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STEVEFLETCHER| Lexington

I understand and appreciate a newspapers goal of providing us readers with contrasting viewpointsso, presumably, we can pick and choose from among competing ideas those that resonate. Hopefully, the end result is that we are better educated about ourselves and whats happening locally, nationally, and globally;better able to make smarter decisions about public policy and who we elect. We can sort the wheat from the chaff.

Accordingly,I suffer Cal Thomas and John Hood, whose columns routinely disparage government meddling, especially if it will raise taxes, without any meaningful analysis of whether the government might in fact be accomplishing something of value that the so-called private sector is unable or unwilling to provide. Take a look at the Scandinavian countries and decide for yourself whether higher taxes might actually contribute to an improved quality of life.

This kind of mindset is perhaps best crystallized in Ronald Reagans infamous pronouncement: The nine most terrifying words in the English language are,Im from the government and Im here to help. Its not that government sometimes screws up (as we all do). The message is that government is evil, a message that has metastasized into the anti-government, anti-intellectualism that threatens our ability to deal effectively with the threats confronting us today that are truly terrifying.

And then there is Victor Davis Hanson, whose column in The Dispatch, Hillary Clintons greatest masterpiece, exceeds my capacity for tolerance.You dont have to be a defender of Hillary (Im not) and/or acolyte of Donald Trump to be repelled by the lies, distortions, and outlandish logic depressingly displayed in this diatribe. It is conspiracy theory on steroids, barely removed from QAnon craziness.

Publishing Hansons piece without disclaimer or correction only serves to spread the virus that so infects our current public discourse.

STEVEFLETCHER

Lexington

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Hanson's column on Hillary Clinton is 'conspiracy theory on steroids': Letter to the editor - Lexington Dispatch

Prosecutors alleged that El-Saadi and Diab served as conduits for Andy Khawaja, the high-flying owner of a payment processing company, to route money into the U.S. political system during the 2016 presidential campaign.

While Khawaja reportedly became a billionaire as a result of the success of his Allied Wallet payments business, a grand jury indictment returned in 2019 said the funds directed to U.S. politics originated with a man who played a prominent role in U.S. Middle East policy and business deals for several decades, George Nader.

However, outside the presence of the jury, prosecutors said they believed that the original source of the money was actually the government of the United Arab Emirates.

The campaign finance indictment charged a total of eight men, including El-Saadi, Diab, Khawaja and Nader, who came under scrutiny in special counsel Robert Muellers investigation of ties between Donald Trumps 2016 presidential campaign and foreign governments.

Nader worked closely with the Trump White House on Mideast issues but had a history of child pornography charges and got a 10-year sentence in a sex-abuse case in 2020.

Of the eight indicted in the campaign finance case, El-Saadi and Diab were the only ones to go on trial this month in U.S. District Court in Washington. Nader and four other defendants pleaded guilty in the case and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, while Khawaja was arrested in Lithuania in 2019 and has been fighting extradition to the U.S.

Judge Randy Moss, who oversaw the trial, has declared Khawaja a fugitive.

The verdicts in El-Saadis favor on a conspiracy charge and a straw-donor charge were returned shortly after jurors sent the judge a note asking what they should do if they could reach verdicts for one defendant but not the other.

When the jurors filed into Moss courtroom late Thursday, the foreman read the not guilty verdicts aloud for El-Saadi. He was masked like other courtroom participants, and there was no immediately visible reaction. However, he and his lead defense attorney, Justin Shur, later exchanged handshakes with the prosecutors. Shur also clasped El-Saadis shoulder to congratulate him.

Moss notified El-Saadi that all restrictions of his pretrial release were lifted and he was free to go.

El-Saadi also exchanged an embrace with the other defendant, Diab, who will have to return for further proceedings.

Outside the courtroom, El-Saadi seemed to be tearing up as he texted others with the news.

Just after the verdicts were read, Moss read a standard charge to the jury to continue to try to reach verdicts on the three felony charges Diab faces. Moss said he was ready to send the jury home for the day, but the foreman said jurors wished to stay late to deliberate further. Jurors then huddled for almost an hour and a half before heading home just before 6:30 p.m. A fourth day of deliberations is expected on Friday.

While the indictment put the amount the men sought to send to pro-Clinton committees at more than $3.5 million, in front of the jury prosecutors made a more modest claim during opening statements.

This is a case about a large-scale conspiracy to funnel well in excess of $1 million into the U.S. political system money that came from the United Arab Emirates, prosecutor Michelle Parikh told jurors.

After Trumps victory in 2016, the conspiracy shifted to direct some funds to Republicans, while still aiding Democrats, according to prosecutors. The indictment in the case lists $750,000 in donations to the Republican National Committee in 2017, as well as $225,000 to the GOPs Protect the House committee and $337,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee the following year. Khawaja also gave $1 million to the Trump inaugural committee and got inaugural tickets in return, the indictment alleges.

One of the charges the jury is still deliberating on against Diab stems from the $225,000 donation he made to the committee backing House GOP candidates in 2018.

Prosecutors say the campaigns were not aware of the straw-donor arrangement or that the funds originated abroad.

During the trial, El-Saadis attorneys insisted that the $150,000 he donated to a Clinton fundraising committee in September 2016 was a genuine donation motivated by their clients fears that Trumps promised ban on Muslim visitors to the U.S. would devastate El-Saadis services to high-end travelers passing through Southern Califonia.

He believed that his contribution to Hillary Clintons campaign would save his business, defense lawyer Megan Church said in her opening statement. His company catered to clients who were travelers from Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East the same people Mr. Trump intended to ban from the U.S. A Trump presidency posed a fatal threat to Mr. El-Saadis business. Thats why he donated.

Diabs lawyer, Harland Braun, said his client is Khawajas cousin and served as the chief operating officer of Allied Wallet. Braun said Diab was unfamiliar with campaign finance laws.

In opening statements, Braun also briefly suggested to the jurors that the prosecution was the product of a political vendetta against Hillary Clinton. However, moments later the defense lawyer seemed to back away from that.

Braun emphasized that the U.S. political system is awash in cash and that ultra-wealthy donors can legally give much more than the sums at issue in the Khawaja case. In fact, there really is no limit on political donations in the U.S, the attorney said.

The best government money can buy, Braun quipped.

The prosecutions first witness, Diane Hamwi, a former Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraiser, said Khawaja hired her for $7,500 a month in the spring of 2016 to advise him on how to get closer to American politicians and to seek appointment to a part-time government post or commission related to the Mideast.

He hired me to help him develop more relationships in the political sphere, Hamwi said. I was ensuring that when he made the large contributions he was making that he was getting the most for that.

Khawaja leapt into political giving with gusto, Hamwi said, hosting an event at his Los Angeles home with former President Bill Clinton in June 2016 in exchange for donating or raising about $1 million for committees associated with Hillary Clintons campaign

With many of the defendants, witnesses and events from the Los Angeles area, Hollywood gossip migrated into the courtroom. Jurors heard that Hamwi and Khawaja first met during a breakfast fundraiser that then-President Barack Obama attended in April 2016 at the Brentwood home of Spider-Man actor Tobey Maguire.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misspelled the name of Harland Braun.

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Jury acquits one defendant of conspiring to funnel millions to back Clinton in 2016 - POLITICO

A day after Russian warplanes bombed a maternity hospital in the besieged city of Mariupol in war-torn Ukraine, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday (March 10) condemned President Vladimir Putin for committing war crimes.

The deadly attack by Russia on the maternity hospital in Mariupol left three dead and 17 injured. The civilian building was targeted several times with high explosive Russian bombs, thereby, forcing pregnant women to deliver their newborn in the basement.

In a tweet, Clinton wrote, If Russian leadership would rather not be accused of committing war crimes, they should stop bombing hospitals.

While Hillary Clinton has been upfront in calling out the atrocities committed by Russia in Ukraine, the United States also has a long history of targeting hospitals and civilian buildings. Many such war crimes were committed by the States during her tenure as the 67th Secretary of State between 2009 and 2013.

In June 2011, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), of which the United States is a part, acknowledged that a missile intended for a military missile site struck a civilian home in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.

It appears that one weapon did not strike the intended target and that there may have been a weapons system failure which may have caused a number of civilian casualties, NATO had conceded.

As per a report in The New York Times, at least 9 people were killed in the misfire. The blast knocked the top off the structure, leaving a concrete staircase reaching into the air. Several carports on the block collapsed, crushing the vehicles within, the report emphasised.

A month later, The Atlantic reported that NATO bombed a hospital in Zliten town in Western Libya. The deadly attack killed 7 people and destroyed several food warehouses, besides the towns hospital.

An eyewitness named Osama Mahmoud told the reporters that the military operation took place overnight. He had said, In this whole area there is no military. While speaking about the bombings, Major General Nick Pope claimed that the NATO forces had attacked only staging posts near Zliten.

Popular Twitter user, Hadi Nasrallah, pointed out how the US misadventure in the North African country had left it in tatters. Look at the destruction Russias bombs did to Ukraine. This is a war crime. Sorry, I meant NATOs bombs in Libya, he had tweeted.

Following reports that Muammar Gaddafi was killed by NATO-backed rebels, a joyous Hillary Clinton had announced, We came, we saw, he died. While lambasting the US for leaving Libya in ruins, journalist Richard Mehdurst stated, Ten years on Libya has slave markets, a shattered economy, and its resources plundered.

During the 2011 invasion of Libya, the NATO forces deliberately targeted State-owned water installations and crippled Libyas water supply. Even to this day, the North African country is struggling with the water crisis.

The deliberate destruction of a nations water infrastructure, with the knowledge that doing so would result in massive deaths of the population as a direct consequence, is not simply a war crime, but potentially a genocidal strategy, wrote Nafeez Ahmed in The Ecologist.

During the Obama administration, the US Air Force launched an airstrike on October 3, 2015, targeting a clinic named Kunduz Trauma Centre in northern Afghanistan. The hospital was run by the charity Mdecins Sans Frontires (Doctors Without Borders). The incident had claimed 42 lives and injured 30 others.

While MSF labelled the attack as war crime, the Pentagon had denied the allegations and called the attack unintentional. It claimed that the airstrike at the hospital was the result of technical and human errors.

According to General Joseph Votel, the US mistook the Kunduz hospital for a building captured by the Taliban. Although he assured that disciplinary action would be taken against 16 US personnel, the accused would not face any criminal charges. The fact this was unintentional takes it out of the realm of being a deliberate war crime, he had claimed.

Mdecins Sans Frontire had informed that the US officials did not stop the air raid despite multiple requests. On April 29, 2016, the charitys President remarked, Todays briefing amounts to an admission of an uncontrolled military operation in a densely populated urban area, during which US forces failed to follow the basic laws of war.

Khalid Ahmad, one of the victims gravely injured in the aerial raid, had said that the US Air Force personnel are criminals, who ought to be jailed.

Hillary Clinton served as the First Lady between January 1993 and January 2001. During her husband Bill Clintons tenure as the 46th US President, war crimes were committed in Somalia, Yugoslavia and Sudan.

Journalist Alan MacLeod pointed out how in September 1993, the US Army Rangers had fired two mortars outside the Digfer Hospital in the Somalian capital of Mogadishu.

The Chicago Tribune had reported, Hospital director Dr Fuji Mohammed says three women were killed when the bomb exploded. He says the hospital received six or seven hits, but he does not know the total number of victims because patients and their relatives fled when the attack started, taking the dead and wounded with them.

A similar incident took place in May 1999 when NATO warplanes used laser-guided missiles to destroy a hospital in Belgrade in Yugoslavia. The tragic attack claimed the lives of 3 people and injured several others, including 2 women in labour and medical staff.

Nato spokesman Jamie Shea acknowledged that one of its laser-guided bombs had gone astray over the capital and struck a building about 450 metres away from its intended target, The Guardian had reported.

Reportedly, the Al Shifa factory in Khartoum in Sudan manufactured half of the countrys pharmaceutical products, including anti-malarial drugs. However, on August 20, 1998, the Clinton administration ordered the bombing of the medicine factory.

Fourteen years later, its wreckage remained, a shrine to an incident that locals still refer to as a terrorist attack. The Al Shifa plant had been taken out on the direct orders of Bill Clinton. The strike was in retaliation for Osama bin Ladens recent bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, it was stated.

Journalist Alan MacLeod had tweeted that the deliberate attack destroyed Sudans main source of drugs, leading to tens of thousands of deaths.

While Hillary Clinton is busy calling out Russia for bombing a maternity clinic, she did not speak a word against the atrocities committed by the US against civilians of different nations during her husbands administration or that of her tenure as the US Secretary of State.

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Hillary Clinton calls the Russian bombing of maternity hospital a war crime: Heres the sordid US track record she conveniently glosses over - OpIndia

Governments across the globe are restricting the flow of information. This has resulted in the rise of censorship, blocking, and internet shutdowns.

Accurate information is critical for society. And, for this, we need tools to circumvent censorship. In this story, well look at a set of basic tools that can help you stay free. Lets dive in.

Tor browser is one of the best ways to safeguard your privacy, and access the open web. When you visit an address, it uses multiple relays to hide your identity from the site and your Internet Access Provider.

In case authorities are blocking Tor relays, you can read our detailed guide about using bridges to browse safely.

Notably, some websites like Facebook, the New York Times, and more recently BBC, have released their own .onion addresses. These are special sites that rely on the Tor networks onion protocol, so that they cant be traced, and prevent being blocked in turn.

You can download Tor from its official website, or use one of its mirrors if thats not working.

If youre using Android, you can download it from the Play Store, F-Store, or in .apk file format. And if youre on iOS, you can try the Onion browser.

You probably have your most private and intimate conversations on the internet through chat apps. This is why its essential that no one else has access to them. End-to-end encryption is a basic security protocol that will prevent someone from snooping on your chat.

While WhatsApp technically has this protection, it collects a ton of metadata about you, including device activity, profile picture, and contact info.

Signal on the other hand, provides much more privacy. It only collects menial data and all your conversations are encrypted, so they cant be read by third parties.

If you dont want to give out your digits, you can go a step further and use Session. This doesnt require an email ID or phone number to sign up.

For folks who like decentralized end-to-end encrypted standards to run local servers, you can use apps built on the Matrix protocol, such as Element.

For offline, or hyper-local secure communications you can use Bridgify (which works on Bluetooth) or Briar (which works on Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Tor network).

There are sites like Netblocks and Downdetctor that can give you a basic sense of service unavailability in your area.

However, for more pinpoint information like blocked sites and apps, you can use the Open Observatory of Network Interferences (OONI) probing app. It works on both desktop and mobile, and contains tests for websites, communication apps, VPNs, network performance, and Tor to check whats blocked.

Virtual Private Network (VPN) apps are one of the easiest tools to let you access blocked websites. They work by pointing you to a server at another location. When India banned porn sites in 2018, it was very easy for locals to access them through VPNs.

But its hard to suggest a particular service, because it might not work in your region or with the sites you want to access.

Digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a guide for choosing the right VPN for you. Plus, Access Now, another organization promoting free access to the internet, has some useful recommendations.

This is just the tip of the iceberg theres a lot more to learn about staying secure and private online. With that in mind, here are some excellent guides:

If you think we should include a tool in this list, send us an email, or @ us on Twitter. Safe browsing.

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A beginners toolbox for fighting internet censorship

Chinas Peoples Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, posted a video on March 9 on Weibo, the popular Chinese social-media platform, showing Russia providing humanitarian aid to Ukrainians outside Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city near the Russian border that has faced artillery and rocket attacks since Moscows February 24 invasion. The video received more than 3 million views.

In other coverage, the Moscow correspondent of Chinas Phoenix TV has issued reports while embedded with Russian troops outside of Mariupol, a strategic port city that is the scene of stiff fighting. In a recent clip he speaks with soldiers about their steady advance and talks to civilians allegedly welcoming the presence of Russian forces.

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Chinas tightly controlled media and heavily censored Internet have provided increasingly skewed coverage, omitting details on civilian casualties and the widespread international condemnation of Moscow, while quoting Russias own state-backed networks and broadcasting the views of Russian officials without verification or pushback to its domestic audience.

While Beijing is threading the needle diplomatically and looking to put breathing room between it and its close ties with the Kremlin in the face of mounting international pressure over its invasion of Ukraine, Chinas state media and vocal officials are increasingly converging with Moscows distorted narrative of the war even beginning to push conspiracy theories against Ukraine and the West in the process.

U.S. biolabs in Ukraine have indeed attracted much attention recently, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on March 8, echoing a conspiracy theory regularly pushed by Russian media and online accounts that some Western officials charge could be part of an effort by the Kremlin to justify its invasion by saying that Ukraine is working on biological or nuclear weapons.

All dangerous pathogens in Ukraine must be stored in these labs and all research activities are led by the U.S. side, Zhao added, without providing evidence to support the claim. U.S. and Ukrainian officials say the allegation is baseless.

