Snowden: UFO Balloons 'Engineered Panic' To Distract From Nordstream Revelations
Former NSA whistleblower has gone on record accusing the US government of engineering the "balloon wars" scare to detract attention away from Seymour Hersh's explosive investigative report detailing how the US White House plotted and blew up the Nord Stream pipelines - an act of terrorism or war against Russia and Germany. Also today: wasting millions to shoot down phantom balloon "threat." And US to send propaganda special forces into Ukraine.
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you today.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you today?
Doing well.
Doing well.
Good, good.
So we get to play with balloons again.
I wonder if they're having fun.
Target practice, you know, and burn up, but they're up high.
It probably won't even pollute my show when they run all those jets up there and shoots down the balloons.
But anyway, there's stuff to be thought about and what's really going on.
I don't think anybody has the, somebody has the final answer, but I don't think it's out in the open.
We can analyze the best we can.
But I want to start off with, you know, a Zero Hedge article, which we frequently do.
Snowden says UFO hysteria is engineered distraction from Nord Stream pipeline bomb cell.
Now that we reported on the bombshell, and that is a story in itself.
And I would see why somebody might not want that out in the open.
And they'd rather talk about balloons, you know, sky high.
Nobody knows, they can make up any story they want.
Shoot them down.
You can't find what you shot down.
I mean, the whole thing is crazy.
The pipeline, and it's been analyzed.
You know, Hirsch analyzed this and told us exactly what happened.
And I believe what he wrote until proven otherwise.
But he's a believable person.
He never got the orders about, you know, objectivity is a dangerous thing for COVID and teaching people what to do.
You've got to fudge a little bit.
None of this objectivism.
So he never got the message.
And he tells us a different story about it.
We should be concerned about that pipeline bomb because he even took the risk of being really canceled because he indicted United States.
And what's sad is it's becoming more believable.
You know, in the old days, when they should have been believing things, people say, I don't want to believe that.
I was part of that.
I don't want to believe that, believe that.
But now it's getting where it's believable, which means it's good that people are waking up, but at the same time, it's sad that it's that bad of a situation.
It is.
And let's put up this first clip because this is from Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News via Zero Hedge.
And here you see the headline again.
Snowden says, UFO hysteria is engineered distraction from Nord Stream Pipeline Bombshell.
That's the first thing that we thought.
Here's his tweet where he spells it out.
If we can put the next one up that came late yesterday, he said, it's not aliens.
I wish it were aliens, but it's not aliens.
It's just the old engineered panic, an attractive nuisance, ensuring national security reporters get assigned to investigate balloon BS rather than budgets or bombings, a la Nordstream.
Until next time.
So that's a very astute observation from someone who's in a position to understand how these things work, obviously.
I think what it does do, Dr. Paul, is it shows how devastating Seymour Hirsch's investigative reporting was when he discovered exactly how it was done and he reported it clearly because you can see it from the reaction.
The first thing we talked about it last week, they ignored it.
No such thing.
Seymour Hirsch never heard of him.
It's just some guy.
Like Reuters said, some blogger, you know, some blogger.
On the second one, they try to discredit Seymour Hirsch.
Oh, he's a conspiracy theorist.
Oh, he's past his prime.
Oh, he always gets it wrong.
Well, that's one thing that he doesn't do because he's so careful.
And now it looks like, in a panic, because it's not working, they're trying to do a distraction of shooting down balloons over American soil.
Nobody knows what they are.
It hasn't been the policy in the past to shoot down balloons without even knowing what they are.
So something is very fishy, and I think hopefully most Americans are smelling the fishiness of this.
You know, Hurst is an interesting person.
You think, well, how does he get so lucky?
How can he find people?
Because generally he takes interviews from people that end up giving him the truth.
But you know what?
He's so old-fashioned, you know, about verifying it.
You don't take one rumor and decide that is the answer.
He probably talked to two or three, and something like that.
He may have gotten verification from two or three, at least two.
But he's old-fashioned.
And that's how he stayed out of trouble.
Some people don't think in those terms, but if trouble is the destruction of your character and your credibility, yes, he's protecting himself because he certainly has it.
And he's telling us what's going on.
And that shouldn't go away because it was so insane.
And it was, you know, when it first spoke, we just said, you know, it makes no sense.
