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At the top of the list are JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and BlackRock, each with US$ 1 billion invested in the network of livestock financiers. The list of implicated companies includes Suzano, JBS, Marfrig, Cargill and ADM — agribusiness giants that wield their corporate might to sway Brazilian politics against the interests of the environment, peasants, Indigenous groups, and working people everywhere.
Between 2019 and 2021, transnational banks and investment funds contributed more than US$ 27 billion to companies that are part of the funding chain of Instituto Pensar Agro (Pensar Agro Institute – IPA). IPA is the think tank behind the Frente Parlamentar da Agropecuária (Agricultural Parliamentary Front – FPA) which is responsible for a package of anti-environmental measures being considered in the Brazilian Congress. The amount invested corresponds to Lebanon’s GDP, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimate for 2020.
The billion-dollar figure corresponds to share purchases by sovereign wealth funds, loan concessions, debt renegotiations, and bond issues executed between January 2019 and April 2021 (date of the last data collection). In the case of multinational groups, such as soybean processors Cargill, ADM and Bunge, and meat processing companies JBS, Marfrig and Minerva, only investments for operations in Brazil were considered.
The results show six global financial groups at the head of investments in companies linked to the IPA. Together, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and the BlackRock, Vanguard, and Dimensional funds transferred US$ 4.12 billion to companies involved in financing the agribusiness lobby in Brasília. The amount corresponds to 15% of the total value of US$ 27.06 billion in transactions analyzed in the period.
Suzano Concentrates 51.9% of Investments Among IPA Funders
The report compiled by De Olho shows that Suzano was foreign capital’s favorite over the last three years. Between 2019 and 2021, the group led by the Feffer family received US$14.03 billion from global banks and investment funds, the equivalent of 51.9% of the total invested in IPA-associated companies in the period. The company’s main supporters were Bank of America ($791.3 million), JP Morgan Chase ($774.8 million), and BlackRock ($525.5 million).
Investor attention was mainly focussed on the merger with Fibria (formerly Veracel), announced in 2018 and completed the following year. This process has created a virtual monopoly: Suzano S.A., because of the merger, is the largest producer of pulp and eucalyptus in the world and the fifth largest company in Brazil, across all economic sectors.
Women from the MST occupying a Suzano unit in 2015
The CEO, Walter Schalka, is vice president of Ibá, an association that brings together the largest pulp producers in Brazil and one of the main supporters of the Instituto Pensar Agro. Apart from the timber sector, Suzano also operates in the pesticide and transgenic seed sectors through its subsidiary FuturaGene, which participates in CropLife Brasil.
In addition to these conflicts, the company is known for the participation of its directors, brothers David and Daniel Feffer, in financing movements of the so-called “new right” in Brazil. Daniel is one of the founders of the Millenium Institute, alongside the Minister of Economy, Paulo Guedes. His brother David was involved, in 2007, in the creation of the Institute for Leadership Formation, one of the organizers of the Liberty and Democracy Forum, alongside José Salim Mattar Junior, owner of the car rental company Localiza Hertz and former Secretary General for Privatization in Mr. Bolsonaro’s government.
The family also has close ties to the former Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles. In 2018, De Olho nos Ruralistas showed that Suzano was the main beneficiary of Salles’ attempt to irregularly modify the Management Plan of the Environmental Protection Area (APA) Várzea do Rio Tietê when he was Environment Secretary in São Paulo. Indicted by the Federal Public Prosecution Office, he was acquitted in March 2021.
United States and Europe Lead International Funding
The analysis of financial transactions based on data from the Florestas & Finanças platform shows a large concentration of resources directed to Brazilian agribusiness companies come from investors in the global North. The United States is the biggest provider of funds, with US$ 7.44 billion coming mostly from banks such as American International Group (AIG), Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and Vanguard.
JBS is one of the leaders in international investments
Large European financial groups, such as the German Allianz and Deutsche Bank; the British Barclays and Standard Chartered; the Spanish BBVA and Santander; the French BNP Paribas; the Dutch ABN-Amro and Rabobank, among others; have invested $4.5 billion in IPA companies.
As the sole remaining survivor among the financial players that were behind the 2008 global crisis, JP Morgan Chase tops the list, having invested more than US$1.1 billion in transactions during the period. In addition to the aforementioned Suzano, the Wall Street bank invested in 15 other companies, especially the meat processing company Marfrig, which received US$ 103.29 million in 2019 and another US$ 4.7 million between January and April 2021.
Bank of America and BlackRock have also invested $1 billion each. The latter is famous for being the main investor in Brazil’s JBS, totaling $139.34 million in transfers since 2019. The world’s largest producer of animal protein, the company owned by brothers Wesley and Joesley Batista has also received money from stockbrokers registered in offshore tax havens.
According to the report, the meat processing company received US$ 60 million for the purchase of shares and bonds by two private brokerage firms in Bermuda, Fidelity International and Lazard, both cited in the Offshore Leaks, an investigation into tax evasion and capital flight led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ). To a lesser extent, both also traded Bunge shares in 2021.
The Brazilian Financial Sector Also Joins the Party
Despite leading the investments, international groups are not the only ones to support the activities of the companies that make up the IPA. Banks and players in the Brazilian financial market such as BTG Pactual, Safra, Verde Asset Management, Vinci Partners, and XP Investimentos – whether through credit, holding shares and bonds, or loans, direct or via the Plano Safra – maintain bonds estimated at US$ 9.3 billion.
In addition to the private sector, the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES) – which has an investment policy partly focused on agribusiness – has lent more than US$ 3 billion to companies linked to the IPA between January 2019 and April 2021. Standing out is the bank’s equity stake in Ourofino Saúde Animal, part of the Ourofino group, second in the ranking of companies that operate within the structure of agribusiness associations, with participation in six entities.
In addition to the development bank, Brazilian institutional investment funds, such as Petros, of Petrobras, and Valia, of mining company Vale’s employees, also have a share.
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Caio de Freitas Paes is a journalist. He writes for De Olho nos Ruralistas and The Intercept Brasil, among other media outlets.
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***
It is declared, fallaciously, that America is a “democracy,” and that supposed democracy is now in danger from aggressive and vile challengers, that is to say the former president and his staff.
“A grand jury has subpoenaed several associates of former President Donald Trump in connection with the Department of Justice’s investigation into the origins of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, [indicate] multiple people familiar with the case,” reports the corporate media.
As should be more than obvious, the “riot” at the nation’s Capitol was blown severely out of proportion for propaganda purposes. Most Americans are not aware (being largely political imbeciles) that the FBI and Capitol Police played a major role instigating violence and property damage during the mischaracterized riot. The New York Times admitted as much, but threw in the typical spin, making excuses for Stasi-like tactics.
Last September, The Hill reported the “FBI had an informant in the crowd during the Jan. 6 attack,” an unlikely prospect, as I have researched the state’s political police force for a number of years. There were undoubtedly numerous FBI informants and agents provocateurs embeded in the demonstration against what is perceived to be an illegitimate and rigged election.
There was an event more than a decade ago that did not result in FBI subversion and the Democrat push to hobble Republicans, tar and feathering them all as Trump loyalists and dangerous extremists, even “fascists” (the politically illiterate “representatives” in Congress know virtually nothing about real fascism).
The event occurred on December, 2011. On that date Congress was occupied by labor activists. “Our Occupy Congress actions on the steps of Congress were unsanctioned by Democratic Party leadership,” said Nick Brana, National Chair of the People’s Party.
“I was there when the Squad occupied Congress and the police treated the group with velvet gloves. When dozens of us with the People’s Party took the steps on Labor Day, the police were so determined to stop us from occupying Congress that they arrested Paula Jean Swearengin, Jackson Hinkle, Martin Gugino and I and kicked everyone else, protesters and tourists, off the Capitol grounds and closed it entirely,” he wrote.
Unlike the January 6 “protest,” nobody was shot to death or beaten by police during the aborted occupation. Nobody was sent to solitary confinement.
More than a decade ago, at the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, a mob of Democrats occupied the state house.
“Most conservatives have condemned the right-wing mob that assaulted the U.S. Capitol. But 10 years ago, Democrats embraced the left-wing mob that occupied the state Capitol in Madison,” writes Marc A. Thiessen for The Washington Post. “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) praised the occupiers for an ‘impressive show of democracy in action’ and tweeted as they assaulted the Capitol that she continued ‘to stand in solidarity’ with the union activists. In other words, Democrats were for occupying capitols before they were against it. (Emphasis added.)
In other words, if the cause reflects the agenda of the elite that own the Democrat-Republican one party system, the authorities will respond in a more mild mannered fashion.
Obviously, Trump is an outsider, an outlier, and his surprise victory of the electoral vote was considered completely unacceptable by the one-party pretending to be two separate and (according to the corporate media) divided parties.
Trump was, of course, a disaster. I do not want to see him re-elected, but if that’s what the American people want, the ideologically radical Democrat party must step aside. Of course, they will not, as the legal and propaganda shenanigans went on nonstop during his tenure and continue until this very day. The Democrats are determined to get Trump indicted and put behind bars, thus revealing their endless venality for any opposition to their corporate-dominated rule.
This is normal behavior for a ruling party. For them, only the opposition is capable of criminality and extremism, no matter the political platform or popular support. Democracy in America, for a very long time, has served as window dressing for authoritarianism. That showy window dressing is now beginning to fray and the people, those with any political sense (or, for that matter, can tell the difference between right and wrong), are either outraged or keep their mouths shut, as most people do during the reign of authoritarians, lest they become victims.
Case in point: Hillary Clinton’s email server, loaded up with classified documents, was easily hacked by a number of intelligence agencies in other countries. She will never be prosecuted. She is nothing short of sacrosanct to large numbers of Democrats, a top figure representing the corporate-banker dominated elite. If Democrats have their way, she may be the next president, never mind her thick ledger of war crimes during the especially violent Obama administration.
The state will no longer tolerate dissidence or demands of a change in policy (for instance, torturing and killing millions of people in foreign lands, then stealing their resources and privatizing everything from water to state services paid for by taxpayers).
The crack down on Trump supporters is only the beginning. If Democrats and their Republican allies continue to engage in political repression of opposing political organizations and parties, America will soon become a full-blown dictatorship. In fact, it is well on the way.
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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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In this episode, Mike is joined by scientist and social theorist, Denis Rancourt, to debunk climate change hysteria and the myths forwarded by its cult leaders and adherents.
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Sanctions on Russia are preventing Gazprom from operating North Stream 1, the only one bringing Russian gas to Germany after the forced closure of its sister pipeline, North Stream 2. The Kremlin reports that “Sanctions imposed by the EU, UK, US and Canada have disrupted the technical maintenance system of turbine components that ensured pumping.”
The U.S.-EU strategy is clear: to prevent Europe from receiving Russian gas at low prices due to the long-term agreements previously made with Russia, forcing European consumers to buy it on the spot market at extremely higher prices set according to speculative and political mechanisms by the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, which is now part of a large U.S. holding company.
The only pipeline that regularly transports Russian gas to Europe is the TurkStream, via the Black Sea and the Balkans. Hungary, which opposes EU sanctions (despite being part of the EU and NATO), has signed a long-term agreement with Gazprom to receive 80 percent of the gas it needs from Russia through this pipeline.
However, there are growing tensions in the Balkans, especially against Serbia through which TurkStream passes, caused by NATO’s long hands, which could lead to the blocking of this last pipeline from Russia as well.
This situation is part of an increasingly explosive political-military scenario. The new British premier Liz Truss declares herself “ready to use nuclear weapons.”
A further danger is caused by the fact that Ukrainian forces – armed, trained and de facto commanded by NATO – are firing guns supplied to them by NATO and the EU on the Zaparozhye nuclear power plant currently under Russian control, exposing Italy and Europe to the very serious risk of a new Chernobyl.
The International Atomic Energy Agency warns: “With the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant we are playing with fire and something very, very catastrophic could happen” .
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This article was originally published on byoblu.
Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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Calls have been growing for some of the Queen’s crown jewels to be returned to India and Africa.
While many have taken to the streets of London near Buckingham Palace, the area around Windsor Castle, as well as social media to pay their respects, others have spoken out about the colonial history of the country which the Queen served for 70 years.
In particular, people have been calling for the return of the Koh-i-Noor diamond which is currently set in the crown of the Queen Mother and is part of the Crown Jewels on display at the Tower of London and the Great Star of Africa set in the Sovereign’s Sceptre, which is also part of the Crown Jewels.
‘The Koh-i-noor diamond from India sits atop the crown made for the Queen Mother in 1937 and the Great Star of Africa sits in the Queen's scepter’ pic.twitter.com/l1gZfmmrh5
The Koh-i-Noor is one of the largest cut diamonds in the world coming in at just over 105 carats. It is said to be worth between $140 and $400 million, but is also hailed as priceless. It is also known as one of the world’s most controversial diamonds too.
While it is believed to have first been mentioned over 5,000 years ago in a Sanskrit script, the diamond was referred to as the Syamantaka and subsequently who actually had ownership of it was simply speculation.
After that, for the next 300 years from the year of 1339, it stayed in the city of Samarkand.
The Koh-i-Noor remained in India until 1849, when British forces conquered the Punjab and it became part of the British East India Company.
It was then shipped back to Britain and, in July 1850, given to Queen Victoria.
The diamond became part of the crown jewels after Queen Victoria passed away.
“Instead of returning plundered patrimony to its rightful owners, the British are clinging to stolen artefacts such as the Kohinoor diamond, which they embedded in the Queen Mother’s tiara and shamelessly flaunt in the Tower of London,” Tharoor said.
Calls have also grown for the Great Star of Africa – also known as Cullinan I and First Star of Africa – to be returned.
Africa Archives tweeted:
“Queen Elizabeth II owns the largest clear-cut diamond in the world known as the Great Star of Africa. The 530-carat gem was mined in South Africa back in 1905. It was stolen from South Africa. It has an estimated worth of $400 million.
Queen Elizabeth II owns the largest clear cut diamond in the world Known as 'The Great Star of Africa' the 530 carats gem was mined in South Africa back in 1905. It was stolen from South Africa. It has an estimated worth of $400 million. pic.twitter.com/HesTmGTv4d
Africa Archives tweeted: “Queen Elizabeth II owns the largest clear-cut diamond in the world known as the Great Star of Africa. The 530-carat gem was mined in South Africa back in 1905. It was stolen from South Africa. It has an estimated worth of $400 million.
“The British claim that it was given to them as a symbol of friendship and peace yet it was during colonialism. The British then replaced the name ‘The Great Star of Africa’ with name of Chairman of Mine ‘Thomas Cullinan’.”
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Featured image is a collage from Unilad, image copyright Alamy Stock Photo
If anybody thinks that the recent extreme Pakistani monsoon floods (see Red Cross photo below) and the US-instigated ousting of Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Imran Khan, are sheer coincidence, might be dead-wrong.
Lest we forget, one day before the 9/11 attacks [as well as on the morning of 9/11, the dad of the sitting President of the United States of America, George Herbert Walker Bush was meeting none other than Shafiq bin Laden, the brother of the alleged terror mastermind Osama bin Laden.
Much of the traditional control the UK exerted over the Middle East was grounded in a range of monarchies that had been imposed or backed by the empire and maintained close links to Britain’s royal family.
Damning words from Dunja Mijatovic, human rights commissioner for the Council of Europe on the controversial Legacy Bill, which is currently going through Parliament. The sense of panic to get this legislation into law has been hastened by the brilliant work of organisations like Relatives for Justice and the Pat Finucane Centre, which have been a tremendous help and support to victims and families of the Troubles.
When Stephanie de Garay allowed her three children to sign up for Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot trial, she assumed the worst that could happen was anaphylactic shock — and in that case, they’d be treated with an EpiPen and be fine. From her daughter’s perspective, the trial was a way to keep up with a close friend who had already signed up for the trial.
I have taken the risky step of referring to the speech of Charles Coughlin in my recent writings. Coughlin was the most trenchant critic of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, after he had come out as an early supporter. Although Coughlin’s later writings are problematic, and at some points disturbing, it is not accurate to say he was simply an American fascist.
This article demonstrates unequivocally that mortality and morbidity has increased dramatically as a result of the vaccine. The incidence of Covid positive cases has also increased.
The German-French Nobel Peace Prize winner, pacifist and “jungle doctor” Albert Schweitzer was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. His philosophical thinking was based on the assumption that when people reflect on themselves and their limits, they mutually recognise each other as brothers who reflect on themselves and their limits.
In a rare gesture of political realism, the US government refused to consider Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. President Joe Bidenstressed that the measure would bring many problems and damages, being firm in his negative response.
The statement by Poland that it needs to rearm its troops in preparation for a “war with Russia” in the next few years is intended to attract additional aid and weapons from NATO to strengthen its eastern borders and to modernise its arsenal after it supplied obsolete weapons to Ukraine. However, this comes at the price of destroying the economy and the quality of life of the average citizen.
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According to Reuters, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will appear at a summit with Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and other American weapons manufacturers later this month. The Ukrainian leader is expected to appeal for more arms transfers. On Thursday, top White House officials announced nearly $3 billion in military support for the war.
The conference will be hosted in Austin, Texas on September 21 and Zelensky will appear via video conference. Since the war started, he has spoken with Congress, the Grammys and numerous other worldwide cultural events. The summit later this month will be the first time Zelensky directly appealed to the heads of arms manufacturers.
After Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the Biden Administration has announced several rounds of security assistance for Kiev totaling tens of billions of dollars. The US has sent over one dozen High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) produced by Lockheed and thousands of Javelin anti-tank missiles produced jointly by Lockheed and Raytheon. Both companies experienced bumps in their stock prices after the start of the war.
The weapons sales from the war in Ukraine are expected to last well into the future. This week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told a group of European officials the US will support Kiev for the long haul. “We will work together to train Ukraine’s forces for the long haul. We will work together to help integrate Ukraine’s capabilities and bolster its joint operations for the long haul,” he said.
Austin was formerly employed at Raytheon and has supported the US intervention in Ukraine. On Tuesday, Austin, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, announced $2.8 billion in military aid for Ukraine. The US has pledged over $15 billion in weapons for Kiev since February.
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Maddie de Garay signed up for Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot trial when she was 12; previously a healthy preteen, her life has been forever changed due to health problems caused by the shots
Maddie suffered a severe systemic adverse reaction to her second dose of the shot and struggled through 11 ER visits and four hospital admissions in the year and a half that followed
Injuries from the shot have left her unable to walk or eat — she receives her nutrition via a feeding tube — and suffering from constant pain, vision problems, tinnitus, allergic reactions and lack of neck control
Maddie and her family were continually dismissed by the medical professionals put in place to help, ignored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and denied the care needed to help Maddie
The medical professionals went so far as to label Maddie’s health problems as psychological in nature, and they still haven’t been contacted by anyone from Pfizer or the FDA — even after her true diagnosis was revealed and found to be related to the shots
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When Stephanie de Garay allowed her three children to sign up for Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot trial, she assumed the worst that could happen was anaphylactic shock — and in that case, they’d be treated with an EpiPen and be fine. From her daughter’s perspective, the trial was a way to keep up with a close friend who had already signed up for the trial.
It also didn’t hurt that the trial offered monetary compensation of $119 per visit.1 This is what prompted all three of de Garay’s children to ultimately sign up for the COVID-19 shot trial, which changed the life of de Garay’s daughter Maddie. A healthy 12-year-old girl prior to the trial, Maddie loved to dance, play soccer and spend time with her friends.
She suffered a severe systemic adverse reaction to her second dose of the shot, however, and struggled through 11 ER visits and four hospital admissions in the year and a half that followed. Injuries from the shot have left her unable to walk or eat — she receives her nutrition via a feeding tube — and suffering from constant pain, vision problems, tinnitus, allergic reactions and lack of neck control.2
As though the physical trauma weren’t enough, Maddie and her family were continually dismissed by the medical professionals put in place to help, ignored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and denied the care needed to help Maddie.
The medical professionals went so far as to label Maddie’s health problems as psychological in nature, and they still haven’t been contacted by anyone from Pfizer or the FDA — even after her true diagnosis was revealed and found to be related to the shots.
In the video above, Del Bigtree with “The Highwire” details Maddie’s ordeal and the family’s continued fight to not only get help for their daughter but get the word out so others aren’t similarly harmed by COVID-19 injections.3
Adverse Reaction Started Within Hours of the Second Dose
After Maddie joined Pfizer’s COVID-19 trial for 12- to 15-year-olds, she received her first dose of the experimental shot December 30, 2020. They were told it was just like a flu shot, “no big deal,” de Garay said. The second dose was given three weeks later, blood drawn two weeks after that and immune responses compared.
Participants were given access to the TrialMax app to record side effects, like a swollen arm, but de Garay was surprised at the format it used. There wasn’t space for open-ended comments, only direct questions with “yes” or “no” options for answers, or check boxes to signify a set of predetermined potential effects.
With the first shot, Maddie had a fever and her arm swelled. She received the second dose January 20, 2021, which the children said hurt more than the first shot. At that point, de Garay started writing notes to make sure she was documenting what happened to the children; she thought it would be valuable for the trial.
The next day, January 21, 12 hours after Maddie’s second COVID-19 shot, de Garay wrote, “Maddie came into our room around 4 a.m. and said she didn’t feel right and asked if she could sleep with us. Not typical of her.”4
The next day, she barely made it through the day at school, and when she walked in the door from the bus, she wasn’t in good shape. De Garay’s husband sent her a text at work saying Maddie was having a reaction to the shot. In the background, de Garay could hear her daughter screaming that her heart felt like it was going to be ripped out through her neck; she was in that much pain.
A trip to the ER was useless — they checked her out for appendicitis, ruled it out and sent her home, saying it was most likely an adverse reaction to the COVID-19 shot and would get better in time.
They recommended seeing a family doctor if there were any more issues — even though Maddie was part of a clinical trial, arguably the most high-profile clinical trial ongoing at the time, the whole purpose of which is to find out if the shots cause adverse reactions. Yet, Pfizer did not contact the family and Maddie’s heart pain wasn’t addressed.
Shot Reaction Labeled a Psychological Problem
January 23, 2021, de Garay recorded Maddie’s continued symptoms, which included severe body pain, nausea, diarrhea and extreme fatigue. They visited an ER three times that week and Maddie was finally admitted on the third visit.
But instead of sending in medical specialists and doing extensive testing, they sent in psychologists and social workers, as they were focused on her mental health. They labeled Maddie with anxiety and suggested that her anxiety about the shot was causing all of the symptoms.5 On Life Funder, a website where a fundraising effort has been started for Maddie, it’s explained:6
“After reporting everything to the Pfizer clinical trial Principal Investigator [Dr. Robert Frenck] and being brushed aside, we started documenting every detail of Maddie’s injury. Cincinnati Children’s first tried to treat Maddie as “a mental patient,” telling us it was anxiety and it was all in Maddie’s head.
Pfizer listed her traumatic systemic adverse reaction as “functional abdominal pain” when reporting to the FDA. A day before Pfizer submitted their request for emergency approval for the covid vaccine for 12-15-year-olds and before necessary testing was done, they put Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) as a diagnosis in her chart.”
Maddie’s symptoms continued into February, with old symptoms getting worse and new symptoms, including extreme bloating after eating, starting. Maddie was dizzy, nauseous and in pain. She felt like her heart was on fire and soon began throwing up when she ate, until she couldn’t eat at all. Her ability to shower on her own became a thing of the past.7
It was Dr. Amal Assa’ad at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital who, after spending just 15 minutes with Maddie, determined that her physical symptoms weren’t the result of the shots but were due to a functional neurological disorder.
She put in her notes that she had discussed with another doctor, Robert Frenck, measuring an antibody titer to determine whether Maddie had received the shot or a placebo in the trial, but ultimately she said she thought it will be “irrelevant to the management of Madeline’s functional disorder.”8 Assa’ad’s notes went so far as to advise against any further investigation, even though Maddie was a participant in a clinical trial:9
“My assessment is that Madeline has a functional impairment that is not organic in nature … I also discourage further work up since this is usually detrimental in functional disorders because it drives the patient to thinking that there must be something wrong that is indicating all this work up. It also delays the necessary psychologic intervention that is needed to help resolve the functional disorder.”
‘It’s Like We’re Stuck in a Nightmare’
Frenck, director of the Vaccine Research Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, was principal investigator of the Pfizer COVID-19 trial, put there to act as an advocate for the people in the trial and making sure that they were safe, as well as determine if any reactions they experienced were due to the vaccine. He offered little help to the de Garays, even as Maddie’s symptoms persisted and worsened.
February 19, 2021, de Garay wrote that Maddie fainted and, when she came to, couldn’t remember her birthday or her friend’s names. In response, the hospital gave her a different tape for her IV and said she may have a rubber allergy.
During her second hospital stay, Maddie woke up from an MRI of her brain and upper GI, fell to the ground and hasn’t been able to walk since. Her father said, “It’s like we’re stuck in a nightmare,” and they feel they’ve been abandoned.
When they signed Maddie up for the clinical trial, the de Garays assumed they’d have medical staff on hand and scientists there to support them. Any medical bills due to adverse events were also supposed to be covered, but Pfizer and the hospital were refusing to pay for Maddie’s treatments, claiming they weren’t research-related. De Garay’s notes continued into March 2021:10
March 24, blackout that lasted 20 minutes, pulse went up to 150
March 28, 10 convulsions and seizures, can’t walk, gets around by scooting on her butt
Previously, doctor’s notes said Maddie had no anxiety, but then they changed their tune, writing that she “seems to have some anxiety which may be augmenting her pain.” Even after 1.5 months in the hospital, the health care providers were treating Maddie’s shot reaction as a psychological issue instead of a physical one.
After she didn’t make any physical progress, the hospital transferred Maddie to a mental institution — but after seeing the harsh conditions used at the facility, the de Garays took Maddie home instead, with no support offered for her care.
“They’ve just basically pretended this didn’t happen … I thought in a clinical trial that if anything happened, they were going to do everything they could to figure it out,” de Garay said. “I thought that was the whole point. So that’s why I wasn’t worried. But they didn’t do that. They just tried to make her look like she was crazy.”11
Pfizer Reported Maddie’s Severe Reaction as Abdominal Pain
If you’re wondering how Pfizer got away with this, in Pfizer’s April 2021 disclosure of Maddie’s case to the FDA, it’s stated:12
“One participant experienced an SAE [serious adverse event] reported as generalized neuralgia, and also reported 3 concurrent non-serious AEs (abdominal pain, abscess, gastritis) and 1 concurrent SAE (constipation) within the same week. The participant was eventually diagnosed with functional abdominal pain. The event was reported as ongoing at the time of the cutoff date.”
Bigtree stated, “That looks like fraud to me.” Even as the de Garays tried to transfer Maddie’s care to a different local hospital, they were met with bias and red tape; the health care providers who received all the digital records had already made their minds up about the diagnosis before Maddie was seen.
The de Garays feel they’re blacklisted at major hospitals, and any doctor who’s going to do the right thing is going to risk their career in doing so. And, as noted on Life Funder, “Pfizer has zero financial obligation for Maddie’s injury and they have not offered any assistance.”13
After a year and a half, with the help of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) and React19, a nonprofit that offers support for those suffering from long-term COVID-19 shot adverse events, they found doctors willing to conduct the proper tests, who diagnosed Maddie’s vaccine reaction as follows:14
“The findings were consistent with severe distal chronic acquired demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy, small fiber sensory neuropathy and orthostatic intolerance in the setting of COVID vaccination.”
Pfizer Classifies Severe Reactions as ‘Not Related’ to Shots
The FDA and Pfizer attempted to hide the COVID-19 shot clinical trial data for 75 years, but the FDA was ordered by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas to release redacted versions of trial documents on a much faster schedule. As part of the court order, 80,000 pages of documents related to the FDA’s approval of Pfizer’s COVID-19 shots were released June 1, 2022.15
Among those documents were case report forms (CRFs) revealing that deaths and severe adverse events took place during Phase 3 trials, but, as reported by Children’s Health Defense, Pfizer had “a trend of classifying almost all adverse events — and in particular severe adverse events (SAEs) — as being ‘not related’ to the vaccine.”16
Examples include a woman in her early 50s who died from a heart attack November 4, 2020, five days after she’d received the second dose of Pfizer’s experimental COVID-19 shot. Her death was listed as “not related” to the shots. Two other heart attack deaths — one in a woman in her late 50s and the other in a man in his mid-60s — also occurred within two to three months of the shots, but were also listed as “not related.”17
In other instances, a teenage girl suffered from deep vein thrombosis two months after the second dose of the shot, but it, too, was deemed “not related,” as was the acute exacerbation of asthma experienced by a woman in her late 50s about two months after the shots.18 According to independent journalist Michael Nevradakis, for Children’s Health Defense:19
“The many serious adverse events — and several deaths — recorded during the Phase 3 trials are also apparent in a separate, massive document exceeding 2,500 pages, cataloging such adverse events. This document lists a wide range of adverse events suffered by trial participants classified as toxicity level 4 — the highest and most serious such level.
However, not one of the level 4 (most severe) adverse events listed in this particular document is classified as being related to the vaccination … Similarly, only a small number of toxicity level 3 adverse events were indicated as having been “related” to vaccination.”
Even the instances that were attributed to the shots were downplayed, such as the report of “one younger participant with no past medical history [who] had a life-threatening SAE of myocardial infarction 71 days after Dose 2 that was assessed by the investigator as related to study intervention.” The report then goes on to state that the SAE “lasted one day and resolved the same day.”20
The FDA Ignored Maddie’s Case
Just as it ignored the many red flags in Pfizer’s clinical trial data, the FDA also ignored Maddie’s case, even when attorneys got involved. In August 2021, the de Garays reached out to ICAN’s legal team; ICAN’s Aaron Siri is now representing them. According to Siri:21
“What happened to Maddie is not only the story of an injury to a child, which is heartbreaking in and of itself. But Maddie was in a clinical trial that only had 1,000 children in the age bracket of 12 to 15 years old that got the COVID-19 vaccine.
When she suffered that reaction, there should have been every medical expert at Cincinnati and at the FDA that should have descended to study what happened to Maddie, because if that could happen to one in 1,000 children, the repercussions could be really devastating, especially for an infection that doesn’t harm children anywhere near that rate.”
After ICAN’s team got Maddie’s medical records and reviewed them, they believe the causal connection to Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot is extraordinarily strong. In October 2021, they sent a letter to the FDA, including all of Maddie’s medical records and highlighting how Pfizer downplayed the condition in their disclosure, describing Pfizer’s move as “at best dishonest. To regulators, it should be criminal.”22
In February 2022, the FDA finally responded, incredulously by saying to file a VAERS report or send a letter to CISA — Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Project — which is run by Dr. Kathryn Edwards, who sits on the data safety monitoring board for Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot trials. In other words, they did nothing.23
Maddie’s story is ongoing but, sadly, is only one of many cases of people being seriously injured or killed by COVID-19 shots and not being taken seriously — or outright discredited — by health care providers and health officials. However, there is hope — and it comes in the form of protecting your right to informed consent and the freedom to make your own medical choices. As Siri put it:24
“The hope is that we make sure that we always have the choice to say no. As long as we can say no, that is the safeguard. That is the stopgap to all of this bad conduct. It’s not going to protect those who don’t know better to say no in certain situations, but it will protect those who do … There should be a lot of hope out there because COVID vaccine mandates have receded all across this country …
Freedom of speech, the ability to have individual liberties. That is what will save us … The ability to become educated, to have access to information and to make informed decisions … the ability to say no about something, or a medical procedure, that we don’t want to have on our bodies or our children’s bodies.”
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The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
BBC live report of the collapse of WTC building 7, more than minutes before the collapse took place. Building Seven in the background is still intact.
Author’s note
21 years ago. Commemorating 9/11: September 11, 2001:
The article below was published in April 2015. In the meantime, the issue of the mysterious 28 pages had resurfaced. The 28 pages were made public. Essentially they served as a distraction which undermines 9/11 Truth. They revive the role of Al Qaeda supported by Saudi Arabia. But Al Qaeda was not behind the attacks and therefore the links to Saudi Arabia constitute a non sequitur.
It is fairly well established that Al Qaeda could not have been behind the 9/11 attacks. This is confirmed by the analysis of Richard Gage and Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. The WTC towers were brought down through controlled demolition.
Al Qaeda did not have the technical capabilities of bringing down the WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7.
Osama bin Laden was said to have coordinated the attacks. Where was he on the morning of 9/11? According to Dan Rather in a special CBS News report, Osama bin Laden had been admitted to a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi on the 10th of September, one day before the tragic events of 9/11. His whereabouts were known to both Pakistani and US authorities.
Al Qaeda is known to be supported by Saudi Arabia in liaison with the CIA.
But there is a lot more to this saga.
The two key figures behind this new wave of propaganda are former Senator Bob Graham, who led the joint inquiry of the Senate and the House intelligence committees together with (former) Rep. Porter Goss, a career CIA official who was subsequently appointed Director of National Intelligence (DNI) by the Bush administration.
Graham coordinated the drafting and editing of the report including the 28 classified pages on Saudi Arabia.
While Graham is now heralded by the mainstream media as a 911 Truther, the evidence suggests that immediately in the wake of 9/11, he was involved (together with Porter Goss) in a coverup on behalf of Bush-Cheney.
The 28 pages have nothing to with 9/11 Truth. This alleged Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks has served to precipitate segments of the 9/11 Truth movement into an erroneous and contradictory discourse.
The objective of the Saudi connection propaganda ploy is to ultimately sustain the official narrative which states that Islamic terrorists were behind the 9/11 attacks, which has been disproved by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
Even assuming that Al Qaeda were behind the attacks, it is amply documented that al Qaeda, “the Base” was a creation of the CIA and that Osama bin Laden was a CIA intelligence asset. In this regard, Saudi Arabia as well Pakistan were involved in close liaison with the CIA in the recruitment and training of terrorists.
And because Bob Graham accuses the FBI and the federal government, the 9/11 Truth movement applauds without realizing that these accusations directed against the FBI are “framed” with a view to sustaining the mainstream 9/11 narrative. What is at stake is a desperate ploy to uphold the legend that Muslims were behind 9/11 and that Saudi Arabia was behind the terrorists giving them money, with the FBI involved in a coverup, George W. Bush protecting his Saudi cronies because the Bushes and the bin Ladens were “intimo amigos”.Porter Goss and Bob Graham played a direct role in sustaining the propaganda ploy in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks. (quoted from article below)
In late August 2001 Bob Graham and Porter Goss were in Pakistan for consultations with the head of Pakistani military intelligence (ISI), General Mahmoud Ahmad. The Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) was known to having provided covert support to various al Qaeda affiliated organizations in liaison and consultation with the CIA.
Michel Chossudovsky, April 28, 2016, updated September 4, 2016, September 11, 2022
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Saudi Arabia’s Alleged Involvement in the 9/11 Attacks and the 28 Pages: “Red-Herring”, Propaganda Ploy
by Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, April 2015
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The 9/11 narrative in the mainstream media has taken on a new slant. The FBI is now accused of whitewashing Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks.
The alleged Saudi involvement in supporting Osama bin Laden, not to mention the classified 28 pages of the 9/11 joint Congressional inquiry pertaining to the insidious role of Saudi Arabia in supporting the hijackers is part of a propaganda ploy.
When the report of Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 was released in December 2002, it was met with considerable skepticism. That skepticism grew for a period of time but then was reduced to speculation about what was contained in the 28 pages that had been redacted by the Bush White House.
Various U.S. government leaders have since suggested that the missing 28 pages point to Saudi Arabia’s complicity in the 9/11 crimes. However such musings fail to discuss other important issues, like the links between the Saudi regime and the Western deep state, or the fact that, from the start, even the Saudis were calling for the 28 pages to be released. Discussion of the missing 28 pages also omits mention of the highly suspicious nature of the Inquiry’s investigation and its leaders. (Kevin Ryan, The 9/11 Joint Congressional Inquiry and the 28 Missing Pages, Global Research, March 14, 2014
The report of the FBI 9/11 Review Commission (25 March 2015) has revealed circumstances which allegedly were withheld by the FBI from both the 9/11 Commission headed by former Jersey Governor Thomas Kean as well from the joint Senate House inquiry committee chaired by former Senator Bob Graham. Graham.
And now agencies of the US government including the FBI are being accused of protecting the Saudis. This alleged Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks has served to precipitate segments of the 9/11 Truth movement into an erroneous and contradictory discourse. On the part of the US government and its intelligence apparatus, the objective is to ultimately to build a narrative which will weaken the 9/11 Truth movement.
The purpose of this new propaganda ploy is ultimately to sustain the legend that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks and that Saudi Arabia relentlessly supported Al Qaeda, namely that Saudi Arabia acted as a “state sponsor of terrorism”.
In this regard, the media reports intimate that if the Saudi connection is confirmed by the 28 classified pages, this “would make 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war by a foreign government.”
There is, however, an obvious hiccup in this reasoning: if the Saudis were indeed the State sponsors of 9/11, why on earth did the US and the Atlantic Alliance (under the doctrine of collective security) choose to wage a “Just War” of retribution against Afghanistan. Did they get their countries mixed up?
9/11 Truth
Many 9/11 Truthers across America are now calling for the release of the 28 classified pages. They are also accusing the FBI of coverup and complicity.
All eyes are on the classified 28 pages, which document Saudi support for the alleged hijackers. Meanwhile, the irrefutable evidence of controlled demolition of the Twin Towers –not to mention the mysterious collapse of WTC 7 which was announced by CNN and the BBC more than 20 minutes before it occurred– no longer constitutes the centrefold of the 9/11 Truth movement: ‘The Saudis are behind 9/11 and our government is protecting them.”
Framed in a “Tele Novela” style scenario featuring wealthy Saudis in the plush suburban surroundings of Sarasota, Florida two weeks before 9/11, the New York Post describes the circumstances of Saudi involvement (quoting the FBI 9/11 Review Commission Report) in an article entitled How the FBI is whitewashing the Saudi connection to 9/11: .
“Just 15 days before the 9/11 attacks, a well-connected Saudi family suddenly abandoned their luxury home in Sarasota, Fla., leaving behind jewelry, clothes, opulent furniture, a driveway full of cars — including a brand new Chrysler PT Cruiser — and even a refrigerator full of food.
About the only thing not left behind was a forwarding address. The occupants simply vanished without notifying their neighbors, realtor or even mail carrier.
The 3,300-square-foot home on Escondito Circle (see image right) belonged to Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of then-King Fahd. But at the time, it was occupied by his daughter and son-in-law, who beat a hasty retreat back to Saudi Arabia just two weeks before the attacks after nearly a six-year stay here.
Neighbors took note of the troubling coincidence and called the FBI, which opened an investigation that led to the startling discovery that at least one “family member” trained at the same flight school as some of the 9/11 hijackers in nearby Venice, Fla.
… The Saudi-9/11 connection in Florida was no small part of the overall 9/11 investigation. Yet it was never shared with Congress. Nor was it mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.
Now it’s being whitewashed again, in a newly released report by the 9/11 Review Commission, set up last year by Congress to assess “any evidence now known to the FBI that was not considered by the 9/11 Commission.” Though the FBI acknowledges the Saudi family was investigated, it maintains the probe was a dead end.
The panel’s report also doesn’t explain why visitor security logs for the gated Sarasota community and photos of license tags matched vehicles driven by the hijackers, including 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta.
The three-member review panel was appointed by FBI Director James Comey, who also officially released the findings.
Former Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, who in 2002 chaired the congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11, maintains the FBI is covering up a Saudi support cell in Sarasota for the hijackers. He says the al-Hijjis “urgent” pre-9/11 exit suggests “someone may have tipped them off” about the coming attacks.
Graham has been working with a 14-member group in Congress to urge President Obama to declassify 28 pages of the final report of his inquiry which were originally redacted, wholesale, by President George W. Bush.
….
Sources who have read the censored Saudi section say it cites CIA and FBI case files that directly implicate officials of the Saudi Embassy in Washington and its consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks — which if true, would make 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war by a foreign government. The section allegedly identifies high-level Saudi officials and intelligence agents by name, and details their financial transactions and other dealings with the San Diego hijackers. It zeroes in on the Islamic Affairs Department of the Saudi Embassy, among other Saudi entities.
The [FBI] review commission, however, concludes there is “no evidence” that any Saudi official provided assistance to the hijackers, even though the panel failed to interview Graham or his two key investigators — former Justice Department attorney Dana Lesemann and FBI investigator Michael Jacobson — who ran down FBI leads tying Saudi officials to the San Diego hijackers and documented their findings in the 28 pages. (emphasis added)
The key figure behind this new wave of propaganda is former Senator Bob Graham, who led the joint inquiry of the Senate and the House intelligence committees together with Rep. Porter Goss, a career CIA official who was subsequently appointed Director of National Intelligence (DNI) by the Bush administration. Graham coordinated the drafting and editing of the report including the 28 classified pages on Saudi Arabia.
While Graham is now heralded by the mainstream media as a 911 Truther, the evidence suggests that immediately in the wake of 9/11, he was involved (together with Porter Goss) in a coverup on behalf of Bush-Cheney. According to Kevin Ryan, “in the months following 9/11, both Goss and Graham rejected calls for an investigation”:
The Senate voted for one anyway, however, and that led both Bush and Cheney to attempt to stop it or limit its scope. Apparently the best they could do was to make sure that Goss and Graham were put in charge. That seemed to work as the Inquiry began in February 2002, more than five months after the attacks, and the approach taken was one of uncritical deference to the Bush Administration and the intelligence community.
Goss immediately made it clear that the Inquiry would not be looking for guilt or accountability with regard to 9/11. Saying he was “looking for solutions, not scapegoats,” Goss continued to defend the White House with regard to warnings the president had received about an impending attack, saying it was “a lot of nonsense.” The FBI did not cooperate but that didn’t seem to bother Goss and Graham. (Kevin Ryan, The 9/11 Joint Congressional Inquiry and the 28 Missing Pages, Global Research, March 14, 2014
Both the joint inquiry led by Graham and the 9/11 Commission were part of a Big Lie. And now Bob Graham and 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean are accusing the FBI of camouflage and the Saudis of collusion in the 9/11 attacks, while failing to acknowledge coverup and complicity at the highest levels of the US government.
According to Bob Graham in an interview with the Miami Herald,
‘The FBI has served America through most of its history. There were stumbles by the agency before 9/11 and since the tragedy there has been a consistent effort to cover up the extent of Saudi Arabia’s involvement.’ (emphasis added)
And because Bob Graham accuses the FBI and the federal government, the 9/11 Truth movement applauds without realizing that these accusations directed against the FBI are “framed” with a view to sustaining the mainstream 9/11 narrative. What is at stake is a desperate ploy to uphold the legend that Muslims were behind 9/11 and that Saudi Arabia was behind the terrorists giving them money, with the FBI involved in a coverup, George W. Bush protecting his Saudi cronies because the Bushes and the bin Ladens were “intimo amigos”.
Former Senator Graham “smells a rat” and that rat is the FBI and complicit government agencies:
“This is a pervasive pattern of covering up the role of Saudi Arabia in 9/11 by all of the agencies of federal government which have access to information that might illuminate Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11.”
“The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier,” he said, adding, “I am speaking of the kingdom,” or government, of Saudi Arabia, not just wealthy individual Saudi donors.
But who is the rat? The FBI or Senator Bob Graham who is visibly involved in a coverup on behalf of US intelligence? He accuses US government agencies of negligence, which serves to arouse protest against the FBI by many 9/11 Truthers.
Graham’s staged accusations thereby serve to distract the American public’s attention from the real evidence, amply documented that the WTC towers were brought down through controlled demolition and that Islamic terrorists were not behind the 9/11 attacks. The issue of Saudi financial support of al Qaeda is not only known and documented since the heyday of the Soviet Afghan war, it is irrelevant in establishing who was behind the terror attacks. Moreover, the contents of the 28 classified pages are known.
Former Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who co-chaired a congressional inquiry into 9/11 — separate from the 9/11 Commission — stated, as though now it was obvious, “None of the people leading this investigation think it is credible that 19 people — most who could not speak English and did not have previous experience in the United States — could carry out such a complicated task without external assistance.”
Now, Graham says, a breakthrough may finally be around the corner with the upcoming declassification of the 28 pages of the “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.”
Calling for the official release and publication of the 28 page classified section of the joint inquiry report pertaining to Saudi Arabia is an obvious red-herring. The objective is to confuse matters, create divisions within the 9/11 Truth movement and ultimately dispel the fact that the 9/11 attacks were a carefully organized False Flag event which was used to declare war on Afghanistan as well as usher in sweeping anti-terrorist legislation.
Both the Congressional inquiry as well the 9/11 Commission report are flawed, their objective was to sustain the official narrative that America was under attack on September 11, 2001. And Graham’s role in liaison with the CIA, is “damage control” with a view to protecting those who were behind the demolition of the WTC towers as well sustaining the Al Qaeda legend, which constitutes the cornerstone of US military doctrine under the so-called “Global War on Terrorism”.
Without 9/11 and the “Global War on Terrorism”, the warmongers in high office would not have a leg to stand on. In turn, 9/11 Truth is an encroachment which undermines war propaganda and the US-led campaign of Islamophobia, which is sweeping the Western World.
Note to Readers: Remember to bookmark this page for future reference.
Please Forward the GR I-Book far and wide.
This text was first published in August 2012.
