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In the segment below on last night’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson said, “there are unresolved concerns” about the long-term health effects of COVID vaccines, including on female fertility and pregnant women.

The American people should not be forced to take a one-size-fits-all medical treatment, Carlson explained. “No medicine is designed for every person in all circumstances,” he said.

Last month, the Biden administration said the federal government will not require all Americans to get the COVID vaccine, nor will it require vaccination passports. But the truth is, when it comes to COVID vaccines, President Biden is not pro-choice, he’s pro-mandate, Carlson said.

He added:

“The question of whether to take them, whether to have powerful drugs injected into your body is the most intimate kind of personal health decision. Politicians and bureaucrats should have no role in a decision like that.”

But just because there’s no federal mandate to get the COVID vaccine doesn’t mean you or your family won’t be required to get it, Carlson explained. With support from the Biden administration, “private industry and nonprofits may be forcing you to,” he added.

Carlson noted that colleges and universities are requiring COVID vaccinations in some form, including the entire University of California system, the largest in the country.

Based on what we know about COVID and its effect on young people, Carlson said it doesn’t make sense to require them to get the vaccine — yet nobody is asking why college students need the vaccine.

“Why would we immunize people against a virus for which they already have antibodies?” Carlson asked. On top of that, he reminded viewers, no coronavirus vaccines have been fully licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Carlson said:

“From a medical standpoint, it’s hard to understand the reasoning behind this. As a group, young people are not at risk of dying from COVID. Huge numbers of college students have already been infected with the coronavirus and therefore have natural immunity to it.”

Watch Tucker Carlson’s segment here.

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“As of 1986, only 12.8% of American kids had chronic diseases. That number has grown to 54% among the vaccine generation (ie, Generation V, those children born after 1986) in lockstep with the CDC’s and AAP’s expanding vaccine schedule.” 

**

“Safety testing, which typically requires months and years for other medical products, often lasts only a few days with vaccines – not nearly long enough to spot cancers or chronic conditions like autoimmune diseases (e.g. juvenile diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis), allergic illnesses (e.g. food allergies, allergic rhinitis, eczema, asthma), or neurological and neurodevelopmental injuries (e.g. ADD, ADHD, narcolepsy, epilepsy, seizure disorders, and autism). Vaccine manufacturer’s vaccine inserts that accompany every vial of mandated vaccines include warnings about these and over 400 other injuries including many serious immune, neurological, and chronic illnesses for which FDA suspects that vaccines may be the cause.” 

**

“The children who comprise this vaccine-injured generation are now aging out of schools that needed to build quiet rooms and autism wings, install wobble chairs, hire security guards and hike special ed spending to 25% to accommodate them. 

They are landing on the social safety net which they threaten to sink. As Democratic lawmakers all around the nation vote to mandate more vaccines and call for the censorship of experts (including parents of vaccine-injured or killed children) that are expressing concerns about vaccine safety, Democratic Presidential candidates argue about how to fix America’s dysfunctional and unaffordable health care system without addressing the reality of the vaccine-related chronic disease and autoimmune disorder epidemic.

The good news for Big Pharma, of course, is that many of these vaccine-injured children have lifelong dependencies on unaffordable blockbuster drugs like insulin, Adderall, anti-psychotic drugs, Epi-Pens, asthma inhalers, and diabetes, arthritis, and anti-seizure meds made by the same companies that made the vaccines.”

**

“An overwhelming majority of the FDA officials directly charged with licensing vaccines, and the CDC officials who effectively mandate them for children, have personal financial entanglements with vaccine manufacturers. These ‘public servants’ are often shareholders in, grant recipients from, and/or paid consultants to vaccine manufacturers, and, occasionally, even patent holders of the very vaccines they vote to approve. Those conflicts of interest motivate them to recommend ever more vaccines with minimal support from evidence-based science” 

**

“In 1986, Congress—awash in Pharma money (the pharmaceutical industry is number one for both political campaign contributions and lobbying spending on legislators over the past 20 years) enacted a law granting vaccine makers blanket immunity from liability for injuries caused by vaccines. The subsequent gold rush by pharmaceutical companies boosted the number of recommended inoculations from twelve shots of five vaccines in 1986 to 54 shots of 13 vaccines today. A billion-dollar sideline grew into the $50 billion vaccine industry behemoth.” 

**

“Since vaccines are liability-free – and effectively compulsory to a captive market of 76 million children – there is meager market incentive for companies to make them safe. The public must rely on the moral scruples of Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, and Pfizer. But these companies have a long history of operating recklessly and dishonestly, even with (the many drug) products for which they can be sued for injuries.

The four companies that make virtually all of the recommended vaccines are all convicted felons.  Collectively they have paid over $35 billion since 2009 for defrauding regulators, lying to and bribing government officials and physicians, falsifying science, and leaving a trail of (incurable chronic illnesses) injuries and deaths from products they knew to be dangerous and still sold under pretense of safety and efficacy.”

 

To view the C-Span Video Click Screen below 

 

**

“I ate breakfast last week with the president of a network news division at CBS) and he told me that during non-election years, 70% of the advertising revenues for his news division come from pharmaceutical ads.  And if you go on TV any night and watch the network news, you’ll see they become just a vehicle for selling pharmaceuticals. He also told me that he would fire a host who brought onto his station a guest who lost him a pharmaceutical account.” 