And then we thought, well, Germany wouldn't do it.
Here they're involved in the mess too.
And they rationalized it.
So that to me is, you know, very interesting.
And Snowden, we respect for telling the truth and suffered a lot because he did tell the truth.
And he's letting us know it's just a bunch of hysteria.
And he's still able to keep up with his following what the deep state's doing.
Yeah, you make a really good point.
And you use an important word.
These are two people that have been known for telling the truth.
And that's what the reputation is staked on.
Now, if Seymour Hirsch's entire career had been just sending out conspiracy theories, we wouldn't pay as much attention when something dropped.
I mean, we know people that are famous for spreading conspiracy theories, and you always take it with a grain of salt.
But he's developed his reputation at great cost to his own professional career, because now the big media doesn't want to publish him anymore because of it.
And the same is true, obviously, with Ed Snowden.
You know, he's had to give up his entire country because he wanted to tell the truth.
So they have a lot of weight when they say something, and it carries a lot of weight.
And here's something interesting about Snowden.
If we put this next one up, here he is chiding the U.S. government.
And this is from the same article.
He says, as we previously highlighted, Snowden chided the White House's denial that it was involved in the pipeline attack by pointing out it also denied previous false flags.
And here's Snowden.
Can you think of any example from history of a secret operation that the White House was responsible for but strongly denied?
He tweeted.
Besides, you know, that little mass surveillance kerfuffle, he added.
And here's another important point.
Snowden included a UPI news report from April 1961.
I'm sure you remember this, Dr. Paul, in which U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk denied that the Bay of Pigs had been staged from American soil, with Rusk telling the media, the Cuban affair was one for the Cubans themselves to settle.
So his point here is that they lie and they lie and they lie again throughout history.
So the default should be that they're lying this time.
You know, a spy story I didn't want to believe because I was in the military.
It was the early 60s.
And it was the story about the U-2, you know, being shot down.
Eisenhower was president at the time of the incident.
But he started off with a lie.
And that was disappointed.
I was.
Because later on, he had to admit the truth.
Yes, we did have a spy plan, especially when they had to pilot.
So they will.
They'll lie, cheat, and steal.
And that's what they're taught in school.
Eisenhower's Deception00:02:48
You know, if you're going to be involved in Espigna in this business, so you have to know how to handle it.
So, but you know, I can't even keep up with the numbers.
The big one was the beginning.
And who knows exactly?
Oh, I don't think they're finding all those parts yet.
And then there's a lot of little ones, which probably, you know, whatever they're going to turn out to be, and even if they're balloons, they're probably incidental and probably have been around and nobody even cared about it.
But now, if they're right, this is a distraction.
And I think that's a useful tool.
But the other thing we, all Americans, should be concerned about: well, is it really, really necessary to do all this to make us safe?
Yeah.
Or is some of this going to make us less safe?
Well, I think one thing for sure is going to make us more poor because it costs a lot of money.
Even what was it?
You know, the one that was shot off at Lake Huron missed it, missed at the cost of $400,000.
Trump change.
So there's a cost to it, but the real cost is the deception that goes on, and people still not knowing who to believe.
Yeah.
Well, Hirsch doesn't usually talk to the media at all.
And we remember when Hirsch broke the Abu Grabes story, we wanted to have him come and speak to our Thursday lunch.
And at the time, it seemed a little ungracious.
He said, I already gave it the office, you know.
But the point he was making is that, look, this is how I do my work.
I don't want to talk about it.
I'll let my work speak for itself.
So it was very unusual that he gave an interview with Mark Ames of the War Nerd.
Mark Ames is also a very astute observer and writer.
He also knows Hirsch.
So he gave him an interview and talked a little bit about how it felt to be demonized by his former colleagues.
And it must be amazing.
You know, he's in the latter stages of his career.
He's been writing and doing this for 50 years, probably at least.
And now, can you imagine what it looks like to look over the landscape of the American media?
And here's what he said.
It's amazing to me how they fall into line, my colleagues, said Hirsch, referring to the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Those are his two previous employers who now just fall in line with the government propaganda.
And when Hirsch steps up to debunk it, they don't want to have anything to do with him.
In fact, they ridicule him and criticize him.
Yeah, it reminds me of what's going on and what has gone on with COVID.