It provides a detailed introduction and overview as well as a collection of articles by Global Research authors on 9/11 and the “Global War on Terrorism”.
Note: Apart from minor edits, this text including the selection of articles has not been modified since its publication in August 2012.
[scroll down for I-BOOK Table of Contents]
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GLOBAL RESEARCH ONLINE
INTERACTIVE READER SERIES
GR I-BOOK No. 7
THE 9/11 READER
The September 11, 2001 Terror Attacks
9/11 Truth: Revealing the Lies, Commemorating the 9/11 Tragedy
Michel Chossudovsky (Editor)
August 2012
The 911/ Reader is part of Global Research’s Online Interactive I-Book Reader, which brings together, in the form of chapters, a collection of Global Research feature articles, including debate and analysis, on a broad theme or subject matter. To consult our Online Interactive I-Book Reader Series, click here.
INTRODUCTION
The tragic events of September 11, 2001 constitute a fundamental landmark in American history. a decisive watershed, a breaking point. Millions of people have been misled regarding the causes and consequences of 9/11.
September 11 2001 opens up an era of crisis, upheaval and militarization of American society.
A far-reaching overhaul of US military doctrine was launched in the wake of 9/11.
Endless wars of aggression under the humanitarian cloak of “counter-terrorism” were set in motion.
9/11 was also a stepping stone towards the relentless repeal of civil liberties, the militarization of law enforcement and the inauguration of “Police State USA”.
September 11, 2001 marks the onslaught of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification by the US and its NATO allies to carry out a “war without borders”, a global war of conquest.
At eleven o’clock, on the morning of September 11, the Bush administration had already announced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. This assertion was made prior to the conduct of an indepth police investigation.
CIA Director George Tenet stated that same morning that Osama bin Laden had the capacity to plan “multiple attacks with little or no warning.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks “an act of war” and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them”.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey, without mentioning Afghanistan, pointed his finger at “state sponsorship,” implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence Eagleburger, “I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution.”
That same evening at 9:30 pm, a “War Cabinet” was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors. And at 11:00 pm, at the end of that historic meeting at the White House, the “War on Terrorism” was officially launched.
The tragic events of 9/11 provided the required justification to wage war on Afghanistan on “humanitarian grounds”, with the full support of World public opinion and the endorsement of the “international community”. Several prominent “progressive” intellectuals made a case for “retaliation against terrorism”, on moral and ethical grounds. The “just cause” military doctrine (jus ad bellum) was accepted and upheld at face value as a legitimate response to 9/11.
In the wake of 9/11, the antiwar movement was completely isolated. The trade unions and civil society organizations had swallowed the media lies and government propaganda. They had accepted a war of retribution against Afghanistan, an impoverished country in Central Asia of 30 million people.
The myth of the “outside enemy” and the threat of “Islamic terrorists” was the cornerstone of the Bush administration’s military doctrine, used as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the repeal of civil liberties and constitutional government in America.
Amply documented but rarely mentioned by the mainstream media, Al Qaeda is a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet- Afghan war. This was a known fact, corroborated by numerous sources including official documents of the US Congress, which the mainstream media chose to either dismiss or ignore. The intelligence community had time and again acknowledged that they had indeed supported Osama bin Laden, but that in the wake of the Cold War: “he turned against us”.
The 9/11 Commission Report has largely upheld the “outside enemy” mythology, heralding Al Qaeda as the “mastermind” organization behind the 9/11 attacks.
The official 9/11 narrative has not only distorted the causes underling the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, it has also erased the historical record of US covert support to international terrorism, while creating the illusion that America and “Western Civilization” are threatened.
Without an “outside enemy”, there could be no “war on terrorism”. The entire national security agenda would collapse “like a deck of cards”. The war criminals in high office would have no leg to stand on.
After 9/11, the campaign of media disinformation served not only to drown the truth but also to kill much of the historical evidence on how this illusive Al Qaeda “outside enemy” had been fabricated and transformed into “Enemy Number One”.
The 911 Reader is composed of a carefully selected collection of key articles published by Global Research in the course of the last eleven years. [since 2001]
9/11 was an important landmark for Global Research. Our website was launched on September 9, 2001, two days prior to 9/11. Our coverage of 9/11 was initiated on September 12, 2001.
Within this collection of more than 60 chapters, we have included several important reports from our archives, published by Global Research in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. These articles provide a focus on issues pertaining to the 9/11 Timeline, foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, the attack on the Pentagon, the issue of insider trading on Wall Street in the days preceding 9/11 pointing to foreknowledge of the attacks.
What prevails is a complex web of lies and fabrications, pertaining to various dimensions of the 9/11 tragedy. The falsehoods contained in the official 9/11 narrative are manifold, extending from the affirmation that Osama bin Laden was the mastermind, to the assertion by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that the WTC buildings collapsed due to the impacts of fire. (see Part III).
Where was Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001?
Is there any proof to the effect that Osama bin Laden, the bogeyman, coordinated the 9/11 attacks as claimed in the official 9/11 narrative?
According to CBS news (Dan Rather, January 28, 2002), “Enemy Number One” was admitted to the urology ward of a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi on September 10, 2001, courtesy of America’s indefectible ally Pakistan. He could have been arrested at short notice which would have “saved us a lot of trouble”, but then we would not have had an Osama Legend, which has fed the news chain as well as presidential speeches in the course of the last eleven years.
DAN RATHER. As the United states and its allies in the war on terrorism press the hunt for Osama bin Laden, CBS News has exclusive information tonight about where bin Laden was and what he was doing in the last hours before his followers struck the United States September 11.
This is the result of hard-nosed investigative reporting by a team of CBS news journalists, and by one of the best foreign correspondents in the business, CBS`s Barry Petersen. Here is his report.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BARRY PETERSEN, CBS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Everyone remembers what happened on September 11. Here`s the story of what may have happened the night before. It is a tale as twisted as the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
CBS News has been told that the night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan.
The foregoing CBS report which is of utmost relevance indicates two obvious facts:
1. Osama bin Laden could not reasonably have coordinated the 9/11 attacks from his hospital bed;
2. The hospital was under the jurisdiction of the Pakistani Armed Forces, which has close links to the Pentagon. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts were known to both the Pakistani and US military.
U.S. military and intelligence advisers based in Rawalpindi. were working closely with their Pakistani counterparts. Again, no attempt was made to arrest America’s best known fugitive. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed, at the time, that the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden were unknown. According to Rumsfeld: “Its like looking for a needle in a stack of hay”.
October 7, 2001: Waging America’s 9/11 War of Retribution against Afghanistan
The immediate response of the US and its allies to the 9/11 attacks was to declare a war of retribution against Afghanistan on the grounds that the Taliban government was protecting “terror mastermind” Osama bin Laden. By allegedly harboring bin Laden, the Taliban were complicit, according to both the US administration and NATO, for having waged an act of war against the United States.
Parroting official statements, the Western media mantra on September 12, 2001 had already approved the launching of “punitive actions” directed against civilian targets in Afghanistan. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times:
“When we reasonably determine our attackers’ bases and camps, we must pulverize them — minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage” — and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror’s national hosts”.
This decision was taken by the Bush-Cheney war cabinet in the evening of September 11, 2001. It was based on the presumption, “confirmed” by the head of the CIA that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks.
On the following morning, September 12, 2001, NATO’s Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, endorsed the Bush administration’s declaration of war on Afghanistan, invoking Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.
An act of war by a foreign nation (Afghanistan) against a member of the Atlantic Alliance (the USA) is an act of war against all members under NATO’s doctrine of collective security. Under any stretch of the imagination, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon cannot be categorized as an act of war by a foreign country. But nobody seemed to have raised this issue.
Meanwhile, on two occasions in the course of September 2001, the Afghan government –through diplomatic channels– offered to hand over Osama Bin Laden to US Justice. These overtures were turned down by president Bush, on the grounds that America “does not negotiate with terrorists”.
The war on Afghanistan was launched 26 days later on the morning of October 7, 2001. The timing of this war begs the question: how long does it take to plan and implement a major theater war several thousand miles away. Military analysts will confirm that a major theater war takes months and months, up to a year or more of advanced preparations. The war on Afghanistan was already in the advanced planning stages prior to September 11, 2001, which begs the question of foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.
The repeal of civil liberties in America was launched in parallel with the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, almost immediately following 9/11 with the adoption of the PATRIOT legislation and the setting up of a Homeland Security apparatus, under the pretext of protecting Americans. This post-911 legal and institutional framework had been carefully crafted prior to the 9/11 attacks.
Al Qaeda is a US Intelligence Asset
Important to the understanding of 9/11, US intelligence is the unspoken architect of “Islamic terrorism” going back to the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war.
Bin Laden was 22 years old and was trained in a CIA sponsored guerrilla training camp. Education in Afghanistan in the years preceding the Soviet-Afghan war was largely secular. With religious textbooks produced in Nebraska, the number of CIA sponsored religious schools (madrasahs) increased from 2,500 in 1980 to over 39,000.
“Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the [Islamic] Jihad.” (Pervez Hoodbhoy, Peace Research, 1 May 2005)
“The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings….The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books,..”, (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)
Under the Reagan administration, US foreign policy evolved towards the unconditional support and endorsement of the Islamic “freedom fighters”. This endorsement has not in any way been modified.
In a twisted irony, throughout the post 911 era, US intelligence in liaison with Britain’s MI6, an Israel’s Mossad, continues to provide covert support to the radical Islamist organization allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda and its various affiliated groups including the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and factions within the Free Syria Army (FSA) are directly supported by the US and NATO.
In a bitter irony, the US and its allies claim to be waging a “war on terrorism” against the alleged architects of 9/11, while also using Al Qaeda operatives as their foot-soldiers.
Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s
Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official,
Milt Bearden at a Mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987.
(source RAWA)
Ronald Reagan meets Afghan Mujahideen Commanders at the White House in 1985 (Reagan Archives)
The Collapse of the World Trade Center Buildings
Based on the findings of Richard Gage of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings was not caused by fire resulting from the crash of the planes:
In more than 100 steel-framed, high-rise fires (most of them very hot, very large and very long-lasting), not one has collapsed, ever. So it behooves all of us, as your own former chief of NIST’s Fire Science Division, Dr. James Quintiere, said, “to look at real alternatives that might have been the cause of these collapses.”
Let’s start with temperatures – 1,340° F. temperatures, recorded in thermal images of the surface of the World Trade Center rubble pile a week after 9/11 by NASA’s AVIRIS equipment on USGS overflights. Such temperatures cannot be achieved by oxygen-starved hydrocarbon fires. Such fires burn at only 600 to 800° F. Remember, there was no fire on the top of the pile. The source of this incredible heat was therefore below the surface of the rubble, where it must have been far hotter than 1,340 degrees.
Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc., who was hired for the Building 7 cleanup, said that “molten steel was found at 7 WTC.” Leslie Robertson, World Trade Center structural engineer, stated that on October 5, “21 days after the attacks, the fires were still burning and molten steel was still running.” Fire department personnel, recorded on video, reported seeing “molten steel running down the channel rails… like you’re in a foundry – like lava from a volcano.” Joe O’Toole, a Bronx firefighter, saw a crane lifting a steel beam vertically from deep within a pile. He said “it was dripping from the molten steel.” Bart Voorsanger, an architect hired to save “relics from the rubble,” stated about the multi-ton “meteorite” that it was a “fused element of molten steel and concrete.”
Steel melts at about 2,850 degrees Fahrenheit, about twice the temperature of the World Trade Center Tower 1 and 2 fires as estimated by NIST. So what melted the steel?
Appendix C of FEMA’s BPAT Report documents steel samples showing rapid oxidation, sulfidation, and intergranular melting. A liquid eutectic mixture, including sulfur from an unknown source, caused intense corrosion of the steel, gaping holes in wide flange beams, and the thinning of half-inch-thick flanges to almost razor-sharpness in the World Trade Center 7 steel. The New York Times called this “the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation.”
NIST left all of this crucial forensic evidence out of its report. Why? Because it didn’t fit in with the official conspiracy theory.
Last year, physicist Steven Jones, two other physicists, and a geologist analyzed the slag at the ends of the beams and in the samples of the previously molten metal. They found iron, aluminum, sulfur, manganese and fluorine – the chemical evidence of thermate, a high-tech incendiary cutting charge used by the military to cut through steel like a hot knife through butter. The by-product of the thermate reaction is molten iron! There’s no other possible source for all the molten iron that was found. One of thermate’s key ingredients is sulfur, which can form the liquid eutectic that FEMA found and lower the melting point of steel.
In addition, World Trade Center 7’s catastrophic structural failure showed every characteristic of explosive, controlled demolition. … The destruction began suddenly at the base of the building. Several first responders reported explosions occurring about a second before the collapse. There was the symmetrical, near-free-fall speed of collapse, through the path of greatest resistance – with 40,000 tons of steel designed to resist this load – straight down into its own footprint. This requires that all the columns have to fail within a fraction of a second of each other – perimeter columns as well as core columns. There was also the appearance of mistimed explosions (squibs?) at the upper seven floors on the network video recordings of the collapse. And we have expert testimony from a European demolitions expert, Danny Jowenko, who said “This is controlled demolition… a team of experts did this… This is professional work, without any doubt.”
Fire cannot produce these effects. Fire produces large, gradual deformations and asymmetrical collapses. Thermate can produce all of these effects used in conjunction with linear shaped charges. If the thermate is formed into ultra-fine particles, as has been accomplished at Los Alamos National Laboratory, it is called super-thermate, and is very explosive.(Richard Gage, January 2008)
The following AE911Truth Video provides evidence that the WTC center towers were brought down through controlled demolition.
According to David Ray Griffin:
“The official theory of the collapse, therefore, is essentially a fire theory, so it cannot be emphasized too much that fire has never caused large steel-frame buildings to collapse—never, whether before 9/11, or after 9/11, or anywhere in the world on 9/11 except allegedly New York City—never.” See David Ray Griffin).
According to Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, based on solid scientific analysis and evidence, the collapse of the WTC towers was engineered through controlled demolition. While AE11Truth does not speculate on who might be behind the conspiracy to bring down the WTC buildings, they nonetheless suggest that the carrying out such an operation would require a carefully planned course of action with prior access to the buildings as well as an advanced level of expertise in the use of explosives, etc.
The Collapse of WTC Building Seven
The most grotesque lie pertains to the BBC and CNN announcement in the afternoon of September 11, that WTC Building Seven (The Solomon Building) had collapsed. The BBC report went live at 5.00pm, 21 minutes before the actual occurrence of the collapse, indelibly pointing to foreknowledge of the collapse of WTC 7. CNN anchor Aaron Brown announced that the building “has either collapsed or is collapsing” about an hour before the event.
CNN anchor Aaron Brown seems to struggle to make sense of what he is seeing one minute after announcing that WTC Building 7, whose erect facade is clearly visible in his view towards the Trade Center, has or is collapsing.
Coverup and Complicity
The 911 Reader presents factual information and analysis which points to cover-up and complicity at the highest levels of the US government.
This body of articles by prominent authors, scholars, architects, engineers, largely refutes the official narrative of the 9/11 Commission Report, which is reviewed in Part IV. It dispels the notion that America was attacked on September 11, 2001 on the orders of Osama bin Laden.
This is a central issue because US military doctrine since 9/11 has been predicated on “defending the American Homeland” against Islamic terrorists as well as waging pre-emptive wars against Al Qaeda and its various “state sponsors”. Afghanistan was bombed and invaded as part of the “war on terrorism”. In March 2003, Iraq was also invaded.
War Propaganda
Fiction prevails over reality. For propaganda to be effective, public opinion must firmly endorse the official 9/11 narrative to the effect that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks. A well organized structure of media disinformation (Part XI) is required to reach this objective. Perpetuating the 9/11 Legend also requires defying as well smearing the 9/11 Truth Movement.
Throughout the post 9/11 era, a panoply of Al Qaeda related events and circumstances is presented to public opinion on a daily basis. These include terrorist threats, warnings and attacks, police investigations, insurgencies and counter-insurgencies, country-level regime change, social conflict, sectarian violence, racism, religious divisions, Islamic thought, Western values, etc.
In turn, 9/11, Al Qaeda – War on Terrorism rhetoric permeates political discourse at all levels of government, including bipartisan debate on Capitol Hill, in committees of the House and the Senate, at the British House of Commons, and, lest we forget, at the United Nations Security Council.
September 11 and Al Qaeda concepts, repeated ad nauseam have potentially traumatic impacts on the human mind and the ability of normal human beings to analyze and comprehend the “real outside World” of war, politics and the economic crisis.
What is at stake is human consciousness and comprehension based on concepts and facts.
With September 11 there are no verifiable “facts” and “concepts”, because 9/11 as well as Al Qaeda have evolved into a media mythology, a legend, an invented ideological construct, used as an unsubtle tool of media disinformation and war propaganda.
Al Qaeda constitutes a stylized, fake and almost folkloric abstraction of terrorism, which permeates the inner consciousness of millions of people around the World.
Reference to Al Qaeda has become a dogma, a belief, which most people espouse unconditionally.
Is this political indoctrination? Is it brain-washing? If so what is the underlying objective?
People’s capacity to independently analyse World events, as well as address causal relationships pertaining to politics and society, is significantly impaired. That is the objective!
The routine use of 9/11 and Al Qaeda to generate blanket explanations of complex political events is meant to create confusion. It prevents people from thinking.
All of these complex Al Qaeda related occurrences are explained –by politicians, the corporate media, Hollywood and the Washington think tanks under a single blanket “bad guys” heading, in which Al Qaeda is casually and repeatedly pinpointed as “the cause” of numerous terror events around the World.
The Alleged Role of Iraq in the 9/11 Attacks
9/11 mythology has been a mainstay of war propaganda. In the course of 2002, leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, “Osama bin Laden” and “Weapons of Mass Destruction” statements circulated profusely in the news chain. While Washington’s official position was that Saddam Hussein was not behind the 9/11 attacks, insinuations abounded both in presidential speeches as well as in the Western media. According to Bush, in an October 2002 press conference:
“The threat comes from Iraq. It arises directly from the Iraqi regime’s own actions — its history of aggression, and its drive toward an arsenal of terror. .,.. We also must never forget the most vivid events of recent history. On September the 11th, 2001, America felt its vulnerability — even to threats that gather on the other side of the earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat, from any source [Iraq], that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America.” (President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat, October 7, 2002)
Barely two weeks before the invasion of Iraq, September 11, 2001 was mentioned abundantly by president Bush. In the weeks leading up to the March invasion, 45 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was “personally involved” in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. (See . The impact of Bush linking 9/11 and Iraq / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com, March 14, 2003)
Meanwhile, a new terrorist mastermind had emerged: Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.
In Colin Powell’s historic address to the United Nations Security Council, in February 2003, detailed “documentation” on a sinister relationship between Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi was presented, focussing on his ability to produce deadly chemical, biological and radiological weapons, with the full support and endorsement of the secular Baathist regime. The implication of Colin’s Powell’s assertions, which were totally fabricated, was that Saddam Hussein and an Al Qaeda affiliated organization had joined hands in the production of WMD in Northern Iraq and that the Hussein government was a “state sponsor” of terrorism.
The main thrust of the disinformation campaign continued in the wake of the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. It consisted in presenting the Iraqi resistance movement as “terrorists”. The image of “terrorists opposed to democracy” fighting US “peacekeepers” appeared on television screens and news tabloids across the globe.
Iran: Alleged State Sponsor of 9/11
In the wake of the Iraq invasion, the same alleged “state sponsorship” of terrorism accusations emerged in relation to Iran.
In December 2011, the Islamic Republic of Iran was condemned by a Manhattan court, for its alleged role in supporting Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks.
The investigation into Tehran’s alleged role was launched in 2004, pursuant to a recommendation of the 9/11 Commission “regarding an apparent link between Iran, Hezbollah, and the 9/11 hijackers”. The 91/11 Commission’s recommendation was that the this “apparent link” required “further investigation by the U.S. government.” (9/11 Commission Report , p. 241). (See Iran 911 Case ).
“U.S. District Judge George B. Daniels ruled that Iran and Hezbollah materially and directly supported al Qaeda in the September 11, 2001 attacks and are legally responsible for damages to hundreds of family members of 9/11 victims who are plaintiffs in the case”.
According to the plaintiffs attorneys “Iran, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda formed a terror alliance in the early 1990s. Citing their national security and intelligence experts, the attorneys explained “how the pragmatic terror leaders overcame the Sunni-Shi’a divide in order to confront the U.S. (the “Great Satan”) and Israel (the “Lesser Satan”)”. Iran and Hezbollah allegedly provided “training to members of al Qaeda in, among other things, the use of explosives to destroy large buildings.” (See Iran 911 Case ).
This judicial procedure is nothing more than another vicious weapon in the fabricated “War on Terror” to be used against another Muslim country, with a view to destabilizing Iran as well as justifying ongoing military threats. It also says a lot more about the people behind the lawsuit than about the accused. The expert witnesses who testified against Iran are very active in warmongering neocon circles. They belong to a web of architects of the 21st century Middle-Eastern wars, ranging from high profile propagandists to intelligence and military officers, including former U.S. officials.
But what makes this case absurd is that in September 2011, a few months before the judgment, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has questioned the official 9/11 narrative, was accused by Al-Qaeda leaders of “spreading conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks”. The semi-official media outlet of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, insisted that al-Qaeda “had been behind the attacks and criticised the Iranian president for discrediting the terrorist group.” (See Julie Levesque, Iran Accused of being behind 9/11 Attacks. U.S. Court Judgment, December 2011 (Havlish v. Iran), Global Research, May 11, 2012)
Al Qaeda: US-NATO Foot-soldiers
Ironically, while Washington accuses Iran and Afghanistan of supporting terrorism, the historical record and evidence indelibly point to the “state sponsorship” of Al Qaeda by the CIA, MI6 and their counterparts in Pakistan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Al Qaeda death squads have been recruited to wage America’s humanitarian wars throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
In Syria Al Qaeda units were recruited by NATO and the Turkish High command: “Also discussed in Brussels and Ankara, our sources report, is a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels.”
In Libya, jihadists from Afghanistan trained by the CIA were dispatched to fight with the “pro-democracy” rebels under the helm of “former” Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) Commander Abdel Hakim Belhadj:
Western policy makers admit that NATO’s operations in Libya have played the primary role in emboldening Al Qaeda’s AQIM faction (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb). The Fortune 500-funded Brookings Institution’s Bruce Riedel in his article, “The New Al Qaeda Menace,” admits that AQIM is now heavily armed thanks to NATO’s intervention in Libya, and that AQIM’s base in Mali, North Africa, serves as a staging ground for terrorist activities across the region. http://www.globalresearch.ca/al-qaeda-and-natos-pan-arab-terrorist-blitzkrieg/
Table of Contents of the 9/11 Reader
In Part I, the 911 Reader provides a review of what happened on the morning of 9/11, at the White House, on Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, at Strategic Command Headquarters (USSTRATCOM), What was the response of the US Air Force in the immediate wake of the attacks? Part II focusses on “What Happened on the Planes” as described in the 9/11 Commission Report.
Part III sheds light on what caused the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. It also challenges the official narrative with regard to the attack on the Pentagon.
Part IV reviews and refutes the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report.
Part V focusses on the issue of foreknowledge by Western intelligence agencies. Part VI examines the issue of how foreknowledge of the attacks was used as an instrument of insider trading on airline stocks in the days preceding September 11, 2001. The bonanza financial gains resulting from insurance claims to the leaseholders of the WTC buildings is also examined.
Part VII focusses on the history and central role of Al Qaeda as a US intelligence asset. Since the Soviet-Afghan war, US intelligence has supported the formation of various jihadist organizations. An understanding of this history is crucial in refuting the official 9/11 narrative which claims that Al Qaeda, was behind the attacks.
Part VIII centers on the life and death of 9/11 “Terror Mastermind” Osama bin Laden, who was recruited by the CIA in the heyday of the Soviet Afghan war. This section also includes an analysis of the mysterious death of Osama bin Laden, allegedly executed by US Navy Seals in a suburb of Islamabad in May 2011.
Part IX focusses on “False Flags” and the Pentagon’s “Second 9/11”.
Part X examines the issue of “Deep Events” with contributions by renowned scholars Peter Dale Scott and Daniele Ganser.
Part XI examines the structure of 9/11 propaganda which consists in “creating” as well “perpetuating” a “9/11 Legend”. How is this achieved? Incessantly, on a daily basis, Al Qaeda, the alleged 9/11 Mastermind is referred to by the Western media, government officials, members of the US Congress, Wall Street analysts, etc. as an underlying cause of numerous World events.
Part XII focusses on the practice of 9/11 Justice directed against the alleged culprits of the 9/11 attacks.
The legitimacy of 9/11 propaganda requires fabricating “convincing evidence” and “proof” that those who are accused actually carried out the attacks. Sentencing of Muslims detained in Guantanamo is part of war propaganda. It depicts innocent men who are accused of the 9/11 attacks, based on confessions acquired through systematic torture throughout their detention.
Part XIII focusses on 9/11 Truth. The objective of 9/11 Truth is to ultimately dismantle the propaganda apparatus which is manipulating the human mindset. The 9/11 Reader concludes with a retrospective view of 9/11 ten years later.
PART I
Timeline: What Happened on the Morning of September 11, 2001
On the morning of September 11, Pakistan’s Chief Spy General Mahmoud Ahmad, the alleged “money-man” behind the 9-11 hijackers, was at a breakfast meeting on Capitol Hill hosted by Senator Bob Graham and Rep. Porter Goss, the chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence committees.
Response to Questions Evoked by My Fifth Estate Interview
– by Prof David Ray Griffin – 2010-01-12
Given the cell phone technology available in 2001, cell phone calls from airliners at altitudes of more than a few thousand feet, were virtually impossible
The official theory about the Twin Towers says that they collapsed because of the combined effect of the impact of the airplanes and the resulting fires
Besides omitting and otherwise falsifying evidence, NIST also committed the type of scientific fraud called fabrication, which means simply “making up results.”
The Pentagon revealed that some of the unidentifiable remains from victims at the Pentagon and Shanksville sites on September 11, 2001 were disposed of in a landfill.
“Foreknowledge” and “Failure to act” upholds the notion that the terrorist attacks (“act of war”) “waged by Muslims against America” are real, when all the facts and findings point towards coverup and complicity at the highest levels of the US government.
On the morning of September 11, Pakistan’s Chief Spy General Mahmoud Ahmad, the alleged “money-man” behind the 9-11 hijackers, was at a breakfast meeting on Capitol Hill hosted by Senator Bob Graham and Rep. Porter Goss, the chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence committees.
Osama bin Laden was recruited by the CIA in 1979. The US spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings.
The main justification for waging this war has been totally fabricated. The American people have been deliberately and consciously misled by their government into supporting a major military adventure which affects our collective future.
Muslim countries possess three quarters of the World’s oil reserves. In contrast, the United States of America has barely 2 percent of total oil reserves.
“Another [9/11] attack could create both a justification and an opportunity to retaliate against some known targets”
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2006-08-10
The presumption of this military document, is that a Second 911 attack “which is lacking today” would usefully create both a “justification and an opportunity” to wage war on “some known targets
This is not the first time that brash and unsubstantiated statements have been made regarding an impending terror attack, which have proven to be based on “faulty intelligence”.
The Doomsday Project is the Pentagon’s name for the emergency planning “to keep the White House and Pentagon running during and after a nuclear war or some other major crisis.”
In both 9/11 and the JFK assassination, the US government and the media immediately established a guilty party. Eventually, in both cases a commission was set up to validate the official narrative.
9/11 Ringleader connected to secret Pentagon operation
– by Dr. Daniele Ganser – 2005-08-27
Atta was connected to a secret operation of the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in the US. A top secret Pentagon project code-named Able Danger identified Atta and 3 other 9/11 hijackers as members of an al-Qaida cell more than a year before the attacks.
According to Chossudovsky, the “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
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***
Today is the 21st anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. There has never been an official US investigation of the attack. After much pressure from families of those who died in the collapse of the towers, the White House finally and most reluctantly assembled a 9/11 Commission consisting largely of politicians and a neoconservative staff director to sit and listen to the government’s narrative and to write it down. This is what comprised the 9/11 Commission Report.
Afterwards the commission’s co-chairmen and legal counsel wrote books in which they said the 9/11 Commission was set up to fail, that resources and information were withheld from the Commission, and that the Commission considered referring criminal charges to the Department of Justice against some of the government officials who falsely testified before the commission. These confessions were ignored by the presstitutes and had no effect on the government’s highly implausible narrative.
NIST’s account of the collapse is simply a computer simulation that delivered the results NIST programed into the simulation.
For 21 years I reported on the independent investigations and findings of scientists, scholars, engineers, and architects that concluded on the basis of hard evidence that the government’s narrative was a false account. Initially, the distinguished scientists, architects, and engineers who rejected the official narrative were characterized by the presstitutes as “conspiracy theorists,” following the line the CIA had employed against experts who disputed the official narrative of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. However, over time the efforts of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth convinced more and more Americans that the official story was false. In recent years polls have shown that half of those polled no longer believe the official narrative.
It was obvious to me early that 9/11 was an inside job, a false flag event blamed on Muslims in order to justify two decades of a “war on terror” whose purpose was to destroy Israel’s Middle Eastern opponents who were funding Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that twice drove the vaunted Israeli Army out of Israel’s attempted occupation of southern Lebanon. If Hezbollah’s supporters–Iraq, Syria and Iran–could be eliminated, Israel could seize the water resource in southern Lebanon. This, and profits and power for the US military/security complex are all the “war on terror” was about.
The reason it was obvious to me that 9/11 was an inside job is that, as it was presented, it amounted to the worse humiliation a superpower had suffered in all of recorded history.
The Official Narrative
A handful of young Saudi Arabians without support of any state or security agency had delivered a crushing blow to the image of the United States. The almighty National Security Apparatus was incapable of warding off a handful of foreigners who, magically, caused US airport security to fail four times on the same morning, hijack 4 airliners, cause the US military to conduct a simulation of the attack at the same time an actual attack was occurring, thus causing massive confusion and prevented the US Air Force from intercepting the hijacked airliners. The young men also prevented VP Dick Cheney, who was monitoring “the attack on America,” from blocking the attack on the Pentagon.
When you look at this record of extraordinary failure of the multi-trillion dollar National Security State and hear no demand from the President of the United States, the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress, and the media for investigation and accountability for the government’s total failure, hearing instead opposition to any inquiry, you know for an absolute fact that the highest levels of the US government were responsible for the attack in order to unleash war on the Middle East, just as Pearl Harbor was a Roosevelt orchestration to get the US into a war that Congress and the American people opposed.
If in fact the US government believed its narrative, the government, embarrassed to the hilt, would have been demanding explanation and accountability. There would have been endless investigation. Many heads would have rolled. I spent a quarter century in Washington, and I know for a fact that the government would not have been content to assemble a Commission and then read an implausible account to them and call that an investigation of America’s and their own humiliation.
What the government did instead of an investigation was to quickly destroy all the evidence. The massive steel beams of the towers clearly cut at an angle by high temperature explosives were quickly collected over objections by fire marshals, shipped out of the country in order to get rid of the evidence, and sold as scrap metal in Asia.
No explanation or even admission was given for the molten steel still under the ruble weeks after the event.
The testimony of more than a hundred, firemen, police, and building maintenance workers that they experienced explosions all over the towers, including one in the basement before the alleged airliners even hit the towers, was ignored.
That the three buildings collapsed into their own footprints as in controlled demolition was ignored. That the BBC reporter announced the collapse of the third building 30 minutes before it happened while she was standing in front of the still standing building was ignored.
But Americans were sitting ducks for their deception, as they always are. Americans, self-righteous, content in the goodness of their country with the belief reinforced by patriotism and flag-waving were pleased to believe that they were attacked, as President Bush said, because America is so good.
One wonders if today, after 21 years of Identity Politics, Aversive Racism, Critical Race Theory, transgender theory, the NY Times’ 1619 Project, the demonization of our Founding Fathers, destruction of their reputations and removal of their statues, and the glorification of perversity, Americans would still have the confidence in their goodness to fall victim to another 9/11 deception?
Perhaps they would. Many of them seem to have fallen for “we have to save the liberty of Ukraine from Putin,” by which is really meant is that “we must save the Biden family’s and the Democrats’ money laundering operation in Ukraine.” The insouciant Americans sent over billions of dollars, and the money comes back, with a cut taken out for Zelensky and his henchmen, to the Democrats for advice, consulting fees, facilitators of wartime needs.
In recorded history there have been corrupt empires, but the American one takes the cake.
*
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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
When the lateQueen Elizabeth II took the throne in February 1952, the UK was still an empire that held control over vast swathes of the planet and counted hundreds of millions of subjects.
Since then the world has seen wars, revolutions and coups. Britain’s empire has largely disappeared.
Much of the Middle East and North Africa, still a region where the UK holds deep ties – not least through the monarchy – was largely under British control, both directly and indirectly, when she came to the throne.
Much of the traditional control the UK exerted over the Middle East was grounded in a range of monarchies that had been imposed or backed by the empire and maintained close links to Britain’s royal family.
Elizabeth ascended to the British throne on 6 February 1952. At that time, Britain directly controlled most of what are now the Gulf Arab states, with only Saudi Arabia and North Yemen as independent states – albeit ones closely aligned to the empire.
Kuwait would have to wait until 1963 before it became formally independent, while the UAE (then known as the Trucial States), Qatar and Oman would remain protectorates until the 1970s.
Iraq, Iran, Egypt and Jordan were all monarchies aligned with Britain, while the Republic of Turkey would join the Nato alliance that year and come into the Western sphere of influence.
In 1955, Iraq, Iran and Turkey would join Pakistan and the UK in the anti-communist Baghdad Pact.
Four years before Elizabeth became queen, Britain pulled out of Palestine, but not before encouraging Jewish immigration and the Zionist movement’s plan to settle there – a policy that rocked a region that is still coming to terms with the creation of Israel.
Though Britain had left Palestine, in the wake of the Second World War the Middle East was firmly in the Western camp – though the fear of communism and Arab nationalism was never far from rulers’ minds.
Though no longer a direct colony, Egypt played a crucial role in the empire.
Under the rule of King Farouk, the country was closely aligned with Britain, the former colonial power. Poverty and inequality were rife in the kingdom under Farouk, but British support ensured – for a time at least – his administration’s ability to weather the burst of discontent from the populace.
The British had also shared sovereignty over Sudan with Egypt since 1899, maintaining forces in the southern region following their victory in the Mahdist war of 1881-1899.
Crucially, British forces were stationed around the Suez Canal, a route integral to international trade.
Constructed by the Suez Canal Company between 1859 and 1869, the British- and French-owned canal would later become symbolic for Egyptian nationalists of their country’s subservience to foreign powers.
Ensuring the steady flow of ocean trade was one of the key goals of the British Empire in the Middle East.
At the other end of the Red Sea was Aden, in the southwest of the Arabian Peninsula. The city’s port was one of the busiest harbours in the world for trade and travel in the 1950s, overlooking the Gulf of Aden.
Tens of thousands of British soldiers were stationed in Aden. Deals with local tribal leaders helped keep down threats from labour unions and leftists who demanded autonomy and better treatment for native workers – at least for the time being.
In addition to the forces stationed at Suez, control of the canal and Aden left the British fully in control of the quickest shipping route between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean.
At the time of her accession, Elizabeth counted more than 7,300,000 subjects in the MENA region, while a further 55,000,000 at least were under British influence.
A question of sovereignty
The Iranian government led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who in 1951 had nationalised his country’s oil industry, provided real concern for the empire.
Mosaddegh’s decision to take over the British-0wned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – with the popular support of the communists – was in part motivated by the belief that the company existed as a means of exerting foreign control over Iran.
The takeover alarmed Britain and its allies. But the problem would be rectified soon: a year later, with the backing of the UK and the US, Mosaddegh would be overthrown in a coup and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi would be placed in full control of the country and in full deference to foreign powers.
Across the rest of the Middle East and North Africa, other colonial powers still held sway, as well.
Following the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement during World War 1, Syria and Lebanon had fallen under French control but had achieved independence by the 1940s.
However, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria were still under French colonial rule, while Spain controlled what is now known as Western Sahara.
It would not be long before all demanded their own indepdence, with Algeria plunging in a brutal anti-colonial conflict, while Western Sahara remains a disputed region and site of anti-colonial struggle to this day.
The status quo was not to last.
Just five months after Elizabeth ascended to the throne, a group of nationalist military officials, including Gamal Abdel Nasser, launched a coup d’etat in Egypt, abolished the monarchy and declared the country a republic.
That event, perhaps more than any other, kicked off the process ending Britain’s role as the dominant power in the Middle East. Nasser’s government would later oversee indepedence and the end of UK rule in Sudan in 1956, as well as expelling British forces from Suez and nationalising the canal.
The Suez Crisis that followed would see Britain – and its allies France and Israel – fail to unseat Nasser through military force and re-assert control over the canal. The British Empire’s status as the foremost imperial power was over and the US would soon move in to take its place.
“We feel that we are strong, we feel that the world has changed,” Nasser said in a speech following the start of the invasion.
“They want to insult us? Well, we can also insult them… can’t our papers also insult the Queen and their prime minister?”
What the young queen thought – if anything – of these events goes unnoted, as became standard for a figurehead keen to be seen as apolitical.
The same year as the Suez Crisis, King Faisal II of Iraq would pay a visit to London.
In footage taken by British Pathe, Elizabeth, her husband Prince Phillip and other royals and government officials meet Faisal off the train at Victoria Station before being taken by a coach and horses down the thronged street to Buckingham Palace.
During the visit Elizabeth described Iraq as the “model of a modern state built on ancient and famous foundations and confidently facing towards the future”.
Within two years, Faisal would be overthrown and killed in a nationalist takeover inspired by Nasser’s coup in Egypt. The country would be declared a republic and withdrawn from the Baghdad Pact, growing closer to the Soviet Union.
By the end of the 1970s the only remaining monarchy outside of the Gulf was Jordan, with South Yemen becoming a “socialist country” after independence in 1967 (later uniting with the north in 1990), and Iran’s transformation into the Islamic Republic following the 1979 revolution.
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Featured image: Mohammad Mosaddegh in court, 8 November 1953 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
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“The UK government has embarked on a course of action that runs a very significant risk of eventually being found by domestic courts and/or the European Court of Human Rights not to be compliant with the convention.”
Damning words from Dunja Mijatovic, human rights commissioner for the Council of Europe on the controversial Legacy Bill, which is currently going through Parliament.
The sense of panic to get this legislation into law has been hastened by the brilliant work of organisations like Relatives for Justice and the Pat Finucane Centre, which have been a tremendous help and support to victims and families of the Troubles.
Also the recovery of information by Cairan MacAirt at Paper Trail, who has consistently published information supporting the allegations of collusion and cover-up by agencies of the British government.
Recently uncovered documents by Paper Trail highlight missed opportunities that could have saved more lives on what was one of the most frightening days of the Troubles.
It was a little over 50 years ago when the IRA rocked Belfast with 19 bombs across the city. Labelled by the media as Bloody Friday, the bombs on July 21 1972 claimed the lives of nine people and injured 130 others.
All of the fatalities on that awful day occurred at two of the explosions: the Oxford Street bus station where six people died at 3.02pm; and Cavehill Road shops at about 3.15pm where three people lost their lives.
However, Paper Trail discovered documents including British military logs which calls into question the account given by the British army on that terrible day.
The IRA alleged at the time that warnings were given via the Public Protection Agency (PPA) which had been set up by the British government to field complaints of intimidation and attack.
However, on July 30 1972, the Sunday Times published an article under the heading “Mystery of Bloody Friday’s Lost Warnings.”
This article highlighted the discrepancy between records kept by the PPA and public reports by the British armed forces.
The PPA said its log showed it had passed the IRA warnings to the British army immediately. The warning for Oxford Street at 2.40pm, 22 minutes before the explosion and at 2.07pm for Cavehill, one hour and eight minutes before the bomb exploded. Regardless of this revelation, the British army remained adamant that no warnings were given.
The Historical Enquiries Team (HET), which was initially set up in 2005 and operated until 2014 to look into unsolved murders committed during the 30 years of the Troubles, reported that 19 explosions occurred (from 21 planted bombs) on Bloody Friday.
Paper Trail researchers scrutinising these files and others concerning Bloody Friday, discovered a warning against the Europa Hotel via its manager at 6pm the night before Bloody Friday to say a threat was imminent within the next 24 hours.
The threat against the Europa Hotel was considered serious enough for the Welsh Guards, the British army regiment detailed with responsivity for that area, to ask units of the Military Reaction Force (MRF), a covert unit of British soldiers that dressed in civilian clothes and appeared to operate outside of the rules that governed British forces in the North of Ireland, for their assistance.
The MRF confirmed its allocation of six covert operators from 11.59pm on July 20 to 3am on the 23rd and in addition requested a “sniffa team.”
Further evidence of a threat on the Europa hotel was found when the Welsh Guards informed the British army’s 39 Brigade that “journalist reports he has been warned to keep away from the Europa Hotel from 1500 hrs today.”
The HET report confirmed a warning had been passed to the British army at 2.42pm for the bomb located at the bus station in Oxford Street.
The bomb exploded 20 minutes later while members of the Welsh Guards were tasked with the duty at 2.40pm of trying to find it and clear the area.
However, records obtained by Paper Trail show 39 Brigade logged a warning from the PPA of a 200lb bomb at Oxford Street bus station between 2.25pm and 2.30pm, and not 2.40pm as reported by the PPA, 32 minutes before the bomb exploding at 3.02pm.
With regards to the explosions at Cavehill and Limestone road, Paper Trail again found discrepancies. Despite bombs at both locations being recorded as “No-warning bombs,” the “British army Brigade and Headquarters Northern Ireland” logs show warnings were given for both locations.
Files for Headquarters Northern Ireland also record a message from its exchange regarding the car bomb in Cavehill. In addition, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) liaison officer was informed of the Cavehill earning at 2.08pm but that had already been reported by the RUC to Brigade at 2.06pm.
At 2.06pm 39 Brigade logged a warning from the PPA regarding a car bomb at Limestone Road. The report was very informative and contained the make, model and full registration number of the vehicle.
At the same time, the log also shows a warning of a car bomb located at Cavehill received from the RUC. Again, the vehicle’s registration number was included.
This information suggests that by 2.06pm, both the RUC and the British army were aware not only of the location of the bombs but the registration of the cars that contained the bombs.
However, neither the RUC nor the British army recorded any action taken to clear the area or deactivate the bombs at Cavehill or Limestone Road.
Instead, the bombs were left to explode. The Limestone Road bomb exploded approximately 44 minutes after the warnings (again, the reports of the bomb differ with the British army recording the explosion at 2.50pm, while the HET logs it at 2.40pm) while the Cavehill bomb was left in situ for approximately 69 minutes before it too exploded.
Understandably, the families of those who had relatives caught up in the explosions, some left with life-changing injuries, like a woman who lost both legs in the blast, and a child who lost a leg will rightly blame the IRA for planting the bombs.
They may also want answers to why the bombs were classed as “no-warning bombs,” and understandably feel there were missed opportunities to save more lives and prevent casualties.
Families would also be right to question why they and the coroner were provided with false information by the authorities.
No-one can argue with the fact that the actions of the British army, despite being stretched to breaking point that day, still saved many lives, but so too did the actions of one 14-year-old boy.
Stephen Parker was rightly described as heroic after he lost his life as he attempted to clear people from the local shops after spotting the bomb in Cavehill.
His father, a local minister, was only able to identify his son’s body by the box of trick matches in his pocket. A task no parent should have to do, and which should serve as a reminder of why the peace process must not be allowed to be jeopardised by any British government.
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Featured image: A dark cloud of smoke drifts across the centre of Belfast, as firemen hose down the remains of Oxford Street bus station on the day which later became known as Bloody Friday in 1972 (Source: Morning Star)
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I have taken the risky step of referring to the speech of Charles Coughlin in my recent writings. Coughlin was the most trenchant critic of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, after he had come out as an early supporter. Although Coughlin’s later writings are problematic, and at some points disturbing, it is not accurate to say he was simply an American fascist. I suspect there is an agenda behind that argument as well.
That someone like myself with Jewish ancestry who sees great value in the Jewish tradition, would see value in Coughlin also suggests that dismissing him as rabid anti-Semite is overly simplistic, even destructive.
Coughlin’s speech, “Americanism, Neither Nazism Nor Communism” (1939) is most certainly not a model for us, but it does suggest an effort to address the problems of global finance that Roosevelt was afraid to take on.
I would like to read for you a slightly shortened version of Coughlin’s speech of 1934, “Money is no Mystery,” a speech that inspired my series of speeches on the topic of money and led me to the conclusion that we cannot simply go back to the New Deal to find solutions to today’s crisis because the shortcomings of the New Deal in addressing the axis of global finance that ties New York together with London are the very source of today’s financial, social, and civilizational collapse.
As a product myself of Harvard and Yale, I want to make sure that it is perfectly clear that I represent the Franklin D. Roosevelt who held up the responsibility of the intellectual, of those who have privileged backgrounds, to serve the people, but that I cannot endorse his refusal to give up his ties to the bankers and industrialists of Wall Street which undermined the true potential of the New Deal. I hope I can be a true traitor to my class and offer a true “New Deal” to all Americans, to all citizens of the Earth.