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Our thanks to Dr. Gary G. Kohls for collating these statements from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

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***

Thousands of people took to the streets in the two largest cities in Chad of N’Djamena and Moundou on April 27 in the aftermath of the state funeral of slain President Idriss Deby Itno, who had been the leader of this oil-rich state for more than thirty years.

The people involved in the protests were demanding the resignation of the Transitional Military Council which assumed power after the death of Deby on April 20.

This supposedly interim governing structure is led by the 37-year-old son of the former president, the military General Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno. The parliament in the country was suspended by the military council while it was announced that elections will be held within 18 months.

Members and supporters of many mass organizations attempted to march peacefully in the streets when they were attacked by the Chadian security forces. Reports are that the police and military personnel utilized live ammunition to end the demonstrations.

In the security crackdown at least six people were killed and more than 700 were arrested by the authorities. The military ruling council accused the demonstrators of violently attacking them and that they were justified in the use of lethal force.

Opposition parties and organizations argued that the Chadian constitution was violated because it stipulates the appointment of the president of the national assembly in the event of the death or incapacitation of the head-of-state. Instead after announcing the death of the Deby, the ruling military council was declared, absent of any consultation with representative bodies within the legislature.

Additional demonstrations were scheduled to take place after the April 27 attacks on demonstrations and the subsequent arrests and deaths. Nevertheless, the streets were reported to have been calm on Friday April 30 and continued throughout the weekend.

The 55 member-states African Union (AU) has expressed concern over developments in Chad. AU protocols call for the suspension of any government on the continent which comes to power through military means. These measures are designed to prevent the assumption of power by the armed forces which had been a common occurrence in the first few decades of post-colonial African governance. Oftentimes these coups were coordinated and funded by western imperialist states seeking to maintain their influence.

Chad had been a colony of France from 1900 to 1960 when the country gained national independence. Nonetheless, Paris has maintained a military presence inside the country designed to protect its economic and security interests as the former colonizer.

An article in Africa News on the current crisis in Chad notes the role of the AU, saying:

“A team from the African Union arrived Thursday (April 29) in N’Djamena, Chad on a seven-day Fact-Finding Mission to assess the situation in country and examine ways of a speedy return to democratic rule. Following several days of internal pressure, the delegation will produce a report at the end of its mission which will enable the Peace and Security Council to adopt a definitive position on the measures to be taken. Several member countries have called for Chad to be suspended from the African Union because of the Transitional Military Council’s takeover of power. Many also estimated that this was a coup d’état, as the Constitution was not respected.”

The AU Peace and Security Council issued a communique on April 22 after the takeover by the military regime noting that the regional organization:

“Recalls relevant provisions of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, as well as the Lomé Declaration; and expresses grave concern with respect to the establishment of the Military Transitional Council. Urges the Chadian defense and security forces and all national stakeholders to respect the constitutional mandate and order, and to expeditiously embark on a process of restoration of constitutional order and handing over of political power to the civilian authorities, in accordance with to the relevant provisions of the Constitution of the Republic of Chad, and create conducive conditions for a swift, peaceful, constitutional and smooth transition. Underscores the urgent necessity of an all-inclusive national dialogue between all stakeholders in Chad, with the aim of restoring constitutional order and calls on all Chadian stakeholders to immediately engage in the national dialogue.”

The Role of Chad in the Regional Military Strategy of France and the U.S.

Former President Idriss Deby Itno was a military person who came to power through the overthrow of his former leader Hissen Habre in 1990. Habre had been cited for human rights violations while Deby took off his military uniform in exchange for civilian clothing in order to run for political office.

As Deby was praised by Paris and Washington for maintaining stability in Chad, the government and its military forces became a conduit for French and other imperialist interests in West and Central Africa. The military forces were built into an army which principal aim was to ostensibly fight “Islamic terrorism” in the region along with suppressing its own democratic aspirations among the people.

France through its Operation Barkhane has created an alliance of West African military units which serve as frontline troops in several countries including Mali and on the border areas with Nigeria. The objective of these military alliances is to prevent attacks in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and the Lake Chad Basin territories. Yet many of these Islamic Jihadist groups were initially formed and funded by the imperialist countries to fight against the former Libyan government of Col. Muammar Gaddafi during the counter-revolution of 2011.

The rebel Chadian Front for Change and Concord (FACT) was based in post-Gaddafi Libya while recently on April 11 many of its forces reentered the country after the formation of another United Nations-supported interim government in Tripoli. The aims of FACT seem to be solely centered on the removal of the Deby regime.

Reports indicate that the rebel group was in alliance with Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA). Haftar is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset who after defecting from the Gaddafi-era Libyan military during the Chadian war of the 1980s, relocated to the U.S. and was sponsored by the federal government. Haftar was flown back to Libya during the counter-revolution of 2011 where he has repeatedly sought and failed to seize power in Tripoli. Haftar has been supported by France in his unsuccessful military efforts to become the leader of Libya.

A host of rebel groups have been used in Syria, Yemen and Iraq as well to serve the interests of the U.S. and other western states. Whenever the utilization of these forces contradicts the interests of imperialism they can easily be labelled as “enemies” providing further incentives for Washington and Paris to remain in these geo-political regions under the guise of the “war against terrorism.”

