Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc / Contributor via Getty Images
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. that Joe Biden made the decision to blow up Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines because he saw being a war president as giving him a better chance at re-election.
Last month, Hersh published a report asserting that the pipelines were destroyed by the US as part of a covert operation.
According to Hersh’s sources, the explosives were planted in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise and were detonated three months later with a remote signal sent by a sonar buoy.
One source told Hersh that the plotters knew the covert operation was an “act of war,” with some in the CIA and State Department warning, “Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.”
Last week, the New York Times reported that a “pro-Ukrainian group” had sabotaged the pipelines, using a team with as few as six people involved in the mission, contradicting previous assumptions that only a state would have had the resources to carry out the operation.
According to Hersh, referring to Biden, “He did it. He did it, I’m telling you, he did it, adding, The Biden game is to wait it out and never say yes.”
The journalist claimed that Biden wanted to escalate the conflict in order to position himself as a war president.
“I think Biden also saw beating up Russia as a ticket. Jack Kennedy is a classic example – presidents always did well politically in wars,” he said.
Hersh claimed that Biden made the decision in January 2022 to “see if we can find a way to blow… those pipelines, and put [the Russians] back in the dark ages.”
The Pulitzer-Prize winner went on to savage the legacy media for completely failing to follow up on his report that the U.S. was responsible for the attack, which took out three of the four pipelines.
Meanwhile, China has reacted with skepticism towards the explanation that a pro-Ukrainian group was responsible for the blasts.
During a press briefing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin called for “an objective, impartial and professional investigation” into the bombing.
“We have noted that some Western media have been mysteriously quiet after Hersh reported that the US was behind the Nord Stream blast. But now these media are unusually simultaneous in making their voice heard. How would the US account for such abnormality? Is there anything hidden behind the scene?” Wang asked.
New reports also reveal that a German spy ship was in the area where the attack occurred at the time of the blasts on September 26.
According to a report by German magazine Der Spiegel, the CIA warned Berlin about a potential attack on gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea weeks before it happened.
As we highlighted yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin branded claims that the Nord Stream pipeline attack was the work of pro-Ukrainian activists “nonsense,” arguing the blasts must have been carried out by a state power.
The leader of France’s Eurosceptic party The Patriots responded to continuing controversy over the Nord Stream pipeline attack by asserting, “It was obvious that the Americans were behind the bombing.”
Florian Philippot made the comments during an interview with RIA Novosti.
Philippot referenced the report published by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, which claimed the explosives were planted in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise and were detonated three months later with a remote signal sent by a sonar buoy.
“Even before the theory put forward by Hersh, who is a very reputable journalist, it was obvious that the Americans were behind the bombing,” Philippot said. “Even before the war in Ukraine, the US had been fighting the Nord Stream pipelines for years, it had become a permanent element of their policy.”
The politician also highlighted comments by President Biden, who confidently asserted that the pipelines would not be allowed to remain operational.
“Moreover, in early February 2022, Biden publicly said that the Americans were capable of making the pipeline go away. And it happened. After all, it was in the interests of America,” said Philippot.
“And there is nothing absurd about this because Norway is Russia’s gas competitor, and Russian gas has been replaced by Norwegian gas in many countries. So they also had their own interests and enriched themselves at this expense,” Philippot added.
According to Hersh’s sources, the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy were instrumental in locating the right position to plant the explosives.
As we highlighted yesterday, Hersh said during a National Press Club event that Biden gave the green light for the attack because he thought being a war president would give him the best chance of re-election.
“I think Biden also saw beating up Russia as a ticket. Jack Kennedy is a classic example – presidents always did well politically in wars,” he said.
Meanwhile, in a related development, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova slammed attempts by Denmark to deny Moscow access to the investigation into the attack.
“This is such a fraud, a total scam, not even a con but a threepenny game, which in my opinion no one has been buying for a very long time,” Zakharova said in an interview with Rossiya-1.
“They are playing this for themselves, but the story with Nord Stream will not end the same way as many other stories they have buried or covered up, I think, for the simple reason that there’s a lot of money at stake,” she added.
On March 6, Seymour “Sy” Hersh spoke about the Nord Stream explosion on September 26, 2022. He reveals in his substack how it was the result of Washington Administration authorizing C4 explosives be planted on the pipelines in June under the cover of a NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea, and then setting them off using a signal from a sonar buoy dropped on the surface. Hersh discusses the discussion of the sabotage at the UN, the decline of his brand of journalism in mainstream media and more!
The US Govt funded the research that created Covid-19 and killed millions, blew up the NordStream pipelines in an act of international terrorism and committed a coup in Ukraine to start a proxy war with Russia which has killed hundreds of thousands so far.
