An Israeli online advertising company implicated in spyware attacks targeting internet users was heavily active on SpaceX’s Starlink service, Japanese researchers have found, bolstering claims that the firm was running a “targeting and tracking” operation masquerading as a commercial advertising business.
Earlier this month, Canadian cybersecurity watchdog Citizen Lab and New York-based ad security firm Confiant published extensive investigations identifying Discover-Tech, an Israeli advertising technology company, as a middleman helping spyware firms, including Candiru and Intelos, as well as a little-known US-linked operator known as Dark Cartographer, track internet users and potentially infect their devices without their knowledge.
Discover-Tech’s operation involved purchasing advertising space on hundreds of thousands of websites and apps, using ads to collect information about users who viewed them, and making the data available to spyware companies. Those firms could then identify specific targets and potentially install spyware on their devices through malicious advertising code.
Despite presenting itself as a commercial operation, Discover-Tech concentrated much of its advertising spending on markets that would be of limited interest to conventional advertisers. Of 228 countries and territories examined, Palestine was the most heavily targeted, despite its population having severely limited access to Western goods and relatively little purchasing power.
In more than 100 countries, Discover-Tech was the leading bidder for advertising space targeting Starlink users, according to researchers at TrendAI, a unit of Japanese cybersecurity firm Trend Micro. The company was also the largest advertising bidder in Syria, Libya, Yemen and South Sudan, and the second-largest in Afghanistan.
TrendAI published its findings on October 15, identifying the suspicious advertiser only by the codename Shadow-Earth-79. Six people familiar with the research subsequently told Reuters that the codename referred to Discover-Tech.
Noting that “the demand for legitimate Western advertising in sanctioned or active-conflict states is effectively zero,” the researchers concluded that the company was running “targeting and tracking infrastructure rather than a commercial advertising operation.”
The findings suggest that Discover-Tech may have been attempting to identify, geolocate or monitor Starlink users. However, they do not establish that the company successfully infected Starlink users’ devices with spyware.
Who runs Discover-Tech?
Founded in 2020 by Israeli entrepreneur Dekel Boni, Discover-Tech appointed Eric Banoun as its director. Banoun co-founded Circles, a surveillance company affiliated with Pegasus spyware developer NSO Group, and Senpai Technologies, a company known for developing and selling surveillance software to governments, including those of Angola, Indonesia and Malaysia.
Banoun also founded Intelos, which uses advertisements similar to those placed by Discover-Tech to surveil and geolocate individuals. He attempted to sell the technology to Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency, according to Haaretz.
Haaretz also identified Sara Hamou, through her holding company, as a shareholder in Discover-Tech. Hamou is a former manager at Intellexa, the company that marketed Predator spyware in Greece. Earlier this year, she was sentenced to eight years in prison for her role in the Predator scandal.
Is Discover-Tech linked to the Israeli government?
It remains unclear who purchased the services of Candiru, Intelos and Dark Cartographer after the companies obtained user data through Discover-Tech. However, as RT previously reported in its ‘Wired for War’ series, Israel treats domestically developed spyware as a controlled defense export and retains authority over where such technology may be sold.
According to a 2021 investigation by Haaretz, export licenses for Pegasus were often granted when sales were considered beneficial to Israeli foreign policy interests, including in connection with trade agreements or diplomatic support for Israel at the UN.
Other Israeli spy-tech companies covered in the series, including Black Cube, BlackCore and Paragon Solutions, have also been linked to activities aligned with Israeli interests, even when they were not directly contracted by the Israeli government.
Discover-Tech’s advertising infrastructure was used to target at least 45 devices at Al Jazeera with Candiru spyware in 2024 and 2025, according to Citizen Lab. Researchers confirmed that some devices were infected through malicious advertisements that required no interaction from users.
The attacks occurred during a period of heightened tensions between Israel and the Qatar-based broadcaster, which Israeli authorities have accused of threatening national security. Candiru was founded by two Israel Defense Forces (IDF) intelligence veterans and operates under Israeli defense export controls.
While the Israeli government has not been accused of ordering Candiru to surveil Al Jazeera journalists, the targeting raises questions about whether the company’s clients shared interests with the Israeli authorities. The investigations have not identified the government or client responsible for commissioning the attacks.
Is Discover-Tech still operating?
Following the investigations by Citizen Lab and Confiant, several major advertising companies took action against Discover-Tech. Google, Comcast-owned Beeswax and Eskimi blocked the firm from their platforms, while Vungle suspended its access pending a review. Industry association IAB Europe also suspended Discover-Tech from its list of approved vendors.
Discover-Tech’s website, which markets the company as a “tailored digital advertising agency,” remains active. The firm has not publicly responded to the findings reported by Citizen Lab, Confiant or TrendAI.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham has found a novel way of solving Britain’s cost-of-living crisis. By bombing Yemen.
Yes, you read that correctly. This week, Burnham authorized the deployment of British Typhoon fighter jets to Saudi Arabia for its war with Yemen.
Downing Street assured the British public that the deployment was for “defensive” operations only. The BBC and other British media outlets indulged this fantasy by repeating over and over that the Royal Air Force was being deployed for “defensive actions”. The RAF would not be engaging in attacking Yemen, it was claimed, and the British fighter jets were being sent to “protect” Saudi Arabia from “escalating” Houthi aggression.
Britain’s Minister of Defense Wes Streeting (a former health minister, please note) framed the RAF mission as necessary to counter instability in the Middle East and soaring energy prices. As if Britain was not the cause of instability and higher fuel costs by backing Trump’s aggression on Iran.
The Guardianreported: “The [British] military intervention [in Yemen] was partly justified because instability in the Middle East was driving up energy prices and affecting the cost of living.”
This logic is as absurd as it is gross deception.
Recall that Burnham was ushered into Downing Street in July to replace the hapless Keir Starmer as Labour prime minister. Burnham, formerly the Mayor of Manchester and posing with his working-class credentials, made a big public pitch that he would prioritize easing the cost-of-living crisis ravaging Britain.
However, since entering office, his most notable forays have been in foreign policy. For example, he has received the Ukrainian dictator Vladimir Zelensky in Downing Street with promises of more military aid in addition to the $20 billion that Britain has already provided (the second largest source of aid in Europe after Germany). Burnham has pledged to provide Ukraine with British blueprints for manufacturing cruise missiles.
Last month, Burnham announced that Britain was deploying an RAF in-air refuelling plane to “help” Saudi Arabia’s air strikes on Yemen. To allay public concerns about that move, Downing Street and the British media assured that the deployment was “defensive only” and for a limited period.
Ironically, Burnham made that announcement while travelling to address the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where he hailed Britain for offering world leadership for peace and security.
Now, again this week, the RAF deployment is extended to sending Typhoon fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. London is also providing a RAF A400M transport plane for troops and up to 100 military advisers.
This sounds like classic mission creep. Downing Street is aware of the exposure to public criticism. The prime minister’s office denied Britain was being dragged into the conflict. It said: “Our support for Saudi Arabia is considered, proportionate and focused on helping them defend themselves from relentless Houthi attacks.”
The British government and media are distorting the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Yemen as one of “aggression” by the Yemeni forces of Ansar Allah, referred to as “the Iran-backed Houthis”. That description makes the Yemenis sound like crazy terrorists who are being directed by Iran.
Here’s the BBC’s creative reporting: “The UK will deploy RAF Typhoon jets to defend Saudi Arabia in response to escalating Houthi missile and drone attacks, the government has said.”
The BBC goes on: “The defensive mission will help defend Saudi cities and infrastructure – a move authorised by Prime Minister Andy Burnham – against aerial attacks by the Iran-backed group… Since September, Saudi Arabia has been struggling to defend its skies from Houthi attacks after a ceasefire of sorts in Yemen broke down.”
This is reality inversion by the British state-owned media outlet.
The ceasefire in Yemen was violated in mid-July when Saudi Arabia launched air strikes on the international airport in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, to target a delegation attending the state funeral of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, who was murdered in a U.S.-Israeli air strike on his family home in Tehran on February 28.
That ceasefire was called in 2022 to end a seven-year war of aggression by Saudi Arabia against Yemen. The war began in 2015 to reinstate a Saudi puppet regime that the Ansar Allah-led Yemenis ousted in 2014. The Saudis bombed Yemen relentlessly for seven years with support of the United States, Britain, and France. An estimated 20,000 Yemenis were killed in air strikes, and around 300,000 died from a humanitarian blockade that the Western-backed Saudi coalition imposed on the country.
Britain’s military minister Wes Streeting referred to recent Yemeni strikes on Saudi Arabia as “despicable”. He mentioned a ballistic missile attack on October 10 on King Khalid international airport in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. At least 13 people were killed in the strike, and over 300 were injured.
The Ansar Allah-led Yemeni Armed Forces have also hit several other Saudi airports and key oil industry installations. The number of Saudi civilians killed in these attacks is relatively small, around 20, whereas Saudi warplanes have killed hundreds of Yemeni civilians since it broke the ceasefire in July. This week, eight Yemeni fishermen were killed in Saudi strikes. What Yemen is doing to Saudi Arabia is self-defense, not aggression.
London and its media propaganda are making out that Britain is “defending” Saudi Arabia. The reality is London is assisting Saudi aggression and war crimes.
Significantly, Streeting flew to Washington, DC, last week, where he met the war secretary, Pete Hegseth. Their agenda was about how to respond to “Houthi escalation.” Obviously, the junior partner got the memo: send warplanes to Yemen; we’re too busy with Iran.
Meanwhile, in Britain, an unprecedented social crisis is unfolding from poverty and a crippling cost of living. Charities report that four million families are having to go without adequate food or home heating because of soaring bills. Oxfam estimates that 13.5 million Britons, or a fifth of the population, are suffering from poverty. More than six million people rely on food charities for a modicum of sustenance.
It tells you everything about a state whose government does nothing about its own people’s dire needs but finds the resources to send warplanes to distant countries to bomb other poor people.
Andy Burnham is just another puppet who is assigned to put on a show in Downing Street for public appeasement. The imperial deep state has its hand up his rear. That’s mission creep in Downing Street.
Billionaire Elon Musk has accused US politicians of putting Kiev’s interests ahead of their own country’s, alleging that American taxpayer money sent to Ukraine is being laundered back into political campaigns.
Writing on X on Friday, the SpaceX founder suggested that financial interests could explain why some American lawmakers remain staunch supporters of Kiev in its conflict with Russia.
“Some of that US taxpayer money comes back through multiple laundry machines to fund political campaigns in America, which is why you see some politicians caring more about Ukraine than America!” Musk wrote, without identifying the beneficiaries.
In March, US outlet Just the News cited a declassified intelligence summary describing a plan to divert hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid earmarked for clean-energy projects in Ukraine into then-President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign.
Trump shared the report on Truth Social, while then-US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard reportedly asked officials at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to investigate whether the alleged scheme had been carried out.
Musk also accused Ukrainian elites of profiting from Western assistance while ordinary Ukrainians bear the human cost.
“The former have grown very rich off the hundreds of billions flowing to Ukraine, while the latter’s children are conscripted to die in trenches,” he wrote.
Kiev’s increasingly coercive mobilization campaign has been marked by numerous documented cases of forced detentions and violent confrontations involving recruitment officers. Corruption investigations have also exposed schemes allowing wealthier Ukrainians to evade military service.
Ukraine has been rocked by major corruption scandals involving figures close to Vladimir Zelensky. One centered on his longtime associate Timur Mindich and an alleged $100 million bribery and money-laundering operation at state nuclear energy company Energoatom. The scandal forced senior officials from office, including former presidential chief of staff Andrey Yermak, while Mindich fled Ukraine.
Ukrainian investigators have also uncovered what they say is fraud to the tune of $5.6 million involving military drones purchased at prices up to 90% above market rates.
Even Kiev’s staunchest European backers have criticized its failure to deliver promised anti-corruption reforms, warning that billions of euros in assistance could be withheld.
Zelensky is seeking at least €70 billion ($81 billion) in additional foreign assistance for 2027, estimating Ukraine’s total conflict-related spending needs for next year at €155 billion.
European Council President Antonio Costa said on Friday that the EU expects to cover roughly two-thirds of the additional funding, or around €46.7 billion, with a decision potentially coming in November. That sum would come on top of the €45 billion already earmarked for Kiev next year.
On a Sunday morning in October 2019, the chief of the virus ecology unit at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories emailed a postdoctoral scientist in his lab with an idea.
Vincent Munster and his postdoc, Michael Letko, had spent that year building a system to rapidly test whether dozens of SARS-related bat coronaviruses could infect human cells.
That week, Munster read a new preprint from prominent virologists Vineet Menachery and Ralph Baric’s lab groups showing that the protease trypsin could unlock entry for certain coronaviruses that otherwise would not infect human cells.
Letko had forwarded him the paper two days earlier with the note, “Seems like more groups will be converging on this idea soon.”
“You should be able to make S with a more broader cleavage signature (like furin-like) to enhance infectivity,” Munster wrote back on Oct. 6, 2019. “You can include a motif like this R-X-[K/R]-R↓ Might be cool to get some synthesized.”