Unlike Roosevelt, I was ready to be dismissed from my job, to be driven out of Washington D.C., and to be impoverished for my critiques of the deep corruption within my country.
Unlike Roosevelt, I was ready to lose all my ties to colleagues at Yale and Harvard if that was what it took to fight for true social justice. When push comes to shove, I stand with you, not with the bankers and billionaires. I am not interested in any backroom deals to protect myself from their wrath.
“Money is no Mystery”
by Charles E. Coughlin, December 30th, 1934
We, in America, have one choice, namely, to construct a new system founded upon social justice. Still, withal, those who prospered most and produced least under the old system are battling fiercely to maintain their privileges and their functions of legislation.
Certainly, during this coming year and the years immediately following, we will witness the total dissolution of modern capitalism. It is advisedly that I use the adjective “modern,” because capitalism, as we knew it in the past twenty or thirty years, differs substantially from the capitalism which was originally conceived. Today it is more renowned for its vices than for its virtues.
Those who are fighting so relentlessly to preserve its poverty-breeding corpse refuse to face the pressing problem of squaring production with distribution. They are those who, during the coming years, will continue to oppose the restoration to Congress of its right to coin and regulate the value of money.
They still believe that the debts of the farmer, of the merchant, of the municipality, of the state which were incurred through the operation of an insane credit inflation, of manufactured bookkeeping money, should be paid back to them in honest currency which does not exist.
That we will refuse to suffer this financial domination any longer is certain. This form of capitalism, now a corpse, demands at least, an honorable burial.
As for modern democracy it has degenerated into a system whereby two political parties, under the leadership of the bankers and the banker-controlled industrialists, so manipulate conventions and elections and so control, either directly or indirectly, the majesty of the state that there is too little democracy and too much plutocracy.
Against all these systems – unspeakable communism, philosophic socialism, dictatorial Fascism, decadent capitalism, controlled democracy and modern plutocracy – there stands an economic system known as social justice. Seeking no compromise, enticing no man by vain promises, it writes down a platform for today, with principles of truth, of justice, of humanity as the Jews of old had them in their codes, as Jesus taught them on the Mount: Justice to the laborer, justice to the farmer, justice to the property owner, justice to all!
Social justice regards man and his family, not as chattel of the state, but regards the state as the servant of its citizens.
Finally, the philosophy of social justice teaches us that the earth is to be apportioned for our maintenance, according to our merits, in such a manner that he who gains ownership of any property cannot use that property contrary to the common good.
This program of social justice does not militate against the Constitution of the United States in any degree. It does, however, oppose the misinterpretation given to that Constitution by the international bankers who have written laws for their own selfish purposes.
At times our bankers extended credit until it became an inflated balloon that could do nothing else but burst. And at all times, with only their billion dollars of real currency on deposit, they loaned this extra twenty or thirty or forty billions of dollars of stage money, of fiction money, at five or six or seven per cent, making a billion dollars in profit even in a poor year.
Bankers, as a class, have proven themselves greedy. They can no more escape that qualification than can a tiger escape being called vicious. Their very nature demands that they be greedy.
Now it is very well for the banker to start his printing press. But at the moment a student of banking and of monetary reform brings the facts to his attention, the banker and his kept press yells out, “Stop, thief!”
The printing press money is the banker’s money. It is his currency. He owns this prerogative. That is why the Baruchs, the Warburgs, the Morgans, and the Mellons, the Federal Reserve bankers and every white-carnation-bedecked banker in America sees red if the bankers’ racket is interfered with.
That is why they scamper up the steps of the White House, and into the cloakrooms of Congress, if anyone dares suggest that the sovereign people of the United States recapture their power over money which originally was placed squarely in the hands of Congress by the Constitution.
A banker is not a producer. He is a leech who lives upon the artistry, the labor, and the scientific development of others. He is in business with his prerogative of manufacturing money through an act of Congress and through the grace of a printing press and fountain pen. His business is eventually to get that which he did not create.
Do you wonder, then, that depressions have been decreed by bankers?
What matters it to them if fifteen million men be idle, if factories close, if commerce freezes, if dire and abject poverty be the lot of the multitude in this land of plenty! Their racket must continue – a sordid, vicious racket that poisons the very life blood of the nation.
What if there is less banking business to be done in the days of depression – they care not! Because, aside from the ordinary loans which they make to ordinary citizens, they still continue to make money on the interest-bearing government bonds which they possess. At least $20-billion of these bonds are in the bankers’ vaults.
And many of those bonds where were issued by the government to dress the boys of 1916 in khaki, to pump murder into their hearts, to feed them hardtack, and to prepare them to become fodder on the battlefields of France.
Bloody bonds which were used for destructive purposes! Criminal bonds which they expect you and me to redeem for the privilege of their having made a slaughter house of this world!
What care they for depressions as long as these bloody bonds continue to drip their malignant poison upon the prosperity of a misunderstanding people!
We are subject to panics, to man-made panics, the greatest of all occurring after the establishment of the privately owned Federal Reserve Banking system which, in the preamble of its charter, practically guaranteed this nation freedom from panics.
They made their runs on the people and captured the real wealth of the nation!
Shall we permit this system to continue, this system of private banking which creates depressions and cashes in on bloody bonds?
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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.
Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.
An entire generation of new human beings have been born, grew up and are now entering the work force, university and college – all without ever knowing the age before the war on terrorism. The Patriot Act, anti-terrorism legislation, and the threat of attacks is part of daily life. Like taxes and death.
This incisive article by William Arkin summarizes the key elements of America’s nuclear doctrine, formulated both before and in the immediate wake of September 11, 2001.
On September 11, 1973, Salvador Allende’s democratic government in Chile was ousted by United States-backed forces in one of the Cold War’s defining moments. Allende himself was killed during the coup while his presidential palace, La Moneda, was extensively bombed. Many thousands of Chileans were either murdered, “disappeared”, imprisoned, and coerced to emigrate or enter exile. Allende’s widow and family were forced to go into hiding in Mexico for many years.
Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts on September 10, 2001 were confirmed by a CBS News Report. Osama had been hospitalized on September 10th, 2001, one day before the 9/11 attacks. How on earth could he have coordinated the attacks from his hospital bed in a heavily guarded Pakistani military hospital located in Rawalpindi.
On the evening of May 1, 2011, President Barack Obama declared that the CIA, on his personal order, successfully killed Al-Qaeda “mastermind” Osama bin Laden. In a conveniently scheduled Sunday evening telecast, Obama shamelessly wielded tired lies and 9/11 propaganda, while congratulating himself and the CIA. In classic lying George W. Bush fashion, Obama announced “mission accomplished”.
Watching the twin towers being struck, Putin immediately phoned President Bush to offer his condolences and understanding. When his call couldn’t reach Bush because he was on Airforce One, Putin immediately spoke to Condoleezza Rice, asking her to pass his message to Bush. The next morning, Putin reached Bush and assured him that “in this struggle, we will stand together.”
Distinguished 9/11 scholar Graeme MacQueen joins host Andy Steele to talk about the soon-to-be-published paper he co-authored with Ted Walter entitled “The Triumph of the Official Narrative: How the TV Networks Hid the Twin Towers’ Explosive Demolition on 9/11.” In that paper, they reviewed 70 hours of news coverage and found that the “explosion hypothesis” was the dominant hypothesis among reporters on the ground. In this new paper, using the same 70 hours of news coverage, they examine how the official narrative supplanted what journalists on the ground were reporting.
Western heads of state, UN officials and military spokespersons will invariably praise the humanitarian dimension of the October 2001 US-NATO led invasion of Afghanistan, which allegedly was to fight religious fundamentalists, help little girls go to school, liberate women subjected to the yoke of the Taliban.
We bring to the attention of our readers the following text of Osama bin Laden’s interview with Ummat, a Pakistani daily, published in Karachi on September 28, 2001. It was translated into English by the BBC World Monitoring Service and made public on September 29, 2001.
This text was first published in August 2012. It provides a detailed introduction and overview as well as a collection of articles by Global Research authors on 9/11 and the “Global War on Terrorism”.
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“…. the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq—I mean of Ukraine.” — George W. Bush
“Kick ass. … If someone tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them. … Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!” — George W. Bush to his generals
“This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog,” — Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi, while throwing his shoes at George W. Bush
It is beginning to seem as if there will never be any meaningful accountability for the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. George W. Bush, now a personal friend of the Obamas, is being rehabilitated among the political elite, his crimes forgotten (except by his victims’ families). These disastrous wars have destabilized the Middle East and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths; the cases for both wars were built on mountains of lies; and they both involved unspeakable criminal violence (from the use of horrific white phosphorous in Fallujah to the bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan that burned patients alive in their beds).Yet these wars are receding in Americans’ memories. The sheer amount of death and deprivation unleashed is difficult to even begin to come to grips with. The bipartisan consensus position in the U.S. appears to be that we are just not going to talk about it anymore, that while scores of Iraqis and Afghans will grow up orphaned, maimed, or both, there will be no investigations and no trials for some of the worst crimes committed in the 21st century.
There are still those who think the invasion of Afghanistan was a morally justifiable “good war,” since it was conducted with the explicit purpose of rooting out Al-Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks. It is hard to maintain this conclusion after reading the U.S. government’s own internal accounts of the war, as revealed in Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock’s 2021 book The Afghanistan Papers. We have evidence that the Taliban might have been willing to strike a deal to end the war quickly; the Guardian reported in October 2001 that “President George Bush rejected as ‘non-negotiable’ an offer by the Taliban to discuss turning over Osama bin Laden if the United States ended the bombing in Afghanistan.” In fact, as Whitlock shows, the Bush administration conflated the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, thus turning what should have been a narrow operation to round up a small criminal gang into an all-out war that toppled the country’s government and replaced it with an unstable, corrupt, and unpopular alternative. For 20 years, successive administrations were unwilling to admit that the war was squandering vast amounts of lives and money and achieving almost nothing. As in Vietnam, Whitlock says, U.S. officials were consistently “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” Whitlock documents almost unbelievable examples of ignorant policymaking, from trying to win “hearts and minds” by giving children soccer balls with Koran verses on them (utterly offensive) to destroying poppy fields in the name of the War on Drugs, thus encouraging enraged, impoverished farmers to join the Taliban. The Costs of War project at Brown University has summarized the harm done to the country:
The war in Afghanistan continues destroying lives, due to the direct consequences of violence and the war-induced breakdown of public health, security, and infrastructure. Civilians have been killed by crossfire, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), assassinations, bombings, and night raids into houses of suspected insurgents. The United States military in 2017 relaxed its rules of engagement for airstrikes in Afghanistan, which resulted in a massive increase in civilian casualties. From the last year of the Obama administration to the last full year of recorded data during the Trump administration, the number of civilians killed by U.S.-led airstrikes in Afghanistan increased by 330 percent. The CIA has armed Afghan militia groups to fight Islamist militants and these militias are responsible for serious human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings of civilians. Even in the absence of fighting, unexploded ordnance from this war and landmines from previous wars continue to kill, injure, and maim civilians. Fields, roads, and school buildings are contaminated by ordnance, which often harms children as they go about chores like gathering wood. The war has also inflicted invisible wounds. In 2009, the Afghan Ministry of Public Health reported that fully two-thirds of Afghans suffer from mental health problems. Prior wars and civil conflict in the country have made Afghan society extremely vulnerable to the reverberating effects of the current war. Those war effects include elevated rates of disease due to lack of clean drinking water, malnutrition, and reduced access to health care. Nearly every factor associated with premature death—poverty, malnutrition, poor sanitation, lack of access to health care, environmental degradation—is exacerbated by the current war. About 241,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone since 2001. More than 71,000 of those killed have been civilians.
George W. Bush said in 2002 that “the history of military conflict in Afghanistan [has] been one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure. We’re not going to repeat that mistake.” Whitlock shows that that is precisely what happened, and that it was the Afghan people who suffered the most. The Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations all lied to the U.S. public about how the war was going. After the U.S. finally withdrew (with one final horrifying drone strike on civilians for good measure, plus a coverup), the Taliban predictably returned to power. The U.S., not content to wreck the country with 20 years of war, froze Afghanistan’s assets and halted aid out of a purported concern with “human rights.” As a result, millions of Afghans are now on the brink of starvation. As the Washington Post notes in a report on the crisis, this is squarely the fault of the Biden administration, since “it was [Biden’s] decision to halt aid in response to the Taliban takeover that put the country on the brink of catastrophe.”
“We were outside of [an Iraqi city] watching as bombs were dropping on the town. … We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so fucking illegal.’” —Army Spec. Russell Baer, speaking of Pat Tillman, NFL football player and Army Ranger killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan
The Iraq war was completely indefensible from the start. The Bush administration knew that the intelligence it was relying on was shaky, but deliberately eliminated any possibility of doubt. It tried to terrify the American public into supporting the war by warning that proof of Saddam Hussein’s secret arsenal of world-ending weapons would come in the form of a “mushroom cloud.”
Saddam Hussein, interviewed in February of 2003 by Dan Rather, made protestations that turned out be quite true, and accused the Bush administration of delusion:
Hussein:
The inspection teams have been here. They have inspected every place. … I think the U.S. and the world know that Iraq no longer has the weapons. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations in Iraq … .
Dan Rather:
Mr. President, Americans are very much concerned about anyone’s connections to Osama bin Laden. Do you have, have you had, any connections to Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden?
Hussein:
Is this the basis of the anxiety in the minds of U.S. officials? Or is it the basis of anxiety in the minds of the people of the United States? … This topic did not appear amongst the concerns of U.S. officials—that is, about any relationship between Iraq and Osama bin Laden—until recently. That is when they realized that what they had been saying about Iraq—that Iraq was probably in possession of proscribed weapons of mass destruction—or that Iraq might have manufactured some of those weapons … if that was the case, then that would be an embarrassment to the United Nations.
The elimination of Hussein, a homicidal psychopath, as Iraq’s leader, could have been a worthy goal in and of itself. Indeed, “bringing democracy to Iraq” swiftly became one of the major public justifications for the war (after it became apparent that the other reasons were nonsense). Yet at every stage the war and occupation were conducted without regard to the well-being or desires of the people of Iraq. After Hussein’s ouster, Bush installed a nincompoop named L. Paul Bremer (a Harvard MBA who spoke no Arabic and had never set foot in Iraq), who ruled over the country like an imperial viceroy. Bremer made disastrous, ignorant decisions that plunged the country into hideous violence, most infamously by disbanding the Iraqi Army, thus instantly creating anarchy. “We created half a million angry, armed, unemployed Iraqis in 48 hours,” commented Bremer’s predecessor. Bremer may have been a bit of a scapegoat for the administration’s failures—some Republicans blame Bremer in order to exonerate Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld—but he did fine out of it. After destroying Iraq, Bremer went on to serve as chairman of the advisory board for Global Secure Corporation, a company that focuses “on securing the homeland with integrated products and services for the critical incident response community worldwide,” as well as on the board of BlastGard International, a “Florida-based company that manufactures materials to mitigate the impact of explosions.” When he’s not doing that, he lives a pleasant life as a ski instructor in Vermont.
Let us review the damage: 500,000 Iraqis died as a result of the U.S. war. Nearly 200,000 of those were violent deaths—people who were blown to pieces by coalition airstrikes or suicide bombers from the insurgency the U.S. occupation unleashed. Others died as a result of the collapse of the medical system—doctors fled the country in droves, since their colleagues were being killed or abducted. Childhood mortality and infant mortality in the country rose, and so did malnutrition and starvation. Millions of people were displaced, and toxins (such as depleted uranium, which is toxic when ingested or inhaled and, like other radioactive substances, confers a risk of cancer) introduced by American bombardment have been suspected of causing a range of public health effects including “increase[s] in Fallujah of congenital malformations, sterility, and infertility.” A “generation of orphans” was created; hundreds of thousands of children lost parents with many left to wander the streets homeless. The country’s infrastructure collapsed, its libraries and museums were looted, and its university system was decimated, its professors assassinated. For years, residents of Baghdad had to deal with suicide bombings as a daily feature of life, and of course, for every violent death, scores more people were left injured or traumatized for life. In 2007 the Red Cross said that there were “mothers appealing for someone to pick up the bodies on the street so their children will be spared the horror of looking at them on their way to school.” The amount of death, misery, suffering, and trauma is almost inconceivable. In many places, we created a kind of hell on earth.
U.S. forces were not trained to deal with Iraqis as human beings. They solved problems with violence, and had little understanding of the culture. Houses were ransacked or destroyed in searches; people were shot for making sudden movements. The U.S. had absolutely no idea how to make Iraq into a functional country after destroying its government, and didn’t care to put in much effort. Testimonies from Iraq Veterans Against The War’s “Winter Soldier” interviews offering a disturbing look at how casual the dehumanization and violence toward Iraqis was:
“I remember one woman walking by. … She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food, and we blew her to pieces.” — Jason Washburn, a corporal in the U.S. Marines who served three tours in Iraq.
“By the time we got to Baghdad … I was explicitly told by my chain of command that I could shoot anyone who came closer to me than I felt comfortable with, if that person did not immediately move when I ordered them to do so, keeping in mind I don’t speak Arabic. My chain of command’s general attitude was ‘better them than us,’ and we were given guidance that reinforced that attitude across the ranks. I watched that attitude intensify throughout my three tours. … [At one point our commander] ordered that everyone on the streets was an enemy combatant. I can remember one instance that afternoon when we came around a corner and an unarmed Iraqi man stepped out of a doorway. I remember the marine directly in front of me raising his rifle and aiming at the unarmed man. Then I think, due to some psychological reason, my brain blocked out the actual shots, because the next thing I remember is stepping over the dead man’s body to clear the room that he came out of. It was a storage room and it was full of some Arabic version of Cheetos. There weren’t any weapons in the area except ours. The commander told us a couple of weeks later that over a hundred enemies “had been killed,” and to the best of my knowledge that number includes the people who were shot for simply walking down the street in their own city. — Jason Wayne Lemieux, sergeant, U.S. Marine Corps
“One time they said to fire on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for transportation. In Iraq, any car can be a taxi cab; you just paint it white and orange. One of the snipers replied back, “Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxi cabs?” The lieutenant colonel responded, “You heard me, trooper, fire on all taxi cabs.” After that, the town lit up, with all the units firing on cars. This was my first experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment.” — Hart Viges, U.S. Army Infantry specialist, 82nd airborne
Very little of this was reported in the U.S. press. As Ashleigh Banfield of MSNBC, who was punished by the network for being publicly critical of the war, said: “There are horrors that were completely left out of this war” by the media. Not that exposure made much difference. The practice of torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and CIA black sites was eventually exposed to the public, but when Barack Obama came into office, he made it clear that there would be complete impunity for misconduct. As Karen Greenberg of the NYU Center on Law and Security noted, Obama “refused to clamp down on [torture] in a way that would make it hard for people in the future to do it.” Obama said that he wanted to “look forward, not backward,” a bizarre phrase that would sound laughable applied to any other serious crime.
Iraqis of all sects and backgrounds made it clear from early on that they did not want to be occupied—public opinion polling consistently showed that the majority wanted the U.S. to leave, despite American rhetoric about bringing “democracy” to Iraq. (In a sign of how much the U.S. respected Iraqi democracy, when the Iraqi parliament voted to expel U.S. troops in 2020, Donald Trump responded by threatening the country with sanctions.) One Iraqi quoted by a Winter Soldier testimonial likely spoke for many when he summarized: “Before America invaded, we didn’t have to worry about car bombs in our neighborhoods. We didn’t have to worry about the safety of our own children before they walked to school, and we didn’t have to worry about U.S. soldiers shooting at us as we drive up and down our own streets.”
When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, American politicians were almost unanimous in correctly declaring the war a hideous crime against humanity. But hardly any wished to discuss the difficult question: With what moral credibility can this country condemn aggressive warfare? We have long claimed the right to invade wherever and whenever we please in order to protect what we see as our national interests. We have wrecked countries and done nothing to make amends for our crimes. On what grounds do we claim Vladimir Putin is not allowed to do the same thing? Having undermined international law repeatedly, we are hardly in a position now to invoke it.
Joe Biden has publicly announced that he believes Vladimir Putin should be tried in the International Criminal Court for the invasion of Ukraine. He should. But shouldn’t George W. Bush? The United States declines to be bound by the jurisdiction of the ICC, and even claims the right to militarily rescue U.S. citizens who find themselves on trial there. (We have a law that has been dubbed the “Hague Invasion Act.”) If we believe that Vladimir Putin should be prosecuted, do we also believe in holding our own war criminals to account? Or do they get a free pass? If they do get a free pass, then the United States makes clear that it believes Putin should be bound by rules that we should be exempt from. And why should Putin be expected to accept such a setup? Asked in a 2003 press conference whether his Iraq policy was a violation of international law, George W. Bush joked: “International law? I better call my lawyer; he didn’t bring that up to me.” If Putin replied like this, we would consider it evidence of his depravity.
The invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have caused decades-long human misery. Our lack of concern for the Iraqi people caused hundreds of thousands of them to die gruesomely, and gave the world the barbaric Islamic State. Afghanistan is now back under Taliban rule, but its people are starving to death. Few in the United States seem inclined to discuss what our country’s government did in our names. Supposedly there is no statute of limitations on murder. But if you are a U.S. official, the statute of limitations is “whenever public attention moves on to the next thing.” Usually that’s about five minutes. Then you are scot-free. Are we truly willing to accept this?
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Le sanzioni alla Russia impediscono alla Gazprom di far funzionare il North Stream 1, l’unico che porta in Germania il gas russo dopo la chiusura forzata del gasdotto gemello, il North Stream 2.Il Cremlino comunica che “Le sanzioni imposte da UE, Regno Unito, Stati Uniti e Canada hanno interrotto il sistema di manutenzione tecnica dei componenti della turbina che assicurava il pompaggio”.
La strategia USA-UE è chiara: impedire all’Europa di ricevere il gas russo a basso prezzo grazie agli accordi a lungo termine precedentemente stipulati con la Russia, obbligando i consumatori europei ad acquistarlo sul mercato spot a prezzi estremamente più alti fissati in base a meccanismi speculativi e politici dalla Borsa di Amsterdam, che fa parte oggi di una grande società finanziaria statunitense.
L’unico gasdotto che trasporta regolarmente gas russo in Europa è il TurkStream, attraverso il Mar Nero e i Balcani. L’Ungheria, che si oppone alle sanzioni UE (nonostante faccia parte della UE e della NATO), ha firmato un accordo a lungo termine con la Gazprom per ricevere dalla Russia attraverso questo gasdotto l’80% del gas di cui ha bisogno.
Vi sono però nei Balcani, soprattutto contro la Serbia da cui passa il TurkStream, crescenti tensioni provocate dalle lunghe mani della NATO, che potrebbero portare al blocco anche di questo ultimo gasdotto dalla Russia.
Tale situazione si inserisce in uno scenario politico-militare sempre più esplosivo. La nuova premier britannica Liz Truss si dichiara “pronta a usare le armi nucleari”.
Un ulteriore pericolo è provocato dal fatto che le forze ucraine – armate, addestrate e di fatto comandate dalla NATO – sparano con i cannoni forniti loro da NATO e UE sulla centrale nucleare di Zaparozhye atttualmente sotto controllo russo, esponendo l’Italia e l’Europa al gravissimo rischio di una nuova Cernobyl.
L’Agenzia Internazionale per l’Energia Atomica avverte: “Con la centrale mucleare di Zaporizhzhya giochiamo col fuoco e potrebbe accadere qualcosa di molto, molto catastrofico” .
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First published on June 29, 2022
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The German-French Nobel Peace Prize winner, pacifist and “jungle doctor” Albert Schweitzer was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. His philosophical thinking was based on the assumption that when people reflect on themselves and their limits, they mutually recognise each other as brothers who reflect on themselves and their limits. In the course of the process of civilisation, solidarity, which was originally only related to one’s own tribe, would gradually be transferred to all, including unknown people. In the 1950s, Schweitzer’s doctrine of “reverence for life” was a moral authority, a guiding principle in the struggle against the nuclear armament of nations.
Image on the right: Albert Schweitzer (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 de)
But the general consciousness of individuals and peoples has not yet found an answer to the “Cain question” from biblical prehistory: “Am I my brother’s keeper? Once again, the catastrophe of a nuclear war threatens us as it did in Albert Schweitzer’s time almost 70 years ago. That is why his “Appeal to Humanity” – which can be read in the collection of writings “Peace or Nuclear War” (1) – has lost none of its topicality.
Bertha von Suttner: “Lay Down Your Arms!”
Never before could the problems of peoples be solved by the method of violence, war. This is no different today than in the history of mankind so far. The backslide into war is a backslide into barbarism, which makes itself felt in all areas of social life: it causes unspeakable suffering in the lives of individuals as well as peoples. The daily TV images of the war in Ukraine give us a lasting impression of this suffering.
Today’s wars are no longer responsible, they have become obsolete. Even the First World War was no longer a conventional war, it was genocide. Since then, the illegal wars of aggression have become even more murderous, more insidious, more widespread, more genocidal.
For the Austrian cultural historian Friedrich Heer, these wars are preparations for the “final solution of the human question” or, as Bertha von Suttner prophesies in her novel “Lay down your arms!”: “The downfall for all” (2). This is certainly true for a universally feared war with nuclear weapons.
Mahatma Gandhi wrote in a letter to Bertha von Suttner after the publication of the novel:
“God grant that the abolition of war may follow your works.” (3)
Alfred Nobel was inspired by Bertha von Suttner to endow the Nobel Peace Prize in his will (4).
History – a work of man
We know today that war is a calamity. We also know that its cause is not “human nature” but the injustice and inhumanity of our social order. This fact must not make us forget that history is a work of man and that man must be changed if the world is to be changed. Accordingly, enlightenment and education are the most important measures that can be taken against war.
We cannot yet say when the conscience of humanity, whose cry of admonition goes through the centuries, will finally make itself heard. But we have no doubt that the existence of the human race hangs on the question of whether people will profess all-human solidarity to a far greater extent than they have done up to now.
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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a teacher (retired headmaster), doctor of education (Dr. paed.) and graduate psychologist (specialising in clinical, educational and media psychology). As a retiree, he worked for many years as a psychotherapist in his own practice. In his books and educational-psychological articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral values education and an education for public spirit and peace.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Notes
(1) Schweitzer, A. (1984). Peace or nuclear war. Munich
(2) Heer, F. In: Von Suttner, B. (1977). Lay down your arms! Introduction, p. VII
I happen to know a thing or two about masks and safety. Why? Because for 25 years I was the editor of an award-winning trade magazine called HazMat Management that covered such topics as pollution prevention and compliance with health & safety laws. We routinely published articles on masks, gloves, respirators and other forms of personal protective equipment (PPE). Now let me tell you a few things about that mask you’re wearing. And please note that what I’m about to share was also stated in the most recent edition of Del Bigtree’s program The Highwire when two OSHA mask experts spoke to the fact that the kinds of masks people are wearing were never (never!) designed to be worn for long periods and doing so is very harmful.
The blue typical mask depicted in the photograph contain Teflon and other chemicals.
A Facebook friend reminds us:
1. Masks are “sterilized” with Ethylene Oxide — a known carcinogen.
Many teachers in various school boards have been experiencing significant symptoms as a direct result of the effects of this chemical.
2. The masks contain (not sprayed with) PTFE which makes up Teflon along with other chemicals.
I found and have posted the US patent to allow manufacturers to use PTFE as a filter in commercial masks… “breathing these for extended periods can lead to lung cancer.”
Don’t agree? Argue with the experts at OSHA, which is the main US agency, i.e., its Occupational Health & Safety Agency. These masks are meant to be worn only for short periods, like say if you’re sanding a table for an hour and don’t want to inhale sawdust.
They don’t do anything whatsoever to stop the spread of any virus, and the emerging science of virology now understands that viruses aren’t even passed person to person.
I know that sounds incredible, but it’s the case that the virus is in the air, you breath it in, there’s no way to prevent that short of living in an oxygen tent, and if you have a strong immune system you’ll be fine, and if you have a weak immune system you may have to deal with the effects of your immune system working to restore balance within your metabolism.
So let’s say you don’t wear the blue packaged masks, and instead wear a homemade cloth mask — the kind people wear over and over and hang on their rearview mirror and so on. Those masks are completely useless against a virus, and are also very dangerous. OSHA would never condone a person wearing a mask of this kind for anything more than the shortest time.
Re-breathing your own viral debris is dangerous to health, and the oxygen deprivation children suffer wearing such masks all day will certainly cause brain damage. I’m not making this up. Again, you might say, well, Guy, you’re not a doctor. True, but I did edit that magazine for 25 years. That’s a long time and many articles on masks and PPE. I’ve attended numerous OH&S conferences and listened to experts discussing these matters.
You may hear people saying that surgeons and nurses wear masks like this all day. Um, no. No they don’t. They’re trained in the proper use of masks, which is to wear them in the OR, then dispose of the mask when they leave that room.
Are you aware that operating rooms are actually supplied extra oxygen, to compensate for the reduction in oxygen flow from mask wearing? To my mind, it’s criminal (not hyperbole) to force children to wear masks all day. Setting aside the very real psychological effects, we’re going to have a generation of brain damaged children. Ever heard the expression, “Not enough oxygen at birth?” That’s a joke at the expense of a mentally challenged person, but that’s literally what we’re doing. And we’re told it’s to “keep us safe”! We’re told this by doctors who actually don’t know about PPE and laypeople who have no clue.
So, you can choose to believe me or not, but I was the editor for a quarter century of a magazine that had a strong occupational health and safety mandate, and I can tell you that the mask wearing currently mandated by governments and private businesses offers no health benefit whatsoever, in no way protects you or anyone else from any virus, and actually does you damage beyond wearing it for a few minutes. Got that? Good.
Now please share this message and get the conversation going with parents, who must end this masking of children immediately. This is a very serious matter. And related to that, let me just state this doesn’t end for me when the lockdown ends or the masking ends.
No, this ends for me when every politician and bureaucrat who inflicted this travesty, this crime against humanity, on the population of Canada (and other affected countries) is in the dock, and faces their misdeeds in a court of law.
And as for those of you who have put masks on young children, I will have a long memory on that score. A very long memory.
END NOTE: The CDC and WHO have acknowledged that asymptomatic people do not spread the virus, so the case for masks for such people is moot in the first place.
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The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), U.K.
The Australian Health Regulation Agency, AHPRA, Australia
Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), Australia
Medsafe, New Zealand
Federation of Medical Regulatory Authorities (FMRAC), Canada
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Ladies and Gentlemen,
We, the survivors of the atrocities committed against humanity during the Second World War, feel bound to follow our conscience and write this letter.
It is obvious to us that another holocaust of greater magnitude is taking place before our eyes. The majority of the world’s populace do not yet realize what is happening, for magnitude of an organized crime such as this is beyond their scope of experience.
We, however, know. We remember the name Josef Mengele. Some of us have personal memories. We experience a déjà vu that is so horrifying that we rise to shield our poor fellow humans. The threatened innocents now include children, and even infants. In just four months, the COVID-19 vaccines have killed more people than all available vaccines combined from mid-1997 until the end of 2013—a period of 15.5 years. And people affected worst are between 18 and 64 years old – the group which was not in the Covid statistics.
We call upon you to stop this ungodly medical experiment on humankind immediately. What you call “vaccination” against SARS-Cov-2 is in truth a blasphemic encroachment into nature. Never before has immunization of the entire planet been accomplished by delivering a synthetic mRNA into the human body. It is a medical experiment to which the Nuremberg Code must be applied. The 10 ethical principles in this document represents a foundational code of medical ethics that was formulated during the Nuremberg Doctors Trial to ensure that human beings will never again be subjected to involuntary medical experimentation & procedures.
Principle 1 of the Nuremberg Codex:
(a) “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.
(b) This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.
(c)The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs, or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.
Re (a): There is no question of a free decision. Mass media spread fear and panic and use the rule of Goebbels’propaganda by repeating untruths until they are believed. For weeks now they have been calling for the ostracism of the unvaccinated. If 80 years ago it was the Jews who were demonized as spreaders of infectious diseases, today it is the unvaccinated who are being accused of spreading the virus. Physical integrity, freedom to travel, freedom to work, all coexistence has been taken away from people in order to force vaccination upon them. Children are being enticed to get vaccinated against their parents’ judgement.
Re (b): The 22 terrible side effects already listed in the FDA emergency use authorization were not disclosed to the subjects of the experimental trial. We list those below to the benefit of the world public.
By definition, there has never been informed consent. In the meantime,thousands of side effects recorded in numerous databases are on record. While the so-called case numbers are being bleeped in 30-min-intervals by all mass media, there is neither any mentioning of the serious adverse side effects nor how and where the side effects are to be reported. As far as we know, even recorded damages have been deleted on a large scale in every database.
Principle 6 of the Nuremberg Code requires:
“The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment”.
“Vaccination” against Covid has proven to be more dangerous than Covid for approximately 99% of all humans. As documented by Johns Hopkins, in a study of 48,000 children, children are at zero risk from the virus.
Your own data shows that children who are at no risk from the virus, have had heart attacks following vaccination; more than 15,000 have suffered adverse events –including more than 900 serious events. At least 16 adolescents have died following vaccination in the USA. As you are aware, just around 1% are being reported. And the numbers are increasing rapidly as we write. With your knowledge.
Principle 10 of the Nuremberg Code:
“During the course of the experiment, the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him, that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.”
Allegedly around 52% of the world population has received at least one shot. Honest disclosure of the true number of “vaccine” injured, terminally injured as well as deceased worldwide is long overdue. These are millions in the meantime. Provide us with the true numbers of Covid vaccine casualties now.
How many will be enough to awaken your conscience?
List of adverse effects being known to FDA before the emergency approval:
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In a rare gesture of political realism, the US government refused to consider Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. President Joe Biden stressed that the measure would bring many problems and damages, being firm in his negative response. The matter had been discussed for a long time in the country, with several congressmen supporting that the measure should be implemented. Until then, responses from top government officials had been ambiguous and evasive, but Biden finally appears to have eliminated any doubts on the topic.
On September 5, Joe Biden was asked by journalists about the possibility of including Russia in the list of states sponsoring terrorism. He replied with a simple “no”, practically ending the discussion on the topic. The next day, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that using the term “terrorism” is not the most effective way to hold Russia accountable for the situation in Ukraine. She noted that such a designation could obstruct the supply of aid to conflict-affected areas or even prevent aid groups and companies from participating in an eventual deal to export grain from blocked ports in Ukraine.
“This designation could have unintended consequences to Ukraine, and the world (…) For example, according to humanitarian experts and NGOs we have spoken to, it could seriously affect the ability to deliver assistance in areas of Ukraine. Another one is it could drive critical humanitarian and commercial actors away from facilitating food exports to help mitigate the global food crisis and jeopardize the Black Sea ports deal that has already led to over a million tons of Ukrainian food exports reaching the world, including those in Horn of Africa”.
As expected, the US government’s stance was heavily criticized by Kiev. President Volodymyr Zelensky recorded videos stating that Russia should be considered a terrorist state due to the alleged bombings that would be being made by Moscow against the Zaporizhye nuclear power plant facilities. On several occasions, Russian state officials presented clear and irrefutable evidence that the side that is bombing the plant is the Ukrainian one, and the matter was even discussed at the UNSC. However, Zelensky insists on his narrative and uses it as an argument to demand that Russia to be considered “terrorist” by other countries.
Within the American political scenario, there were also criticisms against Biden’s stance. Lawmakers who were interested in passing the measure responded harshly to Biden Administration’s officials. In all, 100 lawmakers formed a bipartisan group to demand that the government consider Russia a sponsor of terrorism. These politicians wrote a parliamentary resolution setting out their point of view.
Commenting on the case, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham stated:
“To the Biden administration: You have the complete unanimous support of the United States Senate to label Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. Do it. I didn’t think there was an issue under the sun that could get 100 Senate votes, but we found it: Russia is a state sponsor of terrorism”.
In the same vein, Democrat Richard Blumenthal, who also signed the resolution, argued in favor of including Russia on the list using “moral” arguments. In fact, Blumenthal came to sound offensive and racist in his statements, considering the enemy countries of the US as “pariahs” and “uncivilized”.
“The designation of state sponsorship of terrorism puts Russia in a very small club — it consists of nations like Syria, Iran and Cuba that are outside the bounds of civilized countries…”, he said.
In fact, the arguments of the signers of the resolution seem weak and reflect more the interests of Kiev than the ones of Washington. Considering Russia a sponsor of terrorism would be a delicate decision even if there were reasons to do so, but this is not the case. Moscow simply does not carry out or supports terrorist acts in any country. There are only unsubstantiated accusations in this regard on the part of the Ukrainian and Western sides.
More than that, the strategic value of such a decision would be extremely damaging to the US and the entire Western world. Diplomatic relations would be absolutely broken, the dialogue would be interrupted abruptly and tensions would rise irreversibly, harming everyone involved. The global security crisis resulting from this inclusion would be disastrous and its consequences would negatively affect the entire world.
Another interesting point is to observe the hypocrisy of those who are supporting the inclusion of Russia in the list, considering that the West insists on omitting that the Kiev regime is protected by neo-Nazi and extremist militias, whose acts are really terrorist. Apparently, “terrorism” for anti-Russian activists means being contrary to NATO-backed governments.
Despite having made several catastrophic decisions in recent times, Biden acted rationally, strategically and realistically in making it clear that he does not intend to consider Russia a sponsor of terrorism.
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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter.
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According to promoters of The Great Reset, a traditional whole food diet is not only “unsustainable” but “environmentally destructive” and must be replaced with GMOs and protein alternatives made from insects, plants and synthetic biology. Life on earth cannot be sustained, they say, unless we transition to what amounts to an ultraprocessed and highly unnatural diet
A scientific review throws The Great Reset’s talking points in the proverbial trash, as ultraprocessed foods are “fundamentally unsustainable” and nutritionally nonessential. As such, the environmental impacts of ultraprocessed foods are indefensible, as they are wholly avoidable
Ultraprocessed foods account for 17% to 39% of total diet-related energy use; 36% to 45% of total diet-related biodiversity loss; up to one-third of total diet-related greenhouse gas emissions, land use and food waste; and up to one-quarter of total diet-related water-use among adults in high-income countries
The EAT Forum, cofounded by the Wellcome Trust and the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2014, has developed a “Planetary Health Diet,” intended to be applied to the entire global population. It entails cutting meat and dairy intake by up to 90%, and working with biotech and fake meat companies to replace whole foods with lab-created alternatives — all in the name of climate change prevention and “sustainability”
Once corporations have a monopoly on meat, dairy, cereals and oils, they will be the ones profiting from and controlling the food supply. The companies that control the food supply will also end up controlling countries and entire populations
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According to the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its allied Great Reset minions, a traditional whole food diet is not only “unsustainable” but “environmentally destructive.”
A recent “food analysis” in The Guardian1 took aim specifically at organic pasture-fed beef and lamb, lambasting such farming practices for their extravagant land use while underperforming in terms of yield:
“Arable crops, some of which are fed to farm animals, occupy 12% of the planet’s land surface. But far more land (about 26%) is used for grazing: in other words, for pasture-fed meat and milk. Yet across this vast area, farm animals that are entirely pasture-fed produce just 1% of the world’s protein.”
Animal foods in general, and organically produced ones in particular, The Great Resetters claim, must be replaced with produce genetically engineered for high yield and pest resistance, and protein alternatives made from insects, plants and synthetic biology. Overall, life on earth cannot be sustained, they say, unless we transition to what amounts to an ultraprocessed and highly unnatural diet.
A paper2 published in the September 25, 2022, issue of the Journal of Cleaner Production throws The Great Reset’s talking points in the proverbial trash, but before we get into that, let’s review some background material.
Global Cabal’s Goal: Wipe Out Good Food
In recent months, I’ve dedicated many articles to exposing the intentional destruction of our food system. The decision of the Dutch government to impose nitrogen pollution restrictions on farmers is only one recent example of this. This “green” policy will cut livestock production in the country by 30% in the next year, put farmers out of business and force them to sell their land.
Since The Netherlands is the largest meat exporter in the European Union,3 this plan will inevitably result in meat shortages around the world. Canada is now also implementing identical restrictions as part of its climate plan.4
Not to worry, though, because The Great Reset leaders around the world have a plan to build a new food system based on “micro livestock” like crickets, mealworms and cockroaches, along with cultured meat5 grown in petri dishes, and plant-based meat alternatives such as Beyond Meat, the primary ingredients6 of which are pea protein, canola oil and rice protein.
The Plan for a Planetary Health-Destroying Diet
The EAT Forum, cofounded by the Wellcome Trust and the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2014,7has developed what they call “The Planetary Health Diet,”8 intended to be applied worldwide. It entails cutting meat and dairy intake by up to 90%, and replacing it with foods made in laboratories, along with cereals and oils, most of which are now genetically engineered (GE).
Their largest initiative is called FReSH, which aims to transform the food system by working with biotech and fake meat companies to replace whole foods with lab-created alternatives — all in the name of climate change prevention and “sustainability.”
Once tech giants have control of meat, dairy, cereals and oils, they will be the ones profiting from and controlling the food supply. Needless to say, the private companies that control the food supply will also end up controlling countries and entire populations. At the end of the day, that’s what this hoopla about “sustainable food systems” is all about.
Junk Food on Steroids
However, anyone who knows anything about nutrition can see that everything about this proposed new food system is a disaster in the making. For starters, synthetic biology — meat and dairy alternatives — is junk food on steroids.
They’re all highly processed, and ultraprocessed foods are associated with increased calorie intake, weight gain and chronic disease,9 including cognitive decline,10 while simultaneously promoting malnutrition.
One of the primary reasons why processed food is so bad for health is because it’s loaded with the omega-6 fat linoleic acid (LA) mostly from industrial seed oils. It’s important to realize that plant-based meat alternatives do not contain animal fats. All the fat comes from industrial seed oils like soy and canola oil, which are prescriptions for metabolic disaster.
Sure, processed foods also contain high amounts of sugar, typically in the form of high fructose corn syrup, but as bad as that is, it doesn’t even come close to the damage caused by high LA intake, which acts as a metabolic poison. What’s worse, the LA stays put in your cell membranes for up to seven years, while sugar is rapidly used up and eliminated once you stop putting more in.
To be clear, LA is the one fat you absolutely want to minimize in your diet, not eat more of! Anything above 10 grams a day is likely to cause ill health, and most Americans consume far more than that already. To learn more about the harmful mechanisms of LA, see “How Linoleic Acid Wrecks Your Health.”
In my view, replacing real meat with fake substitutes, regardless of how they’re made, is going to further exacerbate the rapid decline in health the population has already experienced. Next week I will be posting a report on the record-breaking decrease in U.S. life expectancy that just had its sharpest two-year decline in 100 years.11
Simply put, there are no benefits in replacing real meat with fake substitutes. Not for the environment, climate, human nutrition or animal welfare. It’s only hazards and false claims. So, if you value your health, you would do well to stay clear of all meat substitutes.
Why Insect Protein Is a Bad Idea
Alright, but what about insect protein? According to The Great Reset minions, insect protein is as good as it gets, nutrition-wise, and will protect the planet by eliminating the need for livestock, cutting down on agricultural land use and reversing climate change.12
Not so fast. Perhaps someone didn’t think this through. (Or, they did, and any potential negative ramifications of an insect-based diet are actually their intended effects.) As it turns out, insects contain chitin,13,14 a highly inflammatory and allergy-inducing compound.15
Some human tissues do have a chitin-destroying enzyme called chitinase, but it doesn’t always work well, in which case the chitin may trigger an immune response, allergic reactions and inflammation, as it increases inflammatory cytokine production.
Edibleinsects.com, however, launched in 2022, describes chitin as “a valuable prebiotic fiber” with antifungal, antiviral and antibacterial properties,16 and eatcrickster.com claims it can reduce inflammation.17 A number of studies published in recent years have made similar claims.
I for one would recommend proceeding with great caution, as the food industry has, for decades, claimed that processed foods and artificial ingredients are safe and effective, just like the COVID jab, even when ample research shows otherwise.
Food Compass Designed to Destroy Nutrition Guidance
A perfect example of how unhealthy, ultraprocessed foods are being touted as superior to unprocessed animal foods is the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy’s Food Compass,18 unveiled in late 2021. Food Compass was created to:19
The problem is that Food Compass leads people AWAY from wholesome natural foods, and toward processed junk foods. For example, Frosted Mini Wheats scores three times higher than ground beef (87 out of 100, compared to 26), as illustrated in the graph below, posted on Twitter by independent journalist Nina Teicholz.20
Other high-scoring, highly processed foods include chocolate covered almonds, Honey Nut Cheerios, fries, egg substitute fried in vegetable oil, and Lucky Charms. Almond M&M’s even score higher than whole egg fried in butter, cheddar cheese and ground beef — all three of which are whole, unprocessed foods.
Who in their right mind can believe M&Ms are healthier than whole food — any whole food? According to Food Compass, anything with a score below 30 should be minimized, so based on this tool, you’ll be healthier if you replace whole egg, cheddar cheese and ground beef with candy, which is nothing short of insanity.
That’s how you know it’s serving a purpose other than actual nutrition guidance. It’s a Great Reset tool to miseducate people about what’s healthy and what’s not. Without false propaganda, they won’t be able to retool the food system the way they want to.