Chinese Foreign Ministry: “The United States has sought to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, grossly interfered in the elections of at least 30 countries, and attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders." pic.twitter.com/RuaHBh6Xqw
Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said "Germany was not only humiliated, it was put in place" This is how The #US treats it's #NATO allie's. pic.twitter.com/EO3bPAKnAl
Speaker of the Russian parliament Vyacheslav Volodin has branded US President Joe Biden a “terrorist” after a report by iconic American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh blamed Washington for sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines last year.
Volodin said on Thursday that Biden’s State of the Union address, in which he claimed that the US was “a nation that stands as a beacon to the world,” reminded him of “statements by the leaders of the Third Reich.”
The ramifications of this “ideology of exceptionalism” were uncovered in the investigation by Hersh, the Russian MP wrote in a post on Telegram.
The State Duma speaker was referring to a report published by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist on Wednesday, in which he claimed that the US was behind the explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines last September. According to an informed source who talked to Hersh, explosives were planted at the key pipelines in the Baltic Sea back in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of a NATO exercise. They were later detonated remotely.
Nord Stream 1 and 2 had been important routes for the delivery of Russian gas to Europe through Germany.
“If [Harry S.] Truman became a criminal, who used nuclear weapons against civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then Biden became a terrorist, who ordered the destruction of the energy infrastructure of his strategic partners: Germany, France, the Netherlands,” Volodin said.
The sabotage of the pipelines by the Americans was “an act of intimidation of its vassals, who decided to develop their economy in the interests of their own citizens,” he wrote.
The revelations by Hersh should be grounds for an international investigation to “bring Biden and his accomplices to justice,” and to make sure that the nations affected by this “terrorist attack” are paid compensation, Volodin added.
The Biden administration has denied the report by Hersh, with the National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson calling it “utterly false and complete fiction.”
The Russian authorities have for months been pointing to the fact that the only side that benefited from Nord Stream being rendered inoperable was the US, which saw its supplies of liquified natural gas to Europe increase massively following the sabotage.
WAR ON TERROR UPDATE Frantic bets on whether Nord Stream AG will sue the United States Government for engineering a terrorist act.
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
This is a huge story with 2 big questions:
1. How will Russia respond to this act of war?
2. How will the EU respond to being forced into supporting a US proxy war in Ukraine by no longer having the incentive to negotiate peace to maintain access to cheap Russian gas.
The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.
The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.
Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.
There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.
President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.
The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.
From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.
America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy.
Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of Germany’s annual consumption. Tensions were constantly escalating between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration.
Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as Cruz told Blinken, “halted [the pipeline] in its tracks.” There would be enormous political and economic pressure from the German government, then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online.
Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s views. “I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream 2,” he said. “I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany, not to move forward with it.”
A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had “always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not to criticize the move.
There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz, announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden’s foreign policy nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months, deep into the fall. Politico later depicted Biden’s turnabout on the second Russian pipeline as “the one decision, arguably more than the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, that has imperiled Biden’s agenda.”
The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the crisis in mid-November, when Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval of the second Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged 8% within days, amid growing fears in Germany and Europe that the pipeline suspension and the growing possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine would lead to a very much unwanted cold winter. It was not clear to Washington just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, stood. Months earlier, after the fall of Afghanistan, Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a more autonomous European foreign policy in a speech in Prague—clearly suggesting less reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.
Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of December, more than 100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from Belarus and Crimea. Alarm was growing in Washington, including an assessment from Blinken that those troop numbers could be “doubled in short order.”
The administration’s attention once again was focused on Nord Stream. As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.
It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.
All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge.
PLANNING
In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.
It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back and forth chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be reversible—such as another layer of sanctions and currency restrictions—or irreversible—that is, kinetic actions, which could not be undone?
What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.
THE PLAYERS Left to right: Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan.
Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”
At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.
Something like this had been done before. In 1971, the American intelligence community learned from still undisclosed sources that two important units of the Russian Navy were communicating via an undersea cable buried in the Sea of Okhotsk, on Russia’s Far East Coast. The cable linked a regional Navy command to the mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.
A hand-picked team of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency operatives was assembled somewhere in the Washington area, under deep cover, and worked out a plan, using Navy divers, modified submarines and a deep-submarine rescue vehicle, that succeeded, after much trial and error, in locating the Russian cable. The divers planted a sophisticated listening device on the cable that successfully intercepted the Russian traffic and recorded it on a taping system.
The NSA learned that senior Russian navy officers, convinced of the security of their communication link, chatted away with their peers without encryption. The recording device and its tape had to be replaced monthly and the project rolled on merrily for a decade until it was compromised by a forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician named Ronald Pelton who was fluent in Russian. Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defector in 1985 and sentenced to prison. He was paid just $5,000 by the Russians for his revelations about the operation, along with $35,000 for other Russian operational data he provided that was never made public.