In virology parlance, “S” is the coronavirus spike protein, which allows the virus to latch onto the cells it infects, and R-X-[K/R]-R is a furin cleavage site motif, which can make viruses better able to infect cells and spread.
Munster was suggesting that his postdoc engineer a furin site into a coronavirus spike protein to make it more infectious.
Eleven weeks later, a coronavirus carrying a similar furin cleavage site emerged in Wuhan, China, spawning the COVID-19 pandemic. It remains the only known sarbecovirus, the SARS-related group of coronaviruses that Munster and Letko were then screening, to have one.
The email exchange has never been made public before. It appears in a 270-page batch of records recently released by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to U.S. Right to Know in response to a request made under the Freedom of Information Act.
The request sought specific correspondence from Munster’s lab in Hamilton, Montana, from March 2019 through Jan. 22, 2020, the date when his group published one of the first papers showing that the new coronavirus used a human cell receptor called ACE2 as a doorway into cells.
Two new threads run through the records: Weeks before the pandemic began, a senior NIH virologist proposed in writing to build into a SARS-like spike protein the feature that would become the central argument for COVID-19’s laboratory origin: a furin cleavage site.
And, through the same year, his lab was asking virus hunters for unpublished bat coronavirus spike sequences, and getting them, including from researchers in the U.S.-funded consortium called PREDICT, whose New York-based lead partner, EcoHealth Alliance, had a long-standing collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to collect and study SARS-related viruses.
Each goes to a different key point in the origins debate. The furin cleavage site is the single genetic feature most cited in the arguments that SARS-CoV-2 did not arise entirely in nature.
Unpublished sequences are the other: because the pandemic virus matches nothing in the published scientific literature, most laboratory-origin scenarios depend on some lab having held a virus the rest of the world had never seen.
Nothing in the records shows that Letko followed through on Munster’s suggestion to insert a furin cleavage site in a SARS spike protein, however. In fact, the furin cleavage site found in SARS-CoV-2 differs from the motif, or short sequence of amino acids, that Munster suggested.
Nor do the documents indicate that Rocky Mountain Labs possessed SARS-CoV-2 or a close relative, or that either Munster or Letko directly communicated with researchers in Wuhan while working on their project.
Their research also used synthetic gene fragments, not live viruses, employing particles that cannot replicate or spread. Such work generally poses lower biosafety risks.
The two then-unpublished bat virus spike sequences obtained from PREDICT, one from Malaysia and one from Uganda and Rwanda, are also too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to have given rise to it.
Letko, who is now an associate professor at Washington State University, declined to comment for this story, saying in an email “(y)ou will write what you write, regardless of the truth or what I have to say.”
Munster did not respond to requests for comment. He was indicted earlier this year for bringing mpox specimens into the U.S. without proper documentation and giving false statements to law enforcement officials as part of unrelated NIH research. He has pleaded not guilty.
The NIH press office also declined to answer questions about why the agency had not previously told the public that its scientists had solicited and obtained unpublished SARS-like coronavirus spike sequences, or proposed inserting a furin cleavage site into a SARS-like spike, before the pandemic.
Converging on the idea
Munster’s suggestion to add a furin cleavage site is the second known instance of scientists proposing to insert this distinguishing feature into a SARS or SARS-like spike within roughly two years before COVID-19 emerged.
In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance, Baric’s lab and researchers at the WIV had proposed the same kind of modification to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in work that would have used live, replicating viruses. Their application, known as the DEFUSE proposal, was denied.
The concept is notable because the furin cleavage site that helped the virus cause the pandemic has become central to the debate over the pandemic’s origins.
Some proponents of a laboratory origin view DEFUSE as a blueprint for creating SARS-CoV-2, while prominent supporters of a natural origin have argued that deliberately engineering such a feature would have been unlikely and unnecessarily cumbersome. Munster’s email gives the lab-origin supporters another example of such a furin site proposal.
The revelation about Munster’s lab seeking unpublished sequences speaks to a different issue in the COVID-19 origins debate.
Because SARS-CoV-2 descends from no virus previously described in the scientific literature, any scenario in which it was engineered requires assuming that some laboratory held SARS-related sequences that had never been made public.
In a 2021 review of SARS-CoV-2 in Cell by 21scientists called that implausible. “There is no rational experimental reason why a new genetic system would be developed using an unknown and unpublished virus,” they wrote.
But the records show a U.S. government laboratory doing just that two years earlier.
Letko’s platform was a new genetic system, and he sought unpublished sequences precisely because they were unpublished. Sharing them, he wrote in April 2019, “will surely increase the impact of our story by providing a proof of principle with unpublished sequences.”
Researchers in the U.S.-funded virus hunting program supplied two within eight weeks. One of the researchers, Simon Anthony, was also an author of the Cell review.
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist who has advocated for a thorough investigation of laboratory origin scenarios, recently reviewed the Munster-Letko email records at the request of U.S. Right To Know.
“What this shows is that different groups of virologists were converging on the idea of inserting cleavage sites in the spikes of potentially dangerous coronaviruses,” she said.
“Assuming a lab origin of COVID-19, if a lab in Wuhan hadn’t caused the pandemic, it’s plausible that a lab in the U.S. would’ve eventually followed the same path.”
Soliciting sequences
Munster’s emailed proposal didn’t come out of the blue. He and Letko were in the middle of a yearlong research project that the newly released records document from its start.
Seven months earlier, in March 2019, Munster and Letko set out to answer a question: of the hundreds of SARS-related coronaviruses in research databases worldwide, which ones could infect people?
Letko built a workaround that he and Munster described as a “rapid and scalable platform,” according to the records.
Rather than build each virus individually, they took only the receptor-binding domain — the fragment of the spike that grips onto the host cell’s receptor — and spliced it into a SARS-CoV spike backbone.
They then loaded these chimeric spikes onto harmless reporter particles and used them to infect cells expressing hACE2, the receptor SARS-CoV uses to enter the human airway.
A glow from the bioluminescent enzyme luciferase indicated successful cell entry. With Letko’s method, what typically had taken months to test now took about three weeks.
The limiting ingredient to test their method was the spike sequences. Letko had exhausted the SARS-like sequences already published. So, he and Munster started looking for others that hadn’t been, the records show.
On March 8, 2019, Munster emailed EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, Vice President Kevin Olival and Columbia University virologist Simon Anthony, attaching a confidential abstract with a chart and figures illustrating their project.
“While we have now tested all of the variation(sic) currently published for lineage B beta-coronaviruses for their ability to enter primate cells, we are seeking additional, unpublished lineage B beta coronavirus sequences to test in our platform,” Munster wrote.
He asked them not to circulate the attachment, because the work was “still unpublished and quite competitive.”
Of the three recipients, only Anthony, then one of the core leaders on PREDICT, appears in the released correspondence. He replied later that evening: “Hey! Looks super cool.”
Two months of negotiation followed, the emails show. On April 5, Letko thanked Anthony “for agreeing to share betacoronavirus lineage B spike sequences with us,” adding that unpublished material “will surely increase the impact of our story.”
On May 2, Anthony reported back from a PREDICT meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia. His team had detected “around 5 or 6 novel 2b viruses,” he wrote, but had “only managed to get spikes for 2 of them so far.”
Because neither had been published, Letko’s paper “would be the first report of these viruses in the literature,” so long as he credited PREDICT and its partners as co-authors, Anthony said.
Letko agreed. Two days later, Anthony sent the sequences. He identified them as PREDICT_CoV-51, isolate PDF-0663, from Malaysia (which Anthony described as “SUPER divergent. Could be really interesting,”) and PREDICT_CoV-43, from Uganda and Rwanda.
“Absolutely stellar!” Munster replied. “Will keep you posted on the results!”
Anthony was generally correct. A small fragment of the Malaysian virus had been deposited in GenBank, the NIH’s public sequence database, in 2016, and referenced the following year in a survey paper Anthony co-authored with Daszak and others. But neither its full spike sequence nor its complete genome was public.
Nothing at all was public about the African virus. In neither case could anyone outside PREDICT obtain the spike sequence, the part that determines whether a virus can enter human cells and the only part Letko’s platform could use.
A step further
Five months later, after reading the new preprint about trypsin, Munster proposed taking Letko’s project a step further.
For a coronavirus to infect a host cell, binding the receptor is only the first step. The spike must then be cut open by one of the host’s own enzymes before the virus can fuse with the cell and get inside. These enzymes that cut protein apart are called proteases, and each one targets different spots.
The protease a spike is built for largely determines what tissues it can infect. SARS-CoV depends on proteases that are not available everywhere in the body. Furin, however, is expressed in the cells of most tissues.
The Menachery-Baric preprint that sparked Munster’s idea had shown that adding trypsin from the outside could unlock entry into human cells for coronaviruses that otherwise couldn’t infect them.
Trypsin is a far less selective protease, cutting a protein after common amino acids rather than requiring a particular short sequence, or motif. What Munster proposed to Letko — engineering a furin site into the spike itself — would let the virus cut itself open.
Instead of waiting for an outside enzyme to do the job, a furin site could clear the hurdle in one step to “enhance infectivity,” as Munster wrote.
The idea had been proposed before.
EcoHealth Alliance submitted the DEFUSE proposal to DARPA, under a program called PREventing EMerging Pathogenic Threats, or PREEMPT. Its key partners included Baric’s laboratory at the University of North Carolina (UNC) and Zhengli Shi, the leading coronavirologist at the Wuhan lab.
The proposal aimed to introduce human-specific proteolytic cleavage sites, including furin sites, into SARS-related bat coronavirus spikes to evaluate and enhance their ability to infect human cells. DARPA declined to fund it, faulting the proposal over the risks of “gain-of-function” research.
Munster was not named on the proposal submitted to DARPA. But according to official congressional correspondence, he had been part of the DEFUSE team two months earlier.
In April 2024, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), then ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wrote to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and DARPA saying he had obtained documents showing that “Vincent Munster of NIAID’s [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] Rocky Mountain Laboratory was listed as a partner in the DEFUSE proposal presented at the PREEMPT Proposers Day,” a January 2018 DARPA event at which Daszak pitched the project to representatives of at least 15 federal agencies.
Rocky Mountain Laboratories, Paul wrote, “was at one point listed as a partner” alongside the WIV, UNC, Columbia University’s Lipkin Lab and Duke-NUS, a disclosure Paul said appeared to contradict former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci’s testimony to Congress that NIH knew nothing of DEFUSE.
By the time the proposal reached DARPA that March, Munster and his lab were off it; the final list of partners included EcoHealth, the WIV, UNC, Duke-NUS, the USGS National Wildlife Health Center and Palo Alto Research Center.
Paul demanded from HHS records of “all communications between Vincent Munster and any individual from EcoHealth Alliance, WIV, University of North Carolina, Columbia University, or Duke-NUS.” Paul has not released his underlying documents, and neither HHS nor DARPA has publicly answered his requests.
The newly released NIH records show that about a year after DEFUSE was submitted, Munster asked EcoHealth for unpublished sarbecovirus sequences; that he received them from a virologist at Columbia’s Center for Infection and Immunity, the center Ian Lipkin directs; and that in October 2019 he proposed building a spike with a furin-like cleavage site to enhance infectivity.
Steven E. Massey, a professor of bioinformatics at the University of Puerto Rico and a researcher with DRASTIC, the independent group that first published the DEFUSE proposal, called Munster’s suggestion “significant,” saying it “shows the [furin site] idea was circulating outside the EHA-WIV-UNC group,” a reference to EcoHealth Alliance, the WIV and UNC.
Munster’s email does not mention DEFUSE. His idea appears instead as a reaction to the Menachery-Baric preprint, framed as a potential next experiment for his and Letko’s work.
And the motif he proposed is not the one found in the pandemic virus that emerged less than three months later. SARS-CoV-2’s site has alanine where Munster’s pattern called for lysine or arginine.
A suboptimal site
That difference is key. The furin site in SARS-CoV-2 substantially improves the virus’s ability to enter human airway cells and is widely regarded as a major contributor to its transmissibility. Its absence from every other sarbecovirus found in nature is also one of the observations lab-origin proponents cite most often.
The 2021 review in Cell also directly addressed whether the site could have been engineered. Its authors, including Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry and Simon, argued that the site’s own sequence weighs against a lab design.
SARS-CoV-2’s motif, RRAR, “does not match its canonical form (R-X-R/K-R),” they wrote, and is “suboptimal” compared with those of other human coronaviruses.
“There is no logical reason why an engineered virus would utilize such a suboptimal furin cleavage site, which would entail such an unusual and needlessly complex feat of genetic engineering,” the paper stated.
The only prior work inserting a furin site at that position in a SARS-CoV spike, they noted, had used an optimal sequence in a pseudotype system.
Massey disputes that framing. He said excessively efficient cleavage can destabilize the spike and reduce the virus’s ability to enter cells, so a site that looks suboptimal on paper may not be suboptimal for the virus.
The newly released records show Munster reasoning along the Cell authors’ lines nearly two years before their review appeared. The motif he proposed matches the canonical form they describe, not the one the pandemic virus carries, and his lab ran a pseudotype system of the kind they cite.