According to the State Department funded Voice of America (VOA):

“Déby presided over one of the largest and most well-resourced militaries in West Africa. His forces provided crucial support to international security efforts in the Lake Chad Basin and the Sahel, where Islamist militant groups have wreaked havoc in recent years. That is likely why Western powers such as France and the U.S. turned a blind eye to the ever-mounting accusations of human rights abuses and to his habit of suppressing political opposition…. If Déby’s son does not earn the loyalty of Chad’s armed forces, the region could lose a key player in the fight against Islamic extremists.”

Yet Paris and Washington are not at all enthusiastic over the prospects of the ascendancy of a civilian government coming to power in Chad which is ideologically and politically opposed to France and the U.S. French President Emmanuel Macron attended the funeral of Deby and praised his role in the putative fight against “Islamic Jihadism.” Macron says he supports the formation of a civilian government. However, it does not appear that France will break ties with the military transitional council pending the holding of multi-party elections.

Situation in Chad Reflects the Crisis of Governance in Post-Colonial Africa

Although there are 54 independent states on the African continent, with the Western Sahara still suffering under the colonial occupation of the imperialist-backed Kingdom of Morocco in the northern region, due to the legacy of colonialism and enslavement, the AU member-states face formidable challenges in gaining genuine independence through the control of economic and military affairs. The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and France’s Operation Barkhane are proof that these leading imperialist states have no interests in leaving the continent to resolve its own problems.

The struggle against neo-colonialism and imperialism must be led by the African workers, farmers and youth. The military and police forces which are largely trained, armed and financed by the western states, cannot provide the revolutionary leadership required to bring the type of social change which can empower the masses to make the transition from peripheral capitalism and neo-colonialism to socialism and African unification.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Chad former President Idriss Deby killed after winning another term of office (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

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***

The UKCOLUMN has published two interviews with whistleblowers from within the UK’s NHS (National Health Services).

On April 14th they interviewed a nurse whistleblower who referred to the experimental COVID injections as “genocide,” and her interview prompted a Senior NHS Board member to come out also and warn the public, in an interview with Brian Gerrish.

She agreed with the nurse who came forward that “genocide” is the proper word to describe what they were seeing with the adverse reactions to the experimental COVID injections.

If I had a magic wand, it would just stop. It would stop now, before we hurt anybody else. That would be amazing.

That would be the best day ever, because every day I wake up, I think about how I can find that golden nugget to try and wake up the people around me to the damage we are causing.

We are causing — I mean, we heard the word ‘genocide’ from the lady on Wednesday. I don’t disagree with that statement. And it’s terrifying, and it saddens me, and the reason I’m staying where I am for now is to try and make a difference in whatever way I can.

Brian Gerrish then asks her:

And one thing that’s come into my mind while you were talking there, so just allow me one very last one: what advice, or what would you say to your NHS colleagues, to encourage them to think about what’s going on?

She replied:

Honestly, what comes to mind is, “Your children are next.” And that is terrifying, and it makes me well up when I think about it.

So if you won’t speak up because you’ve had the vaccine, or you won’t speak up because you’re scared (I understand that), or you won’t speak up because you don’t want to lose your job (and I totally understand that), just know that this doesn’t stop until we all stand up and say, “Stop.”

And we’re getting younger and younger here now, and our time’s running out.

Listen to the interview and read the transcript at The UKCOLUMN.

The video is currently on the Vimeo platform which has been known to censor anything negative regarding vaccines, so we have copies on our Rumble and Bitchute Channels as well.

Pfizer and BioNTech Apply for Emergency Use to Inject 12 to 15 Year Olds with their mRNA Experimental Shots

Just days after this interview with the Senior NHS Board member, it was announced that Pfizer had applied for emergency use authorization with both the FDA in the U.S., and the EMA in Europe, to inject 12 to 15 year olds with their experimental COVID mRNA shots.

FiercePharma reported:

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) started an “accelerated assessment” of Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine, known as Comirnaty, for people aged 12 to 15.

The EMA said its recommendation could come in June—unless additional information is needed—and would apply to all member states, pending the European Commission’s final consent.

The FDA is expected to authorize Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, which it created alongside BioNTech, for adolescents 12 to 15 years old by early next week, The New York Times reports, citing federal officials.

The agency’s endorsement would be an amendment to Pfizer’s existing emergency use authorization, and the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) would likely meet the following day to examine the clinical trial data. (Source.)

FiercePharma also announced today that Pfizer has made $3.5 BILLION so far this year for their experimental COVID mRNA shots, and is projected to make $26 BILLION by the end of the year.

In the first three months of 2021, Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine pulled in as much revenue as some pharma blockbusters make in an entire year. That’s just the beginning, as Pfizer eyes sales from more than a billion additional doses before the end of 2021.

The mRNA-based shot Comirnaty—first to market in the U.S.—reeled in $3.5 billion globally in the first quarter, Pfizer said (PDF) in its earnings report. For the full year, Pfizer projects a whopping $26 billion in Comirnaty sales, based on the 1.6 million doses the company has pledged worldwide.

Meanwhile, Pfizer now has a full FDA approval in its sights. (Full article.)

Are the Europeans and the U.S. citizens going to allow this to happen? Many have voluntarily accepted the injections for themselves, but will they now sacrifice their children on the altar of pharmakeia?

Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter.

If you say, “But we knew nothing about this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who guards your life know it? Will he not repay each person according to what he has done? (Proverbs 24:11-12)

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Britain’s Brexit trade deal with the EU was determined by “quarrels, low blows, [and] multiple betrayals” by self-aggrandizing Tory MPs, Michel Barnier has written in his long-awaited memoirs.

The UK’s problem, writes Barnier in The Great Illusion, was that it began negotiations by “talking to themselves,” leading its negotiating team to “underestimate the legal complexity of this divorce, and many of its consequences”.

Barnier said talks among British negotiators soon spiraled into Conservative party infighting and “political piracy”.

“The current team in Downing St is not up to the challenges of Brexit nor to the responsibility that is theirs for having wanted Brexit. Simply, I no longer trust them,” he wrote.

Published in France on Thursday and in English translation in October, The Great Illusion is a blow-by-blow account of the four years Barnier, a former French cabinet minister and European commissioner who has said he expects to “play a role” in the country’s next presidential election, spent as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator.

Barnier also described what it was like negotiating with Britain’s Brexit envoy in Brussels. He described David Davis as “warm, truculent, and very self-assured”, Dominic Raab as “almost messianic” and Theresa May as “direct, determined … and rather rigid, in her figure and in her attitudes” before laying into her infamous “Red Lines” speech at Lancaster House.

“The number of doors she shut, one after the other,” he marveled on January 17, 2017. “I am astonished at the way she has revealed her cards … before we have even started negotiating.”

On her promise to end the jurisdiction of the European court of justice, halt free movement, leave the single market and customs union, and end EU budget payments, he recoiled: “Have the consequences of these decisions been thought through, measured, discussed? Does she realise this rules out almost all forms of cooperation we have with our partners?”

Barnier also questioned the claim that Britain could not be truly “global” inside of the EU. “I do wonder what, until now, has prevented the UK from becoming ‘Global Britain’, other than its own lack of competitiveness,” he writes. “Germany has become ‘Global Germany’ while being firmly inside the EU and the eurozone.”

Brexiteers in general and Nigel Farage and his UKIP followers in particular, Barnier writes, had simply behaved “irresponsibly, with regard to the national interests of their own country. How else could they call on people to make such a serious choice without explaining or detailing to them its consequences?”

On Boris Johnson, Barnier said he was prone to “posturing” and banter that would “leave him open” but cautioned against underestimating him. “[He was] advancing like a bulldozer, manifestly trying to muscle his way forwards,” Barnier wrote of Johnson.

When one of his 60-member team explained to Johnson the need for customs and quality checks on the Irish border, Barnier writes, it was “my impression that he became aware, in that discussion, of a series of technical and legal issues that had not been so clearly explained to him by his own team”.

As late as May 2020, Barnier records his surprise at the UK’s continued demands for “a simple Canada-type trade deal” while still retaining single market advantages “in innumerable sectors”. There remains “real incomprehension, in Britain, of the objective, sometimes mechanical consequences of its choices”, he writes.

Barnier’s final warning, however, is to the EU itself. “There are lessons to be drawn from Brexit,” he writes. “There are reasons to listen to the popular feeling that expressed itself then, and continues to express itself in many parts of Europe – and to respond to it. That is going to take time, respect and political courage.”

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Video: Farm Laws in India

May 5th, 2021 by Colin Todhunter

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***

Picture this: Contrary to medical claims, the genetic injection called “COVID vaccination” forces cells of the body to produce not one, but hundreds of DIFFERENT proteins. Some of these proteins launch severe and fatal allergic reactions. Other foreign proteins stimulate the body to produce a powerful and continuing immune response that goes on too long; the person becomes severely ill or dies. Still other proteins, which are inherently needed by the body, are now viewed as evil intruders which must be neutralized…

I’ve written articles criticizing the COVID vaccine, from a number of perspectives. “Criticizing” is too mild a word. [1]

In this article, I want to examine a narrow claim about the COVID RNA vaccine: It instructs cells of the body to manufacture ONE AND ONLY ONE specific protein. [2] [3]

In fact, this is touted as THE major action of the genetic vaccine. Supposedly, that protein is similar to a protein in the purported SARS-CoV-2, and it “prepares and rehearses the body for the real thing.”

However, what guarantee do we have that the cells of the body are manufacturing only the one desired protein during the rehearsal?

How do we know the cells are always making the same protein?

Where is the proof? Where is the large confirmatory study that has examined thousands and thousands of human cells, from thousands of people who have been vaccinated?

I haven’t been able to find such a study.

If it exists, where are the large follow-up studies, carried out by different teams of researchers—verifying or rejecting the original research?

Well, in the analogous area of GMO plants, which are injected with genetic material, long-time researcher and author, Jeffrey Smith, writes about—guess what?—the runaway production of unintended proteins: [4]

“For example, long after Monsanto’s Roundup Ready corn had been consumed by hundreds of millions of people, a team led by Dr. Antoniou found more than 200 significant changes in its proteins and metabolites, compared to non-GMO corn of the same variety. Two of the compounds that increased are aptly named putrescine and cadaverine, because they produce the horrific smell of rotting dead bodies. More worrisome; they are also linked to higher risks of allergies and cancer. Another Monsanto GM corn has a new allergen and their cooked soy has up to seven times the level of a known soy allergen, compared to cooked non-GMO soy.”