That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells, was innovative and risky, and produced invaluable intelligence about the Russian Navy’s intentions and planning.
Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right across the border from Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for the mission? “It would be a goat fuck,” the Agency was told.
Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”
Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”
What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
Huff knows that the FBI and the food industry have tried to investigate what he calls “terrorist attacks,” but they’re getting nowhere. He suspects that a government-funded actor or a globalist group like the World Economic Forum is behind it.
Rair Foundation.com
Jan 16, 2023
In the United States, dozens of food processing plants suspiciously caught fire over the past year. Remarkably, no one was present at the time of the fires. The Eco Health Alliance whistleblower, bioterrorism expert, military veteran, and scientist Dr. Andrew Huff has a possible explanation for the food supply fires.
Huff has access to government information about simulating a food supply attack. The information comes from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Food and Agriculture Sector Criticality Assessment Tool (FASCAT). This also includes which places are particularly at risk.
According to Huff, who authorities have harassed due to the nature of his work since 2019, the U.S. government coordinated the attacks on the food facilities. But, in addition, something remarkable happened: the hard disk with the FASCAT data disappeared.
Since then, there have been about 200 food factory attacks around the world, most of them in the U.S., he explained.
Huff had another backup and analyzed the attacks. It turned out that the attacks exactly matched the most critical systems in his data set. He reported this to the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI but never received a response.
Huff knows that the FBI and the food industry have tried to investigate what he calls “terrorist attacks,” but they’re getting nowhere. He suspects that a government-funded actor or a globalist group like the World Economic Forum is behind it.
Watch Dr. Andrew Huff’s interview with journalist Emerald Robinson:
Attention was placed on the Kremlin’s statement after the conversation between leaders of Russia and Germany over Kiev’s incendiary attacks against Russian civilian infrastructure, including the Crimean Bridge and power installations
MOSCOW, December 2. /TASS/. The explosions on the Crimean Bridge and on Nord Stream pipelines are akin to one another since both are acts of terrorism, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told TASS this Friday.
This is how Peskov explained these emergencies, saying they went side by side in the Kremlin’s statement after a conversation between Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
“Both are categorized as terrorist acts,” the Kremlin Spokesman said.
Attention was placed on the Kremlin’s statement after the conversation between leaders of Russia and Germany over Kiev’s incendiary attacks against Russian civilian infrastructure, including the Crimean Bridge and power installations. This included the terrorist act against the Nord Stream and the Nord Stream 2 pipelines, whose circumstances require a transparent investigation with the participation of relevant Russian authorities, the Kremlin said.
Turkey lashed out at Washington, going so far as to suggest the United States was to blame for the blast. “Turkey’s interior minister accused the U.S. of being complicit in a recent bombing in the city of Istanbul on Sunday that left at least six people dead and dozens of others injured,” The Hill reports.
“I emphasize once again that we do not accept, and reject the condolences of the US Embassy,” Soylu said, according to Turkish state media publication Anadolu Agency.
We reported earlier on Monday that Turkey has made an arrest for the terror bombing of a busy tourist hub in central Istanbul which left six people dead and dozens more injured.
But soon after the rare deadly attack which Turkey quickly blamed on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) – and despite no official initial claims of responsibility – Ankara officials used the incident to air broader geopolitical grievances.
Turkey lashed out at Washington, going so far as to suggest the United States was to blame for the blast. “Turkey’s interior minister accused the U.S. of being complicit in a recent bombing in the city of Istanbul on Sunday that left at least six people dead and dozens of others injured,” The Hill reports.
The accusation was prompted by an official condolence statement from the US Embassy in Ankara. Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu in a dramatic press conference said that Turkey has rejected the condolence statement from Washington.
“I emphasize once again that we do not accept, and reject the condolences of the US Embassy,” Soylu said, according to Turkish state media publication Anadolu Agency.
Soylu slammed the US statement as being akin to “a killer being first to show up at a crime scene.” The allegation was hurled due to America’s well-known longtime support of Syrian Kurds, which form the core of the US-trained Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Ankara has long alleged that Washington is giving aid to “terrorists”.
The hugely provocative Turkish reaction to the US condolence message came despite the White House saying it stands “shoulder-to-shoulder” with its NATO ally Turkey.
The U.S. strongly condemns the act of violence that took place today in Istanbul, Turkiye. Our thoughts are with those who were injured and our deepest condolences go to those who lost loved ones. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our NATO Ally Turkiye in countering terrorism.
Turkey will likely hold this against NATO applicants Finland and Sweden as well, given it has been blocking their membership to the Western military alliance based on accusations that they harbor Kurdish terrorists and entities linked to the outlawed PKK.
Turkey says it has a Syrian woman linked to the PKK in custody. However, both the PKK and Syrian YPG (as well as SDF) have issued official statements denying their involvement.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone