become a chef?
It is not an easy job to just leave that behind.
Once you're in the military and you've been trained and the Ministry of Defense has invested in you, you remain at their beck and call for the rest of your life.
We don't know what Kovalev was up to, but our sources say, over months, he spent 80 hours being interviewed by FBI agent Kerry.
who had investigated multiple Russia and a year later when she awoke to the same symptoms in the middle of the night in California.
Now, before I show you more of her and this is so this is the whole thing.
She was investigating.
This guy who was speeding, the chef who was speeding.
And apparently that's supposed to be the motive for why the Russians decided to attack her brain.
She was not on the verge of discovering anything.
And even if she were her knowledge would be institutional knowledge.
It would be, well, what benefit would there be to make her have a bunch of headaches?
Because she was investigating this Russian chef who was speeding near Key West in Florida.
I mean, do you see the intricate conspiracy theories they've weaved?
Now, remember, these are all dependent upon people who work in the government.
Who now have to claim that, like, oh, I started having these weird symptoms in my head, these weird headaches, these debilitating symptoms that no modern science can find.
They've had doctors examine all these people.
They cannot find anything that is happening inside their brains, any kind of brain dysfunction at all.
It's just them claiming that these symptoms they heard on the TV that other people have, that they have themselves.
Now, as you listen to her, I just want to show you that there's this very common dynamic that anyone who's a journalist or any kind of political blogger or writer knows very well, which is that you constantly get emails from people who write very long emails and they claim that they are the victims of things very similar to this, which is that you constantly get emails from people who write very long emails and they claim
They claim they're being gang stalked.
They claim that they are being tortured by all sorts of similar devices of this kind, invisible energy devices directed at their brains.
And it may be true.
But what ends up happening is a lot of people hear about this community of people.
And they write every journalist almost every week with these really long emails trying to insist you have to uncover this.
This is the biggest story ever.
It makes the Snowden story seem minuscule in nature.
And they write you really long emails about how they're being tortured by these invisible energy waves.
They're convinced of it.
And the more they hear other people describing it, there's a lot of people who then have difficulty in life, who struggle in life with depression, with all kinds of symptoms, with headaches.
And they start saying, oh, I must be gang stalked as well.
I must be one of these people who are targeted.
And the New York Times actually wrote a long article on that, because New York Times reporters are among the people whose email inboxes are inundated with them.
When I went around the country, when I was giving speeches and making appearances as part of the Snowden reporting, it was frequent that people who identify as being in this community of people who are being gang-stalked would appear at my events.
And when I did book signings at the end or met people, a lot of them were very menacing and obviously unwell and unhinged.
And they would come up to me and they would say, when are you going to show the part of the Snowden archive about how we're being gang-stalked?
I mean, it's a community of people who believe this.
And they call themselves targeted individuals and they believe that there are these new, unknown, secret weapons that have been invented by the U.S. government that cause them to feel extreme pain in their brains.
The New York Times wrote an article headlined, The United States of Paranoia.
They see gangs of stalkers.
Quote, nobody believed him.
His family told him to get help.
But Timothy Trusbiss, an out-of-work recording engineer in his early 40s, was sure he was being stalked, and not just by one person, but dozens of them.
He would see the operatives, he said, disguised as ordinary people lurking around his Midtown Manhattan neighborhood.
Sometimes they bumped into him and whispered nonsense into his ear, he said.
Quote, now you see how it works, they would say.
At first, Mr. Trespass wondered if it was all in his head.
Then he encountered a large community of like-minded people on the internet who called themselves, quote, targeted individuals, or TIs, who described going through precisely the same thing.
And so these people would meet each other and become convinced that they all share common symptoms, because we're social animals.
We can connect to one another and become convinced that what other people's experiences are, our experiences are well.
That's what social contagion is.
Or mass psychosis, another not as nice word for it.
And here was a YouTube video that the New York Times featured of some of the people who claimed to be part of this community.
The most important thing in life will always be the people in this room.
So is it New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania on the screen, Connecticut. - I like it.
President Obama and citizens of the world.
We are G.I.s!