China, Russia, And The Ukraine War

The biolab theory has been a mainstay of Russian state media and even some embassy accounts on social media with a recent report by Foreign Policy magazine highlighting how it has taken hold among American far-right online conspiracy networks and spread to other countries as well.

It is also not the first time it has been referenced by Chinese officials, with Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying first raising the claim about biolabs in Ukraine during a May 2021 press conference.

Chinese diplomats have also frequently pointed to Fort Detrick, a U.S. military facility in Maryland that the Soviet Union falsely claimed in the 1980s was the source of the virus causing AIDS and has often been a target of Russian disinformation, to deflect questions when asked about the origins of COVID-19.

But the timing and renewed push of the theory could be part of a wider strategy, with Britains Defense Ministry tweeting on March 8 that while the baseless claims are long-standing, Ukraine has stated that it has no such facilities, they are currently likely being amplified as part of a retrospective justification for Russias invasion of Ukraine.

The biolab story also fits with a growing trend of convergence between Chinese and Russian sources that has accelerated since the war in Ukraine, with false and misleading stories echoed by Chinese media and receiving hundreds of millions of views on Weibo in the process.

Throughout the war, Chinese media have helped spread dubious Russian-state narratives about Ukrainian forces using civilians as human shields while also saying the Russian military only goes after other military targets, despite the shelling of dozens of apartment blocks and other civilian structures.

Chinese networks have also magnified and spread Russian disinformation, such as when Chinese state broadcaster CCTV quoted Russian officials to falsely claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had fled the capital, or when the state-backed Global Times, citing the Russian state network RT as its only source, said many Ukrainian soldiers had surrendered on the first day of the invasion.

Taken together, this highlights a different version of the war that viewers and online users are seeing in China compared to most of the world and how Chinese authorities have allowed the Kremlins propaganda networks to shape its publics perception of the war with few restrictions.

For instance, the Kremlin-backed Sputnik has over 11.6 million followers on Weibo and other Russian outlets also have large and engaged followings inside China, where access to many other foreign media outlets and major information sites are blocked or restricted.

This has contributed to Russian claims about Ukrainian officials being extremists and neo-Nazis to be regularly adopted online and also picked up by Chinese-language outlets, which often reference the Azov Battalion a fringe unit of the Ukrainian National Guard known for having neo-Nazi sympathizers in its ranks and show it as representative of wider Ukrainian society.

More Than Censorship

Control of all Chinese media by the Communist Party and intensive Internet censorship make it difficult to gauge public opinion, while pervasive censorship also means the pro-Russian sentiment online in China is likely not representative of the country as a whole.

But the types of content that are allowed online or published by state-backed media show what Chinese authorities want their population of 1.4 billion people to think.

Chinas government has neither condemned nor condoned Russias war in Ukraine and has even refrained from calling it an invasion. Both expressions of sympathy for Ukraine and support for Russia appear online and in social media, but criticism of Moscow is regularly censored, according to China Digital Times, a group that tracks Chinese censorship and online discussion at the University of California, Berkeley.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin have grown closer in recent years and heralded a new era in their ties during a joint meeting in Beijing on February 4.

While Russias invasion of Ukraine has left Beijing awkwardly distancing itself diplomatically from the Kremlin, the shared messaging from both countries state media shows that ties are still intact and they could be growing in the information space, an area where many experts say cooperation has been developing in recent years.

Xi and Putin have signed a variety of media-cooperation agreements over the years and have held a Sino-Russian media forum annually since 2015.

A December report by the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) found that both China and Russia had played a central role in spreading COVID-related disinformation and propaganda throughout the pandemic. However, the report did not find clear-cut evidence of direct cooperation between Beijing and Moscow, instead noting that they borrowed from and amplified each others campaigns.

Similarly, a June report from the Carnegie Moscow Center found that while both countries state-backed media and officials often echo similar talking points and narratives on world events, this is largely due to Beijing and Moscow having shared strategic objectives in global affairs.

Chinese and Russian online behavior are largely the result of Chinese actors careful but independent study of and creative adaptations of the Kremlins tools, rather than an expression of active, ongoing cooperation between the two governments, the report noted.

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Beyond Censorship: How China amplifies propaganda for Russia's distorted version of the war in Ukraine - Milwaukee Independent