Interestingly, the top fruit, watermelon, is actually quite healthy for most and it is my absolute favorite fruit. Just be careful to avoid eating the seeds as they, like most seeds, are loaded with LA.
Ultraprocessed Foods Are NOT ‘Green’
Having reviewed why The Great Reset’s ideas for a new food system is a disaster for your health, let’s jump into the Journal of Cleaner Production paper21 I mentioned at the beginning.
The title of the paper is “A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Environmental Impacts of Ultra-Processed Foods and Implications for Sustainable Food systems.” It explains why ultraprocessed foods are completely counterproductive to environmentally “green” and sustainable goals. For example, ultraprocessed foods (UPF) account for:
17% to 39% of total diet-related energy use
36% to 45% of total diet-related biodiversity loss
Up to one-third of total diet-related greenhouse gas emissions, land use and food waste
Up to one-quarter of total diet-related water-use among adults in high-income countries
Ultraprocessed food production and manufacturing also significantly contributes to the degradation of land, promotes herbicide use, and contributes to eutrophication (aka nutrient-induced increase in phytoplankton productivity).
And, for all the lip service paid to making sure there’s “equity” in all areas of life, increasing consumption of processed foods redirects finances away from smaller farmers and homesteaders, thereby contributing to “economic inequalities as some large transnational corporations responsible for UPF production rely on underpaid food system workers in poor conditions, resulting in an uneven distribution of wealth.” In other words, promoting consumption of processed foods:
Promotes financial inequity, the exact opposite of what The Great Reset supporters claim to be working toward
Promotes biodiversity loss and degrades both land and water, which is the opposite of environmental and planetary protection promised by Green New Deal supporters
Ultraprocessed Foods Are ‘Fundamentally Unsustainable’
As noted by the authors:22
“The findings highlight that environmental degradation associated with UPFs is of significant concern due to the substantial resources used in the production and processing of such products, and also because UPFs are superfluous to basic human needs …
UPFs utilize persuasive marketing and are usually mass-produced using inexpensive ingredients to enable overconsumption through availability, hyper-palatability, poor satiety and displacing wholefoods in diets.
A growing body of evidence reports that UPF consumption is associated with increased risk of overweight and obesity, cardiovascular diseases, type-2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, cancer, depression, and all-cause mortality, among others. It is plausible that this is caused by UPFs poor nutrient composition and degraded food matrices …
A detailed understanding of the environmental impacts of UPFs is key to informing food policies and dietary guidance. This is pertinent because UPFs are frequently excluded from global and national guidelines and policy documents on sustainable food systems and diets.
For example, the EAT-Lancet report, one of the most recognized reference documents on sustainable diets, does not mention UPFs, nor does the major FAO report on the biodiversity impacts of food and agriculture.
The few policy activities which consider the environmental sustainability of UPFs are based on conceptual evidence, rather than evidence from empirical studies …
Conclusion: Ultra-processed foods are fundamentally unsustainable products; they have been associated with poor health and social outcomes and require finite environmental resources for their production … UPFs are responsible for significant diet-related energy, [and] greenhouse gas emissions …”
The real take-home here is that the environmental impacts of ultraprocessed foods are AVOIDABLE, because these kinds of foods are NOT nutritionally essential. They could and should be eliminated altogether, if we actually want to protect the environment, our planet and our health.
What we need more of is organic, biodynamic and regenerative farming of everything from fruits and vegetables to animal foods. That’s what the world needs for optimal health, and it’s also what can preserve and improve our environment the best.
Reject The Great Reset Diet
As noted in a 2004 review in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,23 “many health disparities are linked to inequalities in education and income.” A nutrient-dense diet typically costs more than a calorie-dense but nutrient-deficient one.
One reason for this is because high-calorie processed foods contain ingredients subsidized by government, such as corn, wheat, sugar and various seed oils. Because they provide better profit margins for industrial farmers, there’s little incentive to grow crops that don’t make it into the processed food cycle. Back in 2016, the WEF published an article titled “What Will We Eat in 2030?”24
Taking note of the health and income disparity link just mentioned, the article proposes to improve the food system, not by reducing processed foods, but by processing foods which they claim are “ways that are better for our health,” such as “fortification (or biofortification) — where nutrients are engineered in, either in the biology or manufacture of food — and the significant reformulation of current foods for fewer calories and more nutrients.”
“‘Ultraprocessed’ foods need not be unhealthy,” the WEF goes on to claim. This is as big a lie as “Roundup is safe enough to drink,” “Smoking is safe for pregnant women,” “DDT is good for me” and “COVID vaccines are safe and effective.” There is no way to make ultraprocessed food healthy. Period.
Below is a graphic that has circulated on Twitter,25 showing the WEF’s plans for our dietary future. For the record, while it claims to have been sourced from the WEF, the clear sarcasm suggests it’s a spoof. It’s highly instructive, however, and right on the money, in terms of being factually correct.
This is indeed the kind of diet the WEF and its Great Reset allies want us to adopt, whether we want to or not. Even the most questionable inclusion of “upcycled citizens” is not wrong, as this cabal is, in fact, promoting the idea that cannibalism is, or can be, acceptable.
For solutions to this rapidly approaching dystopian future, review my previous article, “Why Food Prices Are Expected to Skyrocket,” and Corey Lynn’s article “Finding Sources of Fresh Food.”26
Part of the answer is to grow your own food, to the best of your ability. Another part is to support local growers by buying their produce, or else they’ll get pushed out. Starting local co-ops and community gardens can also go a long way toward creating food security in the long term.
At the same time, we also have to reject globalist solutions like fake meat, gene-edited beef, GMO foods, insect-based foods and all the rest of it. It’s time to recognize that none of their solutions are for our benefit. They’re for our detriment. The WEF has declared that by 2030, you will own nothing, and they really do mean it. They will take everything from us, including the right to grow our own food and to eat natural unprocessed, unadulterated foods — if we let them.
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The statement by Poland that it needs to rearm its troops in preparation for a “war with Russia” in the next few years is intended to attract additional aid and weapons from NATO to strengthen its eastern borders and to modernise its arsenal after it supplied obsolete weapons to Ukraine. However, this comes at the price of destroying the economy and the quality of life of the average citizen.
Poland’s Deputy Defence Minister Marcin Ociepa said that Warsaw sees “the danger of war with Russia” in next three to ten years and needs to use this time to rearm, “no matter the cost”.
With war waging in Ukraine, Poland wants to show that it is on the front lines in the fight against a supposedly “aggressive Russia” and position itself as a major player in Europe and NATO. Poland in this light is stressing that the EU and NATO need to strengthen its eastern borders.
The Poles freed up their stockpile of obsolete weapons by sending them to Ukraine and now expects new weapons and preferential treatment from Western countries, primarily the United States. The Poles are wanting air defence systems, missile defence systems, potentially new ground forces, and heavy equipment, such as tanks and self-propelled artillery.
This also comes as Poland and the three Baltic states said on September 8 that they would temporarily restrict access for Russian citizens holding EU visas from entering by September 19. Supposedly, this is to address “public policy and security threats.”
The prime ministers of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland said in a statement they were concerned “about the substantial and growing influx of Russian citizens” into the EU, adding: “We believe that this is becoming a serious threat to our public security and to the overall shared Schengen area.”
The statement said they “agreed on a common regional approach and hereby express their political will and firm intention to introduce national temporary measures for Russian citizens holding visas”, with exceptions only made for “dissidents,” “humanitarian cases,” and family members and holders of residence permits in EU countries.
It is recalled that EU foreign ministers met in Prague last month and agreed to suspend a 2007 visa facilitation deal with Russia, stopping short of a wider visa ban. However, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said that countries bordering Russia could “take measures at a national level to restrict entry into the European Union.”
Effectively, in a cowardly way, Borrell allowed the Baltic states and Poland to put roadblocks on Russians from entering the EU. He emphasised that any measures would have to conform with rules for the EU’s Schengen common travel zone and members of Russian civil society should be able to travel to the EU. But clearly this is not the case.
With Poland closing its borders to Russian citizens and demanding the strengthening of its military, it is evident that Warsaw is preparing for an escalation in its relations with Moscow, something that will be enthusiastically backed by the US.
Poland is not an exception to the energy crisis gripping Europe, which is bringing great fears of recession once the winter arrives. US-led sanctions were imposed following the Russian military operation in Ukraine, forcing Moscow to insist that all purchases of energy must be made in the rouble, a demand that Warsaw has rejected. With Moscow’s decision to slash oil and natural gas exports, energy prices in Europe have gone through the roof and sent the cost-of-living soaring.
To deal with this, Poland has turned to Nigeria, already one of its gas suppliers, to increase its LNG shipments. This prompted Poland’s President Andrzej Duda to become the first leader from the Eastern European country to ever visit Nigeria since diplomatic relations were established 60 years ago. However, many remain sceptical that Nigeria, whose economy is badly battered, can meet the European and Polish demand, especially as unprecedented crude oil thefts by militants in the Niger Delta are affecting exports.
More importantly, Poland’s economy is slowing down. A GDP drop to 2.7% is expected in Q3 2022, the Polish Economic Institute (PIE) reported on August 31. This followed from a drop of 8.5 to 5.3% in Q2. The state-owned think tank believes that inflation by the end of Q4 will be at 14.5% but could rise to 15.6% in February 2023 due to rising energy prices.
In this way, Poland is prioritising US interests in pressuring Moscow in the false belief that Russia is preparing to invade the country. This not only highlights that Poland still does not fully understand the reasons for Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, but that it is also willing to destroy the economy and quality of life of the average citizen for the sake of having new weapons and strengthening its military.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
An earlier version of this article was published in 2003
Author’s Note
Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts on September 10, 2001 were confirmed by a CBS News Report. Osama had been hospitalized on September 10th, 2001, one day before the 9/11 attacks.
How on earth could he have coordinated the attacks from his hospital bed in a heavily guarded Pakistani military hospital located in Rawalpindi.
Bear in mind that the Combined Military Hospital Rawalpindi (under the adminstration of the Pakistani military) exclusively “provides specialised treatment to Army personel and their immediate family”. Osama bin Laden must have had some connections in the Pakistani military or intelligence to be admitted to the hospital. He was, according to Dan Rather’s CBS report, provided with “treatment for a very special person”.
If the CBS report by Dan Rather is accurate and Osama had indeed been admitted to the Pakistani military hospital on September 10, 2001, courtesy of America’s ally, he was in all likelihood still in hospital in Rawalpindi on the 11th of September, when the attacks occurred.
In all probability, his whereabouts were known to US officials on the morning of September 12, when Secretary of State Colin Powell initiated negotiations with Pakistan, with a view to arresting and extraditing bin Laden.
The CBS report is a potential bombshell. It invalidates the Osama bin Laden “legend” created by US intelligence. It casts doubt on the notion that Osama was the “mastermind” behind the 9/11 attacks. It points to coverup and complicity at the highest echelons of the US administration.
President Obama’s alleged assassination of Osama bin Laden (April 2011) was part of a propaganda ploy. Osama was the alleged architect of 9/11, organizing and coordinating the 9/11 attacks from his hospital bed in the urology ward of the Rawalpindi military hospital.
The official story was that his whereabouts on 9/11 upon his release from hospital were unknown.
Michel Chossudovsky, September 10, 2022
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Where was Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001?
by Michel Chossudovsky
“Going after bin Laden” has served, over a period of 10 years (2001-2011) to sustain the legend of the “world’s most wanted terrorist”, who “haunts Americans and millions of others around the world.”
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly claimed in the wake of 9/11 that the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden remained unknown: “It is like looking for a needle in a stack of hay”.
In November 2001, US B-52 bombers carpet bombed a network of caves in the Tora Bora mountains of eastern Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and his followers were allegedly hiding. These caves were described as “Osama’s last stronghold”.
CIA “intelligence analysts” subsequently concluded that Osama had escaped from his Tora Bora cave in the first week of December 2001. And in January 2002, the Pentagon launched a Worldwide search for Osama and his top lieutenants, beyond the borders of Afghanistan. This operation, referred to by Secretary of State Colin Powell as a “hot pursuit”, was carried out with the support of the “international community” and America’s European allies. US intelligence authorities confirmed, in this regard, that
“while al Qaeda has been significantly shattered, … the most wanted man – bin Laden himself remains one step ahead of the United States, with the core of his worldwide terror network still in place. (Global News Wire – Asia Africa Intelligence Wire, InfoProd, January 20, 2002)
For ten years, the US military and intelligence apparatus (at considerable expense to US taxpayers) had been “searching for Osama”.
A CIA unit with a multimillion dollar budget was set up, with a mandate to find Osama. This unit was apparently disbanded in 2005. “Intelligence experts agree”, he is hiding in a remote area of Pakistan, but “we cannot find him”:
“Most intelligence analysts are convinced that Osama bin Laden is somewhere on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Lately, it has been said that he’s probably in the vicinity of the a 7700m Hindu Kush peak Tirich Mir in the tribal Chitral area of northwest Pakistan.” Hobart Mercury (Australia), September 9, 2006)
President Bush had repeatedly promised to “smoke him out” of his cave, capture him dead or alive, if necessary through ground assaults or missile strikes. According to a recent statement by president Bush, Osama is hiding in a remote area of Pakistan which “is extremely mountainous and very inaccessible, … with high mountains between 9,000 to 15,000 feet high….”. We cannot get him, because, according to the president, there is no communications infrastructure, which would enable us to effectively go after him. (quoted in Balochistan Times, 23 April 2006)
The pursuit of Osama became a highly ritualized process which fed the news chain on a daily basis. It was not only part of the media disinformation campaign, it also provided a justification for the arbitrary arrest, detention and torture of numerous “suspects”, “enemy combatants” and “accomplices”, who allegedly might be aware of Osama’s whereabouts. And that information is of course vital to “the security of Americans”.
The search for Osama served both military and political objectives. The Democrats and Republicans compete in their resolve to weed out “islamic terrorism”.
The Path to 9/11, a five-hour ABC series on “the search for Osama” –which made its debut in 2006 to mark the fifth anniversary of the attacks– casually accuses Bill Clinton of having been “too busy with the Monica Lewinsky scandal to fight terrorism.” The message of the movie is that the Democrats neglected the “war on terrorism”.
The fact of the matter is that every single administration, since Jimmy Carter have supported and financed the “Islamic terror” network, created during the Carter administration at the outset of the Soviet-Afghan war. (See Michel Chossudovsky, Who is Osama bin Laden, 12 September 2001). al Qaeda is a instrument of US intelligence: a US sponsored intelligence asset.
Where was Osama on September 11, 2001?
There is evidence that the whereabouts of Osama were known to both the Bush and Obama administrations.
On September 10. 2001, “Enemy Number One” was in a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi, courtesy of America’s indefectible ally Pakistan, as confirmed by a report of Dan Rather, CBS News. (See our October 2003 article on this issue)
He could have been arrested at short notice which would have “saved us a lot of trouble”, but then we would not have had an Osama Legend, which has fed the news chain as well as George W’s speeches in the course of the last five years.
According to Dan Rather, CBS, Bin Laden was hospitalized in Rawalpindi. one day before the 9/11 attacks, on September 10, 2001.
“Pakistan. Pakistan’s Military Intelligence (ISI) told CBS that bin Laden had received dialysis treatment in Rawalpindi, at Pak Army’s headquarters.
DAN RATHER, CBS ANCHOR: As the United states and its allies in the war on terrorism press the hunt for Osama bin Laden, CBS News has exclusive information tonight about where bin Laden was and what he was doing in the last hours before his followers struck the United States September 11.
This is the result of hard-nosed investigative reporting by a team of CBS news journalists, and by one of the best foreign correspondents in the business, CBS`s Barry Petersen. Here is his report.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BARRY PETERSEN, CBS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Everyone remembers what happened on September 11. Here`s the story of what may have happened the night before. It is a tale as twisted as the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
CBS News has been told that the night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan.
Pakistan intelligence sources tell CBS News that bin Laden was spirited into this military hospital in Rawalpindi for kidney dialysis treatment. On that night, says this medical worker who wanted her identity protected, they moved out all the regular staff in the urology department and sent in a secret team to replace them. She says it was treatment for a very special person. The special team was obviously up to no good.
“The military had him surrounded,” says this hospital employee who also wanted his identity masked, “and I saw the mysterious patient helped out of a car. Since that time,” he says, “I have seen many pictures of the man. He is the man we know as Osama bin Laden. I also heard two army officers talking to each other. They were saying that Osama bin Laden had to be watched carefully and looked after.” Those who know bin Laden say he suffers from numerous ailments, back and stomach problems. Ahmed Rashid, who has written extensively on the Taliban, says the military was often there to help before 9/11.
(…)
PETERSEN (on camera): Doctors at the hospital told CBS News there was nothing special about that night, but they refused our request to see any records. Government officials tonight denied that bin Laden had any medical treatment on that night.
(voice-over): But it was Pakistan’s President Musharraf who said in public what many suspected, that bin Laden suffers from kidney disease, saying he thinks bin Laden may be near death. His evidence, watching this most recent video, showing a pale and haggard bin Laden, his left hand never moving. Bush administration officials admit they don`t know if bin Laden is sick or even dead.
DONALD RUMSFELD, DEFENSE SECRETARY: With respect to the issue of Osama bin Laden`s health, I just am — don`t have any knowledge.
PETERSEN: The United States has no way of knowing who in Pakistan`s military or intelligence supported the Taliban or Osama bin Laden maybe up to the night before 9/11 by arranging dialysis to keep him alive. So the United States may not know if those same people might help him again perhaps to freedom.
Barry Petersen, CBS News, Islamabad.
(END VIDEOTAPE) END, emphasis added.
(CBS News, 28 January 2002 emphasis added, the complete transcript of CBS report is contained in annex to this article)
It should be noted, that the hospital is directly under the jurisdiction of the Pakistani Armed Forces, which has close links to the Pentagon. U.S. military advisers based in Rawalpindi. work closely with the Pakistani Armed Forces. Again, no attempt was made to arrest America’s best known fugitive, but then maybe bin Laden was serving another “better purpose”. Rumsfeld claimed at the time that he had no knowledge regarding Osama’s health. (CBS News, 28 January 2002)
The CBS report is a crucial piece of information in our understanding of 9/11.
It refutes the administration’s claim that the whereabouts of bin Laden are unknown. It points to a Pakistan connection, it suggests a cover-up at the highest levels of the Bush administration.
Dan Rather and Barry Petersen fail to draw the implications of their January 2002 report. They suggest that the US had been deliberately misled by Pakistani intelligence officials. They fail to ask the question:
Why does the US administration state that they cannot find Osama?
If they are to stand by their report, the conclusion is obvious. The administration is lying. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts were known.
If the CBS report is accurate and Osama had indeed been admitted to the Pakistani military hospital on September 10, courtesy of America’s ally, he was either still in hospital in Rawalpindi on the 11th of September, when the attacks occurred or had been released from the hospital within the last hours before the attacks.
In other words, Osama’s whereabouts were known to US officials on the morning of September 12, when Secretary of State Colin Powell initiated negotiations with Pakistan, with a view to arresting and extraditing bin Laden. These negotiations, led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, head of Pakistan’s military intelligence, on behalf of the government of President Pervez Musharraf, took place on the 12th and 13th of September in Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage‘s office.
He could have been arrested at short notice on September 10th, 2001. But then we would not have been privileged to five years of Osama related media stories. The Bush administration desperately needs the fiction of an “outside enemy of America”.
Known and documented Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda is a construct of the US intelligence apparatus. His essential function is to give a face to the “war on terrorism”. The image must be vivid.
According to the White house, “The greatest threat to us is this ideology of violent extremism, and its greatest public proponent is Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden remains the number one target, in terms of our efforts, but he’s not the only target.” Recent Statement of White House Assistant for Homeland Security Frances Townsend, 5 September 2006).
The national security doctrine rests on the fiction of Islamic terrorists, led by Osama who are portrayed as a “threat to the civilized World”. In the words of President Bush,
“Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. The question is will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say? We are on the offensive. We will not rest. We will not retreat. And we will not withdraw from the fight until this threat to civilization has been removed.” (quoted by CNN, September 5, 2006)
The “hot pursuit” of Osama in the rugged mountainous areas of Pakistan must continue, because without Osama, referred to ad nauseam in news reports and official statements, the fragile legitimacy of the US administration collapses like a house of cards.
Moreover, the search for Osama protects the real architects of the 9/11 attacks. While there is no evidence that Al Qaeda was behind the 911 attacks, as revealed by numerous studies and documents, there is mounting evidence of complicity and coverup at the highest levels of the State, Military and intelligence apparatus.
The continued arrest of alleged 911 accomplices and suspects has nothing to do with “national security”. It creates the illusion that Arabs and Muslims are behind the terror plots, while shunting the conduct of a real criminal investigation into the 911 attacks. And what we are dealing with is the criminalization of the upper echelons of State.
For much of the population, September 11 marks the anniversary of the infamous terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
But for the people of Chile, much of Latin America, and democratic reformers at large, it marks another significant anniversary.
On the morning of September 11, 1973, all branches of the Chilean Armed Forces had conspired to wrest control of the country from democratically-elected leader Salvador Allende. Allende, having been tipped about the military’s activities, held his ground in his Presidential palace, La Moneda.
After Allende refused to negotiate or surrender, General Augusto Pinochet ordered a siege on the compound accompanied by military helicopter gunships and Air Force bombers. Salvador Allende died during the melee, apparently by his own hand, and a military junta took power headed by General Pinochet.
It is well documented that the US government, through the CIA, played a key role in the overthrow of the Allende government.
The new order in Chile saw massive economic reforms take effect. An alarming number of people were imprisoned and tortured under his rule. Over three thousand people are estimated to have been killed during Pinochet’s 17 year reign.
PInochet himself was eventually arrested in London in 1998, and faced with the unpleasant prospect of having to answer for his crimes.
The 40th anniversary of Chile’s 9/11 is an occasion to ask what have been the impacts of the coup, and the dictatorship that followed?
These questions are explored in depth by two people knowledgeable about the coup.
Michel Chossudovsky was a visiting Professor of Economics in Chile at the time of the coup. In this week’s radio show, Chossudovsky reflects on his memories of the coup, and looks at how it served as a dress-rehearsal for the use of macro-economic reform as a weapon for disarming governments worldwide.
Peter Kornbluh then recounts the US role in the affair. He is the author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, recently updated to mark the 40th anniversary of the coup. Not only does he elaborate on the proof of the US connection with the coup, he explains his conviction that the arrest of Pinochet marks a major turning point in terms of holding past and present state criminals accountable.
Of utmost relevance to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, this article by Mark Taliano was first published on July 16 2016
***
Recently [June 20, 2016], General Petr Pavel, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, admitted that,
“It is not the aim of NATO to create a military barrier against broad-scale Russian aggression, because such aggression is not on the agenda and no intelligence assessment suggests such a thing.”
Decoded, this means that intelligence reports indicate that Russia is not a threat to the West.
Since Russian aggression is not a threat, then increased NATO deployments to encircle Russia are a threat — to Russia.
Decoded again: We are the bad guys, Russia is not.
But this hasn’t stopped Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, from confirming, according to CBC news, that
“Canada will send a battle group of soldiers to Latvia by early 2017 as part of a NATO plan to counter fears of Russian aggression in eastern Europe.”
So, Canada’s decision to provoke Russia is based on groundless fears.
Since reasonable foreign policy decisions are few and far between, Canadians might want to pay heed to a recent observation made by Paul Craig Roberts:
“ … only an absolute idiot could think that three or four thousand troops constitutes a defense against the Russian Army. In June 1941 Operation Barbarossa hit Russia with an invasion of four million troops, the majority German component of which were probably the most highly trained and disciplined troops in military history, excepting only the Spartans. By the time that the Americans and British got around to the Normandy invasion, the Russian Army had chewed up the Wehrmacht. There were only a few divisions at 40% strength to resist the Normandy invasion. By the time the Russian Army got to Berlin, the German resistance consisted of armed children.”
Decoded? We’re idiots.
Our now broad-based idiocy is based on the fact that we are being fed a constant diet of lies, and stories, and toxic myths.
The fake Russian threat is consistent with the fake terrorist threat. It is very well documented, with sustainable, Western-based evidence, for example, that NATO and its allies support terrorism. The terrorists currently invading Syria are Western proxies/”strategic assets”, employed to effect illegal regime change.
It is also well documented that the illegal Western sanctions besieging Syria are impacting the legitimate, secular, pluralist, democratic government of Syria, and liberated areas, not the foreign terrorist- plagued areas that are replenished from surrounding NATO countries, especially Turkey.
So, the “Russian threat” is fake; there never was a “Syria threat” (except that Syria insists on its sovereignty and territorial integrity); and the “terrorist threat” is a hoax, because we support the terrorists.
The “humanitarian bombing” strategy is also a hoax, because ISIS territory expands when the U.S illegally bombs Syria.
Basically, everything we’re hearing is fake. The government, and Soros et al.–funded “non- government organizations” (NGOs) – are fake, not only because they aren’t “non-governmental”, but also because they’re embedded with the terrorist invaders.
The fakery of the news stories is doubly protected by laws embedded in the National Defense Authorization Act which blur the lines between reality and spectacle. The author writes,
“According to an amendment to the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the House Bill H.R 5736 (now law), the federal government of the United States can now legally propagandize the domestic public.
“As reflected in a recent NATO conference in Latvia and in the Pentagon’s new ‘Law of War’ manual, the U.S. government has come to view the control and manipulation of information as a ‘soft power’ weapon, merging psychological operations, propaganda and public affairs under the catch phrase ‘strategic communications.’ “
We can also reasonably assume that much of the terrorism afflicting the West is also fake, in the sense that it is synthetic/false flag terrorism. This doesn’t mean that innocent people aren’t being killed — thousands were murdered during the 911 false flag — but it does mean that deep state operatives are likely orchestrating much of the domestic terrorism with a view to blaming “ISIS”, advancing imperial war plans, and institutionalizing domestic police state legislation that protects the neo-con war criminals responsible for the mass-murdering barbarity.
Seemingly, all of these “Gladio-style” crimes demonstrate the dirty hand of intelligence operatives – who should be the first suspects — but rarely are.
All of this fakery provides cover for imperial conquest and the advancement of a predatory economic model called “neoliberalism”. The name itself is fraudulent, because it isn’t new, and it isn’t “liberal”. It’s a predatory economic model of bailed-out, deregulated, parasitical privatization schemes that preys on the commons, the people, and protects the transnational oligarch criminals who capture legislative bodies, and advance transnational corporate empowerment faux “deals” (deceptively labeled “free trade).
Spectacle and deceit is everything, since democracy, justice for all, and freedom, are incompatible with this predatory system.
We are being trained and brainwashed to willingly accept, even embrace, our enslavement.
Syrians are at the forefront of those who are effectively opposing this globalized, unipolar model of enslavement, poverty, and barbarity. Those who are currently being demonized – Syria, Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and their allies – are paying with their blood, but they are fighting for all of us, and for our freedoms.
As Canadians, we should be opposing our country’s foreign policy idiocy, and we should be supporting the heroics of Syria and its allies. Warmongers have successfully managed our perceptions to view Syria, Russia, and Iran etc. as “threats” or “enemies”, but beneath the lies and deceptions, evidence demonstrates that they are neither.
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***
What the US hadn’t incorporated into its grand strategic calculations was that the success of its structurally identical divide-and-rule scheme against Russia and Ukraine would positively influence China and India’s perceptions of one another to the point of inspiring them to pragmatically manage their security dilemma.
China and India agreed on Thursday to the mutual disengagement of their military forces from the disputed frontier in a milestone development that represents these two multipolar Great Powers making tangible progress towards their shared grand strategic goal of jointly pioneering the AsianCentury. The security dilemma that had hitherto threatened to disastrously divide and rule them the detriment of Eurasia is now in the process of being responsibly managed.
As a brief backgrounder, their preexisting border disputes that date back to the imperial era formed the basis of mutual suspicions, which were exacerbated by the US’ divide-and-rule information warfare campaign against them. America actively sought to manipulate their perceptions of one another in order to ultimately turn India into its proxy for “containing” China. These Great Powers eventually clashed over the Galwan River Valley in summer 2020, which represented a dangerous low-point in their ties.
Instead of the all-out war that Washington wanted and in spite of many observers’ expectations, Beijing and Delhi surprisingly pulled back from the brink even though tensions continued to boil up until recently. Prior rounds of talks failed to achieve any tangible progress in de-escalating tensions, though neither seemed prepared to unilaterally worsen the situation at risk of their own interests, to say nothing of their region’s and Eurasia’s more broadly.
The core of the Chinese-Indian security dilemma isn’t so much their unresolved border disputes from the imperial era, but their mutual suspicions of one another’s grand strategic intentions, though the US manipulated views of the first-mentioned in order to worsen the second. The largely unpopulated Himalayan frontier between them can be delineated through mutual compromises without harming either’s objective national interests, but this is impossible without the restoration of trust.
America is keenly aware of this, hence why it twisted perceptions about this sensitive issue in ways that attempted to inflame domestic public opinion in both countries so as to artificially manufacture grassroots resistance to such an outcome. From there, it took advantage of comparatively less significant but nevertheless still important issues of mutual concern such as perceived technological and trade disparities in order to catalyze a self-sustaining cycle of suspicion and resultant escalation.
The latest US-provoked phase of the UkrainianConflict was a game-changer, however, since it directly led to both multipolar Great Powers correcting their perceptions of the other. India realized the lengths to which its new military-strategic partner will go to divide and rule neighboring pairs of countries in order to advance its hegemonic interests. Moreover, the US very aggressively pressured India to sanction and condemn Russia, which Delhi declined to do since that would go against its own interests.
In response, a malicious information warfare campaign was launched by the MSM against this South Asian civilization-state, which immediately showed its decisionmakers, strategists, and the society that they represent that America had unfriendly intentions towards them. Delhi’s redoublingof its principled neutrality towards the Ukrainian Conflict strengthened perceptions of its strategic autonomy in the Global South, which China paid very close attention to and appreciated.
The People’s Republic then began to gradually re-evaluate its prior assessment of India’s role in Eurasia, which started to shift from perceiving it as an obstacle to multipolarity to an indispensable asset. This process was brought about purely by India’s proud refusal to sacrifice its objective national interests for the purpose of pleasing the US, the latter of which wanted to coerce that country into becoming its largest vassal state in the New Cold War. Accordingly, China came to acknowledge India’s independence.
The past six months therefore led to India wising up to the US’ long-running scheme to erode its hard-earned strategic autonomy in parallel with China finally concluding that this neighboring Great Power truly had multipolar intentions all along. Neither no longer regarded the other as an irredeemable threat to their interests that required a never-ending cycle of tit-for-tat military-strategic moves to deter, hence the consensual decision to mutually disengage their military forces from the disputed frontier.
The unresolved border dispute was merely the fuse that the US wanted to spark in order to doom their shared grand strategic goal of jointly pioneering the Asian Century that would thus doom its own declining unipolar hegemony if it succeeded. To that end, the MSM manipulated the perceptions that each of those two’s decisionmakers, strategists, and societies had of one another in order to create the security dilemma that the US hoped would be insurmountable and thus inevitably divide and rule Asia.
What Washington hadn’t incorporated into its grand strategic calculations was that the success of its structurally identical divide-and-rule scheme against Moscow and Kiev would positively influence Beijing and Delhi’s perceptions of one another to the point of inspiring them to pragmatically manage their security dilemma. Dividing Russia from Ukraine, and consequently from Europe, isn’t as significant in sabotaging the global systemic transition to multipolarity as dividing China and India would be.
That’s not to say that the US hasn’t somewhat succeeded in disrupting part of the emerging Multipolar World Order, but just that it’s been far less successful than it planned after China and India just decided to do what’s needed in order to stop America’s attempted replication of the Russian-Ukrainian scenario in Asia. Considering that their continent is the center of global processes, this means that their present rapprochement has the chance to supercharge multipolarity and thus deal a death blow to unipolarity.
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This article was originally published on OneWorld.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The tragic events of September 11, 2001 constitute a fundamental landmark in American history. a decisive watershed, a breaking point. Millions of people have been misled regarding the causes and consequences of 9/11.
September 11 2001 opens up an era of crisis, upheaval and militarization of American society.
A far-reaching overhaul of US military doctrine was launched in the wake of 9/11.
The following article was first published in August 2004, following the release of the 9/11 Commission Report. It was also published as a chapter in the author’s book: “America’s “War on Terrorism”
***
“We Have Some Planes”
The 9/11 Commission’s Report provides an almost visual description of the Arab hijackers. It depicts in minute detail events occurring inside the cabin of the four hijacked planes.
In the absence of surviving passengers, this “corroborating evidence”, was based on passengers’ cell and air phone conversations with their loved ones. According to the Report, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was only recovered in the case of one of the flights (UAL 93).
Focusing on the personal drama of the passengers, the Commission has built much of its narrative around the phone conversations. The Arabs are portrayed with their knives and box cutters, scheming in the name of Allah, to bring down the planes and turn them “into large guided missiles” (Report, Chapter 1, http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch1.pdf ).
The Technology of Wireless Transmission
The Report conveys the impression that cell phone ground-to-air communication from high altitude was of reasonably good quality, and that there was no major impediment or obstruction in wireless transmission.
Some of the conversations were with onboard air phones, which contrary to the cell phones provide for good quality transmission. The report does not draw a clear demarcation between the two types of calls.
More significantly, what this carefully drafted script fails to mention is that, given the prevailing technology in September 2001, it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to place a wireless cell call from an aircraft traveling at high speed above 8000 feet:
“Wireless communications networks weren’t designed for ground-to-air communication. Cellular experts privately admit that they’re surprised the calls were able to be placed from the hijacked planes, and that they lasted as long as they did. They speculate that the only reason that the calls went through in the first place is that the aircraft were flying so close to the ground
Expert opinion within the wireless telecom industry casts serious doubt on “the findings” of the 9/11 Commission. According to Alexa Graf, a spokesman of AT&T, commenting in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks:
“it was almost a fluke that the [9/11] calls reached their destinations… From high altitudes, the call quality is not very good, and most callers will experience drops. Although calls are not reliable, callers can pick up and hold calls for a little while below a certain altitude”
While serious doubts regarding the cell calls were expressed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a new landmark in the wireless telecom industry has further contributed to upsetting the Commission’s credibility. Within days of the release of the 9/11 Commission Report in July 2004, American Airlines and Qualcomm, proudly announced the development of a new wireless technology –which will at some future date allow airline passengers using their cell phones to contact family and friends from a commercial aircraft (no doubt at a special rate aerial roaming charge) (see http://www.qualcomm.com/press/releases/2004/040715_aa_testflight.html )
“Travelers could be talking on their personal cellphones as early as 2006. Earlier this month [July 2004], American Airlines conducted a trial run on a modified aircraft that permitted cell phone calls.” (WP, July 27, 2004)
Aviation Week (07/20/04) described this new technology in an authoritative report published in July 2004:
“Qualcomm and American Airlines are exploring [July 2004] ways for passengers to use commercial cell phones inflight for air-to-ground communication. In a recent 2-hr. proof-of-concept flight, representatives from government and the media used commercial Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) third-generation cell phones to place and receive calls and text messages from friends on the ground.
For the test flight from Dallas-Fort Worth, the aircraft was equipped with an antenna in the front and rear of the cabin to transmit cell phone calls to a small in-cabin CDMA cellular base station. This “pico cell” transmitted cell phone calls from the aircraft via a Globalstar satellite to the worldwide terrestrial phone network”
Needless to say, neither the service, nor the “third generation” hardware, nor the “Picco cell” CDMA base station inside the cabin (which so to speak mimics a cell phone communication tower inside the plane) were available on the morning of September 11, 2001.
The 911 Commission points to the clarity and detail of these telephone conversations.
In substance, the Aviation Weekreport creates yet another embarrassing hitch in the official story.
The untimely July American Airlines / Qualcomm announcement acted as a cold shower. Barely acknowledged in press reports, it confirms that the Bush administration had embroidered the cell phone narrative (similar to what they did with WMDs) and that the 9/11 Commission’s account was either flawed or grossly exaggerated.
Altitude and Cellphone Transmission
According to industry experts, the crucial link in wireless cell phone transmission from an aircraft is altitude. Beyond a certain altitude which is usually reached within a few minutes after takeoff, cell phone calls are no longer possible.
In other words, given the wireless technology available on September 11 2001, these cell calls could not have been placed from high altitude.
The only way passengers could have got through to family and friends using their cell phones, is if the planes were flying below 8000 feet. Yet even at low altitude, below 8000 feet, cell phone communication is of poor quality.
The crucial question: at what altitude were the planes traveling, when the calls were placed?
While the information provided by the Commission is scanty, the Report’s timeline does not suggest that the planes were consistently traveling at low altitude. In fact the Report confirms that a fair number of the cell phone calls were placed while the plane was traveling at altitudes above 8000 feet, which is considered as the cutoff altitude for cell phone transmission.
Let us review the timeline of these calls in relation to the information provided by the Report on flight paths and altitude.
United Airlines Flight 175
United Airlines Flight 175 departed for Los Angeles at 8:00:
“It pushed back from its gate at 7:58 and departed Logan Airport at 8:14.”
The Report confirms that by 8:33, “it had reached its assigned cruising altitude of 31,000 feet.” According to the Report, it maintained this cruising altitude until 8.51, when it “deviated from its assigned altitude”:
“The first operational evidence that something was abnormal on United 175 came at 8:47, when the aircraft changed beacon codes twice within a minute. At 8:51, the flight deviated from its assigned altitude, and a minute later New York air traffic controllers began repeatedly and unsuccessfully trying to contact it.”
And one minute later at 8.52, Lee Hanson receives a call from his son Peter.
[Flight UAL 175]“At 8:52, in Easton, Connecticut, a man named Lee Hanson received a phone call from his son Peter, a passenger on United 175. His son told him: “I think they’ve taken over the cockpit—An attendant has been stabbed— and someone else up front may have been killed. The plane is making strange moves. Call United Airlines—Tell them it’s Flight 175, Boston to LA.
Press reports confirm that Peter Hanson was using his cell (i.e it was not an air phone). Unless the plane had suddenly nose-dived, the plane was still at high altitude at 8.52. (Moreover, Hanson’s call could have been initiated at least a minute prior to his father Lee Hanson picking up the phone.)
Another call was received at 8.52 (one minute after it deviated from its assigned altitude of 31,000 feet). The Report does not say whether this is an air phone or a cell phone call:
Also at 8:52, a male flight attendant called a United office in San Francisco, reaching Marc Policastro. The flight attendant reported that the flight had been hijacked, both pilots had been killed, a flight attendant had been stabbed, and the hijackers were probably flying the plane. The call lasted about two minutes, after which Policastro and a colleague tried unsuccessfully to contact the flight.
It is not clear whether this was a call to Policastro’s cell phone or to the UAL switchboard.
At 8:58, UAL 175 “took a heading toward New York City.”:
“At 8:59, Flight 175 passenger Brian David Sweeney tried to call his wife, Julie. He left a message on their home answering machine that the plane had been hijacked. He then called his mother, Louise Sweeney, told her the flight had been hijacked, and added that the passengers were thinking about storming the cockpit to take control of the plane away from the hijackers.
At 9:00, Lee Hanson received a second call from his son Peter:
It’s getting bad, Dad—A stewardess was stabbed—They seem to have knives and Mace—They said they have a bomb—It’s getting very bad on the plane—Passengers are throwing up and getting sick—The plane is making jerky movements—I don’t think the pilot is flying the plane—I think we are going down—I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building—Don’t worry, Dad— If it happens, it’ll be very fast—My God, my God.
The call ended abruptly. Lee Hanson had heard a woman scream just before it cut off. He turned on a television, and in her home so did Louise Sweeney. Both then saw the second aircraft hit the World Trade Center.50 At 9:03:11, United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center. All on board, along with an unknown number of people in the tower, were killed instantly.”
American Airlines Flight 77
American Airlines Flight 77 was scheduled to depart from Washington Dulles for Los Angeles at 8:10… “At 8:46, the flight reached its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet.”
At 8:51, American 77 transmitted its last routine radio communication. The hijacking began between 8:51 and 8:54. As on American 11 and United 175, the hijackers used knives (reported by one passenger) and moved all the passengers (and possibly crew) to the rear of the aircraft (reported by one flight attendant and one passenger). Unlike the earlier flights, the Flight 77 hijackers were reported by a passenger to have box cutters. Finally, a passenger reported that an announcement had been made by the “pilot” that the plane had been hijacked….
On flight AA 77, which allegedly crashed into the Pentagon, the transponder was turned off at 8:56am; the recorded altitude at the time the transponder was turned off is not mentioned. According to the Commission’s Report, cell calls started 16 minutes later, at 9:12am, twenty minutes before it (allegedly) crashed into the Pentagon at 9.32am:
” [at 9.12] Renee May called her mother, Nancy May, in Las Vegas. She said her flight was being hijacked by six individuals who had moved them to the rear of the plane.”
According to the Report, when the autopilot was disengaged at 9:29am, the aircraft was at 7,000 feet and some 38 miles west of the Pentagon. This happened two minutes before the crash.
Most of the calls on Flight 77 were placed between 9.12am and 9.26am, prior to the disengagement of automatic piloting at 9.29am. The plane could indeed have been traveling at either a higher or a lower altitude to that reached at 9.29am. Yet, at the same time there is no indication in the Report that the plane had been traveling below the 7000 feet level, which it reached at 9.29am.
At some point between 9:16 and 9:26, Barbara Olson called her husband, Ted Olson, the solicitor general of the United States. [using an airphone]
UAL flight 93 was the only one of the four planes that, according to the official story, did not crash into a building. Flight 93 passengers, apparently: “alerted through phone calls, attempted to subdue the hijackers. and the hijackers crashed the plane [in Pennsylvania] to prevent the passengers gaining control.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_flight_93 ). Another version of events, was that UAL 93 was shot down.
According to the Commission’s account:
“the first 46 minutes of Flight 93’s cross-country trip proceeded routinely. Radio communications from the plane were normal. Heading, speed, and altitude ran according to plan. At 9:24, Ballinger’s warning to United 93 was received in the cockpit. Within two minutes, at 9:26, the pilot, Jason Dahl, responded with a note of puzzlement: “Ed, confirm latest mssg plz—Jason.”70 The hijackers attacked at 9:28. While traveling 35,000 feet above eastern Ohio, United 93 suddenly dropped 700 feet. Eleven seconds into the descent, the FAA’s air traffic control center in Cleveland received the first of two radio transmissions from the aircraft….”
At least ten cell calls are reported to have taken place on flight 93.
The Report confirms that passengers started placing calls with cell and air phones shortly after 9.32am, four minutes after the Report’s confirmation of the plane’s attitude of 35,000 feet. In other words, the calls started some 9 minutes before the Cleveland Center lost UAL 93’s transponder signal (9.41) and approximately 30 minutes before the crash in Pennsylvania (10.03)
“At 9:41, Cleveland Center lost United 93’s transponder signal. The controller located it on primary radar, matched its position with visual sightings from other aircraft, and tracked the flight as it turned east, then south.164 “
This suggests that the altitude was known to air traffic control up until the time when the transponder signal was lost by the Cleveland Center. (Radar and visual sightings provided information on its flight path from 9.41 to 10.03.)
Moreover, there was no indication from the Report that the aircraft had swooped down to a lower level of altitude, apart from the 700 feet drop recorded at 9.28. from a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet:
“At 9:32, a hijacker, probably Jarrah, made or attempted to make the following announcement to the passengers of Flight 93:“Ladies and Gentlemen: Here the captain, please sit down keep remaining sitting.
We have a bomb on board. So, sit.” The flight data recorder (also recovered) indicates that Jarrah then instructed the plane’s autopilot to turn the aircraft around and head east. The cockpit voice recorder data indicate that a woman, most likely a flight attendant, was being held captive in the cockpit. She struggled with one of the hijackers who killed or otherwise silenced her.
Shortly thereafter, the passengers and flight crew began a series of calls from GTE airphones and cellular phones. These calls between family, friends, and colleagues took place until the end of the flight and provided those on the ground with firsthand accounts. They enabled the passengers to gain critical information, including the news that two aircraft had slammed into the World Trade Center.77…At least two callers from the flight reported that the hijackers knew that passengers were making calls but did not seem to care.
The hijackers were wearing red bandanas, and they forced the passengers to the back of the aircraft.80 Callers reported that a passenger had been stabbed and that two people were lying on the floor of the cabin, injured or dead—possibly the captain and first officer. One caller reported that a flight attendant had been killed.81 One of the callers from United 93 also reported that he thought the hijackers might possess a gun. But none of the other callers reported the presence of a firearm. One recipient of a call from the aircraft recounted specifically asking her caller whether the hijackers had guns.
The passenger replied that he did not see one. No evidence of firearms or of their identifiable remains was found at the aircraft’s crash site, and the cockpit voice recorder gives no indication of a gun being fired or mentioned at any time.
We believe that if the hijackers had possessed a gun, they would have used it in the flight’s last minutes as the passengers fought back.82 Passengers on three flights reported the hijackers’ claim of having a bomb. The FBI told us they found no trace of explosives at the crash sites. One of the passengers who mentioned a bomb expressed his belief that it was not real. Lacking any evidence that the hijackers attempted to smuggle such illegal items past the security screening checkpoints, we believe the bombs were probably fake. During at least five of the passengers’ phone calls, information was shared about the attacks that had occurred earlier that morning at the World Trade Center. Five calls described the intent of passengers and surviving crew members to revolt against the hijackers. According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane. They decided, and acted. At 9:57, the passenger assault began. Several passengers had terminated phone calls with loved ones in order to join the revolt. One of the callers ended her message as follows:
“Everyone’s running up to first class. I’ve got to go. Bye.” The cockpit voice recorder captured the sounds of the passenger assault muffled by the intervening cockpit door. Some family members who listened to the recording report that they can hear the voice of a loved one among the din.
We cannot identify whose voices can be heard. But the assault was sustained. In response, Jarrah immediately began to roll the airplane to the left and right, attempting to knock the passengers off balance. At 9:58:57, Jarrah told another hijacker in the cockpit to block the door. Jarrah continued to roll the airplane sharply left and right, but the assault continued. At 9:59, Jarrah changed tactics and pitched the nose of the airplane up and down to disrupt the assault. The recorder captured the sounds of loud thumps, crashes, shouts, and breaking glasses and plates.
At 10:00:03, Jarrah stabilized the airplane. Five seconds later, Jarrah asked, “Is that it? Shall we finish it off?” A hijacker responded, “No. Not yet. When they all come, we finish it off.” The sounds of fighting continued outside the cockpit. Again, Jarrah pitched the nose of the aircraft up and down.At 10:00:26, a passenger in the background said, “In the cockpit. If we don’t we’ll die!” Sixteen seconds later, a passenger yelled,“Roll it!” Jarrah stopped the violent maneuvers at about 10:01:00 and said, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!” He then asked another hijacker in the cockpit,“ Is that it? I mean, shall we put it down?” to which the other replied, “Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.” The passengers continued their assault and at 10:02:23, a hijacker said, “Pull it down! Pull it down!” The hijackers remained at the controls but must have judged that the passengers were only seconds from overcoming them. The airplane headed down; the control wheel was turned hard to the right.
The airplane rolled onto its back, and one of the hijackers began shouting “Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest. ”With the sounds of the passenger counterattack continuing, the aircraft plowed into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 580 miles per hour, about 20 minutes’ flying time from Washington D.C. Jarrah’s objective was to crash his airliner into symbols of the American Republic, the Capitol or the White House. He was defeated by the alerted, unarmed passengers of United”
The Mysterious Call of Edward Felt from UAL 93
Earlier coverage of the fate of UAL 93 was based in part on a reported cell call from a passenger named Edward Felt, who managed to reach an emergency official in Pennsylvania. How he got the emergency supervisor’s number and managed to reach him remains unclear.
The call was apparently received at 9.58 am, eight minutes before the reported time of the crash at 10.06 am in Pennsylvania:
“Local emergency officials said they received a cell phone call at 9.58 am from a man who said he was a passenger aboard the flight. The man said he had locked himself in the bathroom and told emergency dispatchers that the plane had been hijacked. “We are being hijacked! We are being hijacked!” he was quoted as saying. A California man identified as Tom Burnett reportedly called his wife and told her that somebody on the plane had been stabbed. “We’re all going to die, but three of us are going to do something,” he told her. “I love you honey.”
The alleged call by Edward Felt from the toilet of the aircraft of UAL 93 was answered by Glenn Cramer, the emergency supervisor in Pennsylvania who took the call.
It is worth noting that Glenn Cramer was subsequently gagged by the FBI.” (See Robert Wallace`s incisive analysis published in Sept 2002 by the Daily Mirror, (http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/WAL403A.html ).
Ironically, this high profile cell call by Ed Felt, which would have provided crucial evidence to the 9/11 Commission was, for some reason, not mentioned in the Report.
American Airlines Flight 11
Flight 11 took off at 7:59. Just before 8:14. The Report outlines an airphone conversation of flight attendant Betty Ong and much of the narrative hinges upon this airphone conversation
There are no clear-cut reports on the use of cell phones on Flight AA11. According to the Report, American 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8.46.
Concluding Remarks
A large part of the description, regarding the 19 hijackers relies on cell phone conversations with family and friends.
While a few of these calls (placed at low altitude) could have got through, the wireless technology was not available. On this issue, expert opinion within the wireless telecom industry is unequivocal.
In other words, at least part of the Commission’s script in Chapter 1 on the cell phone conversations, is fabricated.
According to the American Airline / Qualcomm announcement, the technology for cell phone transmission at high altitude will only be available aboard commercial aircraft in 2006. This is an inescapable fact.
In the eyes of public opinion, the cell phone conversations on the Arab hijackers is needed to sustain the illusion that America is under attack.
The “war on terrorism” underlying the National Security doctrine relies on real time “evidence” concerning the Arab hijackers. The latter personify, so to speak, this illusive “outside enemy” (Al Qaeda), which is threatening the homeland.
Embodied into the Commission’s “script” of 911, the narrative of what happened on the plane with the Arab hijackers is therefore crucial. It is an integral part of the Administration’s disinformation and propaganda program. It constitutes a justification for the anti-terror legislation under the Patriot acts and the waging of America’s pre-emptive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.
ANNEX
The 9/11 Commission’s Report’s Footnotes on the Cell Phone Conversations
70. On FDR, see NTSB report,“Specialist’s Factual Report of Investigation—Digital Flight Data Recorder” for United Airlines Flight 93, Feb. 15, 2002; on CVR, see FBI report,“CVR from UA Flight #93,” Dec. 4, 2003; Commission review of Aircraft Communication and Reporting System (ACARS) messages sent to and from Flight 93 (which indicate time of message transmission and receipt); see UAL record, Ed Ballinger ACARS log, Sept. 11, 2001. At 9:22, after learning of the events at the World Trade Center, Melody Homer, the wife of co-pilot Leroy Homer, had an ACARS message sent to her husband in the cockpit asking if he was okay. See UAL record,ACARS message, Sept. 11, 2001.
71. On FDR, see NTSB report,“Specialist’s Factual Report of Investigation—Digital Flight Data Recorder” for United Airlines Flight 93, Feb. 15, 2002; on CVR, see FBI report,“CVR from UA Flight #93,” Dec. 4, 2003; FAA report,“Summary of Air Traffic Hijack Events: September 11, 2001,” Sept. 17, 2001; NTSB report, Air Traffic Control Recording—United Airlines Flight 93, Dec. 21, 2001.
72.The 37 passengers represented a load factor of 20.33 percent of the plane’s seating capacity of 182, considerably below the 52.09 percent for Flight 93 on Tuesdays in the three-month period prior to September 11 (June 11–September 4, 2001). See UAL report, Flight 93 EWR-SFO load factors, undated. Five passengers holding reservations for Flight 93 did not show for the flight.All five were interviewed and cleared by the FBI. FBI report,“Flight #93 ‘No Show’ Passengers from 9/11/01,” Sept. 18, 2001.
73. INS record,Withdrawal of Application for Admission for Mohamed al Kahtani,Aug. 4, 2001.
74. See FAA regulations,Admission to flight deck, 14 C.F.R. § 121.547 (2001);UAL records, copies of boarding passes for United 93, Sept. 11,2001.One passenger reported that ten first-class passengers were aboard the flight. If that number is accurate, it would include the four hijackers. FBI report of investigation, interview of Lisa Jefferson, Sept. 11, 2001;UAL record, Flight 93 passenger manifest, Sept. 11, 2001.All but one of the six passengers seated in the first-class cabin communicated with the ground during the flight, and none mentioned anyone from their cabin having gone into the cockpit before the hijacking.Moreover, it is unlikely that the highly regarded and experienced pilot and co-pilot of Flight 93 would have allowed an observer into the cockpit before or after takeoff who had not obtained the proper permission. See UAL records, personnel files of Flight 93 pilots. For jumpseat information, see UAL record,Weight and Balance Information for Flight 93 and Flight 175, Sept. 11, 2001;AAL records, Dispatch Environmental Control/Weekly Flight Summary for Flight 11 and Flight 77, Sept. 11, 2001.
75. Like Atta on Flight 11, Jarrah apparently did not know how to operate the communication radios; thus his attempts to communicate with the passengers were broadcast on the ATC channel. See FBI report,“CVR from UA Flight #93,” Dec. 4, 2003.Also, by 9:32 FAA notified United’s headquarters that the flight was not responding to radio calls.According to United, the flight’s nonresponse and its turn to the east led the airline to believe by 9:36 that the plane was hijacked. See Rich Miles interview (Nov. 21, 2003); UAL report, “United dispatch SMFDO activities—terrorist crisis,” Sept. 11, 2001.
76. In accordance with FAA regulations, United 93’s cockpit voice recorder recorded the last 31 minutes of sounds from the cockpit via microphones in the pilots’ headsets, as well as in the overhead panel of the flight deck. This is the only recorder from the four hijacked airplanes to survive the impact and ensuing fire.The CVRs and FDRs from American 11 and United 175 were not found,and the CVR from American Flight 77 was badly burned and not recoverable. See FBI report,“CVR from UA Flight #93,”Dec. 4, 2003; see also FAA regulations, 14 C.F.R. §§ 25.1457, 91.609, 91.1045, 121.359; Flight 93 CVR data. A transcript of the CVR recording was prepared by the NTSB and the FBI.
77. All calls placed on airphones were from the rear of the aircraft. There was one airphone installed in each row of seats on both sides of the aisle.The airphone system was capable of transmitting only eight calls at any one time. See FBI report of investigation, airphone records for flights UAL 93 and UAL 175 on Sept. 11, 2001, Sept. 18, 2001.
78.FAA audio file, Cleveland Center, position Lorain Radar; Flight 93 CVR data; FBI report, “CVR from UA Flight #93,” Dec. 4, 2003.
79. FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Todd Beamer, Sept. 11, 2001, through June 11, 2002; FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Sandy Bradshaw, Sept. 11, 2001, through Oct. 4, 2001.Text messages warning the cockpit of Flight 93 were sent to the aircraft by Ed Ballinger at 9:24. See UAL record, Ed Ballinger’s ACARS log, Sept. 11, 2001.
80.We have relied mainly on the record of FBI interviews with the people who received calls. The FBI interviews were conducted while memories were still fresh and were less likely to have been affected by reading the accounts of others or hearing stories in the media. In some cases we have conducted our own interviews to supplement or verify the record. See FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham,Sandy Bradshaw,Marion Britton,Thomas Burnett, Joseph DeLuca,Edward Felt, Jeremy Glick,Lauren
Grandcolas, Linda Gronlund, CeeCee Lyles, Honor Wainio.
81. FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Thomas Burnett, Sept. 11, 2001; FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Marion Britton, Sept. 14, 2001, through Nov. 8, 2001; Lisa Jefferson interview (May 11, 2004); FBI report of investigation, interview of Lisa Jefferson, Sept. 11, 2001; Richard Belme interview (Nov. 21, 2003).
82. See Jere Longman, Among the Heroes—United Flight 93 and the Passengers and Crew Who Fought Back (Harper-Collins, 2002), p. 107; Deena Burnett interview (Apr. 26, 2004); FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Jeremy Glick, Sept. 11, 2001, through Sept. 12, 2001; Lyzbeth Glick interview (Apr. 22, 2004). Experts told us that a gunshot would definitely be audible on the CVR. The FBI found no evidence of a firearm at the crash site of Flight 93. See FBI response to Commission briefing request no. 6, undated (topic 11).The FBI collected 14 knives or portions of knives at the Flight 93 crash site. FBI report, “Knives Found at the UA Flight 93 Crash Site,” undated.
83. FBI response to Commission briefing request no. 6, undated (topic 11); FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Jeremy Glick, Sept. 11, 2001, through Sept. 12, 2001.
84. See FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from United 93.
85. FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from United 93. For quote, see FBI report of investigation, interview of Philip Bradshaw, Sept. 11, 2001; Philip Bradshaw interview (June 15, 2004); Flight 93 FDR and CVR data.At 9:55:11 Jarrah dialed in the VHF Omni-directional Range (VOR) frequency for the VOR navigational aid at Washington Reagan National Airport, further indicating that the attack was planned for the nation’s capital.
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Russia’s hope was to establish long-standing ties with the EU and make sure the strategic security on its western borders would be ensured through economic cooperation, not military might. However, Washington DC had other plans and the compliant elites in Brussels followed suit.
For years, the political West has been accusing Russia of so-called “weaponization” of its natural resources, particularly gas and oil. Moscow is being blamed for using these essential resources to supposedly “blackmail” the European Union, while Brussels, partly pushed by US imperialist belligerence, partly by its own (neo)colonialist ambition, kept creeping up to Russia’s geopolitical backyard, creating ever-escalating tensions with the Eurasian giant. Moscow would never allow the repeat of the Nazi German invasion which took tens of millions of Russian lives, in addition to the unprecedented devastation left in its wake. To make matters worse, “Barbarossa” was yet another on the long list of attempts by the political West to destroy Russia. For over a thousand years, many in Europe have tried to neutralize the Eurasian giant. Russia prevailed each and every time, but it had to do it with the force of arms.
However, in recent decades, Moscow has been trying hard to establish mutually beneficial cooperation with the political West, especially its European portion. This included making long-term deals with the EU, particularly those concerning the supply of essential commodities such as natural gas, oil, food and other raw materials which were helping fuel the growth of entire industries in Europe and elsewhere. Russia’s hope was to establish long-standing ties with the EU and make sure the strategic security on its western borders would be ensured through economic cooperation, not military might. However, Washington DC had other plans and the compliant elites in Brussels followed suit, making sure NATO military infrastructure (especially the strategically impactful US military facilities) kept expanding eastwards, getting ever closer to Russia’s heartland.
Instead of trying to make a deal with Moscow, Brussels joined the economic war on Russia, prompting the Eurasian giant to respond. Now, when natural gas prices are upwards of 400% higher than just a year ago, EU powers, particularly Germany, are faced with the prospect of a near-complete industrial shutdown. And the burning issue isn’t only coming from soaring natural gas prices, but also the shortages. For months, high prices were bleeding the EU economies dry of cash, but after the Nord Stream stopped pumping natural gas altogether, the issue is exponentially worse, as entire industries are at risk of collapsing completely.
In addition to the production sector shutdown, many EU members are faced with soaring energy prices, which is putting a tremendous amount of pressure on households, which are faced with the prospect of not just bankruptcy, but also freezing, as the cold season in the EU is starting with natural gas storage facilities at their lowest level ever. Thus, the pressure on Brussels is both economic and social. With many EU member states’ governments collapsing, the political instability in the troubled bloc is bound to get much worse in the coming months. In addition to natural gas shortages, there is also the problem of soaring food prices, which also might turn into shortages soon, causing even more social and political instability across the EU.
The question is what will the EU do? Should it ask for help from its overlords in Washington DC? And will the US send food, oil, gas and other essential commodities? Does the US even have enough of those for itself? How will the “moral high ground of sticking it to Putin“ help heat homes, feed hundreds of millions of hungry (and angry) citizens and power entire economies and countries? How will the EU governments explain to their voters that all this is “worth doing“ so that the “young, vibrant democracy in Kiev“ can survive? What will Europe look like in 2023 after it goes through a complete political and social unraveling? Will the EU ever become sovereign enough to realize that whatever happens, the US will continue importing essential commodities from Russia while pressuring others not to do so? The coming winter will be a perfect litmus test of sovereignty and an excellent indicator of who will get the privilege of joining the new multipolar world of sovereign nations.
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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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There are themes in the West that are difficult to question without running the risk of receiving sharp criticism. For the following themes, for example, there is a position considered “correct” by Western collective opinion: “Welfare State,” “climate policy,” “multicultural society,” or “covid-19 vaccination.” It is implied that the “acceptable” position to each one of these themes can and should be adopted without any prior critical analysis at the individual level.
The list of these themes is not static; new ones rise to prominence in society, while others become less important over time. In recent years two new themes have emerged: “authoritarian Russia” and “communist China,” which is not surprising considering that Washington, and thus, by extension. the West, has decided to treat these two nations as strategic enemies. A recent study shows, for example, that in a very short time the percentage of Americans with a negative view of China increased dramatically, from 46 percent to 67 percent. This is not a coincidence, but the result of a media communication strategy.
The Critique of the Antiwar Position
As far as Russia is concerned, the “correct” attitude to have in the West, especially since the start of the Ukraine conflict on February 24, 2022, is no less than an absolute condemnation of that country. Support for Ukraine must be comprehensive and can receive social confirmation by a small blue and yellow flag on Facebook. Unconditional support for the economic war waged by Western leaders against Russia is also socially required for Europeans, even though they will be the first to suffer from it.
It is for this reason that the Amnesty International report of August 4, 2022, which confirmed that “Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas” became a media bomb, not only in Ukraine but also in the West. This report disturbs a lot of people because it is not in line with the black and white view of Russia as a criminal aggressor and Ukraine as an innocent victim.
The people who do not take the “correct” stance on the conflict in Ukraine are often accused of being “pro-Russian,” even when this stance simply consists in being objective; by considering the recent history and behavior of the various protagonists. They are considered “pro-Russian” because they do not express unconditional support for Ukraine, but more often, propose conditions for peace. Indeed, the position of most of these critics is not at all “pro-Russian,” but “pro-peace” by supporting active Western efforts to reach a ceasefire, thus sparing as many Ukrainian lives as possible.
Western media did not react when, on July 14, 2022, the Ukrainian government published a black list of Western politicians, academics, and activists who, according to Kiev, “promote Russian propaganda.” This list includes leading Western intellectuals and politicians, such as Republican Senator Rand Paul, former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, military and geopolitical analyst Edward N. Luttwak, the political realist John Mearsheimer, and award-winning freelance journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Though this Ukrainian blacklist should obviously have been condemned in the West, it has hardly elicited any reactions at all, because the Western media already agree with its conclusion: the people on the list are already criticized in their own countries for not adopting the pro-Ukrainian position. Moreover, would the Ukrainian government have dared to publish such a list if it had not had the prior agreement of Washington?
The Formation of the Collective Opinion
What is happening in the case of the attitude toward Russia, as well as in the other themes mentioned above, is not surprising or new. In his famous work, On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill is perhaps today best known for his prescient early warning of the dangers of the “collective opinion”; the “tyranny of the majority” in the form of “the dominant opinions and feelings that society is trying to impose” on a minority.
Society’s majority is naturally intolerant of nonconformism, because thinking like everyone else gives psychological comfort and strengthens social ties. Yet, though society depends on collective opinion for its social cohesion, paradoxically it also depends for its well-being on views that run counter to this majority opinion. Just as natural science progresses only through the sometimes tortuous but generally respectful process of peer review, society also needs minority opinions and dissident voices to curb the permanent search for consensus on the part of the majority.
But minority opinions will suffocate if there is no deeper understanding of Mill’s idea. Fortunately, this understanding exists today. To Mill’s “collective opinion” were added fundamental sociological concepts, such as “crowd psychology” (Gustave Le Bon, 1895), the “political formula” (Gaetano Mosca, 1923), “propaganda” (Edward Bernays, 1928), the “role of the intellectuals” (F.A. Hayek, 1949), the “banality of evil” (H. Arendt, 1963), the “manufacturing of consent” (Chomsky and Herman, 1988), and recently the concept of “mass formation psychosis” (Matthias Desmet).
This accumulated knowledge in the reference above leaves no doubt about the will and the ability of Western political and financial elites to form and direct collective opinion through the control that they exert explicitly and implicitly on the editorial boards of traditional media and on social media platforms. The development of the opinions of Western majorities to the themes mentioned at the beginning of this article is largely the result of these elites” influence on Western public opinion. The collective opinion with respect to climate change is probably the most glaring example of this influence today, considering the significant economic consequences that it will have for Western society.
Libertarianism Is the Only Solution
Political globalization, an antiliberal process which has been underway for several decades, has the effect of aligning national political centers and thus reducing plurality. Gradually, Western political power is flowing toward supranational institutions (like the UN, the EU, the World Economic Forum). This centralization of political power, and the resulting economic concentration of business, including concentration of media groups that this has entailed enables and facilitates the formation of public opinion by the Western elites.
The political philosophy that theoretically is best placed to solve this dilemma of modern society is libertarianism, because it clearly argues for a significant and definitive reduction of political power, both nationally and internationally.
One of the strengths of libertarianism is precisely the importance it places on the cultural and intellectual plurality of a free society. This is the famous “marketplace of ideas” which, like the free market in goods and services, can only exist partially with the pervasive crony capitalism and massive State intervention that most Western societies are subject to today. In a free society, that is, a highly decentralized society with a weak State having at most a night watchman role, the formation of public opinion by political elites then becomes impossible.
The present moment in history represents a particular threat to freedom, because the ruling globalist elites now have an unprecedented opportunity to shape the attitudes and opinions of their societies, in their own, often twisted, interests. At the same time, the new and easy access by the general public to alternative analyses and independent information, can counteract this nefarious trend. In these social conditions, Western voices of freedom must continue to present libertarianism, not only for its economic benefits but also as a means of liberating Western peoples from the chains of directed collective opinion.
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If anybody thinks that the recent extreme Pakistani monsoon floods (see Red Cross photo below) and the US-instigated ousting of Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Imran Khan, are sheer coincidence, might be dead-wrong.
There are no coincidences. Within the timeframe of UN Agenda 2030, or the Great Reset, all is connected.
Source: Red Cross
During a recent conference in Switzerland on geoengineering, a professor of a top European Technical University began his presentation, by saying – there is no need explaining that the current wave of extreme heat waves throughout the Northern Hemisphere, for a record period without interruption, is geoengineered. So let us concentrate on how it’s done.
If heat and drought can be geoengineered, so can extreme rainfall and floods be artificially manipulated.
On 25 July 2018 Pakistan, a country with a 2022 estimated population of close to 230 million, elected the members of the 15th National Assembly and the four Provincial Assemblies, as well as their new Prime Minister.
The 2018 elections were not without violence. But the results were a clear win for Imran Ahmed Khan, an Islamic socialist of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. See table below.
2018 Elections vs. 2013 Votes
The PTI terms itself an anti-status quo movement advocating an egalitarian Islamic democracy. The party aims to dismantle religious discrimination in Pakistan. It claims to be the only non-dynastic party of mainstream Pakistani politics.
The 2018 elections made clear that the people had enough of the US-managed “status quo”. Like the vast majority of the world’s nations, Pakistanis were also seeking sovereign autonomy among the globe’s nation states. The notion of a globalist world and under Washington’s scepter, was not of the Pakistanis. Imran Khan was a popular Prime Minister, of the type Pakistan never had since independence, in 1947.
On 10 April, 2022, prompted by a “silent” Washington instigated – speak corrupted – parliamentary no-confidence motion, Khan lost by a slim margin against a majority of 174 votes (out of 342) in the National Assembly. He was forced to leave the Prime Minister’s Office, thus, becoming the first Pakistani PM to lose a no-confidence vote.
Sworn in as the new PM was immediately Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif, as Pakistan’s 23rd and current Prime Minister, as of 11 April 2022. Mr. Shehbaz Sharif came in second in the 2018 elections with 24.35% vs Khan’s 31.82% of the votes. Mr. Shehbaz Sharif is the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) – PML(N) party, a center-right and liberal conservative political party.
The PML(N) is allied with the US, and, therefore, Washington scored the perfect coup d’état; a pre-emptive coup, so to speak. The reason for the non-confidence vote is hardly mentioned by the mainstream media. As usual, they are paid for reporting on western interests, not on the interests of the people, let alone on the values of democracy.
The coup was not taken lightly by the majority of Pakistani people. They voted overwhelmingly for Imran Khan. People expected better and more stable living conditions and, foremost, independence from Washington-wielded western influence.
Geoengineered Monsoon?
As a consequence of this coup d’état, Pakistanis took massively to the streets. Popular unrest was growing – when the monsoon hit – an extraordinary monsoon. According to CNN reports, rainfall nationwide is 2.87 times higher than the national 30-year average, with some provinces receiving more than five times as much rainfall as their 30-year average.
The monsoon season in Pakistan usually runs from July to mid-September. This year it started in mid-June, “coinciding” with the peak of people’s pro-Khan uprising. The monsoon hit with an extraordinary severity, peaking in the last week of August 2022 – and ongoing.
Islamabad was quick in towing the western climate-freak line.
Pakistan’s climate minister warned that Pakistan is on the “front line” of the world’s climate crisis after unprecedented monsoon rains wracked the country since mid-June.
By now some 5 million people were directly affected, more than 1,200 people were reported killed by the flashfloods and up to a million left homeless.
Associated Press (AP) reports that Nearly a half million people were crowded into camps after losing their homes in widespread flooding.
CNN adds that the southern province of Sindh, which has been badly hit by the flooding, has asked the UN for 1 million tents, while neighboring Baluchistan province — largely cut off from electricity, gas and the internet — has requested 100,000 tents.
Extreme floods have hit particularly the north center-west of Pakistan and the southern Province of Sindh. It damaged bridges and road networks across Pakistan, and agricultural crops. In the Sindh Province 90% of agriculture was wiped out. Agriculture damage country-wide will likely produce food shortages and falling export incomes. It’s an economic disaster – in all possible ways.
Pakistan’s agriculture sector plays a central role in the country’s economy. It contributes close to 20% to GDP and absorbs 42.3 percent of the labor force. It is also an important source of foreign exchange earnings and stimulates growth in other sectors.
Juxtaposing these extreme floods to Pakistani politics, may show how the dots are connected.
The Washington-inspired ousting of the highly popular PM Imran Khan created massive and lasting people’s uprising. If left unchecked, they may bring the former PM Khan back.
What better way than deviating peoples’ attention away from politics, then by creating a deadly disaster? And this in disguise of an extreme monsoon, never before experienced in Pakistan’s history?
Death and destruction, imposing devastating economic disaster, has never been a hindrance for the diabolical agenda of those behind Agenda 2030 and the Great Reset. And the WEF is just an executing agency for the corporate and elite financial cabal.
Remember: If heat and drought can be geoengineered, so can extreme rainfall and floods be artificially manipulated.
“Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather… and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies.” Study Commissioned by the US Air Force: Weather as a Force Multiplier, Owning the Weather in 2025, August 1996
Only by being aware of the plan, and by seeing beyond the curtains of fatal deceptions, by stepping above the 24/7 lie-propaganda, may humanity be able to overcome this relentless onslaught.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
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An investigation by Raya magazine reveals that Cuba was the target of espionage by Colombian military intelligence agencies under the previous government serving the interests of US agents.
Under the title Espionaje Internacional: Objetivo Cuba (International Espionage, Target Cuba), the publication announced that it had access to thousands of classified documents of Colombian military intelligence agencies where it is evident how they spied on Cuban diplomats and officials, leftist political leaders, journalists and social leaders.
In statements to Prensa Latina, its director Edison Bolaño explained today that as a journalist he has always been interested in Colombia’s geopolitical issues and he was very curious about tensions in the last four years between Bogota authorities and Cuba.
“I began to ask around and obviously, through confidential sources, after many conversations, I managed to gain access to more than a thousand files that reflect a whole espionage apparatus against Cuba and its diplomatic corps based in Colombia,” he said.
According to the journal, information was adulterated in the computer of a guerrilla chief to blame Cuba for the violent protest in Colombia at the end of 2019, 2020 and 2021.
The investigation points out that the target “Charlie” was the name given to the espionage operation against the government of Cuba, including its diplomatic corps in Colombia, was carried out fundamentally during the government of Ivan Duque (2018-2022).
It details that little by little the Colombian spies, without a judicial order, carried out surveillance and monitoring of Cuban diplomats by infiltrating political meetings and commemorations of the Cuban Revolution.
This espionage was done by the military intelligence agency in conjunction with the National Intelligence Directorate, a dependency of the Presidency of the Republic of Colombia, he pointed out.
In some cases, they used sophisticated equipment to breach private communications of diplomatic officials, the investigation showed.
It warns that there are documents in English under the name “Secret/Rel To USA, Colombia” that “come from US intelligence agents”.
In these reports it is clear – says RAYA – that the US agents were also very interested in obtaining information about the Cuban diplomats in Colombia.
The truth is that the Colombian agents did not obtain proof that Cuba was indoctrinating, nor behind the social protests, nor that it was carrying out espionage operations.
Finally, RAYA recalled that “on January 11, 2021, before leaving the White House, former President Donald Trump, using the old policy of the internal enemy and the ‘evidence’ that Colombia had provided, again declared Cuba as one of the countries in the world that sponsor terrorism”.
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History reveals the CIA has an affinity for death lists. In 1990, The Washington Post reported the agency “supplied the names of thousands of members of the Indonesian Communist Party to the army in Jakarta, which at the time was hunting down the leftists and killing them in a crackdown branded as one of the century’s worst massacres” in 1965.
The late investigative journalist, William Blum, wrote in his book “Killing Hope,” that the CIA has assassinated or attempted to assassinate leaders in China, India, Panama, Zaire (then the Congo), Haiti, Cuba, and numerous other countries. (See “The CIA’s Greatest Hits – US Government Assassinations”).
Thus it makes perfect sense the CIA would be involved in compiling a list of “terrorists” for the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) to eliminate. As Max Blumenthal recently tweeted, the Ukrainian Myrotvorets website lists “Langley, VA, USA” as a partner in the effort to track down dissidents and murder them. Langley is the hometown of the CIA.
Note: if you are upset by dead and mutilated bodies, do not visit the website. The front page, above the fold, displays dead Russian soldiers.
According to Whois, an internet domain lookup, the site is registered to OroCommerce, a “digital commerce solutions” company. The OroCommerce website’s front page mentions the Ukraine specifically. It features a “Donate Now” button for something called the “Stand with Ukraine” fund.
The StandWithUkraine website, like much of the corporate media, puts forward a number of lies and falsifications to justify its existence in supporting the Ukraine. The opening paragraph:
“On Feb. 24, 2022 Russia declared an unprovoked war on Ukraine and launched a full-scale invasion. Russia is currently bombing peaceful Ukrainian cities, including schools and hospitals and attacking civilians who are fleeing conflict zones.”
YouTube is replete with interviews of Ukrainians escaping the violence (most are now deplatformed). Invariably, they claim the UAF (Ukrainian Armed Forces), in particular its neo-Nazi contingents, have fired upon them as they attempted to escape the fighting. The truth is the opposite of what is claimed by StandWithUkraine and the western corporate media. The UAF has occupied hospitals and schools and used them as firing positions.
No stats on the eight year terror campaign against the civilians of Donbas are included on this heavily biased website. According to the United Nations, the number of casualties in Donbas (as of July, 2021) was 13,200–13,400 people killed and 29,600–33,600 wounded.
“A report from human rights watchdog Amnesty International claims the Ukrainian military is guilty of the widespread use of tactics that constitute war crimes, including using populated residential areas, schools, and hospitals as de facto military bases,” Washington Examiner reported on August 4.
In other words, the media, NGOs, and almost the entirety of the US Congress (including the senile wreck occupying the executive), have turned the truth on its head in astounding Orwellian fashion.
Some members of Congress are demanding Putin be assassinated, an attitude that would be more than welcome at Myrotvorets. In particular, the demented warmonger Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted in March:
“The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out. You would be doing your country—and the world—a great service.”
Evgueny Karas, outed in June as both a neo-Nazi (leader of SICH-C14) and an SBU agent, has given interviews denouncing Jews, gay people, and of course any ethnic group, especially Russian, that is not of “pure” Ukrainian blood. C14 is implicated in a number of violent events, including the murder of journalists.
The SBU excels at torture and murder. For instance, 74 year old Diana Prokofevna Nikiforova, “was told that she was a member of a sub-race in Ukraine, that of the Russians, whose language was no longer recognized, whose history and civilisation were being mocked,” according to Donbass Insider. She was mercilessly beaten for three hours by SBU goons. The abuses of the SBU and its ultranationalist leadership are too many to list here.
A SBU torture victim, simply known as “Larissa,” wrote for the Donbass Insider,
Today in the World, in Ukraine and in the United States, Nazism is rampant, how can they not react and how can they not understand in the West? And then we saw hundreds of Maydan activists arrive, with weapons, in black uniforms, SBU forces and people who came from Western Ukraine, with Biletsky and Mosiychuk. Very quickly they fired into the street and in April already they murdered three people. Terror spread, the city of Kharkov, which I love so much, was under the control of these brigands.
The Myrotvorets now include westerners on their murder list, including the popular former member of the progressive rock band Pink Floyd, Roger Waters. In addition, the Nazis of the Ukraine want to kill Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and Nobel Prize winner Zoran Milanovic. “Ukrainian writer Oles Buzina and former Verkhovna Rada parliamentarian Oleg Kalashnikov” were assassinated after Myrotvorets published their home addresses, reports Debt-Stop.
As for the US love and appreciation of the tactics of real Nazis in the 1930s and 40s, the CIA imported hundreds of Nazis in the late 40s and early 50s, many serious war criminals. This occurred secretly at the time under Operation Paperclip. Much of the information about this criminal program remains classified.
After Russia finishes its special operation to disarm and de-nazify the Ukraine, will the US allow Ukrainian Nazis to emigrate to the US?
Probably not. Most of them will either be eliminated or imprisoned in Russia.
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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
In addition, energy prices have reached a level that threatens the existence of many companies. Just this week, German toilet paper company Hakle filed for bankruptcy, with the owners citing unsustainable energy and material costs as the primary factor. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that Europe’s steel industry, which requires massive amounts of cheap natural gas to run, is slashing production and facing severe financial headwinds. Other sectors, such as chemical production, agriculture, and automating are all facing unprecedented hurdles as the energy crisis continues to grip Europe.
Cries for help from the once booming German economy are now coming from business leaders, associations, and consumers, with the Federation of German Industries (BDI) also warning of a wave of bankruptcies due to energy cost inflation. A new analysis by the BDI states that this is a major challenge for 58 percent of companies, and 34 percent believe the current crisis represents a matter of survival. Germany is no exception either, with warning from the United Kingdom showing that six in ten manufacturing companies face the risk of closure due to the energy crisis.
Some German companies, attempting to survive in an increasingly challenging environment, are claiming they are looking to move production overseas.
Almost every tenth company has already reduced or even interrupted production, while every fourth company is considering or is already relocating company shares or parts of production and jobs abroad where costs are often cheaper than Germany.
The situation is also coming to a head in the skilled trades.
“In the trades, a wave of insolvencies is rolling towards us because of the energy crisis,” said president of the Central Association of German Crafts, Hans Peter Wollseifer, to the Rheinische Post. “Every day, we receive emergency calls from companies that are about to stop production because they can no longer pay the enormously increased energy bills.”
Even though the coronavirus pandemic represented a severe threat to many German businesses, the downturn due to the energy crisis is expected to be much worse. Governments and central bankers are also constrained with their policy choices. Unlike the coronavirus crisis, they can no longer throw hundreds of billions in stimulus at the problem, as it would likely greatly exacerbate already high inflation.
However, despite alarm bells, there is some sign that up until now, the German economy has held up despite various economic threats. The number of insolvencies was still stable in June, according to the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH).
“Despite the energy crisis, supply chain problems, and the gradual phase-out of Corona aid, the insolvency situation is still pleasingly robust,” said IWH expert Steffen Müller. In June, 709 partnerships and corporations filed for bankruptcy, which was slightly below previous months and actually almost exactly the same number as in June 2021. Müller said he did not expect increased numbers for July or August either.
However, severe headwinds remain on the horizon, including rising interest rates, energy prices, and an increase in the minimum wage in October to €12.
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***
The first world leader to call President George W. Bush after 9/11 was Vladimir Putin. In fact, he had called him two days before, on September 9, to warn Bush that, based on unfolding events he had observed in the environment, he had “a foreboding that something was about to happen, something long in preparation.”
Watching the twin towers being struck, Putin immediately phoned President Bush to offer his condolences and understanding. When his call couldn’t reach Bush because he was on Airforce One, Putin immediately spoke to Condoleezza Rice, asking her to pass his message to Bush. The next morning, Putin reached Bush and assured him that “in this struggle, we will stand together.”
Putin offered more than understanding and standing together: he offered total support for whatever Bush decided to do. He and Bush later spoke on the phone for forty minutes. The next Monday, Putin offered to share intelligence with the US, to permit the US to use Russian airspace for humanitarian assistance, to participate in search and rescue operations and to increase military assistance to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. He even stunned the Americans by offering, after an initial hesitation and against the advice of senior Russian military commanders, to allow US troops in Central Asia. The US would establish bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
Russia’s intelligence sharing was of great value because, during its own war in Afghanistan, it had gained detailed knowledge of the country. Russian intelligence provided a veritable map for the US, helping them navigate Kabul and the many mountains and caves. Even before 9/11, by June 2000, Russian intelligence was sharing information on the terrorist threat from Afghanistan.
Putin was still hoping, at this time, to improve relations with the US and the West. He hoped that his assistance to and cooperation with the US would facilitate that relationship. Putin saw the tragedy of 9/11 as a moment to show the US that a world order was possible in which Russia was a partner. In a speech in Washington in November, 2011, Putin said,
“It is very important that the interaction between our countries in fighting terrorism does not become a mere episode in the history of Russian-American relations, but marks the start of long-term partnership and cooperation.”
But in return for helping the US to win the war in the same country the US had lured the Soviet Union into to lose its war decades earlier, Russia got nothing, and NATO remained committed to expanding east. By 2004, the “big bang” of NATO expansion had moved NATO into the Baltic countries and right up to Russia’s border.
Francis Richards, then head of the GCHQ, Britain’s NSA, once said, according to Philip Short in Putin,
“We were quite grateful for Putin’s support after 9/11, but we didn’t show it very much. I used to spend a great deal of time trying to persuade people that we needed to give as well as take . . . I think the Russians felt throughout that [on NATO issues] they were being fobbed off. And they were.”
On 9/11, Jiang Zemin, the president of China, was watching the terrorist attacks on TV. It took him less than two hours to call Bush to offer his sympathy and his support.
China’s response to 9/11 would grow more complicated as the war in Afghanistan grew more complicated, and China began to fear a prolonged US military presence in their neighborhood almost as much as they feared the Taliban’s terror threat and influence globally and in their own country. China feared the US military on its borders, its Pakistani ally being compelled to allow US bases on its territory and supply routes through its territory and the possibility of a strictly pro-US government being set up in Afghanistan.
As the war dragged on, China would not fully back either the Taliban or the US, maintaining diplomatic relations with the Taliban and even supplying them with arms.
But in those first hours in September, 2001, the Chinese leader immediately called the American President and offered his support. According to Andrew Small in The China-Pakistan Axis, China offered intelligence sharing and minesweepers. They even allowed the FBI to set up an office in Beijing. The US rejected much of China’s offer to help, but China offered it.
Iran, also, came to America’s aid after 9/11. After the terrorist attacks in the US, Iran immediately sided with the US against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The reformist president, Seyyed Mohammad Khatami, wanted to improve relations with the US and, like Russia and China, saw the tragedy as an unfortunate opportunity to prove their partnership and friendship.
Iran arrested hundreds of the al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters who had escaped into her borders. Iran documented the identity of more than two hundred al-Qaeda and Taliban escapees to the United Nations and sent many of them back to their homelands. For many others who couldn’t be sent back to their own countries, Iran offered to try them in Iran. Iran also followed up on an American request to search for, arrest and deport several more al-Qaeda operatives that the US identified.
The Northern Alliance, who provided many of the anti-Taliban fighters once the Americans and their allies invaded Afghanistan, was largely put together by Iran, who placed it in the hands of the US. Iran offered its air bases to the US and permitted the US to carry out search and rescue missions for downed US planes. The Iranians also supplied the US with intelligence on Taliban and al-Qaeda targets.
Iranian diplomats were secretly meeting with US officials as early as October 2001 to plan the removal of the Taliban and the creation of a new government in Afghanistan. At the Bonn Conference of December 2001, Iran played what Iran expert and author of Losing an Enemy, Trita Parsi, called an absolutely crucial role in setting up Afghanistan’s post-Taliban government.
In return, like Russia, Iran got less than nothing: all the US gave them was a membership in the Axis of Evil.
Russia, China and Iran, three of America’s arch enemies all offered their hands in friendship after 9/11. Those hands were full of, not just words, but of real support. The world might be just a little better today had the US taken those hands and, as Francis Richards said, shown gratitude and given as well as having taken.
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Ted Snider has a graduate degree in philosophy and writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.
Featured image: The World Trade Center south tower (L) bursts into flames after being struck by hijacked United Airlines Flight 175 as the north tower burns following an earlier attack by a hijacked airliner in New York City in this September 11, 2001 file photo. REUTERS/Sean Adair/Files (UNITED STATES DISASTER POLITICS)
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***
Two U.S. B-52 bombers flew a mission over the Middle East on Saturday in an apparent show of force in the region, the fourth of its kind this year, the U.S. Air Force announced Sunday.
The U.S. has frequently flown such missions at points of high tension with Iran, per AP.
The big picture: The nuclear-capable B-52 departed from a Royal Air Force (RAF) base in Fairford, England, and “flew over the Eastern Mediterranean, Arabian Peninsula and Red Sea before departing the region,” the Air Force said in a statement.
The U.S. bombers were accompanied by warplanes from the RAF, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, while representatives from 16 nations helped organize logistical support, per the press release.
Israeli warplanes also accompanied the mission, though their presence was omitted from the U.S. release.
The Israeli military said that several of its fighter jets joined the mission “through Israel’s skies on their way to the (Persian) Gulf,” adding that working with the U.S. military is critical to “maintaining aerial security in Israel and the Middle East,” AP reported.
The last flyover mission of this kind was in June, the press release noted.
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Featured image: A B-52 Stratofortress arrives at RAF Fairford in 2018. (Photo: USAF / Ted Daigle)
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***
What right does the United States have to starve civilians to achieve political goals? Despite its obvious importance, this question is largely absent from mainstream discourse. Through economic sanctions, or economic warfare, the U.S. can unilaterally collapse economies and generate famine in foreign countries. The civilian death toll from sanctions is often equal to—and sometimes greater than—the toll from conventional warfare. Yet on both sides of the aisle, it is taken for granted that we have the “right” to impose destitution on civilian populations in order to advance our interests.
What are Sanctions?
The U.S. administers two types of sanctions: primary and secondary sanctions. Primary sanctions cut off economic relations between targeted foreign entities—states, individuals, industries, or corporations—and the American economy. Secondary sanctions, also known as “extraterritorial sanctions,” are more pernicious. Secondary sanctions impose sanctions or other penalties on third parties not under the jurisdiction of the U.S. if they refuse to cease economic relations with the entity under primary sanctions. For example, the U.S. imposed both primary and secondary sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran (CBI). Therefore, the U.S. prohibits American citizens and corporations from conducting business with the bank (primary sanctions), and imposes sanctions on any foreign state, individual, or corporation that chooses to work with the CBI (secondary sanctions).
Many legal scholars and most of the world, including the European Union, maintain that these secondary sanctions clearly violate well established principles of international law, interfere with the sovereignty of foreign governments, and are ultimately illegitimate.
However, due to the threat of being cut off from the American economy and the dollar, nations are often forced to comply, regardless of their legal or moral qualms.
Sanctions and Civilians
Through sanctions, the U.S. can, in effect, collapse foreign economies with the stroke of a pen, inflicting punishment on civilian populations. The current sanctions on Syria, for instance, established in the “Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019,” bar foreign entities from participating in Syria’s desperately needed reconstruction effort and obstruct the flow of humanitarian aid and other basic necessities. The sanctions were ostensibly enacted to punish the Assad regime and to promote human rights, but instead have devastated Syrian civilians.
Sanctions are About Politics, not Human Rights
Our political leaders consistently claim that we impose sanctions in order to protect civilians and promote human rights.
Despite this rhetoric, it is clear that the imposition of sanctions is totally inconsistent with these alleged values. Rather, like other tools of American foreign policy, sanctions are correlated with the interests of American elites. States that align themselves with the interests of the U.S. are spared from sanctions, and states that refuse, or choose to align themselves with an American adversary, are not. Defiance is a much better predictor of whether sanctions will be levied than a state’s human rights record.
Sanctions and Bipartisanship
Despite international condemnation and the devastating toll and human suffering caused by sanctions, criticism in mainstream circles is scant. These sanctions are, unfortunately, totally bipartisan. The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019—which is currently threatening Syrian civilians with mass starvation—was introduced by Democratic Representative Eliot Engel, passed with bipartisan support, and then was signed into law by President Donald Trump. The 2017 bill which drastically increased sanctions on Iran—and subsequently sharply increased poverty and a lack of access to basic, lifesaving medicines—was passed in the Senate by a 98-2 vote. Only Senators Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul voted against the bill.
Establishment politicians from both parties have routinely campaigned on their support for sanctions, most prominently Hillary Clinton. Despite widespread criticism of the Clinton Administration’s devastating sanctions policies on Iraq in the 1990s, Hillary Clinton campaigned both in 2008 and 2016 on the promise to drastically tighten sanctions on Iran. Moreover, Clinton’s 2016 campaign website boastedof the fact that she “oversaw significant accomplishments” while Secretary of State, including “building a global coalition to impose crippling sanctions against Iran,” creating the “toughest sanctions regime in history.”
Only Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul, and a handful of congressional democrats have ever defied the bipartisan consensus and expressedfull-throated opposition to sanctions. In the mainstream liberal establishment, it is fully accepted that the U.S. has the right to impose these sanctions, regardless of the terrifying humanitarian toll. It is assumed, without question, that the U.S. should be allowed to collapse economies, generate famine, and drive civilian populations into destitution to achieve political—not humanitarian—goals.