Targeted individuals.
And law-abiding citizens being targeted.
Every day of our lives.
By all levels of government and outside agencies.
Using military grade, highly sophisticated.
And harmful technologies designed to destroy our lives.
For absolutely no reason at all.
Support us in ending our torture now!
Hi, my name's Terry.
I'm a registered nurse.
I'm a TI.
I'm Tom.
I'm a TI.
I'm Mary, and I'm a T.I.
Hi, my name is Julie, and I'm a registered nurse, and I am a T.I.
Hello, I'm Gloria, I'm a grandmother of four, an entrepreneur, I'm a T.I.
Hi, my name is Denise, I'm an entrepreneur, and I'm a T.I.
Hi, my name is Karma, I'm a grandmother, I'm a nurse, and I am a T.I.
Hi, my name is Franz, a co-entrepreneur, I'm a T.I.
Hi, my name is Steve, I'm a proud father of two, and I am a TI.
We are TI's Targeted Individuals.
- Move us. - Now, as I said, I've heard from these people for years and I have no doubt about their sincerity.
They really do believe that whatever difficulties they face in their life, they face because they have been targeted with this secret technology, as they just explained, and they're being tortured.
Now, obviously the point of the New York Times article was to mock these people, to make them sound like they were crazy.
These are crazy people.
Who just start copying one another.
And most people who get emails from them do believe they're crazy.
You end up blocking them or sending their emails automatically to spam because they're convinced, but you can't prove any of their symptoms.
But they insist that they have them, that they're being stalked by technology that the government is using to torture them.
Now, this is exactly what these people sound like, who are insisting that the Russians have targeted their brains with this secret technology.
Listen to them.
Russia and a year later when she awoke to the same symptoms in the middle of the night in California.
It felt like I was stuck in this state of like disorientation, not able to function.
What is happening?
And my whole body was pulsing.
Mark Zaid is Russia.
Vitaly Kovala.
By the way, that Mark Zaid there is their lawyer.
He's the lawyer representing most of these people.
You can go on to Twitter.
He's like Nina Yankovic or he's like any of these crazy resistance liberals who spend all day long on Twitter saying that Donald Trump is a fascist and he's in bed with Putin.
That's their lawyer.
The lawyer in Washington who's running around saying, no, the Russians have attacked their brain.
Here's the rest of this article about what happened to the guy who was speeding.
Kovalev served his time and in 2022 went back to Russia, ignoring American warnings that he was in danger because he'd spent so much time with the FBI.
Kristo Grozev found this death certificate from last year, which says Kovalev was killed at the front in Ukraine.
Do you think Kovalev was sent to Ukraine as a punishment?
One theory is that he was sent there in order for him to be disposed of.
Is Kovalev really dead or is this another cover story?
That is a very good question and we actually worked on both hypotheses for a while.
I do believe at this point that he was dead.
I mean it goes on like this they had a couple other people talking about the similar symptoms that they had and you'll notice there's zero evidence.
It's all this like multi connecting the dots conspiracies about some Russian who is speeding and again They claim, some Bellingcat guy claims that he was a mechanical engineer and that means what?
That he was capable of developing this secret weapon that even the U.S.
intelligence community, in protecting their people, investigated, concluding, and concluded did not happen.
Now, here is the report from BioRIX in 2019, which was the first sign that this was all just the Unhinged ramblings of some obviously unwell people who work for the FBI and the State Department, where they recorded the sounds that they believed they were hearing.
They were like, oh my god, I hear the weapons, and they recorded them, and they turned it over to the government, and the government gave it to these independent researchers who published their findings, and what they found was this, quote, recording of sonic attacks, end quote, scare quotes, On U.S.
diplomats in Cuba spectrally matches the echoing call of a Caribbean cricket.
So you have like women like that, like that crazy woman who's like, I'm feeling disoriented and the Russians are, and they recorded the sounds and they're like, here, we got the sounds on tape and they matched it to the sound.
Here from the Jason Report in November 2018, quote, the most likely source of the sound is the Indy short tail cricket.
The call of this animal matches in nuanced detail the spectral properties of the recordings from Cuba once room echoes are taken into account.
A possible explanation for the reported symptoms is psychogenic illness, in part because the science is weak to declare any causal links from RF or acoustic weapons to brain injury without prior baseline measurements and a control group of similar background.
It is also worth noting the psychogenic effects on vestibular function are common.
And the symptoms can be chronic.
In other words, it's common that people who have symptoms of this kind start imagining them because they're hearing them from other people.
This is a government report that covers a lot of the same, that obviously takes from the same report of the audio report, but then goes further and pretty much clearly implies strongly that these people are psychosomatically creating these symptoms.
Quote, although the JAMA paper dismisses such a dizziness theory, Jason believes psychogenic effects may serve to explain important components of the reported symptoms.
Now, just this last month, The Washington Post, actually, sorry, it was last year, March 1st, 2023, so last year, about a year ago.
They have this, quote, Havana syndrome not caused by energy weapon or foreign adversary intelligence review finds, quote, after a year's long assessment, five U.S.
intelligence agencies conclude it is very unlikely an enemy wielding a secret weapon was behind the mystery ailment.
The mysterious ailment known as Havanda Syndrome did not result from the actions of a foreign adversary, according to a U.S.
intelligence report that shatters a long-disputed theory that hundreds of U.S.
personnel were targeted and sickened by a clandestine enemy wielding energy waves as a weapon.
Seven intelligence agencies participated in the review of approximately 1,000 cases of quote, anomalous health incidents.
The term the government uses to describe a constellation of physical symptoms, including ringing in the ears, followed by pressure in the head and nausea, headaches and acute discomfort.
Five of those agencies determined it was, quote, very unlikely that a foreign adversary was responsible for the symptoms, either as the result of purposeful actions such as a directed energy wave weapon or the byproduct of some other activity, including electronic surveillance that unintentionally could have made people sick, the official said.
Now, obviously the fact that the intelligence community says it's not true doesn't prove it's not true.
But they've had all kinds of research into these people, including reports that they're incapable of finding any irregularities in their brains, in their biological organism.
And you can hear these people, these symptoms are very vague and it's very easy to see how you can talk yourself into these symptoms if you turn on the TV and you hear that Russia It's very common.
I was just talking to some ER health provider last week who was explaining to me how common it is when people who get into the emergency room, and if they're not taken quickly enough, immediately start creating other symptoms because of the anxiety and the fear that they're not being attended to quickly enough, that they're dying in the ER.
And these symptoms are real.
These people aren't lying.
They feel these symptoms, but they're created by the brain.
And so if you hear enough times on NBC News and we've gone over these reports so many times over 2019 and 2020 Russia is attacking the brains this mysterious weapon of through the ear and you have these women like this being like I have headaches and I got dizzy and I had pain in my head.
Obviously a lot of people can convince themselves that they have it.
And lots of U.S.
government reports, including many more than we just read, indicate that's what happened here.
In fact, we have done very extensive shows on the Havana Syndrome over the years and presented all of the evidence comprehensively from inside the government, from individual researchers, people who cannot find any explanation other than things like when these people recorded what they claim was the sound of the weapon, it matched an exotic cricket common to that region.
But you do need, if you're going to do things like get another $60 billion to Ukraine, or try and get Americans afraid enough of what Russia is doing online to justify even more control over the internet in the name of stopping them, you do need elevated fears of Russia in the minds of the American people.
And 60 Minutes and American liberals have made Russia that enemy and are more than happy to bolster using insane conspiracy theories whenever they can.
Hear from the New York Times just a few days ago.
Russia is amping up their online campaign against Ukraine before the US elections.
Moscow has found better ways, better ways to conceal influence operations that spread arguments for isolationism, officials and experts say.
Now, think about what this means.
Isolationism is the ideology that's obviously growing in the United States.
It's both on the left and the right, meaning we're against endless wars of the United States government, like the war in Iraq, like the war in Afghanistan, like the war in Libya, in Syria, like the war in Ukraine.
And here's the New York Times claiming, based, of course, on U.S.
intelligence reports and intelligence agencies from other countries, that the reason why Americans are turning against wars is because of Russian disinformation.
So anybody now who stands up and advocates what the New York Times calls isolation is going to be accused of spreading Russian disinformation, of acting on behalf of the Russian government.
This is what they do to all dissent, all dissent.
immediately gets characterized as pro-Russian disinformation.
Quote, Russian operatives are laying the groundwork for what could be a stronger push to support candidates who oppose aiding Ukraine or who call from pulling the United States back from NATO and other alliances, U.S.
officials and independent researchers say.
The result is that much of the original speech is First Amendment protected, say a member of Congress declaring that resources being sent to Ukraine should instead be used to patrol the southern border of the United States.
But the amplification is engineered in Russia or by Russian influencers.
So if you're somebody who believes that the $60 million that Mike Johnson is about to help Joe Biden send to the war in Ukraine would be better spent at home helping to improve the lives of the American people, The New York Times is willing to grant that maybe you're engaged in First Amendment speech by saying that, but it's very likely that the reason you're amplifying that view is because you're a pro-Russian influencer or spreading disinformation engineered in Russia.
Do you see what they're trying to do?
To link any dissent to the Kremlin to characterize any opposition to the endless war doctrines of the US government and both political parties in Washington as anti-American or pro-Russian disinformation?
Quote, researchers at Althea, an anti-disinformation company, have identified a group affiliated with the GRU that is using hard-to-detect techniques to spread similar messages on social media.
A report by Althea echoed a recent assessment by American intelligence agencies.
I mean, we always point this out, but the minute you start looking at how often the New York Times writes articles That are based on recent assessment by American intelligence agencies, you really start to see how much corporate media is designed to just be a propaganda outlet for U.S.
intelligence agencies, citing recent intelligence by American intelligence agencies that said Russia would continue to quote, better hide their hand while conducting influence operations.
Quote, the network demonstrates an evolution of Russian objectives with their information operations.
Lisa Kaplan, the firm's founder and chief executive, said in an interview, quote, where the Russians previously sought to sow chaos, now they appear to be singularly focused on influence democracies to elect candidates that do not support sending aid to Ukraine, which in turn supports isolationist, protectionist candidates and policies.
It's just so transparent.
That the policies that official Washington hates most, isolationism, meaning opposition to endless war, and protectionism, meaning opposition to globalism and free trade, just so happen to be now things that the Russians are supposedly promoting.
So that if you stand up and support either one of these anti-establishment ideologies, automatically you are by definition promoting Kremlin disinformation.
And all of this, of course, is geared up to justifying why it is that the U.S.
government needs to have their paws even more deeply into removing content from the Internet, something that the U.S.
Supreme Court is likely about to ratify and endorse when I believe they will rule.
The US government has the right to do things like they were doing, picking up the phone and influencing big tech to remove dissent.
All of this is designed, as we head into the 2024 election, to elevate fear of Russia, both in order to justify why we have to fund the war in Ukraine, but also to ensure that whatever domestic powers are invoked in the name of stopping the Kremlin Seems like it has real validity.
And obviously the 2016 election was dominated by this narrative.
The 2020 election was dominated by this narrative.
And the 2024 election will be as well.
And just to leave no doubt about what the New York Times' real intentions are, It ends with this, quote, American intelligence agencies do not believe the Kremlin has begun its full-blown influence effort.
Mr. Putin will probably shift at some point from the anti-Ukraine messaging to influence operations that more directly support the candidacy of former President Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
So I don't know why they bothered to work their way around this so indirectly when it was so obvious they were saying all along, oh, Russia.
Is using disinformation to get you to support candidates who are more isolationist, who question NATO, who question the war in Ukraine.
Obviously all along they were saying that if you are a supporter of Donald Trump or if you don't support Joe Biden, it means that you're on the side of the Kremlin.
The propaganda really is this flagrant and this obvious.
It's just usually it's a little bit more subtle than inventing stories about secret Russian weapons that got directed into the brains of American diplomats and intelligence operatives that no modern science can actually find.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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