The doctors falling in line, the ones that are on us, and are criticized by the ones who, you know, just bow to them and they do it and they switch over and they do all these things.
Chinese Balloons and Propaganda00:14:25
So it's a technique, it's a philosophy now.
And that, to me, is this whole idea that truth is not something you should seek.
And I think it's astounding about that information that literally in law schools they teach you and try to condition you where objectivity is hurting the promotion of wokeism.
You can't do anything with that.
So that to me is a real shame.
But they say that truth wins out in the end.
And let's hope, well, let's encourage it.
Yeah.
Well, you alluded to the cost, and that is a big deal because they're not taking out these balloons with P-shooters or BB guns or airsoft guns.
No, they are going whole hog on this.
Let's put this next one up, this next article, because they're sidewinder missiles, and these are expensive pieces of military equipment.
First Sidewinder missile targeting object over Lake Huron missed at a cost of $400,000.
They sent up F-16s firing Sidewander missiles at a cost of half a million bucks each.
The first one missed.
They're heat-seeking missiles.
Conservative commentator Bill Mitchell made a good observation.
If you put that next one on, this is a tweet that he wrote.
And this, again, this should smell fishy.
This should make you think something is going on here beyond Chinese sending 100 balloons over our country.
So here's Bill Mitchell.
He says, the Lake Huron balloon, which is an octagonal object, was at just 20,000 feet.
So why did our fighters use heat-seeking $400,000 Sidewander missiles to shoot it down when a few cannon rounds could have done the job?
Balloons don't have a heat signature, and a missile is overkill.
I don't know what the answer is, but something is weird is going on with this.
Well, I can't be surprised.
I mean, it's still disgusting, but in reality, these are the facts, and that's why it's so important that we get the people to get the facts out.
This is what helps shift people's minds, whether it's the nonsense going on in our schools and on lockdown and all things.
But the nonsense, the big nonsense, I really think is the things that affects the foreign policy.
And Ed Snowden has been in that business.
He was annoyed when he was a very young man.
Now he's probably middle-aged since time flies by.
So he was seeking the truth and became a no person, a non-person.
But on that next one, because when they shot the first balloon down, I was kind of half-joked on Twitter, I bet $100 they're never going to recover this.
It's going to be just like Bin Laden's body.
Oh, we killed him on us, wink, wink.
Out of respect for Muslim customs, we tossed him off the side of the boat, put this next one up, and someone owes me $100 because this is from that same article.
From all of those intercept incidents, the U.S. and Canadian militaries are still working to recover all of the downed debris.
So we have no idea what these were.
I read a tweet from a weatherman who'd been working for 40 years in the business, a meteorologist.
He said that these are most likely U.S. weather balloons that they're shooting down.
Because he analyzed the patterns of how they go and we put up these weather balloons.
We've done it in the past.
We've put up weather balloons.
We've shot down these balloons.
We put them up over elsewhere.
And speaking of that, our next one is, if we can put on the next clip, we sent them over China.
So they sent them over ours.
We sent them over there.
And all of a sudden, it's a major national security set.
This is anti-war.com writing that China says the U.S. sent 10 balloons over its territory since last year.
You know, this idea that they may be shooting down our balloons is, it again suggests an analogy between, you know, the virologists and the lockdown people.
You know, now they're starting to say, hey, maybe these vaccines aren't working so well.
But we have to be prepared for the next one.
Oh, there's not too many around.
Let's create them.
So this way, if there's not enough balloons to deal with and declare that they're the enemy, then they have to create them and they put up their own balloons.
You know, it's a pretty good analogy that Snowden makes.
It's a distraction.
It certainly is.
It got a lot of attention.
And Nord Stream hasn't been in the news for a week.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that is a big story.
And that to me is, to me, it's Russian property.
And It's so clear-cut aggression that, but nobody seem to care too much.
I think it's equivalent, and we in the United States would consider that equivalent to an attack on the United States if that happened, you know, even if it was not right in the United States, you know.
But it would be clearly an attack on the United States, and this is a clear, yeah, this was a clear attack on Russia by us blowing up that line.
And it looks like, you know, even from that Nord Stream, the loss of that, some of the people that, well, why did they want to do this to the people?
Why did the Germans go along?