Read one way, the email corroborates their logic: that a scientist contemplating a furin-like site reached for the textbook motif, and SARS-CoV-2 does not have it.
Read another way, it establishes something the review did not address: by October 2019 the idea of adding such a furin cleavage site to a SARS-related spike to enhance infectivity was circulating not only in an unfunded DARPA proposal but also inside an NIH laboratory.
What was published
When Chinese scientists ultimately posted the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus spreading in Wuhan on Jan. 10, 2020, Letko and Munster had everything they needed to test it in their system.
The platform did not require a live virus, only the sequence of the small piece of the spike that latches onto a human cell. Within hours of the sequence going up, Neeltje van Doremalen, another scientist in Munster’s lab, pasted it into an email to Letko and Munster.
Letko expected results by Jan. 26 or 27. They came back ahead of schedule. On Jan. 21, Munster decided where to send the final manuscript showing their research. “Nature it is,” he wrote to Letko. “Lets(sic) do 2 authors and speed this up.”
The paper went out that afternoon, to Nature and to the preprint serverbioRxiv. Only 12 days had passed since the sequence appeared online.
The lab made the new method’s speed its selling point. Their method “reduces the time from the sequence being published to having real in vitro data to under 12 days,” the cover letter told Nature’s editors, “allowing the scientific community to gain critical information on virus tropism in almost real-time with the outbreak.”
The work drew notice at the top of NIAID.
“First data from my lab confirming ACE2 as the receptor for 2019-NCoV,” Munster emailed an NIAID coronavirus response list that afternoon.
Greg Folkers, then chief of staff to then-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, replied: “When this hits bioRxiv might be worth a tweet.”
The paper that was submitted gives no sign that Letko took up Munster’s suggestion to engineer a cleavage site into a spike. But it does show that the scientists used the protease trypsin rather than the furin Munster had proposed.
The paper’s second figure is titled, “Trypsin enhances lineage B entry in various cell lines.” It reports that bat coronavirus spikes that could not get into human, primate or pig cells on their own did get in once the particles were bathed in the enzyme.
The trypsin experiments appear nowhere in the project before Munster and Letko’s October exchange about the Menachery-Baric preprint. They are also absent from the abstract that Munster previously circulated in the spring. The published paper cites the Menachery-Baric preprint that sparked their exchange conversation.
Neither of the sequences that Anthony sent in May 2019 appears in the paper, and neither he nor PREDICT are acknowledged. The only trace of PREDICT in the 18-page manuscript is a footnote citation.
The panel of viruses the paper did report testing consisted of 29 receptor-binding domains obtained from a public database administered by the NIH.
One of the two viruses resurfaced a year later, when Columbia’s Center for Infection and Immunity deposited its complete genome in GenBank on July 6, 2020, five and a half months after the preprint that was to have carried it.
In February 2021, the bat coronavirus from Uganda and Rwanda also appeared in the journal Virus Evolution, in a study of how SARS-related viruses acquired the ability to use the human ACE2 receptor.
Letko was second author, Munster was listed near the end, Anthony was the senior author and the Ugandan and Rwandan field scientists and PREDICT leadership were included as co-authors, as Anthony had said in 2019 would be required. Run through Letko’s platform, the virus could not enter human cells through ACE2 at all.
The Malaysian virus, which Anthony had called the more interesting of the two, has never appeared in a published study. Nothing in the records says why. Anthony, now a professor at the University of California, Davis, did not respond to requests for comment.
On May 24, 2021, two years after he emailed the virus’s spike sequence to the Montana lab, Columbia deposited its complete genome in GenBank on behalf of the PREDICT consortium, crediting Malaysia’s Sabah Wildlife Department and EcoHealth Alliance.
Lewis Kamb is an investigative reporter who specializes in using freedom of information laws and public records to uncover wrongdoing and hold the powerful accountable.
‘Cambridge Analytica’ is by now a byword for the social media Wild West of 2016, when regulations were non-existent and unscrupulous brokers sold personal user data to advertisers and political operatives. RT explores the scandal that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg still can’t dodge.
On October 22, Meta was ordered by a New Mexico judge to pay $25 billion in civil penalties over the collection of personal data from 44 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica more than a decade earlier.
The judge concluded that Meta’s misconduct warranted a penalty exceeding $219 billion under state law, but reduced the amount to $25 billion, making it one of the largest fines ever imposed on an American corporation.
Meta, operating at the time as Facebook, knowingly and systematically deceived users about how it managed their personal data and allowed its harvesting by third-party companies like Cambridge Analytica. The jury also found Meta’s senior executive team knew of, and lied about, deceiving users about how it planned to investigate data-harvesting companies after the Cambridge Analytica scandal became public.
To understand how Meta ended up owing an eighth of its annual revenue in just one judgment, it’s necessary to go back to 2013, when Cambridge Analytica emerged from Britain’s shadowy private intelligence sector.
What was Cambridge Analytica?
Cambridge Analytica was founded in 2013 as a subsidiary of SCL Group, a London-based private intelligence firm that has provided data analytics and “behavioural analysis” services to the British Defense Ministry and Foreign Office.
Cambridge Analytica CEO and SCL Group Director Alexander Nix has admitted under oath that his companies worked with American and British intelligence agencies, provided psychological warfare training to several Western militaries, employed multiple staff with security clearances in the UK and US, and hired former Israeli spies.
SCL Group’s work for NATO, Israel, Ukraine, and other governments and militaries was extensive, and Cambridge Analytica drew on its parent company’s experience in military psyops to become one of the world’s most effective election influence operations, according to whistleblower Christopher Wylie. On the other hand, SCL insists that its military and political wings were separate entities. Whichever account is true, Cambridge Analytica had been hired by political candidates in 200 elections by 2018, according to company documents. These included parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic, India, and Italy, the Brexit referendum in the UK, and most infamously, the 2016 presidential election in the US.
What did Cambridge Analytica do in 2016?
Cambridge Analytica was paid nearly $6 million by then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign in the runup to the 2016 election. The company used its unprecedented access to Facebook user data to identify persuadable voters and potential donors, select effective markets for television ads, and target certain Hillary Clinton supporters for “deterrence” – adverts discouraging them from going to the polls on election day.
How did this become a scandal?
Cambridge Analytica did not break any laws to obtain this data. It was scraped from tens of millions of Facebook users who had, unbeknownst to themselves, given a third-party Facebook quiz application access to their messages, their profile data, and that of their friends.
Cambridge Analytica hired a Cambridge University professor, Aleksandr Kogan, to develop a personality quiz app, named ‘This is Your Digital Life’. Between 250,000 and 270,000 American Facebook users took the quiz in 2015, and by accessing their data, but crucially, under Facebook terms, accessing the data of all of their friends on the platform, Cambridge Analytica was able to compile detailed psychological profiles on roughly 87 million users.
Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie revealed the workings of the scheme to The Observer in 2018, telling the British newspaper that “we exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles, and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”
Was Cambridge Analytica the only data-scraper doing this?
“Facebook never cared,” Kogan told NBC News in 2018, explaining that “tens of thousands” of developers created apps like his quiz, and sold user data to companies like Cambridge Analytica. Among the developers were CubeYou, which used a “one-click personality test” app to gather information for commercial use, and LocalBlox, which scraped data from 48 million users, which it then sold to marketers.
AggregateIQ, Global Science Research, and Eunoia Technologies all used data gleaned by Kogan for political ends. However, long before these companies existed, Blue State Digital, an American political consultancy, surreptitiously harvested Facebook data, including friends’ data, for use by Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign.
Cambridge Analytica, however, had its work for the Trump campaign exposed at the height of the ‘Russiagate’ hoax, at a time when Democrats and liberal media outlets were convinced that Russia intervened in the election on behalf of Trump. Cambridge Analytica’s data-scraping dovetailed neatly into a narrative of “Facebook bots” and “Russian military hackers” working with the Trump campaign, and the company became a whipping boy for an industry that transcended partisan lines.
US Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee eventually investigated claims that Cambridge Analytica helped the Russian government target political ads at American voters, but both determined that these claims were untrue, and neither investigation found any proof of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Has Facebook been punished?
At the time that the information was collected, Facebook had stopped allowing third-party apps to access friends’ data. However, a loophole allowed apps active on the platform before this change to continue harvesting information through 2015. Within days of Wylie’s revelations hitting the headlines, SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica were suspended from Facebook. Two months later, both companies ceased operations, leaving Facebook to handle the fallout.
Facebook initially went into damage control mode, insisting that “People knowingly provided their information” to Kogan’s app, and that “everyone involved gave their consent.”
However, the US Federal Trade Commission determined that Facebook made its privacy settings deliberately opaque, spreading them out over 20 separate screens and opting users into sharing data with third-parties by default. Facebook settled with the FTC for $5 billion in 2019, setting the stage for a series of similar payouts in the following years.
In 2018, Zuckerberg told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that Facebook was aware that user data had been transferred from Kogan to Cambridge Analytica (this transfer was in breach of its policies) since 2015, but opted not to inform users. He said that Facebook asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data, but never followed up and made sure the company did. “We considered it a closed case,” he told Congress.
The following year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission accused Facebook of misleading investors by presenting “the risk of misuse of user data as merely hypothetical,” when it knew since 2015 that “a third-party developer had actually misused Facebook user data.” Facebook settled the case with the SEC for $100 million.
In 2022, Meta settled a $725 million class-action lawsuit brought by a group of Facebook users, who alleged that the company violated privacy and consumer protection laws by misrepresenting its data-sharing laws and failing to protect their personal information.
Meta attempted to shut down further legal action over the Cambridge Analytica scandal this August, when it reached an $18 billion settlement with 51 attorneys general across US states, territories, and the District of Columbia. Although the cases concerned the addictive design of Meta’s platforms and their effect on children’s mental health, the settlement included a clause resolving a multistate investigation into Facebook’s sharing of user data with third parties “whether known or unknown,” including Cambridge Analytica.
Even if participating states were to discover new facts about the data sharing, they have now waived their right to sue Meta. New Mexico was one of two states that was not party to this agreement, hence the $25 billion penalty.
Did Cambridge Analytica get Trump elected?
Ten years after the fact, it remains unclear how prominent a role Cambridge Analytica played in Trump’s victory over Clinton. The Trump campaign’s use of Facebook and X (then called Twitter) is widely cited as instrumental in his win, but the campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, has since said that he stopped using the company’s data several months before election day, considering it inaccurate.
What about Brexit?
Cambridge Analytica worked with Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU organization in late 2015 and early 2016, and carried out some preliminary data analysis for the campaign. However, the data was never used, and the UK Information Commissioner’s (ICO) office concluded in 2020 that the company had no impact on the referendum. As in the US, the ICO found no links between Cambridge Analytica and Russia, and no evidence that Russia interfered in the vote.
Is Zuckerberg in the clear?
The $25 billion judgement handed down on October 22 may be the largest fine ever imposed on Meta, but it does not mark the end of Zuckerberg’s legal woes. In addition to a Washington DC lawsuit holding him personally responsible for the Cambridge Analytica debacle, Zuckerberg’s company is being sued by investors in California over Facebook’s alleged efforts to conceal the misuse of user data by the company.
Meta will likely settle the latter case, just as it did with the similar SEC case in 2019. However, should Zuckerberg fight the lawsuit, he could find himself in the dock, as the plaintiffs have sought recorded depositions from him, former COO Sheryl Sandberg, and former CFO David Wehner – all of whom could be forced to shed more light on just how much Facebook knew about the scandal, and when.
The very public execution of my professorship and reputation continues in Norway. Today’s media article about me makes three claims that are misleading and/or false.
1) The article dismisses my claim that my research is being criminalized as the journalists merely cite the dismissive comments from the university – no arguments are apparently required.
It is not possible for an academic anymore to analyse the policies of rival powers by assessing their security concerns, as it will be smeared by the government, the government’s NGOs and the media as “legitimizing” the enemy and supporting their narratives. The current Defence Minister singled me out with the accusation of spreading propaganda and criticised two podcasters for even speaking with me (as I have already been cancelled by the media in Norway). How was this accusation by the Defence Minister substantiated? I had argued that NATO expansion triggered the war in Ukraine, which the Defence Minister denounced as dangerous “Russian propaganda”, with no need to substantiate his vile accusation. I can cite a sea of evidence and also refer to statements by American and European political leaders, ambassadors, intelligence chiefs, and others to make my case. However, the purpose is not to engage in debate, but to smear, censor, and cancel. By going after an individual academic for challenging official truths, the government has already claimed a monopoly on the truth. Academics should have their arguments scrutinised and criticised, but these are severe personal attacks from the government without the possibility of even defending myself. How is this not criminalising the research of an academic?
I cannot even speak at any events in Norway without the event being cancelled. The last event I agreed to speak at was because I shared the stage with the former CIA officer John Kiriakou. A newspaper had the event at a church cancelled, and when the backup location did not also cancel, the journalist simply printed in the paper that it had been cancelled so people would not show up. Is this normal? I must use my allotted holiday days to attend conferences because any event I attend can be presented as “controversial,” and then the NGOs and journalists will go after the reputation of the university. Is this normal? Every newspaper article about me merely refers to me as “controversial” or “pro-Russian” without ever assigning meaning to these labels or presenting my argument.