There is more. Injected genetic material—as in the COVID vaccine—can cause ripple effects. Jeffrey Smith writes: “…back in 1999, a study showed widespread changes in the DNA due to gene insertion; but many GMO companies conveniently ignored the findings and continue to do so.”

“In that study, scientists studying cystic fibrosis inserted a gene into human cells. Using a microarray, they discovered that the insertion ‘significantly affect[ed] up to 5% of the total genes in the array.’ This means that the presence of a single foreign gene might change the expression of hundreds, possibly thousands of genes. In the case of the human cell being studied, the scientists were at a loss to determine the impact. ‘In the absence of more biological information,’ they wrote, ‘we cannot discern which directions [genetic changes] are better or worse, since any of these may have positive or negative effects’.”

Getting the picture?

The simplistic portrait of the genetic insertion called “COVID vaccine” is ready-made propaganda for a gullible audience.

And as HUGE numbers of serious adverse effects and deaths pile up from the vaccine, the medical establishment has twisted explanations on board:

“If a person experiences ‘severe discomfort’ after vaccination, this is a good sign; the vaccine is working.”

“If a person becomes seriously ill, he was attacked by SARS-CoV-2, or a ‘co-morbidity,’ not the vaccine.”

“If a person dies, that, too, was the virus, or an underlying genetic disorder.”

I refuse to accept—among other lies—that the COVID vaccine forces cells of the body to produce exactly and only the same single protein every time, in every case—unless I see convincing proof.

And I’m NOT talking about a study that takes test samples from a small number of patients. I’m talking about thousands of samples from thousands of patients—which is called SCIENCE, in case anyone has forgotten.

“So, Dr. Mengele, are you sure the COVID vaccine inserts RNA into the correct place in the human cell every time? Are you sure the cells produce only the intended protein?”

“Of course. We’ve shown that in the lab.”

“I’m not talking about the lab, Dr. Mengele. I’m talking about thousands of samples taken from humans after they’ve been vaccinated.”

“Oh no, that would be a very laborious process. We don’t have time for that.”

“In other words, the people of Earth are all vulnerable guinea pigs in your vast vaccine campaign.”

“Of course. I thought this was well understood. We have a captive audience, we have new technology, so we run an experiment. This is what life IS.”

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The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Notes

[1] https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/category/covid/

[2] https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/protein/

[3] https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2021/05/03/covid-vaccinated-people-shedding-and-spreading-genetic-disaster-to-unvaccinated-women/

[4] https://www.responsibletechnology.org/research-exposes-new-health-risks-genetically-modified-mosquitoes-salmon/

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***

Fifty seven British members of parliament have signed a motion in the British Parliament which calls on the British Government to promote international cooperation between the UK and Cuba and urge the Biden administration to normalise relations by removing Cuba from its ‘state sponsors of terrorism’ list and ending the US blockade.

Early Day Motion 1550 on Cuba and the US blockade was formally tabled by Grahame Morris MP and Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cuba on 25 February 2021.

The motion has received support from MPs of numerous parties including Labour, Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, Green, SDLP, DUP as well as several independent MPs.

The motion recognises the cost of the US blockade to the Cuban economy and the “politically motivated” addition of Cuba to the US ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ list by the outgoing Trump administration in January 2021. It encourages the Biden administration to remove Cuba from the list and to end sanctions against the country in order to give Cuba access to the materials it needs to roll out its COVID-19 vaccination programme to its people.

The blockade of Cuba is now approaching its 60th year. The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has condemned the blockade in 28 consecutive votes; the last in 2019 saw 183 countries, voting in support of Cuba’s motion to end the blockade, and just 3 against. The next vote is due to take place on 23 June 2021.

In addition to the deprivations it causes to the Cuban people, the blockade policy is extraterritorial – imposing fines and sanctions on foreign companies, including in the UK, that attempt to trade with the island.

The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the need for international cooperation. Cuba is in the final stages of testing its own COVID-19 vaccine, which could treat its own population and millions across Latin America and the global south if the country had access to materials to produce and administer the vaccine en masse. The British Government is already collaborating with Cuba on several projects including medical research and such cooperation could benefit the US population too.

Grahame Morris MP said:

“The US blockade of Cuba has cost the Cuban economy billions of dollars and causes shortages in essential services including health and education. I welcome the fact that the UK Government has worked closely with Cuba on joint projects through the pandemic and hope that such cooperation will encourage President Biden to normalise relations by reversing the ludicrous designation of Cuba as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ and ending the blockade.”

Rob Miller, director of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign:

“The world is watching the US President in the early days of the new administration and we hope that he will take note of the United Nations vote in June when the world will once again say no to the blockade. It is heartening to see so many MPs here supporting the campaign against the US blockade and we would urge the British Government to take concrete steps to support UK companies wishing to trade with Cuba and stand up to US bullying on this matter.”

EDM 1550 and Cuba’s report on the impact of the blockade in advance of this year’s UNGA vote will be discussed with María del Carmen Herrera Caseiro, General Director of Multilateral Affairs and International Law at the Cuban Foreign Ministry during a Cuba Solidarity Campaign online meeting on Monday 24 May from 6.30pm. Details at www.cuba-solidarity.org.uk

EDM 1550 – Cuba and the US blockade

Motion text:

That this House recognises the US blockade of Cuba has cost the Cuban economy billions of dollars; causes shortages in essential services; and has been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s designation of Cuba as ‘state sponsors of terrorism’ – a politically motivated move which intensifies sanctions against the Cuban people in the middle of a health pandemic; however, this House welcomes recent comments by Juan González, White House Director for the Western Hemisphere, that the Biden administration is seeking to lift remittance and travel restrictions and further hopes measures will be taken to enable Cuba to access materials to produce and deliver millions of doses of its COVID-19 vaccine both to its own population and elsewhere; further this House congratulates the UK Government for voting against the blockade, and on its positive engagement with Cuba, including joint projects on COVID-19, medical research and facilitating the posting of Cuban medical brigades to British overseas territories; calls on the British Government to promote international cooperation between Cuba and the UK and encourage the Biden administration to normalise relations by reversing the designation of Cuba as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ and ending the blockade.

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Featured image: Cuban doctors and nurses getting ready to travel abroad, Havana, Cuba, April 2020. | Photo: Twitter/ @AlmaCubanita

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Can Guantánamo Ever be Shut Down?

May 5th, 2021 by Karen J. Greenberg

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***

The Guantánamo conundrum never seems to end.

Twelve years ago, I had other expectations. I envisioned a writing project that I had no doubt would be part of my future: an account of Guantánamo’s last 100 days. I expected to narrate in reverse, the episodes in a book I had just published, The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days, about — well, the title makes it all too obvious — the initial days at that grim offshore prison. They began on January 11, 2002, as the first hooded prisoners of the American war on terror were ushered off a plane at that American military base on the island of Cuba.

Needless to say, I never did write that book. Sadly enough, in the intervening years, there were few signs on the horizon of an imminent closing of that U.S. military prison. Weeks before my book was published in February 2009, President Barack Obama did, in fact, promise to close Guantánamo by the end of his first year in the White House. That hope began to unravel with remarkable speed. By the end of his presidency, his administration had, in fact, managed to release 197 of the prisoners held there without charges — many, including Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the subject of the film The Mauritanian, had also been tortured — but 41 remained, including the five men accused but not yet tried for plotting the 9/11 attacks. Forty remain there to this very day.

Nearly 20 years after it began, the war in Afghanistan that launched this country’s Global War on Terror and the indefinite detention of prisoners in that facility offshore of American justice is now actually slated to end. President Biden recently insisted that it is indeed “time to end America’s longest war” and announced that all American troops would be withdrawn from that country by September 11th, the 20th anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on the United States.

It makes sense, of course, that the conclusion of those hostilities would indeed be tied to the closure of the now-notorious Guantánamo Bay detention facility. Unfortunately, for reasons that go back to the very origins of the war on terror, ending the Afghan part of this country’s “forever wars” may not presage the release of those “forever prisoners,” as New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg so aptly labeled them years ago.

Biden and Guantánamo

Just as President Biden has a history, dating back to his years as Obama’s vice-president, of wanting to curtail the American presence in Afghanistan, so he called years ago for the closure of Guantánamo. As early as June 2005, then-Senator Biden expressed his desire to shut that facility, seeing it as a stain on this country’s reputation abroad.

At the time, he proposed that an independent commission take a look at Guantánamo Bay and make recommendations as to its future. “But,” he said then, “I think we should end up shutting it down, moving those prisoners. Those that we have reason to keep, keep. And those we don’t, let go.” Sixteen years later, he has indeed put in motion an interagency review to look into that detention facility’s closing. Hopefully, once he receives its report, his administration can indeed begin to shut the notorious island prison down. (And this time, it could even work.)

It’s true that, in 2021, the idea of shutting the gates on Guantánamo has garnered some unprecedented mainstream support. As part of his confirmation process, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, for instance, signaled his support for its closure. And Congress, long unwilling to lend a hand, has offered some support as well. On April 16th, 24 Democratic senators signed a letter to the president calling that facility a “symbol of lawlessness and human rights abuses” that “continues to harm U.S. national security” and demanding that it be shut.

As those senators wrote,

“For nearly two decades, the offshore prison has damaged America’s reputation, fueled anti-Muslim bigotry, and weakened the United States’ ability to counter terrorism and fight for human rights and the rule of law around the world. In addition to the $540 million in wasted taxpayer dollars each year to maintain and operate the facility, the prison also comes at the price of justice for the victims of 9/11 and their families, who are still waiting for trials to begin.”

Admittedly, the number of signatories on that letter raises many questions, including why there aren’t more (and why there isn’t a single Republican among them). Is it just a matter of refusing to give up old habits or does it reflect a lack of desire to address an issue long out of the headlines? Where, for example, was Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s name, not to mention those other 25 missing Democratic senatorial signatures?

And there’s another disappointment lurking in its text. While those senators correctly demanded a reversal of the Trump administration’s “erroneous and troubling legal positions” regarding the application of international and domestic law to Guantánamo, they failed to expand upon the larger context of that forever nightmare of imprisonment, lawlessness, and cruelty that affected the war-on-terror prisoners at Guantánamo as well as at the CIA’s “black sites” around the world.

Still, that stance by those two-dozen senators is significant, since Congress has, in the past, taken such weak positions on closing the prison. As such, it provides some hope for the future.

For the rest of Congress and the rest of us, when thinking about finally putting Guantánamo in the history books, it’s important to remember just what a vast deviation it proved to be from the law, justice, and the norms of this society. It’s also worth thinking about the American “detainees” there in the context of what normally happens when wars end.