Look at what it hurt, how it hurt their people.
So it just seems so irrational on what they do.
But poor tends to be that way.
Yeah, yeah, it does.
Well, thank our friends at anti-war, that article that we had up.
They make a good point because most Americans right now are distracted by this and they would have the idea that this balloons are so novel.
Those crafty Chinese are figuring out ways to spy.
They're putting balloons.
Well, I think it was probably Dave DeCamp that wrote this piece because he always does great work.
But he points out in this article, he links to it.
In July of 2022, Politico reported that the Pentagon was planning to deploy surveillance balloons to use against China and Russia.
The report said the high-altitude inflatables flying at between 60 and 90,000 feet would be added to the Pentagon's extensive surveillance network.
So we in 2022 were sending them over those countries.
And then in 2019, the Pentagon tested surveillance balloons by launching 25 inside the United States from South Dakota.
So this whole balloon thing is nothing new.
We launched it over their territory.
Maybe they launched it over ours.
Maybe there's a mix of weather balloons or something else involved in it.
Well, whatever the case, the Chinese are a little bit cheesed off over the whole thing.
Put on this next clip.
I mean, what are you guys doing?
What are you smoking over there?
And if we put on that next one, Wang, and that's a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry.
Wang said the U.S. decision to shoot down the balloon with an F-22 was an overreaction.
He said, quote, we do need to point out, however, that the U.S.'s downing of the unmanned airship with advanced missiles is a trigger-happy overreaction.
Many in the U.S. have been asking, what good can such a costly action possibly bring to the U.S. and its taxpayers?
Those communist Chinese are more worried about wasting our tax money in their own government.
You know, the question I would ask if I came across a real expert on all this space operation would be, don't we have satellites up there taking pictures of plates and targeting certain people on the street corners and all this technology?
So it doesn't even seem to have any practical use, you know, to send the spy balloon.
Well, it's just floating around.
You know, he can't be very specific.
And the way that one balloon went didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.
It looked like it was something that they lost control of.
But I think they watch every single thing.
Maybe it's a distraction on how much they really watch us from the satellites.
And if we think if we're complaining about $400,000 shoot, Don, how much does it cost us to put up all those satellites?
It's more than one satellite, let me tell you.
Yeah, no kidding.
Well, let's move on to the next one.
This is our friend Caitlin Johnstone, who spoke at one of our conferences, one of the good progressives.
If we can put this next one up, this is a piece that she put out today.
I think it was late yesterday, a couple days ago.
Pentagon wants to return special ops propagandists to Ukraine.
And she's referring to the next clip, if we can put it up.
This is from the Washington Post, where democracy does die in darkness.
Pentagon looks to restart top secret programs in Ukraine.
So we're going to put in U.S. special ops, and you had it right, Dr. Paul.
Your first reaction was, uh-uh, CIA, you mean, back into Ukraine to start operating.
But as Caitlin points out, this is not just about blowing stuff up.
Put on this next one, because this is a professor I think up in Canada, Ivan Kachato, Tachanovsky.
He comments as well on this article saying that social media warfare, U.S. special operations, quote, before the invasion, U.S. special ops troops were running two irregular warfare surrogate programs in Ukraine.
In one, we had people take, this is a quote from the Washington Post article, we had people taking apart Russian propaganda and telling the true story on blogs.
So I'm sorry that was a mouthful, but the point is they're sending in propagandists to go in there and create propaganda to then go ahead and re-broadcast back to the U.S. You know, but we don't put troops in, we don't put our troops over there in another country.
That would be an invasion.
So we send the troops, and it sounds like that's military.
And then, of course, my suggestion was the CIA always accompanies the troops.
And they all, it's a mixture.
And it's not like, oh, well, this is different.
We are stopping World War III, and that's why we have to deal with those Ukrainians, and we have to make sure that Russia stops.
They want to do this, and the CIA is incentive.
But we're in like 120 countries.
It's all part of the big picture of, you know, not only do we send the troops in, of course, a coup was already.
I was going to mention the significance of coups.
Well, this whole mess started with a coup in 2014, you know, by us going in and saying, hey, you know, this guy that just got elected, we don't like him.
And we've done that not infrequently.
Yeah.
Is that somebody gets elected and we have our candidate up.