I have argued, much like former CIA director Burns, that if the West attempts to pull Ukraine into the NATO orbit, then there would be war and Ukraine would be destroyed. This is considered a “pro-Russian” argument. Arguing that we should respect the will of most Ukrainians who want negotiations to end the war is also considered a “pro-Russian” argument, while in contrast, boycotting diplomacy, deporting Ukrainian refugees, and calling for the conscription of Ukrainian women is “pro-Ukrainian”.
2) To avoid addressing any of my arguments, the journalists go on to uncritically cite personal attacks against me, pointing out that I have been called a propagandist by the Norwegian Helsinki Committee. This is a “non-governmental organisation” financed by the government and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was set up by Reagan and the CIA director in 1983 to manipulate the civil society of other states. The Norwegian Helsinki Committee has been relentless in its smears on social media to have me fired, writing hit pieces in the media, pushing to cancel my speaking events, writing a letter to my university, and even posting a picture of my house on social media. This is a governmental “human rights organisation” that cites human rights concerns to build the case for war.
3) Lastly, to further avoid addressing my actual arguments, they simply cite the fact that arguments I made at a debate last year have been “wholly or partially debunked” by a fact-check. The state-run media (NRK) invited the state-run military defence institute (FFI) to fact-check three of my claims. What claims did they “debunk”?
My first claim was that only 20% of Ukrainians wanted NATO membership between 1991 and the regime change in February 2014. The fact-checker argued that the number went up by the middle of 2014 (after Russia responded by seizing Crimea), which is a completely meaningless comment intended to muddy the waters, as my argument was about the previous era.
My second claim was that Zelensky had argued in an interview with The Economist in March 2022 that there were some Western countries that would like a long war with Russia to weaken a strategic rival, even if it would result in the destruction of Ukraine. The fact-checker argued that not all Western countries wanted a long war and that it was not an official policy. I never claimed it was an official policy, as it was primarily the US and UK pushing for a long war.
My third claim was that the US and UK sabotaged the Istanbul peace agreement in April 2022. The fact-checker claimed this was incorrect and suggested that it could only be based on one statement by David Arakhamia. The fact-checker did not want to mention that both mediators also confirmed it: Turkey’s foreign minister and the former Israeli prime minister both said that Russia and Ukraine were close to a deal, but the US and UK saw an opportunity to weaken Russia by fighting with Ukrainians. Zelensky’s former adviser Arestovych confirmed it, and the Ukrainian ambassador Chaly, who participated in the negotiations, confirmed that Putin was willing to do almost anything to end the war. The former head of the German armed forces confirmed that Boris Johnson sabotaged it, and Boris Johnson himself wrote articles warning about a “bad peace” and arguing for “strategic patience.” I am being fact-checked by war propagandists.
Unfortunately, none of my arguments matter because in Norway there is no debate and no interest in any arguments. Reality means nothing anymore as war narratives must be defended against inconvenient truths. I used to be naïve and think that the endless smears were caused by misunderstanding, as I had simply not been able to convey my arguments properly. However, the endless articles with smears and labels are deliberate lies and deceptions.
Acting Serbian President Ana Brnabic has accused the European Parliament of breaking its own ethics rules and sending a team of political operators to Serbia “with already formed conclusions” about how they want this weekend’s election to end.
Former Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic is running in parliamentary elections this Sunday, after vacating the presidency last month. Vucic’s coalition, led by his SNS party, is competing against the Student List – an electoral faction put together by the organizers of anti-government protests raging in Serbia since 2024.
European Parliament elections observers are due to arrive in Belgrade on Thursday. However, in a letter to Parliament President Roberta Metsola on Tuesday, Brnabic accused the team of political bias, pointing out that some of its members have openly expressed “extremely negative judgments about the authorities in Serbia [and] expectations for their removal.”
Lead EU observer Andreas Schieder monitored parliamentary elections in Serbia in 2023, and signed off on the official result, before accusing Vucic’s party of fraud and vote-buying. Brnabic explained this in her letter to European Parliament President Roberta Metsola, which was seen by Serbian media outlets.
The appointment of Schieder, an Austrian Social Democrat, violates the UN’s Declaration of Principles for International Election Observation, she continued. This document, to which all EU delegations are beholden, states that observers must be “free from any political, economic or other conflicts of interest.”
In June, Schieder publicly backed the student protest movement and accused Vucic of leading Serbia into an “authoritarian downward spiral.”
Speaking to Austria’s APA news agency on Tuesday, Schieder described Brnabic’s letter as “unprecedented attack on the European Parliament’s election-observation mission.”
The observation team also includes liberal MEP Helmut Branstetter, who has described Vucic as “not the person to lead Serbia to the European Union,” and promised to “do everything” to cut Serbia off from EU funds and accession talks over his refusal to ban the funeral of former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic in September.
Two Croatian MEPs are members of the mission. Gordan Bosanac has met with protesters at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, while Suncana Glavak has signed a letter to EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos calling for talks with Serbia to be suspended.
“All of the above indicates that the European Parliament sent an observation mission to Serbia that already has predetermined political positions, and that the goal of such an assessment of the elections and electoral conditions is to directly help one of the participants in the elections,” Brnabic wrote in her letter. “It is clear that their goal is not to impartially observe the elections, but to participate politically in them.”
Recurring protests have dogged Vucic since 2024, when the deaths of 16 people in a railway station disaster in Novi Sad sparked nationwide discontent. More than two decades earlier, the US successfully fomented mass protests that forced Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic out of power, and Vucic has accused the EU and Western NGOs of attempting to run the same playbook against his government.
Last month, Vucic described MEPs who traveled to Novi Sad to support the protests as “scum that cannot rule even in their own countries,” who have “come to demolish Serbia from the outside.”
In the UK, the BBC has been taking in public employees from government departments, and letting them work on news content, specifically “fact-checking” and drafting material for BBC News and its “fact-checking” arm, BBC Verify.
The secondments came from the Government Statistical Service, and took place over the past eight years, with 39 civil servants spending three or six months at the BBC, while their salaries were still paid by their own departments.
The Government Statistical Service is now advertising more of these secondments for 2027.
This was first reported by The Telegraphon October 17.
Meanwhile, the BBC is the same public service broadcaster that the government wants to give more money by introducing a “YouTube tax” – a plan to extend the license fee to streaming services.
And the same BBC is the one the government wants to push up people’s feeds on YouTube and other platforms, by making those platforms give it prominence in their algorithms. A green paper, “Watch this space: a new strategic direction for UK media,” is proposing this.
In the past, Reclaim The Net has reported about this plan, and how the US government said that this would mean “mandating that platforms algorithmically amplify government-preferred media.”
So, to sum it up: the government wants people to fund the BBC, wants the algorithm to favor the BBC, and has its own staff inside the BBC writing the fact-checks.
The subjects they worked on were “small boat” crossings of migrants, Covid, crime, migration, and life expectancy. The work of these civil servants, whose salaries were still paid by their respective government departments, was published under the bylines “BBC News” and “BBC Verify.”
This is how some of the secondees described their work on the Government Statistical Service blog.
One from the Home Office said she worked as “BBC Verify’s consultant statistician, fact-checking claims in heated election debates, ‘filing copy’ on interesting stories, and advising journalists.”
She also worked on “small boat arrivals and visa applications” and did “quality assurance on copies and charts before they were published to the online live page.”
Another from the Department for Business and Trade said, “One of my first tasks was drafting ‘copy'” on annual population statistics, “This was because they related to migration, which was always a topic of interest.” And: “My lines were then quickly pulled into a full article on the main site.”
That post, however, “was taken down after The Telegraph contacted the BBC” – and the BBC “has since insisted that those on secondment do not write copy.”
But the civil servant had just said that he did.
This secondee also worked on “fact-checking claims about crime rates among different nationalities that were dominating news cycles.”
Another civil servant seconded to the BBC analyzed data on “small boat migration” to see if the weather in 2022 meant fewer crossings: “In probably my proudest moment, this made it into an article on the front page and a TV piece.”
The job advert says that “Your salary for this professional development opportunity will continue to be paid by your parent department.”
The person they are looking for should have “the ability to influence decision making, working with credibility and proactively with customers to share knowledge and information.” They will also “be representing their department and the Government Statistical Service.”
The BBC’s own rules, however, say that “Our audiences must be able to trust the BBC and be confident that our editorial decisions are not influenced by outside interests, political or commercial pressures, or any personal interests.”
And: “External activities of individuals working for the BBC must not undermine the public’s perception of the impartiality, integrity, independence and objectivity of the BBC.”
A spokesman for the BBC said that “All BBC journalism and editorial decisions are made by BBC journalists and editors, in line with the BBC’s editorial guidelines, so these statisticians never make editorial decisions.”
But the corporation has also said it will now amend the bylines of the articles written by the civil servants to show their true jobs – something it will do only now, after The Telegraph asked.
Opposition politicians and others have been scathing in their criticism of the scheme, with Mike Wood, shadow Cabinet Office minister, saying that the BBC “must never allow a political agenda to influence BBC coverage via the back door.”
Danny Kruger, of Reform UK, was even more direct: “This is scandalous and looks dangerously as though the BBC has breached its own rules on impartiality.”
Oxford professor Carl Heneghan said, “If you have people writing for you with competing interests, it won’t be impartial. It is the government organisation you will be partial to. You will want to toe the line.”
The arrangement is so absurd that people would probably laugh at it if they heard it was happening in North Korea.
But it’s happening in the UK, and it’s not funny. The “journalists” in question were never identified as government employees to the readers, and the change of heart in that regard comes only now, after a newspaper investigated and reported about it.
J.D. Vance is approaching the halfway point of his term as vice president in an administration that has committed the United States to wars in locations from Ukraine to Venezuela to Somalia to Iran and beyond. All the while, the administration has threatened sending the military into other places across the world including Mexico, Greenland, and Cuba. In short, this presidential administration is fully committed to a warmongering agenda.
Over his 14 years as a United States House of Representatives member, Mike Rogers similarly established his reputation as a committed advocate for US warmongering across the world. This Michigan Republican and the presidential administration are two peas in a pod when it comes to supporting an aggressive empire.
President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential campaign portrayed himself as the peace candidate in the race, a tactic that may have brought him the votes needed to obtain a close electoral victory. But, once elected, Trump turned on a dime, becoming the war president who delivers turmoil, destruction, and death. Through this, Vance has stood by Trump in support.
Given this context, it seems almost unimaginable that Vance would stump in Michigan for electing Rogers to the US Senate by asserting that Vance and Rogers are supporters of peace. Yet, that is what Vance did in a Monroe, Michigan speech on Thursday. With the “peace candidate” ploy having worked for Trump in the 2024 presidential election, Vance audaciously gave it a try in the Michigan speech despite it being divorced from reality.
Vance, in his speech, framed the race between Rogers and Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed as a battle “between politicians obsessed with foreign causes and leaders who remember that their first duty is to fight for the people right here at home.” Vance’s claim is that he and Rogers are among the good “leaders” instead of the bad “politicians” in this comparison. But, it is Rogers, who relentlessly supported US intervention abroad as a House member and in his chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee is the quintessential politician obsessed with foreign causes. And it is crystal clear that over the last two years the Trump administration has, in its obsessive pursuit of foreign causes, sacrificed the interests of the American people, including by substantially increasing the national debt and driving the cost of fuel sky-high.
Vance proceeded in his speech to declare that the Democratic opponent Rogers faces in the race is “absolutely obsessed with conflicts occurring thousands of miles away in the Middle East.” “He is obsessed,” continued Vance, “with the state of Israel and with Gaza.” This, of course, is an obsession of the Trump administration that started the Iran War jointly with Israel and has been giving Israel enormous financial, military equipment, and intelligence aid to support Israel’s attacks on not just Gaza but also other places including Iran and Lebanon.
Meanwhile, Rogers, a staunch supporter of the US aiding Israel, has asked the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — the most prominent organization in the “Israel Lobby” in America — to not directly fund advertisements for his campaign while he travels the country to attend AIPAC organized fundraisers. Rogers is trying to keep under wraps that he is what Vance says his opponent is. Will voters understand the reality or be tricked by the subterfuge?
Why did Vance go through with making claims regarding US foreign policy in his speech that fly in the face of reality? The answer may be found in a comment by Rogers’s Democratic opponent in a Senate election debate held the week before. In that debate, El-Sayed stated in regard to Rogers: “So, it’s just inconsistent to me to be running for Senate from Michigan when you’re more focused on what’s happening to a foreign government than you are focused on what’s happening to folks right here in Michigan.” The foreign government referenced in El-Sayed’s comment is Israel. Instead of trying to give a nuanced counterargument to this charge from the debate, Vance went in his speech with the old standby of “I’m rubber and you’re glue; whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.” In the process, Vance ended up looking ridiculous to anyone with basic knowledge of the foreign policy records of Rogers and the Trump administration.