Prisoners of War

Defying custom and law, the American war in Afghanistan broke through norms like a battering ram through a gossamer wall. Guantánamo was created in just that context, a one-of-a-kind institution for this country. Now, so many years later, it’s poised to break through yet another norm.

Usually, at the end of hostilities, battlefield detainees are let go. As Geneva Convention III, the law governing the detention and treatment of prisoners of war, asserts: “Prisoners of war shall be released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities.”

That custom of releasing prisoners has, in practice, pertained not only to those held on or near the battlefield but even to those detained far from the conflict. Before the Geneva Conventions were created, the custom of releasing such prisoners was already in place in the United States. Notably, during World War II, the U.S. held 425,000 mostly German prisoners in more than 500 camps in this country. When the war ended, however, they were released and the vast majority of them were returned to their home countries.

When it comes to the closure of Guantánamo, however, we can’t count on such an ending. Two war-on-terror realities stand in the way of linking the coming end of hostilities in Afghanistan to the shutting down of that prison. First, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Congress passed right after the 9/11 attacks was not geographically defined or limited to the war in Afghanistan. It focused on but was not confined to two groups, the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as anyone else who had contributed to the attacks of 9/11. As such, it was used as well to authorize military engagements — and the capture of prisoners — outside Afghanistan. Since 2001, in fact, it has been cited to authorize the use of force in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere.Of the 780 prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay at one time or another, more than a third came from Afghanistan; the remaining two-thirds were from 48 other countries.

A second potential loophole exists when it comes to the release of prisoners as that war ends. The administration of George W. Bush rejected the very notion that those held at Guantánamo were prisoners of war, no matter how or where they had been captured. As non-state actors, according to that administration, they were exempted from prisoner of war status, which is why they were deliberately labeled “detainees.”

Little wonder then that, despite Secretary of Defense Austin’s position on Guantánamo, as the New York Times recently reported, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby “argued that there was no direct link between its future and the coming end to what he called the ‘mission’ in Afghanistan.”

In fact, even if that congressional authorization for war and the opening of Guantánamo on which it was based never were solely linked to the conflict in Afghanistan, it’s time, almost two decades later, to put an end to that quagmire of a prison camp and the staggering exceptions that it’s woven into this country’s laws and norms since 2002.

A “Forever Prison”?

The closing of Guantánamo would finally signal an end to the otherwise endless proliferation of exceptions to the laws of war as well as to U.S. domestic and military legal codes. As early as June 2004, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor flagged the possibility that a system of indefinite detention at Guantánamo could create a permanent state of endless legal exceptionalism.

She wrote an opinion that month in a habeas corpus case for the release of a Guantánamo detainee, the dual U.S.-Saudi citizen Yaser Hamdi, warning that the prospect of turning that military prison into a never-ending exception to wartime detention and its laws posed dangers all its own. As she put it, “We understand Congress’ grant of authority for the use of ‘necessary and appropriate force’ to include the authority to detain for the duration of the relevant conflict, and our understanding is based on longstanding law-of-war principles.” She also acknowledged that, “If the practical circumstances of a given conflict are entirely unlike those of the conflicts that informed the development of the law of war, that [the] understanding [of release upon the end of hostilities] may unravel. But,” she concluded, “that is not the situation we face as of this date.”

Sadly enough, 17 years later, it turns out that the detention authority may be poised to outlive the use of force. Guantánamo has become an American institution at the cost of $13 million per prisoner annually. The system of offshore injustice has, by now, become part and parcel of the American system of justice — our very own “forever prison.”

The difficulty of closing Guantánamo has shown that once you move outside the laws and norms of this country in a significant way, the return to normalcy becomes ever more problematic — and the longer the exception, the harder such a restoration will be. Remember that, before his presidency was over, George W. Bush went on record acknowledging his preference for closing Guantánamo. Obama made it a goal of his presidency from the outset. Biden, with less fanfare and the lessons of their failures in mind, faces the challenge of finally closing America’s forever prison.

With all that in mind, let me offer you a positive twist on this seemingly never-ending situation. I won’t be surprised if, in fact, President Biden actually does manage to close Guantánamo. He may not do so as a result of the withdrawal of all American forces from Afghanistan, but because he seems to have a genuine urge to shut the books on the war on terror, or at least the chapter of it initiated on 9/11.

And if he were also to shut down that prison, in the spirit of that letter from the Democratic senators, it would be because of Guantánamo’s gross violations of American laws and norms. While the letter did not go so far as to name the larger war-on-terror sins of the past, it did at least draw attention directly to the wrongfulness of indefinite detention as a system created expressly to evade the law — and one that brought ill-repute to the United States globally.

That closure should certainly happen under President Biden. After all, any other course is not only legally unacceptable, but risks perpetuating the idea that this country continues to distrust the principles of law, human rights, and due process – indeed, the very fundamentals of a democratic system.

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Sanctions Are War

May 5th, 2021 by Daniel Larison

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***

Broad economic sanctions are a form of warfare, and the U.S. is by far the most frequent economic belligerent in the world. Our government’s overuse and abuse of sanctions has increased by leaps and bounds in just the last two decades. Sanctions designations increased significantly during the Obama years, and then they exploded under Trump with 1,457 designations in the year of 2018 alone. Trump’s multiple “maximum pressure” campaigns represented a dramatic escalation of economic warfare against Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Syria, and so far Biden has kept all of them intact. In each case, the US chose to launch these economic wars to try to compel capitulation by the targeted states as if they were rebellious subjects that needed to be brought to heel rather than the sovereign and independent countries that they are.