He doesn't get elected.
So all of a sudden he's a bad guy.
You know, even in Vietnam, they did that with Diem.
You know, he was on our side all of a sudden, and they finally have to assassinate Diem.
Made the wars worse.
So all this stuff makes things worse.
Just because they don't go back to the basic principle that we preach.
And that is non-intervention.
Non-intervention is superior to having an aggressive army that thinks they belong and they have a responsibility to maintain an empire.
And that is the attitude I think is bad.
But now, of course, we see signs now that the American people are starting to say, hey, maybe we shouldn't be spending that much.
That's why, you know, sometimes a small amount of money, how much you pay for a hammer or something, has more impact.
So this one number that you suggest, you recited was the $400,000.
Something like that, because they can't understand.
I can't even comprehend how, you know, if we had $100 bills, could we get a trillion dollars in this room?
No, no way.
So it's just a whole mess that we have.
And I say it's because our foreign policy hurts us, just like some of these things.
Why did they blow up?
The pipeline is hurting some other people that were supposedly their friends.
So you say, yes, but it could get worse.
We have to do it.
Some of them, they claim that there's a lot of danger over there.
And if we're not careful, we let Russia run over all of West Europe, all of Europe.
That's going to be World War III right there.
Oh, yeah, and we did everything we could to stop it.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, sending in these propagandists, they're going to fight disinformation.
I think it's a reflection of the Warhawks in D.C. being concerned that they're losing control of the narrative, and they think that they can capture it again.
So that's something to keep an eye on, something to be upset about spending our money.
I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul, if you don't mind.
And this is something that I, thanks to our friend Larry Johnson, who put this up on his blog, sonar21.com, which I highly recommend.
Actually, not that one.
I don't have a clip for it.
But I just wanted as my closing to mention.
Something that's happened over the past 24 hours that is alarming.
It alarmed me when I read it, and Larry reminded me of it because he put out a blog post.
And this all happened yesterday.
The French foreign ministry urged its citizens to leave Belarus without delay.
Canada urges its citizens to leave Belarus immediately because of the risk of arbitrary application of local laws, etc.
And then the U.S. on Monday, which was yesterday, issued a top-level advisory telling American citizens to leave Russia immediately and to cease travel to the country.
So this is, and they talk about because of a danger of terrorism.
This is pretty alarming, Dr. Paul.
I think we should all be alarmed and keep an eye out.
They're losing.
That is NATO is losing this war.
And when they're losing, they have no exit ramp.
So it's a time for desperation.
So keep an eye out.
Things are not looking good for the NATO alliance right now.
And they can do anything.
And they're meeting right now as we speak.
So I want to thank everyone for watching the show.
Back to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
Dealing With Property Rights00:02:21
I just want to mention that if you're looking for a shortcoming of the EPA, it's not too hard to find one.
Just go to Ohio.
EPA is supposed to help keep our environment clean.
And they have a lot of regulations and rules.
And they're supposed to provide all this purity of air.
But, you know, there was a train crash.
Trains are so old-fashioned, you know, in a way, especially our trains are old-fashioned compared to other countries.
And it was filled with chemicals, very dangerous, and a lot of fires going on.
And it does seem dangerous.
But it was, in a way, it was in total control of federal government regulators.
And I don't know what the details are.
I can't accuse anybody of all.
But the responsibility, it is assumed that the EPA was there.
I think they very frequently fail in their tasks.
We ought to question whether or not the EPA does a lot of good or whether or not private property ownership with the responsibility of any injury and the liability of this might be a better way to go.
And I think there is a better way to go.
When it's dealing with sovereignty and it's dealing with property rights and contract rights, you can protect the environment.
But right now, this is a disaster.
Call the EPA director and see what he can do about it, which is being facetious, of course, because it's a sad tragedy.
Who knows what all this?
I think I read one official saying, you know, but we don't think there's much pollution, you know, in what's happening.
You saw the fire.
What a tragedy.
But once again, I like to present the bigger picture, and that is a philosophic answer, and that is liberty.
Liberty can solve our problems if there's respect for property, and that's where we have fallen short, because these problems can be solved, and it will not be perfect.
But government management, collectivism, and spending money on every problem does not work.
That's authoritarianism, and it's exactly the opposite of libertarianism.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.