If Douma, one of the highest-profile “proven” chemical attacks attributed to Syria’s former Bashar Assad government, has been shown to be fake, what does it say about new, undeclared Syrian chemical weapons that have supposedly been found?
It says we should be extremely skeptical about news of such discoveries.
I spent years compiling an insider’s analysis of the evolving Western narrative of Syrian chemical attacks while I was at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) as well as afterwards.
My conclusion was it is nigh impossible to prove a negative in this situation; to say there had never been a chemical attack by the Syrian government forces.
However, when it came to high-profile allegations of such attacks in the Syrian towns of East Ghouta, Khan Sheykhoun, Ltamenah, Saraqib and Douma, there were fatal flaws in the official narratives.
There were unmistakable signs, clear to us on the inside, of fabrication.
The Douma attack eight years ago appeared to be the last of a series of chemical allegations against the regime.
Yet the saga continues. The OPCW sent a new mission to Syria this May to try to find alleged, undeclared chemical weapons from the government of Bashar al-Assad, who was ousted in 2024.
Before examining the intentions and results of this mission, it is useful to review how the Western-backed OPCW handled its investigation into the 2018 chemical weapons attack in Douma, a suburb of Damascus.
I was an OPCW inspector on that mission and this is why I blew the whistle.
The Establishment Narrative
Just how much of the establishment narrative that blamed Assad for using chemical weapons be believed ?
Devised during the early part of the Western and Gulf-backed jihadist war to overthrow Assad a decade and a half ago – and built upon steadily by Western belligerents throughout the crisis – the story that Assad had “gassed his own people” was widely believed with mainstream media fully on board.
Doubters were glibly dismissed, including “official” dissenters such as some senior inspectors at the OPCW. I was among them.
The chemical allegations followed a well-oiled procedure. Armed opposition groups – who were seeking direct Western military intervention to support their effort to overthrow Assad – would raise the alarm online by posting slick images and videos of an alleged chemical attack.
These opposition groups, sometimes assisted by Western NGOs, would then bring supposed witnesses of these alleged attacks to Gaziantep in Turkey, where the OPCW would send fact-finding missions to interview them.
The OPCW would generally believe the opposition groups and their witnesses and accept items of supposed “evidence” handed over to them, sometimes months after the alleged attack. Until the Douma allegation in 2018, the fact-finding mission never got to the scene of any Syrian chemical attack after an initial attempt in 2014 went awry.
The fact-finding report would be secretly drafted under the direct control of OPCW top management, bypassing any procedural or technical oversight, and would conclude that it was “reasonable to believe” that a chemical attack had indeed taken place.
The follow-up investigations by the heavily politicized Joint Investigative Mechanism (J.I.M.), or by the later Investigation and Identification Team (I.I.T.), would suggest that “a reasonable person would believe” that the Syrian Armed Forces were responsible for the attack.
OPCW inspectors are not fools. Many of us saw what was going on, seeing the tight political control that the U.S. and to a lesser degree the U.K. exerted over anything to do with the Syrian file. But the draconian confidentiality regime in the OPCW kept everyone subdued.
The breakthrough came after the April 2018 Douma allegation.
For the first time, an OPCW team actually got to the scene of an alleged chemical attack, at the town of Douma, in southwestern Syria, about 10 kilometers (6 miles) northeast of Damascus.
We did our job thoroughly, and in doing so we identified serious flaws in the allegation.
OPCW Extreme Measures
The OPCW resorted to ever-escalating measures to bring things back on track. After trying to secretly modify the interim report by withdrawing it from publication and sneaking in the preordained conclusions that were required by influential delegations, senior OPCW officials went to extremes.
They removed all the team members who had gone to Douma and produced a flawed Fact Finding Mission report written by persons unknown, none of whom had much knowledge of what the Douma team had done.
The fact-finding report predictably found that “it was reasonable to believe” there had been an attack with chlorine in Douma. This was followed much later by the OPCW’s inevitable I.I.T. report that blamed the Syrian regime for the attack.
In reaching its conclusions, the drafters claimed, as usual, to have been informed by anonymous experts. The context in the reports was usually along the lines of the fact-finding mission (F.F.M.) “asked an expert about this and the expert said it was possible.” Many qualified experts and commentators, including me, consider this laughable.
The OPCW were going too far, and ultimately this led to the ongoing dispute where the two most senior and experienced inspectors in the F.F.M. team objected.
The drafter of the team’s interim report, Dr. Brendan Whelan (“Inspector B”), was one. I was the other. In my case I had also led the politically-mandated inspections at two facilities of the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Centre (S.S.R.C.) suspected of harbouring illicit chemical weapons activities.
Here again, we did our work thoroughly and in drafting the S.S.R.C. inspection reports I made clear that there was nothing amiss in either of the facilities.
This didn’t stop the U.S., U.K. and France from conducting punitive missile strikes on Barzah S.S.R.C., on the basis of social media postings on the Douma allegation, even before the OPCW team had arrived at the incident scene.
Rather than another detailed analysis of the Douma scandal, suffice it to say, the official Douma narrative has been clearly and scientifically picked apart by many credible observers, including by Dr. Whelan and myself.
This has been widely reported, although predictably not much in the mainstream media.
The OPCW and Western delegations have been in crisis management mode ever since the first leak, that of an internal engineering summary that cast doubt on the allegation that chlorine cylinders had been dropped from aircraft, raising the possibility that militants had placed the cylinders to stage the scene of a chemical attack.
I was the author of that report.
Nose of chlorine cylinder alleged to have smashed through a steel-reinforced concrete roof, April. 21, 2018. (OPCW, courtesy former Syrian government)
Worse still for the prevailing Douma narrative, Dr. Whelan recently won a legal case against the OPCW for their charges against him of confidentiality breaches.
In their submissions, the OPCW inadvertently admitted to suppressing the key toxicology assessment (incidentally by NATO specialists) that dismissed chlorine as the likely cause of death of deceased victims shown in images posted from the scene.
The OPCW has refused to engage in any discussion on the facts and scientific substance of the case, ever since concerns were first raised by Dr. Whelan and myself.
This intransigence to re-open the file is likely dictated by the needs of the three belligerent governments that subjected Syria to punitive missile strikes in retaliation for the supposed Syrian chemical attack even before the Douma F.F.M. had started work.
Any updated or corrected findings on Douma would be inconvenient.
The New OPCW Mission
Still apparently seeking to prove its case, the OPCW formed a new Syria mission in May aimed at “finding” alleged missing, un-declared chemical weapons.
At the end of May the mission reported finding 42 empty chemical weapons munitions; a launcher; bomb-mixing units; precursor-type containers; a facility whose contents were not revealed and thousands of pages of documents that are still being reviewed.
The mission also found 650 kg of “a chemical compound known to have been used by the former government for the production of nerve agents,” which the report does not name. It says an unknown quantity of hexamine, a legal chemical with wide industrial use, was found but it is not clear if this is the same compound as in the 650 kg.
In September, the Syrian government, now under the leadership of a former al-Qaeda and ISIS leader, began destroying the empty bombs, but not any of the chemicals that were found, presumably meaning none were banned.
Despite all the fanfare of these results being presented at a U.N. Security Council meeting last month, it appears that the new OPCW mission came up as empty as those bombs.
None of these discoveries does anything to prove that Assad ever used a chemical weapon, in other words, nothing to prove that I, along with other OPCW officials and countless observers and commentators who challenged the Assad chemical weapons narrative were wrong.
Presumably after all the effort in creating that narrative, Western governments and mainstream media that promoted the Iraq war and then the Syrian conflict to achieve regime change in that country, require a tidier ending than the mess they made of the Iraqi WMD story.
An early press release from the OPCW is telling. It shows what they were attempting to prove with this May mission, in particular two rather flimsy suggestions.
They report the discovery of some of the empty munitions,
“including the same type of aerial bombs that were used in chemical attacks in Ltamenah in March 2017 and Khan Shaykhun in April 2017.”
This refers to empty M4000 aerial bombs, declared by the Syrians as part of their stockpile.
Aside from the questionable Douma-like irregularitiessurrounding “evidence” used by the OPCW to conclude that sarin-filled M4000 bombs were used in those attacks, it’s important to mention something else.
The Syrians had clearly explained to us that 2,000 of these bombs, never filled, had been set aside to be “repurposed,” in other words to be filled with high explosive to turn them into conventional munitions. These could turn up anywhere.
A second questionable statement in the press release is,
“Rockets were also found, of the same type as those that were used in the Ghouta chemical weapons attack in August 2013.”
This relates to artillery rockets crudely modified with a large cylindrical payload container added at the front.
For a start, the U.N./OPCW report of Ghouta did not attempt to identify the perpetrators of that sarin attack, since it was not part of their mandate. The accusations against the regime have always been political, something the mainstream media happily took up.
The Most Credible Analysis So Far
The Ghouta sarin attack took place on Aug. 21, 2013 and according to Western sources killed more than 1,000 people in the Damascus suburb.
The most serious investigation of the Ghouta incident to date points to the attack being launched from opposition-occupied positions, and remains the most credible analysis of the attack.
The opposition forces allegedly responsible were from the al-Nusra Front, which conducted joint operations in 2013 in the Damascus area with the Liwa Al Islam opposition group. Al-Nusra were known to be in possession of sarin, according to reporting by Seymour Hersh, who wrote:
“In the months before the [Aug. 21, 2013] attack [in Ghouta], the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.”
Indeed the U.N./OPCW team was in Damascus at the time of the attack in Ghouta because it was responding to an earlier request from the Syrian government to investigate chemical attacks against their forces.
The OPCW release also mentions a typical catch-all referring to “quantities of separately stored chemicals and related equipment, the nature of which is currently under technical analysis.”
There will always be suggestions of vague bits and pieces, rusty remnants that “may have been a part of” alleged undeclared elements of a chemical weapons program.
And, keep in mind, it’s been 22 months since the Assad government was ousted and their enemies in the opposition group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) have been running the country.
So far as I can see, the OPCW hasn’t found anything remotely close to the desired smoking gun. Anything real, I should say.
Partners in the Anti-Assad Chemical Narrative
Syrian President Ahmaad Al Shaara, former Al Nusra/HTS fighter, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in New York City, September 2025. (State Department Photo, Wikimedia)
We need to keep in mind how this is working. There are three partners in this latest endeavour on the anti-Assad chemical narrative.
First, we have the Western governments, belligerents in the Syrian conflict, which worked hard on building the chemical narrative to delegitimise the regime.
The U.K. government offered specialists to check out suspected sites in Syria to prepare them for the May mission in order to “assist” the current government in finding evidence of hidden chemical weapons.
That leads us to the second group, the government in Syria, reportedly eager to please their Western sponsors in return for economic favours. They are the Al-Nusra/HTS extremists who, in the case of Douma, fabricated the scene to raise a chemical false flag allegation against the Assad.
The third partner is the OPCW.
That means the various groups who have been on this mission are a) those who staged scenes of chemical attacks; b) those who directed them to do so (including Western intelligence agents who allegedly coached and assisted them); and c) the organisation that went along with the narrative and dutifully produced reports damning the Assad regime.
It may appear to the reader that I’m suggesting that the OPCW reports on Syrian chemical weapons will continue to be little more than propaganda, the usual sexed-up nonsense. Perhaps so. In disputing this, these assertions will be dismissed as conspiracy theories.
However, this argument is weakened because the source of the alternative narrative is the scientists and senior inspectors (many “Western”) from within the OPCW teams, including the Douma fact-finding mission and Scientific Studies and Research Centre inspections.
This is why Douma remains a key element in the debate. If they did it once (and doggedly stuck to their guns), they probably did it before.
Many serious and eminent observers are imploring the OPCW to conduct a review of the Douma case, including by the OPCW’s own Scientific Advisory Board.
I see this being done by credible, independent and neutral experts in the fields of chemistry, toxicology, metallurgy and engineering, overseen by the relevant professional institutes.
These experts would report their findings transparently, putting their names and reputations behind their analysis. This will clear up the Douma controversy, either demonstrating that it could have actually happened as alleged, or demonstrating the flaws in the OPCW reports.
Exposing a clear and deliberate fraud would seriously weaken the Western narrative on alleged Syrian chemical attacks. Therefore, in my view, it is not going to happen under the purview of the OPCW.
Ever.
I don’t mean to suggest that those calling for a review are unrealistically hopeful. But the risks of such a review are perhaps too high for it ever to be envisaged by the Western group that was aligned with the efforts on regime change in Syria — chiefly the U.S., the U.K. and France.
This does not mean it can’t happen. There is more than enough open-source material, as well as now-unclassified facts, images, analysis results and information available from the OPCW itself, from former OPCW officials and inspectors, and held by Member States, that would support a credible in-depth review.
The basis for expert analysis would be the material used in the fact-finding mission and I.I.T. reports themselves.
By now we know there isn’t any “smoking gun” evidence. If there had been, it would have been cited in the mission and I.I.T. reports.
Trust me, this study will bear clear results. My hope is that someone sufficiently curious and responsible will commission and fund it.