But how would we feel if this assumption was universal, and we were the victims of this type of economic warfare?
Here, a thought experiment may be revealing. While unrealistic due to the immensity of American power, imagine if, in response to the unlawful American invasion and destruction of Iraq, the international community enacted broad sanctions on the U.S. Imagine that these sanctions—like the sanctions we impose—collapsed our economy; caused a severe shortage of lifesaving pharmaceuticals; increased hunger, unemployment, and destitution; and directly led to the deaths of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of Americans. To those who support sanctions as a tool of American foreign policy: would this hypothetical outcome be just?
To say yes is utterly callous. But if we say no, we are equally callous, but also hypocrites.
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The US is currently importing over $1 billion per month in Russian wood, metals, food and other goods. More than 3,600 ships from Russia have arrived at American ports since February 24, according to statistics cited by the Associated Press.
In the midwestern city of Columbus, Ohio, 20-year-old Donovan Lewis was shot to death while lying in his bed during the early morning hours of August 30. Police claimed they were serving an arrest warrant on multiple charges although there was no threat from Lewis who was unarmed.
During a White House briefing on the new COVID-19 bivalent booster shots, Dr. Ashish Jha, Biden’s COVID-19 response coordinator, urged Americans to get a flu shot and a COVID-19 shot at the same time, claiming that’s why “God gave us two arms.”
Those who drafted the Bill of Rights recognized that human rights are pre-political. They precede the existence of the government. They come from our humanity, and, in the case of privacy, they are reinforced by our ownership or legal occupancy of property.
Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan told reporters recently, that Ankara needs to “secure further steps with Syria.” He added, “You have to accept that you cannot stop political dialogue and diplomacy between countries. There should always be such dialogue.” Ankara’s goal, he added, was not to defeat Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.
The U.S. regime demands nothing less than to take over Russia. Putin fights against that; and that fact could be the best possible single explanation why his job-approval ratings are, and have been, vastly higher than those of his American counterparts have been. It’s a possibility that America’s propaganda-agencies (alias ‘news’-media) never even so much as consider.
The questions of 9/11 have only continued to pile up higher since that fateful day, and despite official platitudes we are no closer to having those questions answered today then we were when they first arose. In fact, for some of the most important 9/11 questions, the government’s own documents and records that could conceivably answered them have been destroyed, meaning we may never have answers.
We cannot stop this silent takeover of the American economy, and of the Earth’s economy, a takeover making use of the covert devaluation of money, the reduction of the Federal Reserve and the Department of the Treasury to agents for the rich, unless we confidently and bravely propose an alternative and simultaneously declare that the monetary and currency policies of the “public private partnership” of the billionaires are illegal and immoral.
With the passage of the 2022 Defense Authorization Act giving the executive branch sweeping powers over the use of the military in all domestic affairs, and with the obvious obsession by a supranational deep state technocracy intent on imposing a final endgame scenario onto the United States, it is important to recognize the historical precedent of the attempted Bankers’ Coup of 1934 that sought to impose a fascist puppet dictator into the White House.
The Argentine judicial system and parts of its national press are co-opted by the US to advance its objectives in the New Cold War through an intensification of Hybrid Warfare with elements of piracy and Lawfare.
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***
There were “terrible flaws” in Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials — and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration knew it, Alexandra (Sasha) Latypova told Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on a recent episode of “RFK Jr. The Defender Podcast.”
There were “terrible flaws” in Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials — and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knew it, according to Alexandra Latypova, a former pharmaceutical industry executive who reviewed nearly 700 pages of documents Moderna submitted to the FDA as part of its application process.
Latypova, who has 25 years of experience in pharmaceutical research and development, started a number of successful companies — primarily focused on creating and reviewing clinical trials.
On a recent episode of “RFK Jr. The Defender Podcast,” she told Kennedy what she learned after reviewing the Moderna documents, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request.
Latypova told Kennedy that out of nearly 700 pages, about 400 pages are irrelevant studies that Moderna repeated multiple times.
Moderna also submitted three versions of a single module, she said. And one module contained only narrative summaries of Moderna’s studies, but no actual study results.
“So we are still missing a large number of results, such as full reports that are supporting those narratives,” Latypova told Kennedy.
The FDA “obviously did not object” to any of this, she said. “That’s evidence of collusion to me with the manufacturer.”
Latypova also discussed Moderna’s clinical trials timeline. She said the Investigational New Drug (IND) application meeting is supposed to occur with the FDA when the company initiates human clinical trials.
Moderna and the FDA had a pre-IND meeting on Feb. 19, 2020, and the IND application was formally opened the next day. The global pandemic was declared on March 11, 2020.
“Somehow these visionaries could predict the future with such certainty that they opened a clinical trial for the vaccine, for which a pandemic was announced a month later,” Latypova said.
There is normally only one IND application for one product. In this case, however, there are two IND applications — one belonging to Moderna, and one belonging to the National Institutes of Health, which partnered with Moderna on its COVID-19 vaccine.
Latypova also told Kennedy that Moderna did not conduct studies to determine if its mRNA vaccine affected male fertility.
“We have no idea what [the vaccine] does to young men who want to have children in the future,” she said.
The documents also confirm that Moderna’s trials studied the vaccine’s delivery mechanism, but not its payload, which in this case is the spike protein.
“They want you to believe that … you can … have a truck filled with food, or you can have a truck filled with explosives,” Latypova said. “They’re saying it doesn’t matter. Focus on the truck. It’s the same truck, doesn’t matter what’s inside.”
In the end, Latypova said, “They’re desperate to vaccinate every single person on the planet because they don’t want you to know what’s going on.”
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Rachel Militello has worked extensively as a legal assistant at law firms and newspaper companies. She is also a self-published author of poetry that is geared toward mental health awareness.
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
Just two days before the 9/11 attack, Prof. Michel Chossudovsky singlehandedly launched the Global Research website.
Among the first articles was a coverage of the events surrounding the “terrorist attack” and the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001.
Since then, Global Research has been committed to delivering facts that are buried elsewhere — from US-NATO imperialistic ambitions, war crimes, crimes against humanity, to worldwide COVID-19 tyranny, and the imminent danger of nuclear war.
So much has changed since 2001 but our mission remains the same — to uphold the fight for truth, peace and justice.
On our 21st anniversary, we would like to extend our deepest gratitude to our authors and readers for all their contributions and support all through the years. Our thanks also to all independent voices, journalists, scholars, lawyers, scientists, medical doctors, health professionals and activists for challenging the establishment’s lies at the expense of their career and safety.
Even before but more so at the onset of the pandemic, we have been the object of censorship that has affected our worldwide reach. We’ve been blocked from mainstream social media platforms. In April this year, we were threatened with coordinated cyberattacks emanating simultaneously from five countries targeting Global Research with several hundred million “malicious DoS requests” (“A Denial of Service”).
For this year onwards, we only have one wish: that more and more people will awaken to the truth and fight for freedom and rights.
Help us sustain our mission and fulfill our wish:
1. Become a member of Global Research and be our messenger to the world.
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
Note: An earlier version of this book under the title The 2020/21 Worldwide Corona Crisiswas initially published as an online E-reader in December 2020 (distributed free of charge, more than 300,000 page views). The new edition includes five new chapters. All the chapters contained in the first edition have been thoroughly revised and updated.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
In the midwestern city of Columbus, Ohio, 20-year-old Donovan Lewis was shot to death while lying in his bed during the early morning hours of August 30.
Police claimed they were serving an arrest warrant on multiple charges although there was no threat from Lewis who was unarmed.
The police in Columbus say that Lewis raised his arms and therefore this justified the bullet fired into his body causing him to die at a hospital shortly afterwards. The officer involved in the killing of Lewis, Ricky Anderson, a 30-year veteran of law-enforcement, has been placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of an internal and judicial investigation.
This act of blatant police violence represents a continuation of the legacy of law-enforcement brutality and killings across the United States. Although the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police more than two years ago sparked widespread demonstrations and rebellions demanding the defunding of law-enforcement agencies, the current administration of President Joe Biden, who pledged during his campaign in 2020 to address the concerns of the African American people and other oppressed communities, has increased monetary resources for cops while still seeking the electoral support of people of color.
Police in their public statements have said that two other people in the apartment with Lewis had already exited the residence. Anderson, the police shooter, was also a member of the K-9 unit which had a dog on the scene of the raid.
According to a report from the Columbus Dispatch which quoted the lawyer for the Lewis family, Atty. Rex Elliot:
“There’s no indication he (Lewis) was aware of what was happening outside. The two individuals were handcuffed very quickly. There’s no indication there was violence in that apartment or about to happen. He was asleep before officers arrived and had no warning that CPD would burst into his apartment. Donovan was alone in his room, in his bed. He almost immediately shot as Donovan was trying to get out of bed. He was abiding by police commands to come out of his room when he was shot in cold blood by officer Anderson. There was no justification for officer Anderson to shoot an unarmed man trying to get out of bed as police officers were instructing him to do. I’d like to know why in the world they’re executing warrants at two in the morning. The reality is felony warrants are executed every day in daylight hours. There’s no reason for it to be served in the middle of the night.”
In response to the outrage exemplified by the community and the legal counsel for the Lewis family, the police have attempted once again to shift the narrative from the 20-year-old African American being a victim of law-enforcement personnel to suggest that this young man was somehow responsible for his own death. The police in every single incident of unprovoked brutality and killing calls upon the public to view the situation within its “totality.”
Image: Donovan Lewis killed by Columbus police on Aug. 30, 2022 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)
Nonetheless, there is no reasonable excuse for someone who is unarmed to be killed in their bed. People in Columbus have rejected the police version and are demanding the firing and prosecution of the officer who carried out the execution.
There was a rally held outside the Columbus police headquarters on September 2 where the father of Donovan, Daryl Lewis, and the mother, Rebecca Duran, spoke to a crowd of protesters. Later there was a march through the downtown area of Columbus demanding justice for the family and people of this municipality of 905,000 people.
A coalition which organized the rally presented a series of demands for the City of Columbus to adopt. The Justice, Unity & Social Transformation (JUST) formation wants the municipality to resolve the current crisis of police-community relations.
“In the aftermath of Lewis’ death, J.U.S.T. organizers are demanding the immediate firing and arrest of Anderson; the elimination of overnight warrants; a meeting between Lewis’ family and Police Chief Elaine Bryant, Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther and Director of Public Safety Robert Clark; an independent investigation separate from the one the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation is conducting; the erasure of qualified immunity for police; more city funding for mental health and social services and less for public safety; and no K-9 teams unless warrants for drug-related offenses are being served.”
Columbus Cited in Study of Frequency in Police Shootings
This violation of the human rights and personal safety of Donovan Lewis and his place of residence is not an isolated affair in Columbus. The police are noted for their frequent and repeated use of lethal force.
“A study released in February 2021, showed Franklin County, Ohio — which encompasses Columbus — has one of the highest rates of police shootings in Ohio and in the nation. The study, conducted by the Ohio Alliance for Innovation in Population Health, ranked Franklin County 18th among the 100 most populous counties nationally on average for annual police-related fatalities. In Columbus, there have been 62 shootings involving Columbus police officers since 2018, including Lewis’ shooting. Of those 62 shootings, 19 have resulted in a death, according to data from Columbus police and the Columbus Dispatch.”
These statistics are reflective of the overall atmosphere in the U.S. There is no discussion within the halls of Congress or the White House in regard to curbing, let alone eradicating, the level of police violence against oppressed and working class people.
Failure of the White House and Congress to Enact Police Reforms
The demonstrations which arose over the last two years have served to create the political conditions for the election of President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party dominance within the House of Representatives and the equally divided Senate. However, no guarantees within the law have been adopted to protect the rights of people most impacted by racism and national oppression.
A bill passed during August ostensibly to address the problems of runaway inflation related to energy and food prices not experienced in 40 years and the looming problems related to prescription drug costs and climate change were conveniently folded into a pre-election package to convey the notion that the legislative apparatus and the administration can work effectively to pass bills. However, these measures will not help the family of Donovan Lewis and the many other victims of police terrorism.
Earlier in the year in the same state of Ohio, Jayland Walker of Akron, was gunned down in a barrage of a hundred bullets, over 40 of which struck the young African American man. Since this time period, the City of Akron has engaged in every effort to blame Walker for his own victimization.
During early September, the city leaders in Akron released more video footage of the June 27 execution. Yet there has not been any definitive action taken to rectify the situation and provide justice to the bereaved family and community.
Municipal officials have released video footage of the Walker killing in separate segments which can easily be misleading to the public. Much of the video has been edited and blurred making it difficult to piece together the chronology of events leading up to Walker’s death.
In a statement released to the public and media through their lawyer, the Walker family noted:
“Now, two months after Jayland’s death, we have received just hand-picked videos, which the City has also released to the media in an apparent effort to build its own narrative of Jayland’s death. We call on the City to stop re-traumatizing the Walker family with these repeated edited video drops and release all unedited videos to their counsel in one comprehensive collection.”
The silence on the part of the Department of Justice and Attorney General Merrick Garland, the White House and both houses of Congress on the persistence of police violence occurring across the country, comes at the same time when the Democratic Party is urging the African American electorate to go out in mass to vote for their candidates in local, state and federal elections. Neither the Republican or Democratic Parties are speaking directly to the concerns and interests of the African American people and all other oppressed and working people.
Irrespective of the outcome of the November ballot, if the questions related to racist violence and police brutality are not corrected there can be no genuine peace in the U.S. The Biden administration and other future presidents will continue to look very hypocritical in their attacks on other states and geo-political regions when they cannot provide just, safe and stable living environments for the ever-increasing minority communities in the U.S.
*
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Donovan Lewis mother turns away from video of police killing of her son (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)
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***
During a White House briefing on the new COVID-19 bivalent booster shots, Dr. Ashish Jha, Biden’s COVID-19 response coordinator, urged Americans to get a flu shot and a COVID-19 shot at the same time, claiming that’s why “God gave us two arms.”
The White House COVID-19 Response Team on Tuesday held a briefing to mark what health officials called a “major milestone,” referring to the rapid authorization of new COVID-19 bivalent booster shots for Americans ages 12 and older.
Commenting on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Aug. 31 amended Emergency Use Authorizations for new the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines, Dr. Ashish Jha, Biden’s COVID-19 response coordinator, said:
“We expect millions will choose to get their [updated bivalent] COVID-19 shot at the same time or over the course of the fall when people go in for routine checkups.
“The good news is you can get both your flu shot and COVID shot at the same time. It’s actually a good idea.
“I really believe this is why God gave us two arms. One for the flu shot and the other one for the COVID shot.”
Jha’s comments trended on Twitter.
NOW – Biden COVID advisor Ashish Jha believes "God gave us two arms — one for the flu shot and the other one for the COVID shot."pic.twitter.com/Wpcxyo1nfM
The new vaccines, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended on Sept. 1, contain sequences from both the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and the most recently circulating Omicron variant.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who also appeared during the briefing, said, “My message to you is simple. Get your updated COVID-19 shot. As soon as you are eligible in order to protect yourself, your family and your community against COVID-19 this fall.”
Fauci said the new bivalent vaccines are safe and effective.
“Through robust safety monitoring systems, we now have an extensive body of safety data as good or better than what we have for any prior vaccine,” Fauci said.
“The [vaccine] manufacturers did not have to go through months-long trials, and the FDA did not have to pore over any human trial data, because there weren’t any,” Nass wrote.
She continued:
“Let that sink in: The new BA.4/5 bivalent vaccines were tested only in mice, not humans. …
“So there is no reason to think the boosters will be any safer than the second dose, in terms of myocarditis. That risk, by the way, was about 1 in 2,000 young men aged 18-24 after their second dose in one Kaiser study.
“Getting vaccinated soon after recovering from COVID-19 is foolhardy, and any officials mandating the shots after recovery are putting people at even greater risk of adverse reactions, including myocarditis.”
Fauci pointed to data from mRNA vaccine efficacy trials in 2020, claiming they showed a “remarkable 94-95% efficacy against symptomatic disease” — claims that have since been challenged.
Data from Moderna and Pfizer, Fauci said, indicated the updated bivalent vaccines “induced higher antibody titers against Omicron than did the original vaccines” as well as against “all CoV-2 variants.”
Although Fauci did not provide specific figures, he also said Pfizer and Moderna’s data showed the bivalent vaccines induced “even higher levels of neutralizing antibodies in individuals who had recovered from COVID-19.”
Based on these data, Fauci said, “We fully expect that the updated bivalent vaccines containing BA.4 and BA.5 sequences will offer better protection against currently circulating strains than the original vaccines.”
Fauci admitted, however, that “it is difficult to predict at this point how much better that protection will be.”
Biden, pediatricians push flu vaccines for kids and adults
On the same day as the briefing on the new boosters, Biden issued a press statement urging Americans to get vaccinated against both the flu and COVID-19.
“Just like your annual flu shot, you should get it [the new bivalent vaccine] sometime between Labor Day and Halloween. It’s safe, it’s easy to get, and it’s free,” he said.
Biden added:
“It’s simple, and it’s easy to understand: If you are vaccinated and 12 and older, get the new COVID-19 shot this fall. This once-a-year shot can reduce your risk of getting COVID-19, reduce your chance of spreading it to others, and dramatically reduce your risk of severe COVID-19.”
The statement did not cite evidence supporting Biden’s claims.
Also on Tuesday, the American Academy of Pediatrics urged parents to get flu vaccines for their children as soon as possible.
ButDr. Michelle Perro, a pediatrician with four decades of experience, questioned the CDC’s recommendation.
“While the flu can be a more serious illness than COVID-19,” she told The Defender, “hospitalizations are low, ranging from 7,000-26,000 in the 2019-2020 season.”
Perro added:
“Some children may die from the flu, however, this is extremely rare. Vaccine efficacy in one report was 32.5% for flu vaccines, which does not exceed the desired vaccine efficacy threshold of 50%.
“What is often lacking in the conversation is how we support and optimize our children’s overall health/immune function via nutrition, targeted supplements during flu season, such as vitamins C and D, as well as the use of gentle, but natural solutions such as herbal medicine and homeopathy.”
The major consideration when it comes to requiring vaccines for children is the risk-benefit ratio, Perro said — whether it’s the flu vaccine or the COVID-19 vaccines.
“Since the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine in children,” Perro said, “the risk from harm from the vaccine has been shown to be profoundly greater than the risk of illness from the virus.”
Perro cited reports of serious side effects in children, including heart issues (myocarditis), changes in autonomic nervous system function (postural orthostatic tachycardia, or POTS), autoimmunity and neurologic disorders, such as Guillain-Barré syndrome.
“It is important to note that historically, with the introduction of previous novel vaccines such as the rotavirus vaccine, they were recalled after only eight incidents of harm,” Perro said.
“Children should not receive this experimental genetic immunomodulatory vaccine, especially in lieu of the fact that their risk of serious illness from COVID-19 is less than .5%,” she said.
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Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
Featured image is from CHD
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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***
Every move you make And every vow you break Every smile you fake Every claim you stake I’ll be watching you.
— “Every Breath You Take,” Song by The Police
The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to privacy. Like other amendments in the Bill of Rights, it doesn’t create the right; it limits government interference with it. Last week, President Joe Biden misquoted the late Justice Antonin Scalia suggesting that Justice Scalia believed that the Bill of Rights creates rights. As Justice Scalia wrote, referring to the right to keep and bear arms but reflecting his view on the origins of all personal liberty, the Bill of Rights secures rights, it doesn’t create them; it secures them from the government.
Those who drafted the Bill of Rights recognized that human rights are pre-political. They precede the existence of the government. They come from our humanity, and, in the case of privacy, they are reinforced by our ownership or legal occupancy of property.
The idea that rights come from our humanity is called Natural Law theory, which was first articulated by Aristotle in 360 B.C. The natural law teaches that there are aspects of human existence and thus areas of human behavior that are not subject to the government. Aristotle’s views would later be refined by Cicero, codified by Aquinas, explained by John Locke, and woven into Anglo-American jurisprudence by British jurists and American revolutionaries and constitutional framers.
Thus, our rights to think as we wish, to say what we think, to publish what we say, to worship or not, to associate or not, to defend ourselves from crazies and tyrants, to own property, and to be left alone are all hard-wired into our human natures by God, the uncaused cause. Nature is the means through which God passes along His gifts to us. We come about by a biological act of nature, every step of which was ordained by God. His greatest gift to us is life, and He tied that gift to free will. Just as He is perfectly free, so are we.
In exercising our free wills, we employ rights. Rights are claims against the whole world. They don’t require approval of a government or neighbors or colleagues. The same rights exist in everyone no matter their place of birth, and each person exercises them as she or he sees fit. The government should only come into the picture when someone violates another’s natural rights. So, if someone builds a house in your backyard, you can knock it down and expel the builders or you can ask the government to do so.
Suppose the builders haven’t consented to the existence of the government? That does not absolve them. Though government is only moral and legal in a society in which all persons have consented to it — this is Thomas Jefferson’s “consent of the governed” argument in the Declaration of Independence — the only exception to actual consent is the use of government to remedy a violation of natural rights.
Professor Murray Rothbard examined all this under his non-aggression principle (NAP): Initiating or threatening force or deception against a person or his rights is always morally illicit. This applies to all aggression, even — and especially — from the government. The folks building a house in your backyard have either used force or deception to get there. Both violate your natural rights and the NAP.
Now, back to the Fourth Amendment and privacy. In a famous dissent in 1928, which two generations later became the law of the land, the late Justice Louis Brandeis argued that government surveillance constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment and thus, per the express language of the amendment, cannot be conducted by the government without a warrant issued by a judge. He famously called privacy the right most valued by civilized persons and described it as “the right to be let alone.”
Today, this is the most violated of personal rights; not by judges signing search warrants for surveillance, but by government officials — local, state and federal — ignoring and evading the natural right to privacy and pretending that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to them. The linchpin of the amendment is the judicial determination of the existence of probable cause — meaning that it is more likely than not that a crime has been committed, and that there is evidence of that crime in the place to be searched and in the things to be seized.
Today, the feds, and this has been picked up and mimicked by local and state police, have told themselves that so long as they are not looking for evidence of crimes, they needn’t follow the Fourth Amendment.
Today, the government rarely bothers to obtain a search warrant for surveillance because it is cumbersome to do so and because it is so easy to surveil folks on a massive scale without one.
Today, the National Security Administration — America’s 60,000-person strong domestic spying apparatus — captures every keystroke on every desktop and mobile device, and every conversation on every landline and mobile device, and all data transmitted into, out of or within the United States.
Moreover, you’d be hard-pressed to find a geographic area that is not covered by police using hardware that tracks the movement and use of mobile phones. When Edward Snowden passed on to journalists the facts of massive warrantless spying in the Bush and Obama administrations, he had the journalists put their mobile devices where his was — in his refrigerator, as anywhere else would have alerted his former colleagues of their collective whereabouts.
The government spends hundreds of billions of dollars annually just to watch and follow us. Who authorized this? Why do we tolerate a society where we have hired a government to secure our rights and instead it engages in aggression against them?
*
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***
When the COVID-19 vaccine rollout to the public began in late 2020, medical professionals, public health agencies, and government spokespeople all assured the American public that the novel mRNA vaccines did not cause negative systematic effects to human bodies. They promised the public, many of whom were skeptical about the safety of a drug brought to market at “warp speed,” that the vaccines were “safe and effective.” [“Operation Warp Speed: Accelerated Covid-19 Vaccine Development Status and Efforts to Address Manufacturing Challenges.” Operation Warp Speed: Accelerated COVID-19 Vaccine Development Status and Efforts to Address Manufacturing Challenges | U.S. GAO, U.S. Government Accountability Office, 11 Feb. 2021, see this] [“Safety of Covid-19 Vaccines.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 8 Aug. 2022, see this]
As we know, those who questioned or challenged the “safe and effective” assurances were dismissed as “anti-vaxxers” and accused of wanting to kill others, especially the elderly. [Gostin, Lawrence O., and Eric A. Friedman. “This Is the Best Evidence Yet That Anti-Vaxxers Kill.” Yahoo! News, Yahoo!, 23 June 2022]
Due to this pressure, during the push to vaccinate everyone against COVID-19, few medical and public health experts spoke out about the need for long-term studies to protect Americans against possible catastrophic vaccine-related outcomes, including against possible negative impacts on fertility.
This attack on challengers to public health’s all out push, and the resulting censorship of the emerging problem, resulted in catastrophic harms to male fertility.
Pfizer’s own documents and other medical studies show:
mRNA vaccine ingredients can be transferred from one person to another via skin-to-skin contact, inhalation and via “sexual intercourse,” through bodily fluids. That is to say, vaccine “shedding” can occur via sexual contact, including via exposure to semen. [“A Phase 1/2/3, Placebo-Controlled, Randomized, Observer-Blind, Dose-Finding Study to Evaluate the Safety, Tolerability, Immunogenicity, and Efficacy of SARS-CoV-2 RNA Vaccine Candidates Against COVID-19 in Healthy Individuals,” Protocol Amendment 14, pp. 213, 246, 398, 431, 575, 607, 751, 783, 918, 948, 1073, 1103, 1226, 1255, 1378, 1406, 1522, 1549, 1663, 1688, 1813, 1836, 1949, 1969, 2081, 2100, 2211, 2228, and 2337.] In other words, according to Pfizer’s own internal documents, a vaccinated man can expose his sexual partner to the vaccine ingredients, via ejaculation.
Pfizer did not test “male reproductive toxicity”. Male reproductive toxicity is defined as adverse effects (negative impacts) related to sexual function and fertility in adult male [“Summary of the Public Assessment Report for COVID-19 Vaccine Pfizer/BioNTech.” GOV.UK, GOV.UK.]
Pfizer also did not test for adverse effects from vaccinated men’s semen, on the development of their offspring. [“Reproductive Toxicity March 2017 – SCHC.” org, SCHC-OSHA Alliance GHS/HazCom Information Sheet Workgroup, Mar. 2017]
mRNA vaccine ingredients travel throughout the body and gather in organs, including in the testes. [“A Tissue Distribution Study of a [3H]-Labelled Lipid Nanoparticle-mRNA Formulation Containing ALC-0315 and ALC-0159 Following Intramuscular Administration in Wistar Han Rats,” see this, p. 24.]
mRNA vaccines resulting in “anti-sperm antibodies” – that is to say, antibodies that treat sperm as an “invader”, and damage or kill it – is a known adverse event related to this form of vaccination. [“5.3.6 Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports of PF-07302048 (BNT162B2) Received Through 28-Feb-2021,” see this, p. 30.] [Salvador, Zaira, and Sandra Fernández. “What Are Antisperm Antibodies? – Causes & Treatment.” InviTRA, 8 Jan. 2019]
mRNA vaccines cause a staggering drop in semen concentration and total motile count. [Gat, Itai, et al. “Covid-19 Vaccination BNT162B2 Temporarily Impairs Semen Concentration and Total Motile Count among Semen Donors.” Wiley Online Library, Andrology, 17 June 2022]
By suppressing discussion of this information, public health agencies, medical professionals, and governments globally denied and continue to deny men true informed consent.
Transfer of mRNA Vaccine Ingredients Between Humans
We stated above that Pfizer knew that men can transmit the vaccine ingredients to their partners via sexual intercourse. Pfizer’s clinical trial protocol shows the company suspected that negative fertility impacts may occur in men, from its vaccine. Male trial participants had to follow specific “Male Participant Reproductive Inclusion Criteria.” These were spelled out in all fourteen versions of Pfizer’s protocol:
“Male participants are eligible to participate if they agree to the following requirements during the intervention period and for at least 28 days after the last dose of study intervention, which corresponds to the time needed to eliminate reproductive safety risk of the study intervention(s)”
The inclusion criteria requirements stated that men must:
Refrain from donating sperm.
In addition, the men in the Pfizer trials must either:
Abstain from heterosexual intercourse with a female of childbearing potential as their preferred and usual lifestyle. They must be abstinent from heterosexual intercourse with a female of childbearing age on a long-term and persistent basis and they must agree to remain abstinent.
OR the men in the Pfizer trial:
Must agree to use a male condom when engaging in any activity that allows for passage of ejaculate to another person.
In addition to male condom use, a highly effective method of contraception may be considered in WOCBP (women of childbearing age) partners of male participants.” [“A Phase 1/2/3, Placebo-Controlled, Randomized, Observer-Blind, Dose-Finding Study to Evaluate the Safety, Tolerability, Immunogenicity, and Efficacy of SARS-CoV-2 RNA Vaccine Candidates Against COVID-19 in Healthy Individuals,” Protocol Amendment 14, pp. 213, 246, 398, 431, 575, 607, 751, 783, 918, 948, 1073, 1103, 1226, 1255, 1378, 1406, 1522, 1549, 1663, 1688, 1813, 1836, 1949, 1969, 2081, 2100, 2211, 2228, and 2337.]
In other words, the men in the Pfizer trial agreed to abstain from heterosexual intercourse with childbearing age women or else, if they did have intercourse with women who could bear children, they agreed to use a condom and were advised to add an effective additional method of contraception. Reassuring, right? The Pfizer study constructs regarding total abstinence from sex with women who could bear children, or else the use of both condoms and other contraception, suggest that Pfizer suspected that vaccinated men’s ejaculate could affect both women and unborn children conceived during the trial or after.
Pfizer’s protocol documents also explain:
“An EDP (Exposure During Pregnancy) occurs if:
…A male participant who is receiving or has discontinued study intervention exposes a female partner prior to or around the time of conception.
A female is found to be pregnant while being exposed or having been exposed to study intervention due to environmental exposure. Below are examples of environmental exposure during pregnancy:
…A male family member or healthcare provider who has been exposed to the study intervention by inhalation or skin contact then exposes his female partner prior to or around the time of conception.” [Protocol Amendment 14, pp. 111, 319, 501, 677, 848, 1009, 1162, 1314, 1461, 1603, 1747, 1889, 2023, 2153, 2279, and 2346.]
Clearly, Pfizer showed strong concern about and precautions against exposure to the “study intervention” – that is, the mRNA vaccine – via bodily fluids contact such as exposure to ejaculate, and via skin-to-skin contact.
Yet as recently as July 2022, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) assured Americans that COVID-19 mRNA vaccine shedding – “the release or discharge of any of the vaccine components in or outside of the body” – is a “myth.” [“Myths and Facts about Covid-19 Vaccines.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 20 July 2022] Indeed a recent FOIA via America First Legal reveals that Carol Crawford of the CDC coordinated with Twitter employees to target tweets (including one by Dr. Naomi Wolf) about “shedding,” as an example, as CDC put it, of “misinformation.” But it was not, per Pfizer’s own documents, disinformation at all. According to the manufacturer, “shedding” was a real concern.
mRNA Vaccines’ Adverse Effects on Male Reproduction
National Institutes of Health (NIH) boldly stated on February 1, 2022, “COVID-19 vaccination does not reduce chances of conception…” [“Covid-19 Vaccination Does Not Reduce Chances of Conception, Study Suggests.” National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1 Feb. 2022] However, the NIH’s statement was and is false.
Pfizer did not initially evaluate its vaccine’s male “reproductive toxicity” – i.e., adverse effects on fertility in adult males – during clinical trials because the company was in a rush: “The absence of reproductive toxicity data is a reflection of the speed of development to first identify and select COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 for clinical testing and its rapid development to meet the ongoing urgent health need.” [“Summary of the Public Assessment Report for COVID-19 Vaccine Pfizer/BioNTech.” GOV.UK, GOV.UK]
But when Pfizer eventually did look at the mRNA vaccine’s impact on male fertility, the company used “untreated male” rats for its “Reproductive and Developmental Toxicity” studies. The untreated males mated with female rats that had been dosed with BNT162b2, Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine. [2.4 Nonclinical Overview, p. 29.]
In other words, Pfizer tested fertility effects on female mammals dosed with its mRNA product but left the males undosed.
Throughout the Pfizer documents, the issue arises that studies were constructed so that Pfizer (and the FDA) did not find what it chose not to look for.
How do scientists determine a new drug’s adverse effects on male fertility if they give only one-half of the reproducing population – the females – the treatment in question?
That same Pfizer document goes on to say, “Macroscopic and microscopic evaluation of male and female reproductive tissues from the repeat-dose toxicity studies with BNT162b2 showed no evidence of toxicity.” [see this, p. 30.]
This statement seems to indicate that the study sought to evaluate whether the vaccine was passed through bodily fluids and/or skin contact during intercourse between the treated females and untreated males.
But how convenient – the male rats’ reproductive tissues were declared free of toxicity; but the male rats had never been vaccinated at all.
Figure 1: Untreated Male Rates in Pfizer’s 2.4. Nonclinical Overview.
Since there were no vaccinated male rats at all in the Pfizer reproductive studies during its internal trials, it appears Pfizer, and since the human males in the Pfizer study had to promise to abstain from intercourse with childbearing age women or else use a condom PLUS another effective contraceptive – it appears that Western public health agencies decided to test the effects of mRNA vaccines on men’s reproduction simply by using the “intervention” – the mRNA vaccine – on human subjects, male as well as female, during a mass vaccination campaign.
mRNA Vaccine Ingredients Travel Throughout the Body and Gather in Organs
As we have seen in other DailyClout/War Room Pfizer Documents Research Volunteer Reports, medical and public health agency professionals assured the U.S. public that the COVID vaccine ingredients remained in the deltoid muscle when injected and did not disperse throughout the body. [Chandler, Robert W. “Pfizer Used Dangerous Assumptions, Rather than Research, to Guess at Outcomes.” DailyClout, DailyClout, 9 Aug. 2022]
However, the FDA received the Pfizer document,” A Tissue Distribution Study of a [3H]-Labelled Lipid Nanoparticle-mRNA Formulation Containing ALC-0315 and ALC-0159 Following Intramuscular Administration in Wistar Han Rats,” on November 9, 2020, over a month before Pfizer’s vaccine received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) and began to be injected into humans worldwide. The document shows shocking biodistribution results. [“A Tissue Distribution Study of a [3H]-Labelled Lipid Nanoparticle-mRNA Formulation Containing ALC-0315 and ALC-0159 Following Intramuscular Administration in Wistar Han Rats,” see this, p. 24.]
“Biodistribution” is a method of tracking where given ingredients travel in the body of an experimental animal or a human subject.The document clearly demonstrates that Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine contents – including lipid nanoparticles – enter the bloodstream, travel throughout the body, and accumulate in organs, including in the testes. Reference Table 1, “Mean (Sexes-Combined) Concentration of Total Radioactivity in Whole Blood, Plasma and (Continued) Tissues Following Single Intramuscular Administration of [3H]-08-A01-C01 to Wistar Han Rats – Target Dose Level: 50 µg mRNA/Animal; 1.29 mg Total Lipid/Animal – Results expressed as total lipid concentration (µg lipid equiv/g (mL)) and % of administered dose,” shown below. [“A Tissue Distribution Study of a [3H]-Labelled Lipid Nanoparticle-mRNA Formulation Containing ALC-0315 and ALC-0159 Following Intramuscular Administration in Wistar Han Rats,” see this, p. 24.]
How did medical and public health leaders remain so staunchly firm in their position that mRNA vaccination did not impact male fertility, even as they had access to Pfizer’s biodistribution study?
These experts who were swearing that the mRNA vaccine ingredients did not leave the injection site also had access to a 2018 NIH-published paper that clearly shows that nanoparticles — of which lipid nanoparticles are subtype [Murthy, Shashi K. “Nanoparticles in Modern Medicine: State of the Art and Future Challenges.” International Journal of Nanomedicine, Dove Medical Press, June 2007, see this] — could pass into the testes from the blood and cause male reproductive harm. The 2018 study showed that NPs accumulate in the testes to damage sperm quality and amount, as well as their “motility”, or ability to move effectively, a requirement of conception:
“NPs [nanoparticles] can pass through the blood-testis barrier…then accumulate in reproductive organs. NP accumulation damages organs (testis, epididymis…) by destroying Sertoli cells, Leydig cells, and germ cells, causing reproductive organ dysfunction that adversely affects sperm quality, quantity, morphology, and motility…”? [Wang, Ruolan, et al. “Potential Adverse Effects of Nanoparticles on the Reproductive System.” International Journal of Nanomedicine, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 11 Dec. 2018, see this]
To appreciate fully how NPs harm key components of healthy male sexual development and function, one must understand the roles of the damaged organs and cells, all crucial to male sexual health and even to male sexual development, mentioned above.
The “epididymis” is involved in transporting sperm from the testes. [Boskey , Elizabeth. “Anatomy and Function of the Epididymis.” Verywell Health, Verywell Health, 30 June 2022]
“Sertoli cells” are vital to the development of the testes. “Sertoli cells are of critical importance for testis development…[and] are the master regulators of testis development…” [Pelosi, Emanuele, and Peter Koopman. “Development of the Testis.” Sertoli Cell – an Overview | ScienceDirect Topics, Science Direct, 2017] “During [the sperm developmental process], developing sperm cells are closely linked with the Sertoli cells.” [Carlson, Bruce. “Gametogenesis.” Sertoli Cell – an Overview | ScienceDirect Topics, Science Direct, 2014]
“Leydig cells” are present in the testicular interstitial tissue. Their main function is to produce testosterone for the maintenance of sperm creation and development and male body development. [Huhtaniemi, Ilpo, and Katja Teerds. “Leydig Cell.” Leydig Cell – an Overview | ScienceDirect Topics, Science Direct, 2018] Thus, when Leydig cells are damaged, one could say that physical masculinity itself is damaged. This is especially urgent to consider when we reflect on the fact that small boys and teenagers, who have not reached or completed puberty, are being injected with mRNA vaccines containing lipid nanoparticles.
“Germ cells” “are…precursors of…sperm cells. [“Germ Cells – Definition, Embryonic to Gametes, vs Somatic Cells.” MicroscopeMaster, MicroscopeMaster.com.]
Thus, these excerpts and citations show that:
lipid nanoparticles gather in human organs including the testes,
nanoparticles are detrimental to normal male reproduction, and
Big Pharma and public health agencies knowingly gambled with harms to boys’ and male teens’ sexual development, and with all ages of males’ testosterone levels, older males’ sperm counts, and male fertility.
A Sperm-Related mRNA Vaccine Adverse Event That Causes Male Infertility
An alarming mRNA vaccine-induced reproductive Adverse Event of Special Interest (AESI) came to light at the end of February 2021. Pfizer’s own document lists “anti-sperm antibody positive” among its 1,290 AESIs. [“5.3.6 Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports of PF-07302048 (BNT162B2) Received Through 28-Feb-2021,” see this, p. 30.]
What is an “ASA”?
According to inviTRA, a certified medical magazine created by doctors and fertility experts, “The presence of antisperm antibodies (ASA) in the ejaculate is an immune cause of male infertility. The adhesion of antibodies to sperm affects their motility, making the sperm’s journey to the egg highly difficult or even impossible.” [Salvador, Zaira, and Sandra Fernández. “What Are Antisperm Antibodies? – Causes & Treatment.” InviTRA, 8 Jan. 2019]
This late February 2021 Pfizer document confirming anti-sperm antibodies is the first documented indication I found within the Pfizer records that Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine negatively impacts male fertility.
Note that Pfizer knew about this male infertility AESI almost 12 months prior to the clearly false NIH statement from February of 2022: “COVID-19 vaccination does not reduce chances of conception…” [“Covid-19 Vaccination Does Not Reduce Chances of Conception, Study Suggests,” 1 Feb. 2022.] The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knew about this AESI by April 30, 2021. [“5.3.6 Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports of PF-07302048 (BNT162B2) Received Through 28-Feb-2021,” see this]
For nearly a year, then, the FDA, public health agencies, and medical organizations ignored this “cause of male infertility” contained in the Pfizer documents – all of which were sent to the FDA. Then they lied about it.
They kept silent for a year and then misled the public, rather than alerting the public. The mass vaccination campaign continued, without even a brief pause, and again, men were denied informed consent.
The Suspension of Informed Consent for Men Continues
Contrary to established medical ethics, Pfizer and public health agencies did not disclose the true impacts of mRNA gene therapy vaccines on male fertility and, thus, as noted above, denied men informed consent. [“Informed Consent – Definition, Examples, Cases, Processes.” Legal Dictionary, Legal Dictionary, 7 Dec. 2015, see this.]
In fact, the medical establishment, governments, public health agencies worldwide, Big Pharma, and Big Tech colluded to suppress COVID vaccine facts, risks, and alternatives. [Tucker, Jeffrey A, and Debbie Lerman. “Besties: Twitter, Facebook, Google, CDC, NIH, WHO.” Brownstone Institute, Brownstone Institute, 3 Aug. 2022]
In January of 2021, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine posted the “Joint Statement Regarding COVID-19 Vaccine in Men Desiring Fertility from the Society for Male Reproduction and Urology (SMRU) and the Society for the Study of Male Reproduction (SSMR)” encouraging COVID vaccination for men, including for male fertility treatment patients, despite their having no data about its impact on male reproductive health:
“As of January 9, 2021, there are no data about the impact of the COVID-19 vaccine on male…fertility. […] the American Society for Reproductive Medicine does not recommend withholding the vaccine from patients who are planning to conceive, and emphasizes that patients undergoing fertility treatment and pregnant patients should be encouraged to receive vaccination based on eligibility criteria.” [“Update No. 11 Covid-19 Vaccination December 16, 2020 – ASRM.” American Society for Reproductive Medicine, American Society for Reproductive Medicine, 9 Jan. 2021]
Additionally, for men, SMRU and SSMR recommended:
The COVID-19 vaccine should not be withheld from men desiring fertility who meet criteria for vaccination.
COVID-19 vaccines should be offered to men desiring fertility, similar to men not desiring fertility, when they meet criteria for vaccination.
The organization went on to blame declines in sperm production on COVID-19 vaccine-related fevers. [“Joint Statement Regarding Covid-19 Vaccine in Men Desiring Fertility from the Society for Male Reproduction and Urology (SMRU) and the Society for the Study of Male Reproduction (SSMR).” ASRM, American Society for Reproductive Medicine, 9 Jan. 2021]
The ASRM, SMRU, and SSMR – all reproductive societies – stated in unison in 2021 that there were no data about fertility impacts and that men “desiring fertility” should take the drug for which fertility impacts are unknown.
But how could they advise that men take the vaccine if there were no data proving that it would not affect fertility?
The slanted messaging continued when the “Semen Analysis Parameters Following Pfizer’s COVID-19 Vaccine” clinical study said, “Unfounded claims in the popular media linked a possible correlation between the COVID-19 vaccine and potential…male infertility. Currently, there is no information in the medical literature which examined semen analysis parameters following the COVD-19 vaccine.” [“Semen Analysis Parameters Following Pfizer’s COVID-19 Vaccine.” Full Text View – ClinicalTrials.gov, ClinicalTrials.gov, 2 Mar. 2021]
Again, how exactly could public speculation about potential mRNA vaccine-induced infertility be “unfounded” when those leading the study admit that, as of February 2021, there were no data to show that such a concern was invalid?
The push to brush off fertility concerns continued throughout 2021.
In September 2021, Fertility and Sterility journal published a study which concluded, “After receiving the two doses of the vaccines, we did not observe a clinically significant sperm parameter decline within the cohort, suggesting the vaccines do not negatively impact male fertility potential.”
However, the study was flawed. It went on to admit: “The limitations of the study include the small number of men enrolled; limited generalizability beyond young, healthy men; short follow-up; and lack of a control group.” [Gonzalez, Daniel C., et al. “Sperm Parameters before and after COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination.” JAMA, JAMA Network, 20 July 2021] [Gonzalez, Daniel, et al. “Effect of COVID-19 Mrna Vaccines on Sperm Quality.” Fertility and Sterility, Published by Elsevier Inc., 17 Sep. 2021, see this]
True experiments always include at least one control group that does not receive the experimental treatment. Without a control group, a study’s outcome cannot be certain. Yet, despite long-established scientific norms being cast aside, “the science” told men in this case that COVID vaccines would not negatively affect their fertility.
At the end of 2021, a Chinese study published truths that previous Western studies had refused to acknowledge. The study validated fertility-related vaccine concerns: “Although several fertility societies have announced that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are unlikely to affect fertility, there is no denying that the current evidence is very limited, which is one of the reasons for vaccine hesitancy…” The Chinese study went on to say, “…given the potential damage of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) to the reproductive system, some individuals suspect that the vaccine which mimics the virus (mRNA vaccine) may also affect fertility via the same mechanism.” It even addressed the fact that COVID vaccines were rushed to market: “Admittedly, data on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are incomplete when compared with traditional vaccines based on long-term studies with large samples.” [Chen, Fei, et al. “Effects of COVID-19 and Mrna Vaccines on Human Fertility.” Human Reproduction (Oxford, England), Oxford University Press, 27 Dec. 2021, see this.]
Finally, cracks were appearing in mRNA vaccine and fertility information dam, and those cracks prefaced a stunning revelation that was about to drop.
Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine in Fact Cause an Astonishing Drop in Male Fertility
On June 22, 2022, Andrology published a bombshell study, “Covid-19 vaccination BNT162b2 temporarily impairs semen concentration and total motile count among semen donors.” The study, which did not even include the effects of additional booster injections, showed a staggering drop in male fertility, with an average decrease of 22.1% across the study group, from the initial injections alone. The study concluded, “Systemic immune response after BNT162b2 vaccine is a reasonable cause for transient semen concentration and TMC (total motile count) decline.” [Gat, Itai, et al. “Covid-19 Vaccination BNT162B2 Temporarily Impairs Semen Concentration and Total Motile Count among Semen Donors.” Wiley Online Library, Andrology, 17 June 2022]
Each study participant provided multiple semen samples throughout the study’s duration as follows:
T0 = pre-vaccination baseline
T1 = 15-45 days post-vaccination
T2 = 75-120 days post-vaccination
T3 = 150+ days post-vaccination
The investigators studied participants for five months (T1-T3 above) after they received Pfizer’s vaccine. Table 2 below demonstrates the troubling results, which have a 95% confidence interval. T3 collection averaged a time frame of 174 (+/- 26.8) days.
So, at close to six months post-vaccination, sperm concentration, motility, and total motile count were all still in significant states of decline versus pre-vaccination levels. Sperm concentration had not recovered at all and was, in fact, at its lowest point yet.
Figure 3: From “Covid-19 vaccination BNT162b2 temporarily impairs semen concentration and total motile count among semen donors,” p. 4.
Despite these alarming outcomes, the published study went on to encourage vaccination: “Since misinformation about health-related subjects represents a public health threat our findings should support vaccinations programs. Further studies concentrating on different vaccines and populations (ex. subfertile patients) are urgently required.” [Gat, Itai, et al., 17 June 2022, see this, p. 6.]
Alarmingly, men continue to receive incomprehensibly contradictory messages, being told to keep injecting the mRNA vaccines even when the study that contains these exhortations, clearly demonstrates adverse fertility results – to men.
The Public Is Left with More Questions Than Answers
This review of documents and studies, culminating with one that shows shocking data about mRNA vaccines conclusively reducing men’s fertility, gives rise to important questions:
When, if at all, do men’s fertility fully recover from such a drastic decline after a two-dose vaccination course?
Do boosters, which twenty-nine percent of the world’s population have received as of July 31, 2021, have an even stronger negative impact on men’s fertility? [Holder, Josh. “Tracking Coronavirus Vaccinations around the World.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 29 Jan. 2021]
Does giving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines to pre-pubescent and adolescent males affect their normal sexual development and ability to reproduce, as the implication of the study on NPs in testes suggest it may?
Is the decline in birth rates being seen in highly vaccinated countries at least in part due to how mRNA vaccines have conclusively affected male fertility? [Chudov, Igor. “Igor’s Newsletter.” Substack.]
What factors in the well-documented “baby die-off” being seen around the globe may come from the effects of men being vaccinated with mRNA vaccines? [Wolf, Naomi. “Dear Friends, Sorry to Announce a Genocide.” Substack, Outspoken with Dr Naomi Wolf, 30 May 2022.]
Why did pharmaceutical companies, public health officials, medical professionals, and governments tell the public that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines did not affect men’s fertility when they had no data to support such a conclusion?
Why, when health officials, doctors, and governments received data confirming mRNA vaccines negatively impact men’s fertility, did they not raise the alarm and fight to give men informed consent?
The public must demand answers to these questions from pharmaceutical companies, world governments, public health agencies, and the medical establishment. Those entities blocked men from having the ability to give informed consent and made them unwitting participants in an ongoing clinical trial of a novel gene therapy.
Such assaults on humanity and its ability to reproduce, and especially, the potential harms to boys, youths, and unborn babies, must be challenged. Those responsible for human experimentation that demonstrably harmed male fertility, must be held accountable.
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Featured image is from Behind the FDA Curtain
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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***
More than 55 percent of children ranging in age between 6 months and 2 years had a “systemic reaction” after their first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, according to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Sept. 1.
In addition, almost 60 percent had a reaction to the second dose of the Moderna vaccine, in the CDC survey of more than 13,000 children.
A systemic reaction is a response beyond the injection site. While the most common systemic reactions were fatigue, fever, irritability, and crying, parents of more than 6 percent of the children in the study said their child was unable to perform normal activities after the second dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine.
The CDC collected the data through a program called V-Safe—a smartphone-based monitoring system that operates through an app that parents download to their phones.
Between June 18 and Aug. 21, parents of more than 10,000 young children reported reactions to the CDC through V-Safe in the seven days after their child had received a COVID-19 vaccination.
Parents of 8,338 children ages 6 months to 2 years who received the Moderna vaccine reported information through V-Safe, with 55.7 percent reporting a systemic reaction after the first dose and about 58 percent after the second dose. For the Pfizer vaccine, parents of 4,749 children ages 6 months to 2 years submitted reports showing that 55.8 percent had a systemic reaction after the first dose and about 47 percent after the second dose of the vaccine.
The most frequently reported reactions for children 6 months to 2 years were irritability or crying, sleepiness, and fever. The most common reactions for children aged 3 to 5 years were injection site pain, fatigue, and fever.
Health Impacts
The data also showed a more serious reaction category labeled “any health impact.”
About 10 percent of all children 6 months to 2 years were reported to have a “health impact” after getting their first dose of either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine. For the Moderna vaccine, slightly more children had a health impact after the second dose; for the Pfizer vaccine, it was slightly less.
The information was presented to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) on Sept. 1 as part of an overview of all data related to the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
In addition to V-Safe, data was presented summarizing reports from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and the Vaccine Safety Data Link (VSD), which includes data from several large health maintenance organizations in the United States.
All three systems look at the safety of vaccines after they’ve already gone to market and have been administered to large numbers of people.
Tom Shimabukuro, the head of the CDC’s vaccine safety team, headed the presentation and told committee members that no “statistical signals” of COVID-19 vaccine reactions were found for young children in the VSD data.
Shimabukuro also said that systemic reactions were “commonly reported” following vaccines.
However, other medical professionals such as Dr. Meryl Nass of Children’s Health Defense have expressed caution over the reported reactions, pointing to the high number of systemic reaction reports among very young children.
She told The Epoch Times on Sept. 2 that she was questioning why the government doesn’t collect and present more information on these cases.
“That stuff is not considered by the CDC to be very important … It’s assumed that all those side effects go away after a few days and leave the people perfectly well,” she said, mentioning the fevers and fatigue. “Those reactions may, in fact, be harbingers of more serious reactions, but nobody to my knowledge has published anything looking at whether these acute local or systemic reactions are indicators of a later problem.”
The FDA approved the emergency-use authorization of COVID-19 vaccines for children aged 6 months to 5 years on June 17. According to the CDC, about 599,460 children in that age group have received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and about 440,770 have received the Moderna vaccine.
From June 18 through Aug. 31, about 1 million doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were administered to children in this age group.
In a review of the VAERS data on young children from June 18 to Aug. 31, the CDC had 496 reports of adverse events for children aged 6 months to 4 years who received the Pfizer vaccine and 521 for children aged 6 months to 5 years who received the Moderna shot, with an adverse event defined as a possible side effect.
More than 98 percent of reports were for what the CDC considers non-serious events.
There are 220 reports of persons aged 5 months to 5 years of age being taken to the emergency room following a COVID-19 vaccine. In one case involving a 2-year-old boy in Arizona, the VAERS report says he was given the Pfizer vaccine on July 29 and on July 30 had a “life-threatening episode.”
The report lists his symptoms as “clammy skin and vomiting leading (8 minutes) to difficulty breathing.” The boy “turned blue,” was “limp” and “non-responsive,” and “fully stopped breathing for two minutes,” according to the report.
He was revived after chest compressions.
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Featured image is from Steve Kirsch’s Newsletter
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan told reporters recently, that Ankara needs to “secure further steps with Syria.” He added, “You have to accept that you cannot stop political dialogue and diplomacy between countries. There should always be such dialogue.” Ankara’s goal, he added, was not to defeat Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu disclosed previously that he spoke with his Syrian counterpart, Faisal Mekdad, at a Non-Aligned Movement summit held in Belgrade in October 2021, in the first public high-level meeting between Turkish and Syrian government officials since 2011. In that meeting, Cavusoglu reportedly told Mekdad that “we need to somehow come to terms with the opposition and the regime in Syria. Otherwise, there will be no lasting peace”.
Over the past year, Turkey has also mended fences with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. Although Turkey backed the deposed Muslim Brotherhood leader of Egypt, former President Morsi, Turkish officials also appear to be working towards restoring ties with Egypt. This comes after several Arab states have restored relations with Damascus and have begun a process of bringing Assad in from the cold.
Erdogan’s AKP party and his opposition have called for normalization with Damascus to deal with the Syrian refugee issue which is being used as a political tool.
In the last meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Erdogan in Sochi, Putin urged Erdogan to reach out to Assad and restore relations to solve a long list of issues affecting the two neighbors, with security issues being at the top of the list. This would propel the political solution to the Syrian crisis after years of stalemate.
Both Turkey and Syria want to see US troops withdraw from Syria, and neither wants an independent, Kurdish-dominated state in northeast Syria.
The US is dead-set against restoring relations with Damascus and has advised Ankara to not move forward in a peace effort. Washington’s policy on Syria is to keep the stalemate.
Turkish election June 2023
In June 2023 Erdogan will face a re-election vote, and his poll numbers are dismal, while the Syrian refugee issue is one of the top concerns for Turkish voters, regardless of their party. Erdogan’s ruling party, AKP (Islamist Justice and Development), is under threat from other parties, as Erdogan is losing support even among his base.
Turks are unemployed, inflation is at 80%, the currency is devalued, and they see the 3.7 million Syrian refugees as the cause of their suffering. Erdogan is being blamed for the economic mismanagement of the country and the opposition parties promise economic reforms. Syrian refugees are only under ‘temporary protection status in Turkey. Erdogan’s pledge to return the millions of refugees to Syria was designed to gain support and votes and matches the promises made by his opposition.
There are now calls to exclude Syrians who have received Turkish citizenship from voting. Even if that were to be approved, it won’t help the Syrians in Turkey, because virtually every party has promised to send them home, such as Ümit Özdağ, founder of the far-right Zafer (Victory) Party. Seeing the writing on the wall, social media videos show thousands of Syrians in Turkey are now migrating to Europe in scenes reminiscent of summer 2015.
The US-NATO attack on Syria for regime change
In March 2011 US President Obama and NATO began a regime change project directed at Syria. Turkey was a US ally, and member of NATO, and was tasked with a huge role in the war. The tents were up on the border in Turkey even before the first refugee walked in. By May 2011, Syrian opposition activists convened in Istanbul and set up their headquarters to support the destruction of Syria. The opposition was made up almost entirely of Muslim Brotherhood members who had not lived in Syria in decades and received the full support of Erdogan.
The National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces commonly named the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) has reacted to the Turkish overtures of reconciliation by claiming they are just rumors, but sources have reported they are in a panic to lose their funding and status.
The Free Syrian Army began in July 2011 with the CIA and the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) funding, training, and arming fighters who sought to establish an Islamic State in Syria, while following the Muslim Brotherhood ideology of Radical Islam. In 2017, President Trump cut off the CIA program to support the terrorists, who the western media had at first dubbed “freedom fighters”, which prompted Erdogan to establish the Syrian National Army, which are Radical Islamic terrorists left over from the CIA program. According to a 2019 poll, 47.5% of Turks see the Free Syrian Army as an “enemy”.
The Syrian refugees in Turkey
Syrians are stereotyped in Turkish media as either backward religious extremists, or as cowards for not fighting to defend their country from terrorism and invasion.
Syrians who have obtained Turkish citizenship still face discrimination in the workforce and social life. The official policy was never to integrate them into society, but to go home as soon as possible.
Racist attacks and hate speech have been on the rise as the economic situation worsens. In 2020, 17-year-old market worker Hamza Ajan was beaten to death, in 2022, 22-year-old Sherif Khaled al-Ahmed was killed by six young Turkish men in Istanbul, also in 2022 in Istanbul Sultan Abdul Baset Jabneh was killed. In 2022 in Gaziantep, 70-year-old Leila Muhammad was videoed being kicked in the face and insulted by a Turkish man in the street. The video was seen online by millions and portrayed the unwelcome existence in Turkey. The UN refugee agency said that an estimated 800 refugees are returning to Syria each week from Turkey.
The Turkish protected Idlib
The last remaining terrorist-controlled area in Syria is the province of Idlib in the northwest. Hayat Tahir al-Sham (HTS) is holding about 3 million persons as human hostages, while the Turkish military protects them from attack by either the Syrian or Russian military.
HTS was formed named Jibhat al-Nusra, which was the Al Qaeda branch in Syria. The HTS routinely aligns with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS). Almost every IS leader killed by the US in airstrikes has been in Idlib.
If Turkey renews its relationship with Syria, HTS will disappear, and their foreign fighters from Central Asia and China will have to go home, even after it was fake Turkish passports issued by Erdogan which moved them from their Uyghur homes to Idlib
The US-Kurdish alliance against ISIS
The US military invaded Syria to fight ISIS, and though ISIS are defeated, the US never left. The US partnered with a renegade Kurdish militia, SDF and YPJ, who are affiliated with the international terrorist group PKK, which has killed thousands in Turkey over three decades.
The Turkish invasion to push back the Kurds
In August 2016, Turkey invaded northern Syria. The objective was to push back and contain, the SDF and YPJ, who they consider to be terrorists and the enemy of Turkey. The fact that Turkey’s enemy is the partner of the US has strained relations to the boiling point. Damascus shares a common interest with Ankara in stopping Kurdish separatist ambitions which will return the northeast to the central government and create a security zone along the border.
Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal al-Mekdad has called for Turkey to withdraw its military from Syria, to stop supporting terrorism, stop interfering in Syrian domestic issues, and solve the water issues between them.
Erdogan and Assad are both invited to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in September and there exists the opportunity for a continuation of the Turkish moves toward Syria.
In the past, Erdogan vowed to pray in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, and that might happen.
*
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***
William J. Perry, the U.S. Secretary of Defense during Bill Clinton’s first term (ending 20 January 1997), issued an article on September 5th, “How the U.S. Lost Russia”, whose concluding paragraph opened with “There is no organic reason why Russia should be our enemy. Putin is the enemy, not Russia.” In other words, he’s advocating for regime-change in Russia, like America did with regards to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Salvador Allende in Chile, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, and also leaders in many other countries — leaders virtually all of whom had had good relations with Russia’s or the prior Soviet Government, even if not outright favorable toward Russia. (Perhaps their refusals to join the U.S. regime’s organizations against Russia constituted actually the main reason why the U.S. regime sought to overthrow and replace each one of these rulers.)
However, Bill Perry himself, while he was in power, as the SecDef, was working to lay foundations for America’s ultimate conquest of Russia that were already building upon the foundation that Clinton’s immediate predecessor, GHW Bush, had started laying when, on 24 February 1990, Bush secretly informed German Chancellor Helmut Kohl that after the Soviet Union would break up and its communism end, and its military alliance the Warsaw Pact that had been established in response to Truman’s having created America’s military Alliance NATO would likewise end, America and its NATO allies would continue forward with the objective now being ultimately to conquer Russia itself.
Shortly thereafter, Bush communicated essentially this same message, likewise privately, to the heads of the other key nations that were in NATO.
As regards those leaders’ objections that they all, like GHW Bush’s own Administration, had already promised to Gorbachev that if the Soviet Union would break up, then NATO would not be expanded “one inch to the east” (i.e., toward Russia’s border), Bush told the leader, in response, that he had given this instruction to them all only in order to fool Gorbachev, but that, in fact, as regards actually delivering on that promise, they wouldn’t do that: “To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn’t.”
In other words, he was instructing each of them that America continues actually with much the same objective that Hitler had had toward Russia in WW II: to conquer that nation, which had (and, even after the U.S.S.R’s breakup, still has) by far the largest landmass (and thus the most natural resources) of any nation on Earth. This was his instruction to them, and they all followed through on it: all of them, now under Bill Clinton, and subsequently under other U.S. Presidents, would and did vote in favor of admitting into NATO all of the former Warsaw Pact countries that they could (via bribe or otherwise) get to apply for membership into America’s anti-Russian military alliance. They all did it.
“President Bill Clinton saw Russian leader Boris Yeltsin as indispensable for promoting American interests following the collapse of the Soviet Union, often prompting him to take controversial steps to ensure Yeltsin’s political survival, according to top-level memoranda of conversation[s] just released from the Clinton presidential library.”
Of course, Putin was the immediate successor to Yeltsin, and as unwelcomed as Yeltsin was welcomed. Instead of trying to overthrow Yeltsin, the U.S. Government helped to keep Yeltsin in power there.
As regards whether Putin has been better for the Russian people than Yeltsin was: Putin became Russia’s leader in 2000, and here is the answer: Russia’s economy sunk under Yeltsin and soared under Putin; and, starting in 2005 — when regulations against alcohol kicked in — male life-expectancies also soared in Russia.
Putin’s job approval-ratings amongst Russians have almost always been far higher than that of America’s Presidents’ since 2000 have been at the comparable time. This fact greatly disturbs America’s ‘news’-media, so that, for example, on 6 March 2016, the Washington Post headlined “How to understand Putin’s jaw-droppingly high approval ratings” and closed by saying, “‘Switch off the television, and this popularity would go away in two months,’ said Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister who is now a leading opposition politician.”
In other words: Russian propaganda does it. On 22 March 2022, CNN bannered “Former Russian TV host explains surprising Putin poll”, and presented a former Russian journalist who described Russia as a dictatorship, but who might have left Russia for the U.S. in order to make more money trashing his home-country in its main enemy nation than continuing to be a journalist in his home-country.
However that may be (and I won’t speculate about that), these U.S. propaganda-agencies against Russia haven’t yet succeeded in providing any other reason to explain Putin’s job-performance-approval among his fellow-Russians than to insinuate that, somehow, it provides yet further evidence against (and so might help to ‘justify’ the U.S. regime’s constant efforts to overthrow and replace) Putin, while they also allege, like the liar Bill Perry does, that “There is no organic reason why Russia should be our enemy. Putin is the enemy, not Russia.”
No, it’s not true: the fact is that the U.S. regime is Russia’s enemy, not merely Putin’s enemy.
The U.S. regime demands nothing less than to take over Russia. Putin fights against that; and that fact could be the best possible single explanation why his job-approval ratings are, and have been, vastly higher than those of his American counterparts have been. It’s a possibility that America’s propaganda-agencies (alias ‘news’-media) never even so much as consider.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
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After Russia launched its counteroffensive against NATO aggression in Europe, the US-led political West vowed to “isolate“ Russia and “cripple“ its economy. Yet, the Eurasian giant didn’t only weather the storm largely unscathed, but it even managed to profit while the sanctions boomerang started ravaging Western economies. Russia has been able to maintain its economic strength, powering through the sanctions and even establishing alternative payment systems with major global powers such as China and India. And yet, the US, as the leading Western power, the one which pushed its European and other vassals into an economic war with Russia, with devastating consequences for the EU and other economies, continues doing business with Moscow.
The US is currently importing over $1 billion per month in Russian wood, metals, food and other goods. More than 3,600 ships from Russia have arrived at American ports since February 24, according to statistics cited by the Associated Press. While that is nearly 50% less in shipments over the same period compared to last year, it still amounts to over $6 billion in imports. The sheer quantity of goods and commodities from Russia entering the US suggests the troubled Biden administration is directly involved in a failure to “isolate“ the Russian economy, as the US incumbent president promised in late February. Due to so-called “wind down“ periods that allow companies to complete previous deals, many of the products and commodities continue to be imported into the US long after the Biden administration imposed sanctions on those goods, including Russian oil and natural gas.
However, there are exceptions to this as well. The import of other crucial Russian commodities, such as fertilizer, came at the request of the Biden administration itself, which has urged US companies to make up for shortages. Although the US has ordered the seizure of luxury yachts owned by rich Russians with supposed “ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin“, the AP found that many companies from the US and EU are still importing millions of dollars in metal from a Russian firm that makes parts for VKS (Russian Aerospace Forces) fighter jets, highlighting yet another hypocritical discrepancy in Western sanctions campaign. And yet, Washington is trying to exert diplomatic pressure on others to stop doing business with Moscow. While many have followed the US diktat, others are not only keeping their economic ties with Russia, but are even expanding them. For instance, Turkey, a NATO member since 1952, has doubled its oil imports from Russia this year.
This hypocritical approach has made many other countries, including major global powers, such as India, frustrated, as they are being criticized for their ties with Russia, while the US gets to cherry pick which ties with Moscow it can keep in order to prevent disruptions to its economy. This has nearly nullified the US attempts to strengthen ties with India and get New Delhi into its fold, despite the fact that American troops are currently engaged in military exercises with their Indian counterparts. And yet, just like Turkey, New Delhi has similarly significantly increased energy imports from Russia, despite US pressure not to do so. In addition, the Indian rupee has become a major currency for the diamond trade, allowing buyers to bypass anti-Russian sanctions, pushing India even closer to Moscow in this regard.
Although the failed economic siege of Russia was also meant to diminish the Eurasian giant’s nearly unmatched military might (which only the US can compare to), it has so far been completely inconsequential. Worse yet, it even had an opposite effect, as Russia is now expanding and strengthening its military, including the increase in production of weapons such as the Su-57, which has proven itself in the special military operation against the Kiev-based Neo-Nazi junta. This resilience isn’t limited to the Russian military. With Russian energy exports far exceeding last year’s levels in recent months and the Russian ruble rallying against the US dollar, the Eurasian giant’s economy is also faring far better than those of the EU members.
Still, the question remains, what will the EU and other US vassals do when the winter comes? Will Washington send food, oil, gas and other essential commodities? How will the “moral highground“ of “sticking it to Putin“ help heat homes, feed hundreds of millions of hungry (and angry) citizens and power entire economies and countries? How will the EU and other governments explain to their voters that all this is “worth doing“ so that the “young, vibrant democracy in Kiev“ can survive the “unprovoked brutal Russian invasion“?
And what will Europe look like in 2023 after it goes through a complete political unraveling? Whatever happens to Europe and other US vassals, one thing is certain – America will keep importing essential commodities from Russia while pressuring others not to do it. However, this isn’t necessarily bad, as it will be a perfect litmus test of sovereignty for many around the globe and an excellent indicator of who will get the privilege of joining the new multipolar world of sovereign nations.
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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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***
Three months from now, an EU-wide embargo on Russian crude oil imports will kick in, shutting off almost all shipments of the commodity from Russia to Europe. But right now, Europe is importing over 1 million barrels of Russian crude daily and has been doing so for the last month. Someone is stocking up before the taps turn dry.
While they publicly condemn Russia for its actions in Ukraine and equally publicly assure their constituents that sanctions are working, European (and other) politicians make no mention of the continuing Russian oil purchases.
Yet, Russia is exporting some 3.32 million barrels of crude daily by sea, Bloomberg calculations have shown, which means Europe is buying a third of that, while it still can. And this means that nothing has changed since June when the embargo was approved, and Europe will have to find alternative oil suppliers at a time of likely higher prices.
Right now, prices are slumping because of new lockdowns in China and expectations of rate hikes by central banks, but once the embargo door shuts, chances are that prices will rebound just when Europe finds it most painful. And that is exactly why it’s stocking up now on the oil it’s about to ban.
It’s not only oil that Europe is stocking up on, either. All fossil fuels are in greater and more urgent demand on the continent than they have been for years. The FT called it “the unavoidable evil of wartime fossil fuels” in a recent report and the European Union has kept repeating that the emission reduction plans are still in place although it is increasingly looking like they’ve taken the back seat to energy security.
Exports of oil from Russia to northern Europe rose particularly markedly in the first week of this month, the Bloomberg calculations showed, suggesting India’s Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri, who told CNBC this week that “I said the Europeans buy more in one afternoon than I do in a quarter. I’d be surprised if that is not the condition still.”
Puri’s comments came in response to a question about criticism leveled at India for continuing to buy crude from Russia despite Western sanctions and condemnation for the invasion of Ukraine.
The Indian top oil official took things a step further, as well. Asked about whether he had any moral qualms about importing oil from Russia, he said “No, there’s no conflict. I have a moral duty to my consumer. Do I as a democratically elected government want a situation where the petrol pump runs dry?”
It would be difficult to argue this point for any politician, even a European one.
One might reasonably argue that the European Union is not an authoritarian state in which the government tells commodity traders where to buy their oil from. However, one could equally argue that the bloc is trying to turn into precisely that sort of an authoritarian state.
Earlier this month, the FT reported that the European Commission had drafted a document seeking sweeping powers over European businesses. The sweeping powers, if approved, would include the “powers to require businesses to stockpile supplies and break delivery contracts in order to shore up supply chains in the event of a crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic.”
Deciding what constitutes a crisis would also be the prerogative of the European Commission under this draft document. Businesses have not exactly welcomed the suggestion that they could be told what to produce, stockpile, and who they trade with by the EC, so the sweeping powers are far from a certain thing. Yet, there is more than one signal the EU is moving into a more centralized-intervention style of government amid the energy crisis.
Right now, Brussels is mulling over direct intervention into energy markets because of the tidal wave of margin calls looming over an already struggling energy industry. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that the suspension of power derivatives was among the options, along with a cap on the price of gas used for power generation.
The power market has a lot more to do with the price of gas than oil, but it’s worth recalling that some European utilities switched from gas to oil for power generation when gas prices skyrocketed earlier this year. Prices have not exactly returned to normal yet, so oil continues to be a viable alternative for power generation. And in three months, imports are going to take a 1-million-bpd dive. Unless, of course, buyers find an alternative.
In all fairness, alternative sources of crude oil are abundant. Middle Eastern producers, for example, would be only too happy to sell their oil to Europe. So would Nigeria and Angola. Yet they would be setting the price. One cannot help but wonder if the European Union will start threatening OPEC with a price cap, too.
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Irina is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry.
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***
(The title “Money is no Mystery” is adopted from the famed speech by that title delivered by Charles E. Coughlin on December 30th, 1934)
We cannot stop this silent takeover of the American economy, and of the Earth’s economy, a takeover making use of the covert devaluation of money, the reduction of the Federal Reserve and the Department of the Treasury to agents for the rich, unless we confidently and bravely propose an alternative and simultaneously declare that the monetary and currency policies of the “public private partnership” of the billionaires are illegal and immoral.
The rich have any number of tricks to fool us into accepting the false idols that they have prepared so lovingly, to cajole us into welcoming the Trojan horse of digital currencies, just as we were forced to accept COVID payouts that made us dependent on an unconstitutional government, a United States of multinational private equity following a classified constitution for the few.
Creating false money and branding it as our currency is an act of counterfeiting, even if that act is undertaken by firms with fancy Wall Street offices run by gentlemen wearing three-piece suits.
That act in itself, even if covered over with the thin veneer of government institutions, is grounds to arrest the stakeholders (not just the CEOs) of these banks and to seize their assets.
But there are a few steps that must come first.
We must face the reality of contemporary America as it is, not as we wish it were.
That brave act will lead us to the painful conclusion that the takeover of the Executive and Legislative branches is so complete that lobbying against, advocacy against, the rule of money by the banks is not the first step towards our liberation.
No, we must first establish a currency which will serve as the foundation for a productive, not speculative, moral, not extractive, economic system that follows the Constitution and natural law, one that is independent of the poisoned Federal Reserve, one that offers a full-formed alterative to the slavery that awaits us.
The transformation of money must be revolutionary. Progressive change is no longer possible. But it must be revolutionary in a sense that appeals to the better angels of our citizens, not the dogs of war who bay at our doorstep.
A revolutionary dollar in five easy steps
1) Education for the citizens about money
Economics is the most corrupt and purposely obscure field of pseudoscience, a devious practice run by high priests who attribute the purposeful destruction of our economy by billionaires to science, suggesting that hyperinflation and overproduction are the equivalent of the snow and rain, proposing that the raising or lowering of interest rates, and the doling out of money to multinational corporations, is the way to relieve the suffering of the common man, the common woman.
Our children are taught horrid falsehoods from elementary school on, told that the destruction of their futures is the result of forces beyond their control, the product of a temporary setback, when laceration of their dreams is the explicit goal of rich and powerful.
The first step in our resistance is to educate citizens about what the economy is and how it truly works.
We must go to the streets, go door to door, and we must explain logically, scientifically, and patiently what is going on behind the screaming headlines.
There is no need for juicy donations to the Harvard Business School, or funding for the Economist Magazine from billionaires, in order for the man in the street to understand how the economy runs, how money is created for the billionaires, and how debt is created to enslave us.
We must tell them the truth about digital currencies, the stock market, derivatives and other frauds, explaining how these cooked-up indicators of growth are unrelated to our economy.
We must explain to the citizens how banks create money out of thin air, and how the digital currencies and cryptocurrencies are but a trap meant to trick them into surrendering the last traces of real ownership to faceless AI.
Citizens must grasp that this digital money, is not money at all, but an IOU note to them from unaccountable powers, a note that can be cancelled at any moment for bad behavior, for no reason at all.
They must understand that its value is determined by computer banks owned by multinational corporations. Digital currency is, in other words, a weapon of mass destruction.
2) Denounce the fiat currency dollar controlled by multinational banks and launch the revolutionary dollar
The collapsing dollar system threatens to take us down with it, be we white collar or blue color, man or woman, black or white. But corporate media tries to divide us against each other using ethic and identity conflicts of its own creation.
Just as other nations must free themselves from the dollar-dominated economic system, so also must the citizens of the United States declare their independence from this banker-driven Titanic.
Taking the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as our sword and our shield, we will bravely assert the true relationship of the citizen to the federal government, insisting that only we the people have the right to issue currency through a Congress that is accountable, in word and deed, to us.
We will assert that the value of the dollar must be determined in a transparent and accountable manner, in accord with the Constitution.
If that is not the case, and it most obviously IS not the case, then it CANNOT be considered as a currency. It is but pretty printed paper.
We will assert that the new digital currency, and the Federal Reserve’s fiat currency dollars, now controlled by multinational banks, are by their self-evident nature unconstitutional, illegitimate, and criminal.
We will refuse to use them for economic transactions and we will allow citizens to convert their fiat dollars for our substantial revolutionary dollars in accord with the true needs of the working people of our country, not the greed of the moneychangers and the speculators.
The “Revolutionary Dollar” will support an accountable and transparent monetary system that is based on value, not forced debt, not the threat of military force, and not chimeric digits floating in cyberspace.
You heard right. The revolutionary dollar will be a democratic currency that is issued directly to citizens following the Constitution.
This new democratic economy will be local in nature, but will include transparent and verifiable systems for national and international exchange that are independent of the casinos run by the gamblers and tricksters.
That independent economy will be based on concrete contributions from the citizens, and will offer a clear alternative to the rotten globalist economy that drags us towards slavery.
3) Establish the value of the revolutionary dollar
The revolutionary dollar will be grounded at the local level in credible agreements among citizens that determine its value with regards to concrete goods and services. The revolutionary dollar will go hand in hand with a transparent, accountable, and democratic banking system, banks that are run as cooperatives by the members of the immediate community first.
But even more important than establishing a free and democratic dollar, we must help the citizen to reduce his or her dependency on money and encourage self-sufficiency, local barter, and cooperation within the community.
Turn strangers into neighbors and you will magically find solutions to many economic needs. It is because you do not know your neighbor, do not trust the man passing you on the street, and have grown distant from your son and daughter that you must conduct all actions via money. That is no accident. That was the plan all along.
The revolutionary dollar will permit a true market economy in which the currency is tied, through participatory discussions, to a set value for three kilos of tomatoes grown in your garden, for two hours of babysitting, for fixing a sink, or for walking a dog every day for a month.
That is to say that the currency will return to the original function of money, a marker in our shared society that allows for a transparent barter system wherein we can cover most needs without ever turning to a multinational corporation or bank.
Trust between neighbors, and between family members, will allow us to govern ourselves, to create an organic system wherein we set the value of money in response to the needs of the citizens in the local economy.
Money will be tied to goods, services, objects and other substantial things, tangible or intangible, through a participatory process wherein citizens set prices through discussion, and establish markets based on real demand.
That process of determining value through open debate between citizens will mean the restoration of politics in the original sense of the word, not the debased Los Vegas strip show to which we are subject today.
The goods and services essential to life: food, tools, housing, transportation, energy, as well as the fundamentals of civilization: rigorous science, moral education, profound intellectual engagement, and the philosophical, aesthetic and spiritual practices that define humanity, will be assigned value within the revolutionary dollar.
The will be no space in this democratic economy for the conversation to revolutionary dollars of ill-got digital fortunes, narco-riches accumulated by billionaires and their intelligence lackeys, money now recorded in the bankrupt fiat currency. The extra billions claimed by multibillionaires by adding a few zeros to the figures in their Amazon, or Google supercomputers, will also vanish.
Inflation will be vanquished by the revolutionary dollar. In addition, no individual, no one family, no class of privileged people, will be permitted to monopolize money, goods or other assets beyond the bounds of fundamental social justice.
So also the debt owed by citizens in that fiat dollar cannot be converted into revolutionary dollars. The revolutionary dollar will be jubilee in every sense of the word.
4) Creation of local banks for the people
The fiat currency dollar has become a tool for the rich to buy up assets from ordinary citizens using phony money that is backed by the authority of the federal government. This scheme has worked because the commercial media gave this “money” undue legitimacy, and because the dollar was no longer backed by precious metals, and because there were no longer local banks granting meaningful loans to local citizens based on the actual money deposited, to stand in opposition to the international banks.
We must establish local banks that are committed by their charters to being run as cooperatives, committed to investing entirely in the local community, and committed to basing their loans on the money they actually have, that is tied to real objects, to real labor, or to real institutions of substance.
The loans offered by these banks must be for ordinary people, in real money, and they must be for productive and helpful activities.
Those banks must focus on the local, must focus on the long-term wellbeing of the community, the environment, and the future of the nation.
Long-term low interest (30 year loans) and micro-loans, will allow the citizen to purchase high quality, locally handmade pairs of shoes that will last for 30 years, or tables that will last for 100 years, for less money than would cost a shoddy set of imported shoes, or an imported fiberboard table sold by criminal distributor like Walmart.
5) A global monetary system for the people
Ultimately a new international, and not globalist, financial and trade system must be built from the bottom up, one that permits for healthy and constructive economic interactions starting from the local community, expanding across the nation, and finally reaching out to the citizens (not the corporations) of other nations.
No part of that financial and monetary system will be controlled by the multinational logistics and shipping companies, the large-scale marketing and retail firms, that are run by Wall Street, and the financial monopolies like BlackRock and Vanguard, and the families like the Houses of Saud and Windsor, the Waltons and the Rothchilds, the Kochs and the Mars, who hide behind them.
A healthy, citizen-centered, financial and trade system for the Earth requires transparent and reliable currencies that are outside of the reach of globalists.
We will bypass the poisoned economic system of the globalists entirely.
The sad state of our economy
The bankers, and their friends at the Treasury Department work day and night to put off the inevitable bursting of the bubble, and they will use any means, even if that means the destruction of our nation. The United States resembles the train in the Marx Brothers film “Go West!” the cars of which were chopped to pieces to feed the locomotive’s engine, leaving behind a wreck.
Money without value is the only thing keeping the ship of state afloat. But over time, creating money without value is a horrific ritual of self-cannibalism for a civilization.
Fear of war, fear of pandemics is essential to keeping the population from understanding how the economy, and the culture, is destroyed.
The critiques of this criminality offered by true conservatives like Ron Paul have been replaced with faux conservatives like Donald Trump created by the banks.
The trenchant critique of markets and global finance offered by Marxists and socialists in a previous age have been supplanted by the indulgent chatter about gender and race offered by the so-called “left.”
Enough is enough! Over the last fifty years, the Federal debt has increased 75-fold from $400 billion to $30 trillion, thus rendering your money nearly worthless. The elite have grown wealthy; the citizen has been driven into poverty.
Verily, it is a sordid, vicious racket that poisons the very life blood of the nation. Truly this market, now a corpse, demands at least, an honorable burial.
Affirm the real economy and denounce the fake economy
Personal morality, the needs of local communities, transparency and accountability, local banks and local finance, are concepts alien to the discourse on money promoted in the gaudy media today.
We cannot purchase a solution to this problem with the dollars that are created, regulated, and controlled by the private multinational banks.
Remember that degradation of money is inseparable from the decay of personal ethics, and of the sense of citizenship at the local and the national level.
We can have healthy food, potable water, quality tools and furniture, livable housing, meaningful education and a profound intellectual, cultural and spiritual experience which will make life worth living. That is our goal. Money can help to achieve that goal by setting up equivalencies for exchange, but money itself can never be the solution to the problem.
When the ancients said that money is root of all evil, they had their reasons.
The trust between citizens is the skeleton to which the muscles of the revolutionary dollar will be attached. The revolutionary dollar will be the base on which an independent and moral economy is built.
No longer must our citizens dive into an immoral and parasitic economy in order to obtain the filthy dollars need to feed their children. Such contradictions, such abominations, must be abolished.
Remember that we are fighting a techno-fascist global system that will try to outsmart us, to overwhelm us, by creating false value using its fiat currencies and digital currencies.
That global system uses algorithms calculated by supercomputers, and bribes any number of authority figures, to convince us of its legitimacy.
Yet ultimately we will win because the value of our money, our revolutionary dollars, will be rooted in human interactions, in actual value.
The revolutionary dollar backed by the Constitution, and supported by concrete economic transactions between citizens, will allow us to say to the billionaires like Bill Gates that when they bought up farmland in Montana or Minnesota using the money printed up at their request by the Federal Reserve, that they did not gain ownership in any sense and that their fiat money, their digital currency, shall have no value.
In addition, take notice! The financial crimes of promoting poisonous vaccines are more than enough to justify the seizure of all the assets of these criminals.
Our revolutionary dollar, in other words, will be the wooden stake driven through the heart of the zombie economy, will be the swift sword that strikes down the vampire market, will be the silver hammer that knocks over the rotten casino set up by the money changers of Wall Street.
What will they do, when their goose is cooked, when their money is worthless and their fake assets have evaporated? That is not our concern.
Our nation belongs to its citizens. Our rivers and fields, mountains and oceans, cannot be owned by anyone but remain our cherished common legacy to be preserved far, far into the future, long after the parasitic billionaires are safely entombed in their gaudy graves.
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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.
Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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***
President Biden’s campaign to banish (or maybe outlaw) political paranoia took a wallop last spring. In April, the Department of Homeland Security proudly announced that it had created a new Disinformation Governance Board. The following month, the board’s chairman resigned, and Biden administration officials claimed the board was being “paused.” But it remains in the wings awaiting the White House summons for an encore performance.
Thought police by another name
From the start, the Disinformation Governance Board looked like a political caricature dreamed up by people who never appreciated either Monty Python or Orwell’s 1984. Given the Biden record, it was unclear whether the new board will be fighting or promulgating “disinformation.” After controversy erupted, an unnamed DHS spokesperson told the Washington Post: “The Board’s purpose has been grossly mischaracterized; it will not police speech…. Its focus is to ensure that freedom of speech is protected.” Geez, why didn’t the Founding Fathers think of adding a clause to the First Amendment creating a nefarious-sounding government agency to ride shotgun on the nation’s media?
Team Biden expected applause and deference when they announced the first disinformation czar for the board, Nina Jankowicz, a 33-year-old Bryn Mawr college graduate who was hailed as an “information warfare expert.” Jankowicz had the type of resume that made the Washington Post swoon — a Fulbright scholar, a graduate degree from Georgetown University, and “stints at multiple nonpartisan think tanks” — all of which were coincidentally progovernment — thus proving that Jankowicz herself was trustworthy.
Team Biden’s vetting operations didn’t win any kudos on this appointment. They failed to ask a critical question: Does she sing? After Jankowicz’s name hit the headlines, activists were soon whooping up some of her greatest performances discovered online. There was her TikTok version of a “Mary Poppins” song warning “Information laundering is really quite ferocious.” More surprising was her YouTube Christmas parody song performance, “Who do I f–k to be famous and powerful?”
More troubling was her long record of cheerleading for political propaganda. Jankowicz previously worked for StopFake, a federally funded media-influence operation that in 2018 “began aggressively whitewashing two Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups with a long track record of violence, including war crimes,” even dabbling “with Holocaust distortion, downplaying WWII-era paramilitaries who slaughtered Jews as mere ‘historic figures’ and Ukrainian nationalist leaders,” as The Nation reported. She also worked for the National Democratic Institute, which is heavily funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which has spurred perennial controversy for interfering in foreign elections.
A long record of censorship
When Jankowicz testified in Britain on the UK’s Online Safety Bill, which entitled the government to ban any content with “the potential to cause harm,” she endorsed banning “misogyny” (bad news for old videos of Benny Hill shows). She also derided free speech as on par with “fairy dust.” As Paul Joseph Watson reported in Summit News, “Jankowicz asserted that social media platforms should utilize algorithms that would ‘allow us to get around some of the free speech concerns’ by demoting content so few people saw it.” Jankowicz assured the legislators: “You can shout in the black void, but you do not get a huge audience to do that.” And people like her should have the prerogative to covertly determine how much audience each idea deserves, right?
Jankowicz believes that “trustworthy experts” such as herself (she boasts that she is “verified” by Twitter) should be empowered to “edit” other people’s tweets to “add context.” She denounced Loudoun County, Va., parents who complained about left-wing school curriculum for “disinformation” and “weaponizing people’s emotion.”
In October 2020, after the New York Post exposed damning emails and other information in Hunter Biden’s laptop, Jankowicz scoffed at the laptop controversy: “We should view it as a Trump campaign product.” She supported the 50 former intelligence officials and other honchos who vouched that the laptop should not be trusted, thereby helping Biden win the 2020 election (according to former attorney general Bill Barr).
Jankowicz never complained when Twitter suppressed all links to New York Post articles before the 2020 election. But when rumors circulated in April that Elon Musk might buy Twitter, she fretted to National Public Radio: “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms.”
That line is the Rosetta stone for understanding the new Disinformation Governance Board. The goal is not “truth” — which could arise from the clash of competing opinions. Instead, political overlords need power to exert pressure and pull to shape Americans’ beliefs by discrediting, if not totally suppressing, disapproved opinions.
The swamp circles the wagons
When DHS revealed that the disinformation board was being placed on hold, it also announced that former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff was brought in to review and assess the board’s mission. Chertoff was assistant attorney general helping organize the mass roundup of 1,200 Muslims after the 9/11 attacks. On November 28, 2001, Chertoff testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee: “Nobody is held incommunicado. We don’t hold people in secret, you know, cut off from lawyers, cut off from the public, cut off from their family and friends.” That was total disinformation, and the Bush administration’s secrecy was later condemned. In August 2002, Chertoff condemned Bush administration critics: “You should not think you’re dealing with a bunch of barbarians….We need to be sober about what is a threat to civil liberties.” But, as The Nation magazine noted, “Chertoff is notorious for enabling some of the most egregious offenses of the War on Terrorism — from federal surveillance, to unlawful detention, to torture. Indeed, his previous governmental appointments were met with vociferous opposition from groups like Human Rights Watch and the ACLU.” When he was DHS boss, Chertoff championed REAL ID and portrayed it as a total surveillance system — even for babysitters. The Nation magazine declared that placing “a man as deeply tainted as Chertoff into a leadership position smacks of a particularly indolent kind of contempt.”
Disinformation a longtime tool of the state
“Disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods. In early 2003, anyone who denied that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was guilty of disinformation — until after George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion found no WMDs. It was disinformation that Obama’s drone assassination program was killing large number of innocent civilians — until Daniel Hale courageously leaked internal documents proving the killing spree. (Hale will spend years in federal prison as a reward for undermining the credibility of this particular disinformation.)
Federal agencies have deluged Americans with malarkey for decades. We don’t need a disinformation czar to hector us to submit to the latest Washington catechism.
The core of the media defense of Jankowicz was that only right-wing nuts fear the U.S. government would censor Americans. But it is already happening. The Biden White House threatened antitrust investigations against social media companies that failed to suppress “disinformation” about COVID vaccines. On March 3, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy “demanded that the tech companies turn over information about individuals who spread” COVID “misinformation,” the New Civil Liberties Alliance reported. Last year, it was “disinformation” to claim that vaccines fail to prevent contracting or transmitting COVID. But after the Omicron wave, the phrase “breakthrough infection” became almost redundant.
The Disinformation Governance Board debacle could not have occurred unless many policymakers felt entitled to control the information Americans receive. Jankowicz’s arrogance was invisible to the Biden team because that arrogance is shared by them. She is part of a niche that assumes they are so superior that they have the right to censor — or at least the right to control what other people think. In the 1960s, the “best and the brightest” had the right to lie Americans into the Vietnam War — for the good of the world. The same type of people now infest Washington and believe they have the right to censor.
The new Cold War — in Ukraine
Targeting Russian issues would have been a prime topic for the new board. After she resigned, Jankowicz touted the disinformation fight by other federal agencies: “Take a look at the recent work to prebunk [pre-debunk] Russian narratives about Ukraine. It focused on raising awareness of the falsities coming out of the Kremlin so Americans wouldn’t buy into them. It worked.”
It “worked” in the sense that the vast majority of the American media has uncritically recited what they have been told about the conflict by U.S. government and Ukrainian officials. But the U.S. government has withheld almost all information it possesses on the battlefield losses of the Ukrainian army, thus helping perpetuate “Ghost of Kiev” types of fantasies about how the conflict is going. On May 27, the Washington Post reported that Ukrainian military “casualties here are largely kept secret to protect morale among troops and the general public” — and American citizens. U.S. officials have also passed on information to the media regarding the conflict that was unverified or even doubtful. At the same time, many politicians have joined a media chorus to denounce as Russian propaganda any suggestion that the war is something less than a glorious triumph of good over evil.