Ian Henderson served as an OPCW inspector from the establishment of the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, and was appointed as one of the first Inspection Team Leaders. An experienced chemical engineer with military experience, he led many of the more complex missions to more than 55 countries. After returning to a career in the chemical industry for 10 years he rejoined the OPCW in 2016 as part of the “rehire” scheme aimed at bringing back experienced inspectors. It was during this time that he became involved in the Syrian chemical weapons operations and, along with others, objected to the apparent influences of political control in the organization. He was suspended from the OPCW in May 2019 after the leak (by unknown others) of his dissenting engineering report on the Douma cylinders.
GAVI, a vaccine alliance that includes the WHO, health agencies, pharma, and the Gates foundation, recently posted that studies reflect that giving multiple vaccines to a baby does not risk increased side effects and chronic disease.
Ironically, the studies it citesdo not support that vaccines do not cause increased risk of side effects and chronic disease. Anyone who actually reads what is cited would conclude as much and may very well decide to no longer trust GAVI, the medical establishment it represents, or the products it promotes. That is called “thinking” or “informed consent”—which these same organizations would then label as “vaccine hesitancy” or “anti-vax.”
Espionage novels portray the spy as a person in a trench coat carrying stolen documents and disappearing into a dark alley. Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard, certainly fit that picture. A Navy analyst who stole American secrets including the complete ten-volume manual of the National Security Agency exposing how the US gathers its signal intelligence and the names of thousands of foreign individuals who worked for US spy agencies. Intelligence officials believe Israel shared stolen documents with the Soviet Union. According to several intelligence assessments, Pollard was one of the most damaging spies in US history.
Pollard received a life sentence in 1987 and was released in 2015. At first, Israel claimed he was a rogue, apologised and did not admit he had been its agent until 1998. In 2007, Israel named a square in Jerusalem after him, honouring him for his services.
Pollard was neither the first nor the last Israeli asset. Lawrence Franklin, a Pentagon analyst, pleaded guilty in 2005 to passing classified information to an Israeli embassy official and two AIPAC staffers. Ben-Ami Kadish, a former Army engineer, pleaded guilty in 2008 to passing secret documents to an Israeli consulate official, and served no prison time. Stewart Nozette from NASA was charged with attempted espionage following an FBI sting operation. In 1970, Richard Perle was caught in an FBI wiretap discussing classified information with an Israeli embassy official.
In 2001, the same Perle chaired the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, while two other Israel-firsters, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz held senior posts in the same building. Franklin had worked in Feith’s policy office when he was indicted for espionage. In 1996, a study group led by Perle, and Feith, prepared a policy paper for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu titled “A Clean Break.” It urged Israel to abandon the Oslo Accords and the peace process with the Palestinians, and it proposed removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq as part of a broader Israeli strategy to reshape the region. Five years later, as leaders in the Pentagon, they delivered America’s first made-for-Israel war in Iraq.
The above is in no way intended to insinuate or allege that anyone, least of all these Zionist Americans, has dual loyalties. No. It is so profound, there is only one way to describe it: Israel-first loyalty.
Fast forward to 2026. David Milstein, stepson of Israeli propagandist Mark Levin and a senior aide to Ambassador Mike Huckabee, effectively the ambassador’s chief of staff. An unabashed Israel-first American Zionist, Milstein oversees the embassy’s West Bank and Gaza portfolio, placing the fox in charge of the henhouse. According to The New York Times, citing a dozen people who have worked with him, Milstein has repeatedly quashed or rewritten embassy reports to the U.S. State Department to favour Netanyahu’s government.
When the Israeli government accelerated the approval of building more Jewish-only colonies in occupied West Bank, embassy staff drafted an urgent memo warning that the move might cross President Trump’s own red line against annexation. According to The Times, the memo never left Jerusalem.
In response to the surge in attacks by Israeli Jewish mobs on Palestinian homes and farms, embassy staff prepared a report documenting Israel’s failure to rein in violence by Zionist youth. Milstein rewrote it and sent an embassy cable to Washington titled “Government Cracks Down on Escalating West Bank Violence.” When US diplomats pointed out that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s distribution sites were chaotic and deadly, Milstein concluded the operation was a success.
Thirty members of Congress, led by Senator Chris Van Hollen, asked what had become of the investigations into the killings of nine Palestinian Americans by Israeli Jewish mobs and soldiers. Embassy staff compiled a report showing little progress and no charges. According to The Times, the report was set aside in favor of a letter saying Israel was handling the cases properly.
Cable traffic from the section covering Palestinian affairs fell from several a week to a few a month, because American embassy staff feared their work would be blocked, rewritten or impact their diplomatic career. Milstein would question embassy staff if they were “pro-Israel” or “pro-Hamas,” not if they were loyal Americans. A diplomatic mission that polices loyalty with questions like that ceases to function as an American embassy.
I once shared a lunch table with an American ambassador serving abroad. He recounted how, during George Shultz’s tenure as Secretary of State, Shultz would meet newly appointed ambassadors, point to a world map in his office, and ask the appointee to identify their country. Most would point to the country where they had been assigned. Shultz would correct them: “No, your country is the United States. Your duty is to serve your own country’s interests, not those of the country to which you are assigned.”
Ambassador Huckabee and Milstein either never heard that lesson, or serving Israel was their priority.
Rather than representing American interests in Jerusalem, the embassy operates as Israel’s envoy within the US government. Turning the US embassy into a Zionist mission run by the evangelical church, and an indoctrinated Zionist whose stepfather is referred to as “Tel Aviv Levin.”
Here again, no one is accusing Huckabee or Milstein of being foreign agents. Frankly, Israel does not need them to be. It need not recruit them or pay them like Pollard. Officials ideologically devoted to Israel can do the same work from within the U.S. government, under legitimate titles and without risking arrest.
No country receives more American financial and military aid than Israel. Yet US counterintelligence assessments have identified Israel as one of the most aggressive intelligence-gathering threats to the American homeland. Jonathan Pollard and others may have been the quintessential trench-coat spies. But the more dangerous risk is not someone stealing classified files; it is Americans whose loyalty to Israel overrides their duty to the U.S., operating in the halls of the White House and the Pentagon with one focus: serve Israel.
Consider David Frum, who coined President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” phrase, helping lay the rhetorical roadmap for America’s longest foreign war.
Frum also wrote speeches for Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, making Israel’s case before the international body. The same writer, serving an Israel-first agenda from two different platforms: first helping sell America a war in the Middle East, then making Israel’s case before the world.
In the 21st century, with Zionist control of mainstream corporate media, and these implants inside America’s halls of power, Israel does not require trench coats, or stolen documents. It operates through officials who occupy positions of power deciding what American policymakers read by shaping diplomatic reporting, suppressing information and steering American decisions in ways that advances Israel’s strategic interests over America’s own. And whenever Israel’s interests and Washington’s information needs diverge, the information bends, delivered in plain sight, through official channels, under official titles, and on the American taxpayer’s payroll.
An Israeli digital advertising agency helped run an espionage campaign using a vast network of online ads to track targets and hack their devices, Reuters reported on 15 October, citing two research groups.
Reports from Canadian cyber watchdog group Citizen Lab and New York advertising security firm Confiant document how the Israeli advertising agency Discover-Tech placed millions of ads online each day for ordinary products such as phones or earpods.
Discover-Tech placed the ads using the advertising services of Google, Comcast, Yandex, and other search engines.
The Israeli ad agency could identify and track internet users who visited websites or used apps with the malicious ads, and at times obtained phone numbers from smartphone users.
Clicking on the ads was not required to allow users to be tracked.
Some ads were used to plant spyware from another Israeli firm, Candiru, on users’ devices.
Jerome Dangu of Confiant said Discover-Tech placed at least 10 million online ads per day, affecting more than 120,000 websites and 75,000 apps.
“Very likely hundreds of millions of people would have been touched by Discover-Tech,” Dangu said.
Citizen Lab said Candiru spyware delivered through Discover-Tech’s ads had been used to compromise devices of journalists and executives at the Qatari news outlet Al Jazeera.
Unidentified media organizations in Mexico, Israel, and Europe were also targeted.
Dangu of Confiant said that the malicious Israeli ads targeted officials at the Pentagon, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Discover-Tech ads also helped to surveil the populations of entire regions, most notably the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.
“You go to almost any site in Palestine – any site – you find a Discover-Tech ad. It gives them a very complete visibility on the digital activities of an entire country,” Dangu said.
Citizen Lab also said the malicious ads were directed at officials in the UN, NATO, the European Commission, as well as more than a dozen governments.
The ads also helped to track employees and executives of chip-related firms such as Nvidia, SanDisk, Broadcom, and Micron.
As a result of the Confiant and Citizen Lab investigations, Google said it has removed Discover-Tech from its ad platforms “for systematically violating our policies.”
IAB Europe, an association for digital marketing and advertising on the continent, has now suspended Discover-Tech from its list of globally approved vendors.
Comcast ad tech subsidiary Beeswax also removed Discover-Tech from its platform.
Yandex did not respond to Reuters’‘ requests for comment.
Israel has a well-documented history of using private technology companies for surveillance, intelligence gathering, and cyberespionage.
Some of these companies have close connections to Israel’s military and intelligence services, particularly Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s signals intelligence unit.
Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, one of it’s leading think tanks, put out a psychotic paper written by Tamir Hayman, the former IDF chief of intelligence from 2018 to 2021, which outlined Israel’s current “national security concept”.
Some concepts outlined in the paper include:
Prioritizing Israel as a Jewish Supremacist State Over A Democratic One:
The paper wrote that “The state’s Jewish identity takes precedence over its democratic system of government,” adding that “This priority is intended to guarantee Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state, even at the cost of eroding its democratic values” and “This principle dictates the need to maintain the primacy of Jewish identity over other national identities (such as Arab-Islamic or Christian).”
Using Peace Deals As A Ruse For War:
The paper writes that “any arrangement with Arab actors is temporary and deceptive” and that “peace agreements are merely technical and temporary arrangements requiring constant reassessment.”
Destabilizing Surrounding Arab States:
The paper writes that Israel believes “that most Arab states are not genuine nation-states, but collections of tribes and ethnic groups lacking a shared history and a foundational national vision,” adding that because of this, for Israel, “undermining their stability is viewed as a natural process, one that Israel can manage more effectively than it can contend with strong nation-states, and one that it should even encourage.”
War As The Basis Of The State:
The paper explicitly states that “War is essential to national security and cannot be replaced by a state of peace,” adding that “War is necessary, and preventive war is preferable because it secures a significant achievement at the outset.”
Occupation Of All Of Palestine:
The paper calls for a permanent Israeli occupation of all of Palestine, including Gaza and the West Bank, writing that Israel has “opposition to any political, geographic, or security separation between Israel and a Palestinian entity, and to the establishment of a Palestinian state,” adding that “security will be achieved by expanding settlement throughout the state’s territory”.
Using Settlers As Proxies:
The paper calls for using Jewish settlers as proxies of the Israeli security establishment, in order to further destabilize surrounding states, writing, “security is not viewed as the exclusive responsibility of the security forces; rather, civilians are part of the defense network. Defense is established by creating communities and outposts in all areas of friction with the Arab population, in Judea and Samaria (West Bank), and in security zones in Syria, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip,” adding that increased Jewish settlements “further contribute to the destabilization of the ‘synthetic’ Arab states.”
Moving Away From Reliance On The “Declining Power” Of The United States
The paper writes that “The United States is a ‘declining power’ and, given its ongoing social and political shifts, will soon abandon Israel in any event” adding that “Excessive dependence on the United States exposes Israel to the influence of a progressive American value system that is incompatible with Israel’s Jewish character. Severing ties with the United States is therefore not only inevitable, but essential to Israel’s independence and the resilience of its Jewish national identity.”
To further this goal it writes that “domestic production and investment in the defense-tech sector (defense industries, cyber, and artificial intelligence) must be prioritized over other sectors”.
Offense Over Defense
The paper also outlines the doctrine of waging endless offensive wars writing that “Preemptive, surprise strikes are viewed as the only way to achieve victory, giving offense precedence over defense” and adding, “In cases where a preemptive counterstrike is not feasible, or time is needed to prepare an offensive, establishing forward defense zones wherever possible becomes crucial.”
Did Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centers destroy the Kremlin’s pro-MAGA bot army? Or are Vladimir Zelensky and his European patrons insulting their citizens with remedial-grade propaganda? RT takes a trip down the rabbit hole.
Ukrainian forces hit three Yandex (Russia’s equivalent to Google) data centers with long-range drones between October 8 and 11. Yandex confirmed that operations were “completely halted” at the facility struck on October 8, and temporarily halted at the center struck on October 11. This much is true, but the story that followed veers into NAFO fiction.
How did the ‘Russian bots’ story begin?
On October 8, American cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler posted a Cloudflare graph showing a dramatic drop in “bot traffic” after the first Yandex center was hit. As Yandex is primarily a search company, its bots crawl the internet indexing content for users. All search engines function in this way, but Fowler – either through malice or ignorance – conflated this search bot activity with social media bot activity, claiming that the drop in traffic could “disrupt the midterm elections in the US.”
The story spread, hitting the mainstream media on October 11 when Tom’s Hardware published an article claiming that “Russian disinformation bot traffic” had been “nearly eliminated” after the strikes. The word “disinformation” was later pulled from the headline, but the tale had already taken on a life of its own.
That same day, an AI-created graph began circulating, claiming that “Russian bots” were making 56% fewer posts in support of Germany’s right-wing AfD party in the aftermath of the strikes. The graph, which was unsourced and had one axis unlabeled, measured the “decline in activity of Russian bots” up to October 15, four days in the future at the time it appeared online.
Regardless, the graph was shared by a Green Party councillor in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia, and by Czech MEP Tomas Zdechovsky. “This is telling: Russian data centres get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets,” Zdechovsky wrote on social media. “So much talk about German patriotism… then the connection from Russia goes down.”
Who spread the lie?
By October 12, the story had been reported by Germany’s Der Standard and Focus. That morning, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky spread it further, claiming at the Warsaw Security Forum that his strikes on Yandex data centers had made it “a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms.”
“A lot of people noticed it, and there was less hate, less division and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots,” Zelensky continued. “And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from. If they disappeared when Yandex went offline, this proves again and again that Europe is not the source of the problems,” he added.
Speaking on the sidelines of the forum, Polish minister Tomasz Siemoniak claimed that the country’s domestic intelligence agency was “observing a significant, radical decline in Russian bot activity online,” while Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevicius said that “we should ask Mr. Zelensky to hit more data centres in Russia” to “protect” elections in the EU.
Anti-Kremlin activist and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov weighed in, claiming that “the Russian troll bots” in his X feed had “dropped dramatically,” while former US ambassador Michael McFaul thanked the Ukrainian weapons industry for granting him reprieve from “daily” harassment by “armies of Russian bots.”
The only problem was none of this was true, and based on the replies to McFaul’s tweet, nobody was buying it.
How was the bots story debunked?
The story didn’t take long to fall apart. Common Consultancy, a Scandinavian NGO that has previously accused Russia of orchestrating social media influence campaigns, concluded that there was “no visible effect” on pro-MAGA or pro-AfD social media posts after the Yandex strikes. Leonid Volkov, an anti-Kremlin activist associated with deceased opposition figure Alexey Navalny, slammed Zdechovsky for spreading “nonsense and falsehood.”
CeMAS, a liberal German think tank, stated that it was “not seeing a drop in the number of posts that could be explained by an attack on data centers.” The Hasso Plattner Institute and Polisphere, two tech nonprofits, concurred, and German newspapers began quietly editing their articles on Monday night.
Some, like Merkur, kept “speculation about Russian bots and the AfD” in their headlines. Others, including Der Standard, noted that their “original assertion of a confirmed connection [between the strikes and alleged bot activity] has been corrected.” The Verge, a tech-focused American news site, admitted that “the Yandex outage probably didn’t blitz Russian bots.”
Is this hybrid war?
By the time the story was debunked and corrected, the damage was done. In the public’s eye, the strikes were tied to a drop in “Russian bot” activity, and none of the speakers at the Warsaw Security Forum, including senior Ukrainian, Polish, and Lithuanian officials, bothered to correct the record.
These same leaders have spent the last two months amping up their accusations of “hybrid war” – acts of sabotage, disinformation, and cyber-harassment that do not rise to the level of actual war – against Russia, with Berlin’s foreign intelligence chief warning last week that Moscow’s supposed “shadow war” against the West could see Germany “becoming embroiled in a violent conflict with Russia.”
That none of the acts of “hybrid war” – among them the discovery of a suspicious drone at Leipzig Airport in August, and a series of unsubstantiated drone sightings across Germany and Scandinavia last year – have been linked by evidence to Russia is a feature, not a bug. “Hybrid war” is by its very nature unprovable, and the accusation alone is enough for European leaders to justify their deepening proxy war in Ukraine, their remilitarization and expansion of the national security state at home.
Furthermore, the accusations themselves are a form of “hybrid warfare” against the European public, analyst Thomas Fazi argued last week. “Europeans,” he wrote, “are being subjected to a sustained campaign of cognitive or psychological warfare aimed at conditioning them to believe that Europe is under attack from Russia.”
Who stands to gain?
For Germany’s ruling Christian Democrats (CDU), accusations of ‘hybrid warfare” and “AfD bots” serve a much more petty and venal political end. Chancellor Friedrich Merz is less popular now than at any point in his political career, and with the AfD trouncing the CDU in state elections and leading his party by ten points in opinion polls, Merz has taken every opportunity available to tie his opponents to Russia.
“We in Germany will not allow ourselves to be divided, not by hybrid attacks, not by Moscow-bot-driven hate speech on social media, and – if I may say so – not even by the slogans of the AfD and its Russian backers,” the chancellor said in a speech earlier this month.
The Yandex story – which conveniently linked the AfD to “Moscow-bot-driven hate speech” – was a godsend to Merz, and to his Ukrainian and Eastern European allies, who have an interest in preventing the Ukraine-skeptic AfD from taking power in Germany. Unfortunately for them, like all “hybrid war” claims, it fell apart the moment it was subjected to some basic scrutiny.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s attempt to blame Russia for the Brexit vote is a crude attempt to undo the referendum and tie the UK back to Brussels. It’s also imploding dramatically.
In an appearance on the ‘The Rest is Politics’ podcast on Sunday, Burnham said that he sought answers about alleged meddling in the 2016 Brexit referendum after taking office this summer.
“I asked the question coming to Downing Street: Well, was there interference in the 2016 referendum from Russia? I’ve had the clear answer that yes, there was.”
Burnham did not identify who had provided the assessment or present any evidence to back it up. Nor did he say whether the alleged interference actually affected the result of the referendum. However, he insisted that anti-establishment movements in Britain, France, and Germany – where Chancellor Friedrich Merz has claimed that the right-wing AfD are “Russian-backed” – are “instigated via our enemies, namely Russia.”
Haven’t we heard this all before?
On June 23, 2016, Britain voted to leave the EU by a margin of 51.89% to 48.11%. The vote was largely driven by a public desire to reclaim sovereignty, control immigration, and humiliate the country’s political elites, the majority of whom favored continued EU membership.
Six months later, Labour MP Ben Bradshaw announced in parliament that Russia “probably interfered” in the vote. Bradshaw conceded that “we do not have the evidence for that yet, but it is highly probable.” His claims were picked up by media outlets in Britain and the US, where the ‘Russiagate’ hoax was taking root in Washington.
A parliamentary committee stated in April 2017 that the collapse of a voter-registration website in the runup to the referendum could have been the work of a Russian or Chinese denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. In November of that year, City University alleged that 13,000 bot accounts – some of them Russian – were tweeting about Brexit before and after the referendum.
X, then called Twitter, rejected the City University study, stating that it found no evidence linking the bot accounts with Russia; separate research tying Russia to the ‘leave’ campaign was found to be fabricated by an anti-Brexit group funded by liberal billionaire George Soros; and in 2020, a parliamentary report found “no evidence of successful interference in the EU referendum.” At the time, Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared that “a retrospective assessment of the EU referendum is not necessary” in light of the report.
All of this begs the question: ten years after the Brexit vote, why is Burnham conjuring up the specter of “Russian interference” again?
Burnham’s big break
Burnham’s political maneuvering is obvious here. The British PM has repeatedly said that he would like to see the UK rejoin the EU, and two weeks before appearing on ‘The Rest is Politics’, he opened his speech at the UN General Assembly with a reference to Brexit, lamenting that “my country has lived through the disruption it brought.”
Speaking at his Labour Party’s annual conference a week later, Burnham argued that “Brexit has done more harm than good.” The following day he pledged to forge closer relations with Brussels and, if politically feasible, “go all the way” and rejoin the union.
Burnham has refused to say whether he intends to run his next election campaign on a platform of EU membership. However, he has promised to have “a serious dialogue about the different options for our relationship in the long-term” when he meets EU leaders in Brussels next month.
With the UK and EU both embroiled in a proxy war with Russia, there is no more effective way to delegitimize the Brexit vote at the moment than by tying it to Moscow. Burnham made this explicit in an address to Parliament on October 12, arguing that it would be “a dereliction of duty” not to pursue closer relations with the EU, given Russia’s alleged interference in the referendum.
The hoax crumbles
The prime minister’s confidence began to crumble under questioning. Asked by Conservative MP Julian Lewis “exactly how he thinks Russia was able to alter the result of the referendum,” Burnham replied that Moscow’s interference in British elections was “a matter of record,” without elaborating further.
Responding to Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, Burnham claimed that he never implied that the result of the referendum was invalid, before repeating the same “matter of record” line.
Burnham’s lack of evidence became clear when his foreign secretary, Stephen Doughty, appeared on ITV’s ‘Good Morning Britain’ the same day.
“What did Russia do during that Brexit referendum?” host Susanna Reid asked Doughty, who responded that he was “not going to get into the specifics.”
“Why are you not getting into specifics when the Prime Minister has just got into the specifics on the podcast?” Reid pressed.
Asked repeatedly about Russian interference in the Brexit vote, Doughty gave a variation on “Russia attempts to interfere in all of our democratic processes. They’ve been doing this for many, many years” every time.
“This is embarrassing,” co-host Ed Balls interjected. “It’s really bad for politics when you just blatantly don’t answer the question on something so important and go back to a nonsensical line, which is contradicted by what the prime minister just said.”
The final nail in the coffin came from MI5 Director Ken McCallum. McCallum is no stranger to anti-Russian opportunism, having pushed for mass internet surveillance to prevent Russia causing “mayhem on British and European streets.” However, he warned on Tuesday against exaggerating “Russian influence” on Brexit, arguing that debating the influence of “Russian trolls” on the vote “play[s] into our adversaries’ hands by making these trolls look 10ft tall.”
The Burnham playbook
Burnham has a habit of making extraordinary claims without the extraordinary evidence to back them up. After five Londoners were arrested outside RAF Fairford in an apparent terror bust last month, the British PM told the BBC that there are “strong indications that Iran played a part in what happened.”
The five men – plus two more suspects arrested afterwards – have all been released on bail. No explosives were found in their vehicles, and no link between the men and the Iranian government has been established, according to all available information. However, Burnham told the BBC that “we can confirm our belief that we believe Iran to have played a part,” before telling Parliament that the supposed terror plot was “almost certainly” directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Tehran has described the incident as “a clumsy false-flag operation,” aimed at “advancing an anti-Iran campaign and evading accountability for Britain’s involvement in the US-Israeli military aggression against the Iranian people.”
Likewise, Moscow has repeatedly denied interfering in the Brexit referendum. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described Burnham’s allegations as “the latest baseless accusations made without any proof.”
One final irony
Burnham’s claim would never have been torn apart in parliament, in the media, and by his own domestic intelligence agency had ‘The Rest is Politics’ host Alastair Campbell [not] pushed back and demanded evidence or elaboration. However, Campbell has a track record of embellishing facts to suit political narratives, with disastrous consequences.
Campbell was serving as then-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s communications adviser in 2002 when he ordered a dossier on “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction” to be “sexed up” in order to make a stronger case for joining the US-led invasion, according to Defense Ministry expert Dr David Kelly.
An inquiry found that Campbell changed multiple lines within the dossier to make Iraq appear more threatening. Among them was a line stating that Iraqi forces “may be able to deploy” chemical weapons against British troops within 45 minutes of receiving an order, which became “are able to deploy.”
Campbell then compiled a second dossier, now known as the “Dodgy Dossier.” This document contained plagiarized and fabricated claims about Iraq’s intelligence services, alleging that they were concealing weapons of mass destruction and “supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes.” None of these claims were true.
The second dossier was published in February 2003. Five weeks later, Parliament held a vote to join the invasion, with Burnham one of 139 Labour MPs voting in favor of the war. Burnham has since said that, if he could go back to 2003, he “wouldn’t have voted for it.”
More than two decades later, Burnham is once again making “dodgy dossier”-tier accusations in service of two foreign conflicts, and in aid of his own political ambitions.
After 23 years, US-led occupation forces are formally leaving Iraq. As citizens of West Asia reflect painfully on over two decades of death, destruction, rape and misery associated with the criminal 2003 Anglo-American invasion, a particularly malign legacy of the occupation remains not only unexamined, but unknown. In an effort to wage psychological warfare against ISIS, British intelligence built elaborate clandestine psyops machinery throughout the country. Leaked documents reveal Baghdad’s youth-oriented “social activism” platform Yallais a flagship component of Britain’s covert Iraqi propaganda apparatus.
Ostensibly launched by young local journalists in 2015, Yalla is one of Baghdad’s largest news and social media platforms, boasting millions of followers within the country and wider region. Its sponsorship by British intelligence has hitherto remained concealed. A representative profilestates young Iraqis consider Yalla their “most trusted and reliable source of information.” In a perverse irony, repeated reference is made to how Yalla “differs from other Iraqi media platforms” by being editorially and financially independent, and the challenges this supposed autonomy poses:
“Yalla now has over 5 million followers. 92% of its followers are inside Iraq and 35% of the followers are women. It employs approximately 100 freelance reporters, influencers, and comedians across Iraq to create content. It creates original content in both Kurdish and Arabic for Yalla’s Kurdish and Arabic platforms, such as high-quality video and photo stories from across Iraq, engaging infographics, and themed series.”
In reality, leaked files reveal Britain’s secret outlay is massive, with £4,300,000 sunk into Yalla in 2019/20 alone, and a further £4 million allocated for the next year. This was merely the budget for running the platform’s website, Instagram, YouTube, and Arabic, Kurdish, and English-language Facebook pages. Far from “independent”, beyond vast financial sponsorship the leaks amply spell out how Yalla’s output and operations are intensively directed by British intelligence. Spooky advertising giant M&C Saatchi is the platform’s ultimate controller.
In submissions to the Foreign Office, M&C Saatchi boasted of its “significant experience…implementing sensitive unattributable programming for government clients.” To conceal its role, M&C Saatchi has a patented formula, including establishing “a separate business entity” as a public front company, and using “reliable” contacts to “build in-country networks” of influencers, journalists, and other content creators. “Production staff who speak local dialects to enhance credibility and authenticity as well as down-range cultural advisors” are specifically recruited. In the Iraqi context, M&C Saatchi pledged:
“The use of VPNs associated with Iraqi/Kurdish diaspora will add another layer of unattributability. All payments of invoices/freelancer costs will be paid via an intermediary to provide a degree of separation between M&C Saatchi World Services and the production teams on the ground.”
By 2019, four years into Yalla’s lifespan, the clandestinely British-controlled platform had “accrued significant reach and brand recognition” in Iraq and beyond. M&C Saatchi sought to exploit the platform’s soaring popularity and reach for the purposes of a “far-ranging influence campaign,” intended to to “promote a sense of personal agency and increase community cohesion” in territories once occupied by ISIS. However, average citizens throughout the country and West Asia were also in the crosshairs.
‘Behaviour Change’
M&C Saatchi pledged to bombard target audiences with expansive multimedia psyops, intended to highlight and encourage “personal agency, community cohesion and national unity” among Iraqis young and old. Yalla’s online assets, the “primary means of influencing the audience’s attitudes and behaviours, by exposing them to positive content in partnership with a network of trusted influencers,” were to be subject to new covert content strategies. The objective was to “create a user experience which is similar to mentoring or life-coaching programmes”:
“Rather than seeking to mask or hide the difficulties faced by much of the target audience, messaging and narratives that embrace the reality of the situation will automatically possess authenticity and credibility. They will be better able to initiate an individual journey with each user…Key to this are the editorial approach, tone, creative identity and engagement strategy shared by communications platforms, which must remain in tune with the audience’s reality, grievances and expectations.”
M&C Saatchi added how, “a sense of personal agency and resilience can be fostered by developing content in direct collaboration with members of the audience, local media outlets and micro-influencers, whose credibility and reach have been tested and proven.” The intelligence cutout pledged to work with “youth psychologists and training experts to develop a range of evergreen modules, each comprising a series of social videos and interactive graphics that live across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube and that users can consume at their own pace.”
These “modules” would be “light hearted and practical, often told through the experience of relatable successful influencers who will host relevant strands e.g. ‘10 things I did to become a…’.” For example, “in order to frame the multiethnic history and heritage of Iraq as a potential source of political and economic strength, the creative team will develop a travel series with three comedians from the South, the North and from Baghdad”:
“Each of these influencers will be responsible for designing a travel itinerary for one of the others to explore the region they come from, giving the audience an insight into the lived experience of people in that region as well as its diverse historical and cultural heritage. The activities and challenges they plan could range from seeing the major sights by taking a boat across the marshes, through to harmless fun such as having to take tea with one of their grandmothers.”
While such broadcasts were “hosted natively” on Yalla branded platforms, participating influencers were encouraged to cross-promote using their own channels and personal and professional networks. Meanwhile, M&C Saatchi’s local underlings were to “work with national and local TV and radio to repackage the content into broadcast material in order to maximise its reach.” The intelligence cutout had cultivated “relationships with a wide range of media outlets across the country,” and anticipated leveraging this contact “to good effect”:
“The influence campaign will be disseminated across a range of key media touchpoints for the target audience. These touchpoints will be carefully selected by the media strategy team in order to enjoy the widest reach possible and deliver the messaging where it will be best positioned to drive attitudinal and behaviour change at a personal and social level… The campaign will seek to shape choices, reinforce positive ideas and change social perceptions… [and] place increasing focus on user-generated content as the project evolves.”
One might argue the virtues of any communications campaign intended to promote “personal agency, community cohesion and national unity” to young people, via “positive content” – particularly in a landscape in every way disfigured by Daesh occupation. However, on top of Yalla’s audiences being entirely unwitting about its output being effectively authored by the same elements thatboth mastermindedthe criminal Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and actively helped create ISIS, the scope for the platform’s abuse was and remains self-evidently massive.
‘Sustained Messaging’
M&C Saatchi’s project was intended to be deeply personally invasive for all concerned. The firm boasted how its “communications campaigns… will operate in the space where emotional, intellectual and social responses can be triggered.” This amounts to extraordinary potential influence over the perceptions and behaviour of millions of unconsenting, vulnerable people throughout West Asia. Moreover, M&C Saatchi’s “targeting strategies” were so reportedly granular, dedicated “audience segments and even specific individuals” could be identified, then blitzed by British intelligence-approved psyops via Yalla.
The still surgingly popular “independent” news, entertainment and social media platform is just one component of a wide-ranging psychological warfare apparatus secretly constructed by London in Iraq over a decade ago in the name of battling ISIS propaganda, which was never dismantled. Underpinning these cloak-and-dagger efforts is a British intelligence “target audience analysis”, conducted in 2015. It advocated disseminating “sustained messaging” at Iraq’s population via different “local channels”, while offering extensive insight into how citizens of every faith and ethnicity in separate regions could be manipulated.
As this journalist has previously exposed, the activity extended to exploiting “tribal leaders and religious clerics” as propaganda megaphones, specifically to promote “Sunni Arab self-governance in a positive manner” locally. Strikingly, M&C Saatchi also managed the operation. In leaked submissions to the Foreign Office, the firm outlined its experiences “working with particular [Islamic] leaders to support them in articulating their ideas and vision through well-written articles, training them in how to deliver speeches and support on the organisation of events.”
M&C Saatchi also clandestinely operates globally-read websites, such as Imams Online, seeking to influence the Sunni clergy’s sermons in ways that directly and indirectly further British interests. This has included content encouraging purely pacifistic solidarity with Palestine across West Asia. Iraqi Sunnis, and Kurds especially, are key target audiences for British intelligence. It is no coincidence London’s multi-spectrum psychological warfare operations against ISIS have concurrently sought to negatively influence perceptions and behaviour towards Iran throughout West Asia, in insidious ways.
For example, this journalist has previously revealed how “within hours” of Iranian Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani’s January 2020 assassination, MI6 cutout Global Strategy Network activated its Aleppo-based network of citizen journalists and media production facilities to produce a video depicting residents of Atarib “handing out sweets in celebration.” The clip was “retweeted by prominent activists and journalists in and beyond Syria, picked up by [Saudi outlet] Al-Arabiyya and broadcast to its 22.5 million followers, and retweeted by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.”
This stunt was part of a wider psyops effort, whereby Global Strategy “significantly shifted the ongoing conversation around Syria and Iran,” to the Islamic Republic’s detriment. Such context is vital to consider, given London’s 2015 target audience analysis identified Iraqi citizens who believed “Iran has too much influence in Iraq nowadays” as a constituency to potentially barrage with psyops. Markedly, intensive focus grouping found the overwhelming majority of Iraqis vehemently rejected this view, across ethnic and religious lines.
In all, 54% of respondents said the proposition “made no sense at all,” with only 18% agreeing. However, 68% of Sunnis surveyed, many of them Iraqi Kurds, concurred. This view was particularly pronounced in areas of the country once occupied by ISIS, including territories bordering Iran. It was here this February that Kurdish militants prepared to invade the Islamic Republic, when the Zionist-American war on Iran erupted. Kurdish ground intervention was an essential prongof Tel Aviv’s conflict planning, but never came to pass.
It was possible to mobilise them because, as British intel’s 2015 Target Audience Analysis found, certain Iraqi Kurds believe their country’s borders “should be changed,” and support seizure of Iranian territory by force. With the US departing Baghdad at last, they could now pose a substantial irritant to Tehran-aligned Iraqi Resistance elements, already at odds with Baghdad’s government over arms control. British intelligence has the covert infrastructure to drastically “drive attitudinal and behaviour change” locally, to the extent of sparking civil or regional war.
International Center for 9/11 Justice – October 9, 2026
One year after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, independent journalist James Lee takes the stage to ask a difficult question: Are there still unanswered questions about what happened—and who gets to investigate them?
Speaking at the 9/11: 25 Years Later conference, Lee examines what he considers inconsistencies and unresolved issues in the case, including the handling of potential evidence, the rapid clearing of the crime scene, questions about the investigation, and the media’s portrayal of the events.
Lee also explores Charlie Kirk’s relationship with Turning Point USA, the organization’s reported shift in funding and political messaging, and Kirk’s publicly expressed frustrations over Israel and its influence on American politics. He raises allegations of possible foreign involvement, which remain unproven in this presentation, and calls for further scrutiny rather than unquestioning acceptance of any single narrative.
The speech expands into a broader argument about free speech, the First Amendment, citizen journalism, and the responsibility of independent researchers to scrutinize institutions and challenge powerful interests. Drawing parallels with the JFK assassination and 9/11, Lee urges audiences to keep asking questions and examining evidence.
Watch the full presentation and decide for yourself which questions deserve further investigation. The allegations and interpretations discussed are those of the speaker and should not be taken as independently verified findings.
Subscribe for more talks, investigative journalism, and presentations from the 9/11: 25 Years Later conference.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei has dismissed claims by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Tehran has repeatedly squandered chances for an agreement, saying the inversion of historical facts cannot erase Washington’s pattern of treaty-breaking from public memory.
Baghaei, responding to an IRNA question on Rubio’s assertion that “Iran has missed opportunities for an agreement multiple times,” stated on Wednesday, “The inversion of historical truths cannot remove the reality of America’s repeated breaches of commitment from the mind of public opinion.”
He pointed to Washington’s successive acts of bad faith, including its unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear deal on May 8, 2018, the sabotage of diplomatic tracks, military aggression against Iran while negotiations were underway, and the subsequent violation of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding Iran reached on June 18.
Baghaei held the United States responsible for the insecurity prevailing in the region and for the economic consequences felt in America and worldwide.
“Blame-shifting and contradictory statements cannot overshadow the demand of American and global public opinion that those responsible for the illegal war and the crimes committed be held to account,” he said.
On the latest developments in contacts with the United States, the spokesman said the Islamic Republic’s considerations and conditions for ending the imposed war on all fronts and restoring security to the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz have been set out explicitly and decisively.
The necessary response to the other side’s proposals will be conveyed through intermediaries. “The exchange of messages between Iran and the US is being conducted through intermediaries,” he added.
On diplomatic efforts related to regional peace and security, including commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Baghaei stressed that the security of navigation in the waterway matters more to the Islamic Republic of Iran than to any other party. Iran, in consultation with Oman as the other littoral state, has spared no effort to restore security to the Strait.
“The consultation process between Iran and Oman has proceeded successfully. In addition to agreeing on the geographical coordinates of safe two-way routes in the Strait of Hormuz, the two sides have reached an understanding on how the matter will be presented to the relevant international body, a step that will, God willing, be taken soon,” he said.
Asked about the possibility of a joint meeting involving Iran, Oman, and other Persian Gulf states, Baghaei said Iran will continue its efforts to strengthen trust and engagement among the region’s countries.
“Defenders of the homeland, in both the diplomatic arena and the field, stand shoulder to shoulder, resolute and steadfast in defending Iran’s sovereignty and securing the nation’s interests and security,” he concluded.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei says the United States and the Israeli regime have a history of manufacturing false-flag incidents only to clean up their messes around the world.
In a Wednesday post on his X account, the Iranian official said such scenarios would not save them from the quagmire of the aggression against Iran.
Baghaei said telling lies about Iran and accusing it of having a role in security incidents would fail to justify the US-Israeli aggression against the Islamic Republic.
“In a world where the American and international public is weary of an unlawful war of aggression against Iran, and where the aggressors have no honest way to justify a war of choice, even a raft made of lies can look like salvation to those who are drowning,” he said in the post.
The post also included a video elucidating previous US and Israeli false-flag operations, including massive US media campaigns denoting the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which led to the invasion of the country in 2003, and Israel’s involvement in a case in Egypt in 1954, known as the Lavon Affair.
“False flags are an old craft: manufacture the incident, assign the blame, and harvest the consequences,” said Baghaei.
The post came after officials in the US and allied countries suggested that Iran may have had a role in recent security incidents, including on a Flydubai flight from the United Arab Emirates to the Israeli-occupied territories and in a suspected plot against an American base in Britain.
Iran has roundly rejected the accusations, calling them a pretext for launching renewed aggression against the country, months after the US and the Israeli regime were forced to end a previous offensive under a ceasefire reached in mid-April.
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