U.S. government agencies poured money into the coffers of Ukrainian government agencies, including the office of Lyudmila Denisova, the commissioner for human rights. Denisova spurred hundreds of lurid western media reports about Russian troops on rape rampages, targeting even young babies. But on May 30, the Ukrainian parliament tossed her out of her job because there was no evidence for many of her allegations. Until the moment that Denisova was fired, denying Russian troops were mass raping Ukrainian females was “disinformation.”
Few Americans recognize how surreal the notion of “truth” has become inside the Beltway. On April 28, the White House appealed to Congress to provide another massive aid package to Ukraine, including hefty provisions to “support activists, journalists, and independent media to defend freedom of expression.” And how can we be sure that Ukrainian journalists are independent? Because U.S. government officials retain the sales receipt for their purchase. Unfortunately, the State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other agencies have been avidly subsidizing “independent media” in foreign nations for years, assuring that there will be an “amen chorus” for U.S. intervention in their nations if deemed necessary. The absurdity of such grants doesn’t register in D.C., in part because so many policymakers are blinded by the presumed righteousness of U.S. policy. As Secretary of State Madeline Albright said, “We are the indispensable nation…. We see further into the future.” Thus, handouts from the U.S. government are the truest source of independence — or some such hokum.
It remains to be seen if Biden’s disinformation campaigns on Ukraine and Russia succeed in dragging our nation into World War Three. The United States funds foreign propaganda operations that echo in American newspapers and cable news, and the White House exploits those stories to drag this nation further into an East European border dispute.
The federal government has long been the most dangerous source of disinformation threatening Americans. The trillions of pages of new secrets that the U.S. government creates each year is a disinformation entitlement program. In a city that already had hundreds of full-time political appointees whose task is to lie to the America public, why was another board needed? Admittedly, calling it the Disinformation Governance Board is more palatable than naming it the Keep Damn Federal Lies Sacrosanct Panel.
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James Bovard is a policy adviser to The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is a USA Today columnist and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, Playboy, American Spectator, Investors Business Daily, and many other publications. He is the author of Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty (2017, published by FFF); Public Policy Hooligan (2012); Attention Deficit Democracy (2006); The Bush Betrayal (2004); Terrorism and Tyranny (2003); Feeling Your Pain (2000); Freedom in Chains (1999); Shakedown (1995); Lost Rights (1994); The Fair Trade Fraud (1991); and The Farm Fiasco (1989). He was the 1995 co-recipient of the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the recipient of the 1996 Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. His book Lost Rights received the Mencken Award as Book of the Year from the Free Press Association. His Terrorism and Tyranny won Laissez Faire Book’s Lysander Spooner award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. Read his blog. Send him email.
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With the passage of the 2022 Defense Authorization Act giving the executive branch sweeping powers over the use of the military in all domestic affairs, and with the obvious obsession by a supranational deep state technocracy intent on imposing a final endgame scenario onto the United States, it is important to recognize the historical precedent of the attempted Bankers’ Coup of 1934 that sought to impose a fascist puppet dictator into the White House. Unfortunately for the JP Morgan network managing this coup, the puppet they selected for their “American Mussolini” was a patriotic retired General named Smedley Darlington Butler.
In this new Canadian Patriot Review film based upon the essay “Why Assume There Will be a 2024 Election?” produced/narrated by Jason Dahl, you will be introduced to this dense period of history beginning with the orchestrated demolition of the financial system in 1929, the Wall Street/London fueled “economic miracle solution” of fascism and eugenics between 1930-1934, and the story of FDR’s war with the financier oligarchy’s London and Wall Street tentacles. From this vantage point, we are then thrust into a deep dive into the person of Smedley Butler and his courageous defense of the republic.
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In his new two volume series The Clash of the Two Americas, Matthew Ehret introduces a new analysis of American history from the vantage point that the globally-extended supranational shadow government that managed the British Empire was never fully defeated and has acted within the USA itself since 1776 as a continuous multi-generational fifth column managing every significant event and assassination of American presidents for the next 250 years.
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“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”—H.L. Mencken
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First came 9/11, which the government used to transform itself into a police state.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which the police state used to test out its lockdown powers.
In light of the government’s tendency to exploit crises (legitimate or manufactured) and capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state, one has to wonder what so-called crisis it will declare next.
It’s a simple enough formula: first, you create fear, then you capitalize on it by seizing power.
Frankly, it doesn’t even matter what the nature of the next national emergency might be (terrorism, civil unrest, economic collapse, a health scare, or the environment) as long as it allows the government to lockdown the nation and justify all manner of tyranny in the so-called name of national security.
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”
Here’s what we know: given the rate at which the government keeps devising new ways to establish itself as the “solution” to all of our worldly problems at taxpayer expense, each subsequent crisis ushers in ever larger expansions of government power and less individual liberty.
This is the slippery slope to outright tyranny
You see, once the government acquires (and uses) authoritarian powers—to spy on its citizens, to carry out surveillance, to transform its police forces into extensions of the military, to seize taxpayer funds, to wage endless wars, to censor and silence dissidents, to identify potential troublemakers, to detain citizens without due process—it does not voluntarily relinquish them.
The lesson for the ages is this: once any government is allowed to overreach and expand its powers, it’s almost impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. As Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe recognizes, “The dictatorial hunger for power is insatiable.”
Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.
In this way, every crisis since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government.
Each crisis has also been a test to see how far “we the people” would allow the government to sidestep the Constitution in the so-called name of national security; a test to see how well we have assimilated the government’s lessons in compliance, fear and police state tactics; a test to see how quickly we’ll march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked; and a test to see how little resistance we offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.
Most critically of all, it has been a test to see whether the Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights—could survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.
Unfortunately, we’ve been failing this particular test for a long time now.
Indeed, the powers-that-be have been pushing our buttons and herding us along like so much cattle since World War II, at least, starting with the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, which not only propelled the U.S. into World War II but also unified the American people in their opposition to a common enemy.
That fear of attack by foreign threats, conveniently torqued by the growing military industrial complex, in turn gave rise to the Cold War era’s “Red Scare.” Promulgated through government propaganda, paranoia and manipulation, anti-Communist sentiments boiled over into a mass hysteria that viewed anyone and everyone as suspect: your friends, the next-door neighbor, even your family members could be a Communist subversive.
By the time 9/11 rolled around, all George W. Bush had to do was claim the country was being invaded by terrorists, and the government used the USA Patriot Act to claim greater powers to spy, search, detain and arrest American citizens in order to keep America safe.
Despite the fact that the breadth of the military’s power to detain American citizens violates not only U.S. law and the Constitution but also international laws, the government has refused to relinquish its detention powers made possible by the NDAA.
Then Donald Trump took office, claiming the country was being invaded by dangerous immigrants and insisting that the only way to keep America safe was to expand the reach of the border police, empower the military to “assist” with border control, and essentially turn the country into a Constitution-free zone.
That so-called immigration crisis then morphed into multiple crises (domestic extremism, the COVID-19 pandemic, race wars, civil unrest, etc.) that the government has been eager to use in order to expand its powers.
Joe Biden, in turn, has made every effort to expand the reach of the militarized police state, pledging to hire 87,000 more IRS agents and 100,000 police officers. Read between the lines and you’ll find that Biden has all but declared war on the American people.
What the next crisis will be is anyone’s guess, but you can be sure that there will be a next crisis.
So, what should you expect if the government decides to declare another state of emergency and institutes a nationwide lockdown?
You should expect more of the same, only worse.
More compliance, less resistance.
More fear-mongering, mind-control tactics and less tolerance for those who question the government’s propaganda-driven narratives.
There’s every reason to worry about what comes next.
Certainly, the government’s past track record and its long-anticipated plans for instituting martial law (using armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems) in response to a future crisis are cause enough to worry about the government’s handling of the next “crisis.”
Mark my words: if and when another nationwide lockdown finally hits—if and when we are forced to shelter in place— if and when militarized police are patrolling the streets— if and when security checkpoints have been established— if and when the media’s ability to broadcast the news has been curtailed by government censors—if and when public systems of communication (phone lines, internet, text messaging, etc.) have been restricted—if and when those FEMA camps the government has been surreptitiously building finally get used as detention centers for American citizens—if and when military “snatch and grab” teams are deployed on local, state, and federal levels as part of the activated Continuity of Government plans to isolate anyone suspected of being a threat to national security—and if and when martial law is enacted with little real outcry or resistance from the public—then we will truly understand the extent to which the government has fully succeeded in acclimating us to a state of affairs in which the government has all the power and “we the people” have none.
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The Argentine judicial system and parts of its national press are co-opted by the US to advance its objectives in the New Cold War through an intensification of Hybrid Warfare with elements of piracy and Lawfare. These tools of neo-colonial control are a negation of the entire system of international law, and whose long-term objective is to neutralize the sovereign forces within the states of Latin America and the Caribbean. The article focuses on the legal implications of the hijacking of the Empresa de Transporte Aerocargo del Sur (Emtrasur SA) plane and its crew as a clear escalation of the US Hybrid War against Venezuela – and against Argentina – as part of the New Cold War to resist the global transition to multipolarity and the fortification of the sovereignty of the countries of the Global South.
The international legal framework has been violated since June 8, 2022, the day on which the events of the hijacking of a Venezuelan airplane in Argentina at the request of the United States took place. This transport aircraft originally belonged to Air France, being later sold to Mahan Air of Iran, and these in turn subsequently sold it to the Venezuelan government, which deploys it through the governmental project, Empresa de Transporte Aerocargo del Sur (Emtrasur SA). This aircraft was purchased between 2020 and 2021 from the Republic of Iran by the Venezuelan Government and by February 2022 the aircraft arrives in Venezuela starting its cargo operations to and fro Asia, the Middle East and the Latin American region. Therefore, the aircraft is Venezuelan, it is not Iranian, it has Venezuelan acronyms and Venezuelan flag whose Venezuelan registration number is YV-3531.
The Emtrasur SA transport aircraft traveled to Mexico where it picked up a load of auto parts as part of an order placed by a transnational vehicle company. Afterwards, it went to Argentina to deliver the cargo, but after finishing the process, it turned out that the Venezuelan aircraft was not refueled at that stop, alleging that it could not be refueled due to US sanctions. The crew of the plane tried for hours to get the Argentinean airport authorities to sell them fuel, which they were unable to do. For this reason, they decided to take a risk and with little fuel remaining, they flew to Uruguay, since they had all the necessary permits to trade for the fuel they needed. However, on the way, the Uruguayan aeronautical authorities revoked the landing permits and the aircraft had to make an emergency return to Argentina. The aviation authorities of both South American nations broke aviation safety protocols in terms of access to fuel and landing permissions.
The United States through Hybrid Warfare seeks to implement a “divide and conquer” strategy, so in its chaotic ingenuity it instrumentalizes nations in the Global South vulnerable to co-optation and wields them against a third nations in order to create enmity and chaos in their day-to-day relations. Each state is composed of a series of internal tensions derived from its own circumstances and contexts therefore the US disposes submission of Global South countries by hacking internal legal and political processes to co-opt control of the white state circuit by circuit.
The situation is configured as an entrapment, or a kind of ambush to trap the Venezuelan aircraft willing to so many irregularities driven by the Rule-Based Order deployed in the Lawfare strategies of the US empire. From there begins a framework that shows us a breach of the Chicago Convention in which the states must favor the actions of civil aviation in terms of collaborative security. Argentina and Uruguay play the role of privateers using lawfare and infowar in an anti-commercialist manner against Venezuela, facilitating a new chapter of piracy and economic sabotage in the US Hybrid War against the entire region.
The international legal framework of civil aeronautical law classifies these actions of piracy and hijacking as conducts that violate international regulations and international treaties on civil aeronautics, such as the aforementioned Chicago Convention. The Charter of the United Nations is also violated by not respecting the sovereignty of the states, understanding that this is a unilateral coercive measure that is being applied by the US in collusion with Argentina, harming not only the sovereign rights of Venezuelan civil aeronautics – which had all the rights and all the permits for air traffic – but also the safety of the hijacked crew, still at risk due to the uncertainty. We are talking about the crew members of Venezuelan nationality and the crew members of Iranian nationality who were at that time carrying out a specialized but daily and lawful task within the international legal framework.
The denunciation by the state of Venezuela should be supported by all lovers of freedom and of free trade between entities that agree to carry out an objective, transactions or exchanges in a sovereign manner as free people of the Global South. These acts of piracy are made viable through a de facto right-wing judicial dictatorship in Argentina to stop the global transition to multipolarity as part of a New Cold War. The judicial apparatus co-opted through Legal Warfare and the elements of the press serving as US proxies in Argentina both want to create a negative aura about the business dealings of the plane and its crew.
In the Argentine media there is an infowarcampaign sowing half-truths and false news when talking about the current situation where unfounded allegations are made of supposed links between the company and irregular groups such as Hezbollah. In a sinister way it merges the Hybrid War that Washington and Tel Aviv have been waging for decades against the Islamic Republic of Iran and Lebanon. The infowar campaign repeats that the plane is not Venezuelan but that it is an ‘Iranian Venezuelan’ plane, which is another piece of false news, part of the propaganda seeking to confuse about the plane’s data and at the same time to increase the racist anti Iranian propaganda within the Argentine society, whose press acts as a proxy of the US through the years spreading xenophobic false news that equates being Iranian with being a terrorist.
There are several points to analyze in this violation of international law. In the first place, the situation of whether the merchandise was legally received, as well as the situation of the 19 crew members of that airplane, whose passports were taken away without their being legally detained. The crew members of the aircraft are in a situation of limbo with no legal basis; this is precisely how Lawfare is designed to condemn without a proper process. Judicially, Argentina did not have any cause, nor did they have any arrest warrant, nor did they have any investigation order, however, the crew is suffering as if they had been convicted.
The press that serves as a US proxy in the infowar inside Argentina judges with racism the fact that 5 members of the crew of Emtrasur SA are Iranian. However, regardless of the fact that there are nationals of the Islamic Republic of Iran, they are Venezuelan crew members because they are working a contract under Venezuelan flag and Venezuelan registered aircraft. This situation of piracy, of hijacking of the assets of a company, which has all the legality for its international performance and the hijacking of the freedom of the crew is an affront to the sovereignty of the nations of the Global South.
This plane performed a lawful act that is intended both for acts of commerce and also to transport to Venezuela much needed health supplies: the importation of insulin, COVID vaccines and specialized medical equipment. According to the United Nations, there should be no action to restrict access to COVID vaccines because the pandemic has gone from being a global problem to being a problem of those nations that cannot procure the specific supplies to treat this disease due to a clumsy and disorganized response of the international community.
There was a surrender of Argentine sovereignty by the federal judge of Lomas de Zamora, Federico Villena, who granted the request of the United States to seize the Venezuelan aircraft held in Argentina for three months. This surrender of sovereignty by one of the branches of the Argentine state is the result of the Argentine resolutions on the case of mid-August, which orders the seizure of the aircraft but does not even maintain for it the custody of the property, it is not even that court alone, it is the judge who says that the property is seized in favor of an Argentine court and a U.S. court, so the custody corresponds to the FBI, which would then raid the aircraft. The co-opted legal apparatus in making this decision displaces Argentine national law and international law in favor of a sub-legal instrument of the United States, such as sanctions, to treat Venezuela in a way that does not recognize a basic principle of the United Nations Charter, such as the legal equality of states. The substitution of authentic international law by the imperial verbiage of the Rules Based Order denies Venezuela of the freedoms to relate with the rest of the members of the international community and hinders its duty to carry out trade actions, exchange actions that allow the entry of resources that guarantee access to human rights within Venezuela.
Emtrasur SA offers a service that is more cost effective than other similar companies in the region, although it is a recent company they provide a very decent cargo capacity thanks to their aircraft – now hijacked by the FBI – and mostly because of the fuel prices they have access to in Venezuela. In the world of aeronautical transport, the contracting price is set by fuel, so due to the current circumstances in Ukraine since the Russian special operation there, a series of conditions have been created that have caused the prices of oil and its derivatives to shoot up in the region, with aeronautical fuel being one of the most affected. On the other hand, Venezuela has one of the lowest prices in the world and in addition to that, Emtrasur SA, being a governmental company, receives a discount in itself. So, in that sense they were offering a service at enviable prices in the region, making it possible for them to compete highly commercially while supplying Venezuela with what it needs.
It becomes evident that by denying Venezuelan sovereignty one is achieving, in turn, the denial of Argentine sovereignty itself, hence the historical efficacy of “divide and rule” implicit in the legal war. It is a double division, not only dividing the nations of a given region from each other, but also creating internal chaos within each nation as a whole, dividing and breaking down each state into more manageable institutional subcomponents. This security failure within the apparatus of the Argentine Republic effectively expresses itself as an interstate security failure by denying two nations, both Venezuela as a buyer and Iran as a seller, their ability to engage in acts of commerce on the basis of a third US state in this case being the one empowered by its own ‘Rules Based Order’ to determine who may or may not enter into the normal actions enunciated in international law.
These serious threats to the mercantile system are caused by the arbitrary weapon of Lawfare which from an illegitimate Rules Based Order guarantees the denial of Venezuela’s right to property as well as a denial of Venezuela’s ability to acquire property. This is fundamental because the actions of the United States, together with Argentina and Uruguay, are treating Venezuela, a sovereign state, as if it were a person that does not even have the legal capacity with its own person to process an act of purchase and sale of certain goods, something that can be done by any person without having to present much documentation.
The joint actions of the United States, Argentina and Uruguay have broken the principles of the United Nations Charter recognizing the dignity of the peoples and consequently the dignity of the inhabitants of these countries, as peoples with individuals capable of jointly creating the conditions to improve their societies. Venezuela, a sovereign republic that makes its procedures endorsed by the international instances that certify the information of its aircrafts, is left without the power to buy an airplane or to provide first class services in air cargo transport by the grace of the U.S. Rules Based Order that seeks to falsify the authentic international law.
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Miguel Santos García is a Puerto Rican writer and political analyst who mainly writes about the geopolitics of Neocolonial conflicts and Hybrid Wars within the 4th Industrial Revolution and the ongoing New Cold War.
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Liz Truss will be sworn in as the new UK Prime Minister today. As the successor to Boris Johnson who quit after an historic number of ministerial resignations, Truss is also a member of the Tory party and will be the third female prime minister to lead the country.
Truss appears to have garnered little support in the UK. According to a poll taken by YouGov, only 12 percent of UK respondents think she will make a “good” or a “great” prime minister. Where 55 percent of respondents said they thought Johnson was a “poor” or “terrible” PM, Truss has fared little better with 52 percent holding the view. Looking back beyond Johnson, a majority of Britons said Truss would be worse than every past leader going back to Thatcher. This includes 34 percent of respondents saying she would be worse than Theresa May.
The survey also found that while on the whole people have not made their mind up about the incoming PM, 38 percent of people agreed that she was “hardworking” and 65 percent of people said she was “out of touch with ordinary people.”
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The Palestinian Authority has once again called for the admission of Palestine to full United Nations membership and has been warned off by the US which says it would veto a Security Council resolution proposing this upgrade.
On November 29, 2012, the General Assembly voted to grant Palestine non-member observer status. The resolution was adopted by 138 with nine against and 41 abstentions. As could be expected the naysayers were the US, Canada, the Czech Republic, Israel and US hangers on — the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Panama. Among the abstainers were Australia, Germany, Holland, and, of course, Britain, the colonial power responsible for the Palestinians’ dire fate.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made the point that UN membership would be a significant step towards rectifying the “unprecedented historical injustice” suffered by the Palestinian people since Israel’s establishment in 1948.
But, really, injustice has afflicted the Palestinians since 1917 when Britain promised to facilitate the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Then as now Britain regarded the indigenous Muslim and Christian people of Palestine as “non-Jewish communities”. Most of the West has adopted this view and continues to act in accordance with it.
It is bitterly ironic that on that same date in 1947, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 which partitioned Palestine into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab. However, the vote was meant to take place on the evening of the 26th when the US, which strongly backed partition, did not have the 32 votes needed to approve the resolution. Under US pressure the vote was postponed because the 27th was the US festival of Thanksgiving and was conducted only when Washington had leaned on several opponents of the plan to vote yes. The deciding vote was 33 in favour, 13 against, and 10 abstentions. It must be pointed out that the General Assembly has the power to recommend a course of action, therefore the resolution was not mandatory and was vehemently rejected by the Palestinians and Arabs.
Although the Zionists considered the partition resolution as the foundation document of their state, they promptly violated the lines delineating Israel by conducting military operations to cleanse Palestinians from the Arab state. Consequently, instead of 45 per cent of their homeland allocated to the Arab state, Palestinians emerged at end of 1948-1949 with only 22 per cent of their country, including occupied East Jerusalem, which had been defended effectively by Jordan’s Arab Legion. West Jerusalem had been targeted early on by the Zionist underground army, the Haganah and cleared of its Palestinian inhabitants although all of Jerusalem was meant to be a corpus separatum (separate area) under international administration.
By the time Israel had proclaimed its independence in mid-May 1948, Palestine was in the throes of a brutal war which drove 750,000 of the 1.2 million Palestinians from their homes and villages. On May 20th, the UN appointed as its mediator Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte who achieved the first ceasefire in the conflict. As he was critical of Israel’s ethnic cleansing and grab for all of Jerusalem, he was assassinated in September by members of the Zionist terrorist Stern Gang, which had a four-man leadership including Yitzak Shamir, who became an Israeli prime minister.
The UN Security Council promptly condemned the murder and the General Assembly, on December 11th, adopted resolution 194 which in paragraph 11 called for the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes when “practicable” and for compensation for their losses and the losses of Palestinians who did not seek to return. Palestinians regard this resolution as the basis of their “right to return” which has never been regarded as “practicable” by Israel and its allies.
The third UN resolution was adopted by the Security Council rather than the General Assembly. This was Resolution 242 of November 22nd, 1967. This resolution, once again, emphasised “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and called for, “Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces occupied in the recent conflict.” These territories were occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the Syrian Golan Heights conquered by Israel that June.
As this resolution was adopted by the Security Council it was meant to be obeyed. While the US and the international community came to regard this as the “land for peace” formula which could resolve the “Palestine Problem”, by the time the Council adopted this resolution, which should have been mandatory, Israel had begun to colonise the conquered territories in violation of international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention. Although Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, UN special rapporteur Michael Lynk estimated that 700,000 Israelis now live in the occupied Palestinian territories. Some 25,000 dwell in the Golan. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who pulled out of Gaza, declared Israel will offer only “peace for peace”.
Why discuss these long dead resolutions? Because, in fact, they are very much alive. Palestine as a cause and an issue has not gone away and the virtual Palestine that exists today despite Israeli colonisation has just as much right as Israel to be a UN member. Israel became a UN member on May 11th, 1949, but its membership was conditional on Israel’s adherence to and implementation of Assembly resolutions 181 and 194. Of course, Israel’s conditionality was ignored since to abide by these resolutions, it would have had to retreat into the 55 per cent of Palestine awarded to the Jewish state by 181 and allow the return of Palestinian refugees under 194. As Israel has not done either, the Palestinian Authority should demand Israel be demoted from full UN membership or even kicked out of the organisation.
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The US and Western media have seized on a UN report published last week on human rights in China’s Xinjiang region to again denounce Beijing for its treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim groups. The accusations of China’s abuse of Uyghurs are a prominent feature in the propaganda constantly broadcast by the US and its allies as they ramp up their provocations and preparations for war against China.
The report produced by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) is a threadbare document that relies on the same paucity of evidence as Western propaganda—Chinese government documents, public and leaked, satellite images of alleged detention centres in Xinjiang, the biased reports and studies of anti-China academics and journalists and “eyewitness” accounts of individuals, unnamed in the case of this report, often connected to CIA-funded Uyghur exile organisations.
UN Human Rights Chief Michelle Bachelet, whose term of office ran out last week, conducted a six-day mission to China in May that included a visit to Xinjiang where she raised concerns over the broad use of counter-terrorism measures against the Muslim population of the region.
Despite the lack of evidence, the report concluded that “interlocking patterns of severe and undue restrictions on a wide range of human rights” are evident in Xinjiang. It claimed there has been “the large-scale arbitrary deprivation of liberty of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim communities” and credible allegations of “torture or ill-treatment” and of “individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence.” It alleged broader discrimination against Uyghurs and other Muslim groups, including “the coercive and discriminatory enforcement of family planning and birth control policies” and “indications” of forced labour.
What is striking about the UN report is the lack of any substantive evidence and what it omits, rather than what it cautiously concludes. It puts no figure on the number of Uyghurs allegedly held in prisons, vocational education facilities and detention centres, whereas Western politicians and media commonly declare as fact their unsubstantiated claims that a million or even two million are being imprisoned.
Moreover, the report acknowledged that “the available information at this stage does not allow OHCHR to draw firm conclusions regarding the exact extent of such abuses.” Nevertheless, it concluded that “the highly securitised and discriminatory nature” of the detention facilities, “provide fertile ground for such violations to take place on a broad scale.” In reality, this statement rests on the biased accounts of individual exiles.
The most significant absence is the lack of any claim of the “genocide” of China’s Uyghur population which is central to Washington’s propaganda as it prepares for war against China. This blatant lie, which rests on a gross distortion of China’s One Child policies, is recycled as fact by Uyghur exile organisations and has been taken up by the Biden administration as a key element of its list of accusations against China.
Not content that the report declared that China’s actions “may constitute… crimes against humanity,” the failure of the UN report to include any reference to “genocide”—for which there is no basis in evidence—has been criticised by various Uyghur advocates and organisations. Rahima Mahmut, UK director at the CIA-funded World Uyghur Congress, declared that she was disappointed that UN had not “called this what it is: genocide.”
Nevertheless, these same advocates recognise the importance of the UN report for adding weight to the farrago of lies and distortions on which their organisations rely. The well-heeled American Uyghur spokeswoman, Rushan Abbas, who is very well connected in Washington, told the New York Times: “It is imperative that nations take this report and make concrete steps toward stopping these crimes against humanity and holding China accountable for them.”
China has predictably denounced the UN report. Liu Yuyin, spokesperson for the Chinese mission to the UN in Geneva, branded the “so-called ‘assessment’ on Xinjiang” as a “farce,” declaring it to be “completely a politicised document that disregards facts, and reveals explicitly the attempt of some Western countries and anti-China forces to use human rights as a political tool.”
An annex to the report by the Chinese mission in Geneva stated it was based on “disinformation and lies fabricated by anti-China forces and out of presumption of guilt.” It went on to declare that “all ethnic groups in Xinjiang” were living a “happy life” because of the government’s measures to “fight terrorism and extremism.”
The flat denials of any abuse of the democratic rights are no more credible than the sweeping and unsubstantiated allegations made by the US and its allies against China. The Chinese regime relies heavily on repressive measures to stamp out any sign of opposition—above all from the working class.
In Xinjiang, the Chinese Communist Party has confronted a rising tide of opposition which its policies have generated. Its measures are justified as a response to terrorist acts carried out by militant Uyghur separatists who have their roots in the CIA funded and armed “jihad” in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Beijing, which backed Washington’s “secret war,” experienced its own “blowback” in the form of the rise of Uyghur extremism in Xinjiang, and is carrying out its own crackdown on “terrorism” and “extremism”.
The US, however, has cynically seized on the alleged abuses of Uyghurs for its own predatory purposes. It is no defender of “human rights” in Xinjiang, nor for that matter in Tibet or Hong Kong, and certainly not of the Chinese working class. Once again Washington and its allies are raising the phony banner of human rights as the justification for the preparations for war, while ignoring the gross abuse of democratic rights of its strategic partners and allies such as the Saudi monarchy.
The very fact that the OHCHR has chosen to focus on alleged human rights abuses in China, while turning a blind eye to the crimes of the US speaks volumes about the role of the United Nations as a tool of imperialism. No such UN investigation has been carried out into the criminal US-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan or Iraq, despite a mountain of evidence of war crimes, torture, arbitrary killings and wanton destruction.
The UN is a “den of thieves,” to use Lenin’s phrase regarding its predecessor, the League of Nations—a clearing house for the intrigues, provocations and conflicts of the major imperialist powers where they can haggle over the spoils.
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In 2017, US and allied Kurdish forces bombarded the city of Raqqa, the bastion of ISIS in Syria and the de-facto capital of the terror group’s self-proclaimed caliphate.
Concurrent to this, US forces conducted massive air strikes on the Iraqi city of Mosul, to support Iraqi and Kurdish ground forces against ISIS there too.
But the US-led campaigns in Mosul and Raqqa falsely suggest that the US and ISIS were implacable enemies. These battles created the perception that the US was committed to fighting Al-Qaeda and its various splinter groups, in a continuation of the so-called “War on Terror” begun by the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11.
Supporting ISIS’ territorial advances
However, a closer look at events in both Iraq and Syria paints a very different picture: The US and its allies, both directly and indirectly, colluded with ISIS to attain specific geopolitical objectives. The terror group that captured the world’s attention in 2014 was in fact a vital and valuable tool for US policy planners.
Evidence of this is rife. In June 2014, when ISIS fighters swept across the Syrian border to first capture Mosul, the largest city of its caliphate, the US military monitored the ISIS convoys crossing from Syria using drones and satellite systems, but took no action to bomb them.
Earlier, in an October 2013 visit to the White House, then-Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had warned Obama administration officials that, “The weapons provided to those killers in Syria have been smuggled to Iraq, and those wolves that came from different countries to Syria are now sneaking into Iraq.”
Maliki’s warnings were spot on. He took his case to Washington because it was clear – even then – that weapons the US and its allies were the pumping into Syria were being passed from so-called “moderate rebels” to Al Qaeda and other extremist militants.
Then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Brett McGurk, who worried about a possible ISIS advance even on Baghdad at the time, described fellow US officials advocating the policy of allowing ISIS to take Mosul as “completely out of their minds.”
Two months later, ISIS fighters coming from Syria in the west, and Mosul in the east, assaulted the Sinjar region of Iraq, home to the Yazidi religious minority. Within the course of a few days, ISIS fighters massacred thousands of Yazidi men and boys, while enslaving some 7,000 Yazidi women and children.
The US looks the other way
At the time, US President Barack Obama claimed he would act to avert a “potential act of genocide” against the Yazidis, but then turned a blind eye to the ensuing ethnic cleansing.
Although the US president approved limited air strikes to reverse ISIS’ advance on Erbil – the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Northern Iraq (where US oil companies and diplomats were based) – Obama simultaneously refused to bomb ISIS militants to prevent the massacre of Yazidis in the village of Kocho, despite desperate pleas from US-based Yazidi activists to do so.
In yet another example of blatant US military inaction, on 20 May, 2015, ISIS conquered the Syrian city of Tadmur at the site of ancient Palmyra, famous for its Roman ruins, thereby paving the way for the terrorist organization to push closer to Damascus.
Once again, US military planners had ample opportunity to bomb ISIS convoys advancing across the open desert from Raqqa on route to assault the UNESCO World Heritage Site, but chose to watch instead.
“As Islamic State [ISIS] closed in on Palmyra, the U.S.-led aerial coalition that has been pummeling Islamic State in Syria for the past 18 months took no action to prevent the extremists’ advance toward the historic town — which, until then, had remained in the hands of the sorely overstretched Syrian security forces. The U.S. approach in Palmyra contrasted dramatically with the very proactive U.S. bombardment of Kobani during 2014-15 on behalf of U.S.-allied Kurdish militias fending off a furious Islamic State offensive.”
How can these contradictions be explained? Why did US planners allow ISIS to grow and expand in Mosul, Sinjar, and Palmyra for 18 months between 2014 and 2015, only to conduct two brutal military campaigns, causing massive civilian suffering, to defeat the terror group in Raqqa and Mosul in 2017? In the fight against ISIS, whose side was the US really on?
Backing terrorists to regime-change Syria
The answer lies partly in US policy toward the Syrian government of President Bashar Al-Assad. Washington initially wished to use ISIS as leverage to oust Assad from power, as part of a broader effort at regime change that had started long before. Once ISIS was no longer useful to this end, US planners turned against the group, as has been the norm whenever US assets pass their expiry date.
To accomplish this regime-change, the US and its allies partnered with Jihadi-Salafis, including from Al-Qaeda in Iraq, to launch a dirty war on the Syrian state in 2011, attacking Syrian police, soldiers and security forces under the cover of the anti-government protests that initially appeared to be part of broader region-wide Arab uprisings.
The early anti-government protests in Syria, including the first protests in Deraa in March 2011, were also orchestrated by US planners, with assistance from activists of both liberal and Islamist orientation, including from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Sarouri trend.
With the help of allied intelligence agencies in the region, the US pumped billions of dollars of weapons and aid to Salafist militant groups in Syria in subsequent years, hoping these militants could successfully topple the Assad government on the US and Israel’s behalf.
Achieving this goal relied in part on establishing what US intelligence analysts described as a “Salafist principality” in the majority Sunni regions of eastern Syria (Raqqa and Deir Ezzor) and western Iraq (Mosul). Destroying the Baathist Syrian state by dividing the country along ethnic, religious and tribal lines had been a goal of US neoconservative planners since at least the 1990’s.
After an intra-jihadi civil war, ISIS as an organization emerged as the most powerful faction in the broader US-backed Salafist insurgency, and in 2014 established the desired Salafist principality, or caliphate, with Raqqa and Mosul as its two main strongholds.
Funneling weapons to terrorists
Though US-backed Persian Gulf sheikhdoms supported ISIS directly, according to admissions from US Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, Washington’s support for the terror group, and its sister organization, the Nusra Front (Al-Qaeda’s Syrian subsidiary), was indirect.
US support for ISIS (and Nusra) came in the form of money and weapons channeled through what was formally known as the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Weapons were then passed on to, or captured by, ISIS and Nusra. US planners simply had to flood the country with weapons, then turn a blind eye to where the weapons would certainly end up.
Though allegedly composed of deserters from the Syrian army fighting to establish a secular, democratic state, in fact the FSA never existed as a real army, but instead functioned largely as brand adopted by many of the Salafist militant groups fighting on the ground. The most capable of the Salafist militants fighting under the FSA banner would then graduate to fight for the more respected Jihadi groups, whether ISIS or Nusra.
Fighters from these Salafist groups, and the western and Gulf weapons funneled to them through the FSA leadership, therefore formed the foundation upon which both ISIS and the Nusra Front were built, and which finally enabled ISIS to establish the Salafist principality in Iraq and Syria desired by US planners.
The FSA brand provided a secular facade to the Salafist and Al-Qaeda dominated insurgency, allowing US and allied countries to publicly justify providing military support to the insurgency, while feigning opposition to the Al-Qaeda groups.
Western media and think tank analysts claimed this military aid was going to help the “Syrian people” resist a dictator, even though the groups comprising the insurgency had little popular, support, generally fought alongside and in support of the Al-Qaeda groups, and broadly terrorized most Syrians with their sectarian ideology and hatred of religious minorities.
Assisting ISIS in Syria
After conquering Mosul in June 2014, ISIS crossed back into Syria to conquer Deir Ezzor province, with the help of local FSA brigades.
According to Samer al-Ani, an opposition media activist from Deir Al-Zour, several fighting groups affiliated to the US-backed Military Council quietly assisted ISIS in the assault on the province. Al-Ani warned that “money being sent through members of the [US-backed] National Coalition to rebels in Deir Ezzor risks going to ISIS,” and that “these groups pledged loyalty to ISIS four months ago, so this was not forced as a result of ISIS’s latest push, as happened elsewhere. Such collaboration was key to the takeover of Deir Ezzor in recent weeks, especially in areas where ISIS could not defeat the local forces so easily.”
Assistance from local FSA factions allowed ISIS to quickly capture a string of strategic towns and cities along the Euphrates River, including Al-Bukamal on the Iraqi border, followed by Al-Shuhayl (known as Nusra’s capital), Al-Mayadeen, and much of Deir Ezzor city itself. This allowed ISIS to expel Nusra from the province.
ISIS relied on FSA factions not only for manpower but also for weapons. Newsweek reports that according to a report by UK-based Conflict Armament Research, ISIS obtained much of their “arsenal as a result of former President Barack Obama’s support for rebels in Syria,” and that these weapons “included a powerful anti-tank missile launcher bought from a Bulgarian manufacturer by the U.S. Army and wielded by ISIS only weeks later.”
Al-Jazeera reported in July 2013 that according to the ISIS commander for Aleppo province at the time, Abu Atheer, “we are buying weapons from the FSA. we bought 200 anti-aircraft missiles and Koncourse anti-tank weapons. We have good relations with our brothers in the FSA.”
Konkurs missiles were provided to FSA groups via the CIA’s regional allies, while the US intelligence agency trained FSA fighters in the use of these weapons in Jordan and Turkey starting in November 2012. When asked about the CIA training, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney simply said, “We have stepped up our assistance, but I cannot inventory for you all the elements of that assistance,” and that “We have provided and will continue to provide substantial assistance to the Syrian opposition, as well as the Supreme Military Council.”
ISIS was able to acquire US and Gulf supplied weapons so quickly because, in many instances, FSA commanders had secretly pledged allegiance to ISIS. Such FSA commanders were therefore able to deliver weapons from the US-backed Supreme Military Council (SMC) to ISIS almost immediately upon receiving them.
Syrian oppositionist news website Deir Ezzor 24 notes for example that FSA commander Abu Seif Al-Shaiti of Ahfad Al-Rasoul attended a meeting in Turkey with western and Gulf intelligence officials where he pledged to fight ISIS in exchange for a large shipment of new weapons.
ISIS then put him on a wanted list as a result. Instead of fighting ISIS, Abu Seif simply pledged allegiance to the organization and delivered all the weapons to the ISIS leadership that he had received from his former western and Gulf sponsors.
US policy makers were aware of this phenomenon, but chose to look the other way, suggesting they were satisfied that their weapons were ending up with jihadists, be they Nusra or ISIS.
In 2015, The Cradle columnist Sharmine Narwani asked US Central Command spokesman Lieutenant Commander Kyle Raines about why Pentagon-vetted fighters’ weapons were showing up in Nusra’s hands. Raines responded: “We don’t ‘command and control’ these forces—we only ‘train and enable’ them. Who they say they’re allying with, that’s their business.”
A full year after Obama declared the US military would “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS, the organization was at the height of its power, controlling some 50 percent of Syrian territory, including the strategically important Yarmouk refugee camp at the door step of Damascus.
Patrick Coburn of the Independentreported in September 2015 that “the majority of the 17 million Syrians still in the country live in government-controlled areas now threatened by ISIS. These people are terrified of ISIS occupying their cities, towns and villages because of its reputation for mass executions, ritual mutilation and rape against those not obedient to its extreme variant of Sunni Islam.”
Russian airpower obstructs US plans
In the fall of 2015, both ISIS (from its strongholds in Deir Al-Zour and Raqqa) and Nusra (in Idlib and Aleppo) were threatening to conquer Damascus and raise their respective black flags over virtually the entire country.
At this critical juncture, the Syrian government formally requested intervention from Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to help thwart ISIS’ significant advances by directing Russia’s Air Force to strike the terror group’s capabilities and manpower.
Despite accelerated CIA shipments of TOW missiles to the FSA and Nusra, it quickly became clear that the tide of the war would soon turn as a result of Russian airpower. The Russian bombing campaign targeted the Salafist insurgency broadly, including ISIS, enabling the Syrian army and allied Iranian-backed ground forces to make crucial gains.
Had Washington been serious about fighting ISIS, US warplanes would have unleashed a massive bombing campaign against ISIS in 2014 and 2015, as the danger of Damascus falling, and the possible massacre of large numbers of its inhabitants, both religious minorities and Sunnis who supported the government, was very real.
Instead, despite the terror felt by millions of Syrians, US planners showed their real intentions by viewing the brutal ISIS advance toward Damascus with approval. In a private meeting with members of the Syrian opposition, Secretary of State John Kerryacknowledged that the US had welcomed the 2015 ISIS advance on Damascus, to use it as leverage to force Assad step down from power.
As Kerry explained, “that is why Russia came in. They didn’t want a Daesh [ISIS] government and they supported Assad. And we know this was growing. We were watching. We saw that Daesh [ISIS] was growing in strength. And we thought Assad was threatened. We thought we could manage that Assad might then negotiate. Instead of negotiating, he got Putin to support him.”
US policy pivots
Shortly after the announcement of the September 2015 Russian intervention, US planners realized that any effort to topple the Syrian government via their jihadi proxies would now likely fail. The leverage that the ISIS threat gave US planners against the Syrian government would soon dissipate due to Russian bombs. Washington had few options left and quickly pivoted, abandoning their ISIS card.
The US bombing campaign which was previously limited to blocking any ISIS advance only in Kurdish areas, now intensified and transformed into a concerted effort to defeat ISIS militarily.
The US began to heavily invest in their budding partnership with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) to give the US new boots on the ground in the conflict. Rebranded by the Pentagon as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), these US-backed Kurdish forces agreed to participate in Washington’s campaign to conquer as much territory (then under ISIS control) as possible, before Russian and Syrian forces were able to do so.
This arguably created a “race to Berlin” dynamic resembling the competition between Allied and Soviet forces to conquer Germany from the Nazis in the Second World War.
While initiating the campaign to defeat ISIS in Raqqa, the US still welcomed any progress the terror group might make against the Syrian government.
As an example, when Russian and Syrian forces were able to retake Palmyra and liberate it from ISIS in March 2016, the LA Timesnoted this of White House officials:
“[They have] difficulty publicly lauding advances against Islamic State by Assad and his allies, including the Russians and Iranians, after years of calling for Assad’s fall” and that the Russian success in combating ISIS created a “dilemma” for US planners, because “Washington has endeavored to portray the battle against Islamic State as a project of the United States and its allies, while accusing Moscow of attacking ‘moderate’ rebels instead of the extremists. Palmyra seems to embody an alternative narrative.”
US dissatisfaction at the defeat of ISIS in Palmyra was also expressed by State Department spokesperson Mark Toner at a press briefing in March 2016, when Toner refused “to laud” the Syrian and Russian effort to liberate the city.
With ISIS in decline, the US decided instead to take over large swathes of northeastern Syria from the terror group, including the country’s major energy and grain producing regions, to provide Washington with new leverage against Damascus, which desperately needed these resources to successfully govern and rebuild the country once the war ended.
US control of these crucial areas would also exacerbate and help maintain the already existing and crushing US economic sanctions on Syria, in the hope of impoverishing Syrians to spur them to turn against the Assad government.
Conquest masked as liberation
US and Kurdish forces ultimately succeeded in capturing Raqqa from ISIS in October 2017 while effectively destroying the city and killing large numbers of civilians in one of the most vicious military assaults in recent memory.
The US military-funded think tank, the Rand Corporation, noted the “shocking level of destruction” caused by the US-SDF assault on Raqqa. As a result, in only four months of fighting, “Raqqa endured the most structural damage by density of any city in Syria,” while “60 to 80 percent of it was estimated to be uninhabitable.”
According to the Rand researchers, “the battle for Raqqa is a cautionary tale about civilian harm in 21st-century conflicts.” Much of the death and destruction resulted from the decision to encircle the city, which prevented the creation of civilian exit corridors, followed by airstrikes and artillery bombardment of heavily populated urban areas, effectively burying civilians in the basements of their destroyed homes.
When a ceasefire was finally reached, causing civilians to think they would be evacuated in bus convoys, US planners allowed the remaining ISIS militants to be evacuated instead, after any benefit to civilians by allowing the ISIS fighters to escape had largely already been lost.
The BBCreported on a “secret deal that let hundreds of IS [ISIS] fighters and their families escape from Raqqa, under the gaze of the US and British-led coalition and Kurdish-led forces who control the city,” and which included some of ISIS’ “most notorious members.” Presumably, this would allow US planners to resurrect the ISIS card if needed in the future.
US and Kurdish forces then pushed to the eastern side of the Euphrates River, blocking the advance of the Syrian army, which had successfully defeated ISIS with Russian help in Deir Ezzor and reached as far as the western side of the river.
US and Kurdish forces continue to occupy Raqqa and northeast Syria at the time of this writing in 2022. The US military presence on Syria’s eastern borders also replaces ISIS’ role to impede Iraqi-Syrian relations, and importantly, to impede an Iranian land route all the way to the borders of occupied Palestine.
ISIS’s invasion and occupation of key swathes of territory across northern Syria and Iraq served to delineate the borders of areas Washington seeks to control. The US then championed its Kurdish allies to “liberate” those territories.
“This is conquest masquerading as liberation,” writes Assyrian writer Max Joseph.
The US military presence also allows Washington to directly control Syria’s strategically important agriculture, oil, and electricity producing regions previously under ISIS control. In this way, the Syrian government is still denied crucial access to the resources needed to rebuild the country and feed its population in the face of crippling US-imposed economic sanctions.
And the US plunders those resources liberally, in broad daylight. In August, the Syrian oil ministry reported that the US and its Kurdish foot soldiers “steal up to 66,000 barrels every single day from the fields occupied in the eastern region,” accounting for 83 percent of the country’s daily production.
Pressure from Washington against the Syrian government has therefore been maintained, with the Kurdish-led SDF now fulfilling ISIS’ previous role in implementing US foreign policy in West Asia.
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In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”. Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.
The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.
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