Economic wars cause the preventable deaths of tens of thousands of people, and in the most extreme cases they have caused deaths in the hundreds of thousands. The death toll doesn’t fully account for the misery that economic warfare creates, but it reminds us that broad sanctions are coercive and destructive by design. The US doesn’t need to resort to military action to cause civilian casualties in unnecessary wars. It just abuses its great economic and financial power to choke intransigent nations when their leaders refuse to bend to Washington’s will.

Placing entire populations under a modern form of siege is intended to cause massive harm to the civilian population. Strangling the people economically is not an unforeseen or unintended “side effect” of an economic war. It is what the siege is supposed to do. Sometimes this is done for the sake of imposing collective punishment on a nation, and sometimes it is an attempt to foment regime change from within, but it always represents an attack by our government on the people of other countries for things they cannot control or change. Broad sanctions strike at every aspect of life. At a recent event hosted by the Quincy Institute on the effects of sanctions, Prof. Asli Bali said,

“The economic consequences of broad-based sanctions affect health infrastructure, water and sanitation, the possibility of sustaining education, and access to critical foods….Sanctions that we present as ‘starving Assad’ are actually a form of collective punishment that are starving a civilian population.”

Sanctions advocates will often portray broad sanctions as “low cost” and an “alternative to war,” but the costs they impose are “low” only to the policymakers that inflict the punishment. The people on the receiving end rightly perceive these policies as an aggressive assault on them and their country. Sanctions advocates then add insult to injury by feigning concern for the people whom they have chosen to starve and impoverish.

Like other wars of choice waged by our government, economic wars against entire countries fail on their own terms. They inflict tremendous hardship and deprivation on tens of millions of people, and in the end they do not even achieve the political and policy goals that their supporters claim to have. Very much like our other wars, broad sanctions on a country never really end. Sanctions are politically easy to impose, and there is almost no pressure on political leaders to lift them. They are applied to so many different issues that even if a targeted state complied with Washington’s demands in one area they would still be sanctioned for other reasons. As we have seen in the case of Iran, a sanctioned government can fully comply with the requirements of an agreement endorsed by the Security Council and the US can still turn around and reimpose its own sanctions with impunity. The arrogant abuse of this power by the US has started to make other major governments look for workarounds to conduct legitimate commerce without suffering US penalties, but for the time being sanctioned countries have to adapt to the sieges and find their own ways to evade them.

Beyond the damage done to the lives and livelihoods of innocent people, economic wars tend to have pernicious political effects on the countries in question. Government officials and cronies tighten their grip on power and use their connections to enrich themselves off of smuggling while most of the population gets poorer, domestic hard-liners use the sanctions as an excuse for cracking down on dissent, and all the while the policies that the US opposes remain the same. In the case of attempted regime change, the targeted leaders become more entrenched, and they can use US hostility to their advantage by casting themselves as nationalist heroes. As with other kinds of war, the result is more authoritarianism and corruption in the government and less freedom for the people. Just as war is the health of the state, economic war is a boon to authoritarian rulers. Sanctions advocates often paint themselves as allies of the people, but their support for collective punishment shows their true colors.

Economic warfare against ordinary people is unjust, and it treats tens of millions of people around the world as our enemies when they have done nothing and could do nothing to us. Sanctions are not an alternative to war. They inflict indiscriminate death and destruction on another country, and in some cases the economic war is just a prelude to later attack. There are certain weapons and tactics that we consider inherently indiscriminate and unjustifiable, and we should apply the same restrictions to sanctions. Broad sanctions are indefensible and cruel, and our government should cease imposing them.

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Daniel Larison is a contributing editor and weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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***

The president of Ukraine met with the presidents of NATO members Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland in the latter’s capital, Warsaw, on May 3 to solidify cooperation against their common adversaries: Russia and Belarus. The five heads of state signed a joint declaration pledging multifaceted cooperation, including on security concerns.

Ukraine’s four partners in the meeting are to the north of it, are on the Baltic Sea and border Russia, its external territory of Kaliningrad and Belarus, Russia’s Union State partner. In fact two of them surround Kaliningrad on the land side, two border Russia proper and three border Belarus. All four nations host NATO Battlegroups and U.S. armed forces assigned to the Pentagon’s Operation Atlantic Resolve.

An analysis by Mehmet Kanci appeared on the website of Turkey’s Anadolu Agencyrecently, an excerpt from which is worth quoting in extenso:

“In September 2016, General John Abizaid, who had retired as the commander of the US Central Forces (CENTCOM) in 2007, was appointed by then-US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to advise then-Ukraine Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak. Until Abizaid was appointed as Ambassador to Riyadh in November 2018, he worked systematically to bring the Ukrainian army up to NATO standards. During this time, the US provided the Ukrainian army with communication systems, Javelin anti-tank missiles, and armored vehicles. Although Ukraine is not officially a NATO country, it has attained NATO standards in the last five years thanks to support from Turkey, the US, the UK, and Poland. Ukraine enacted a strategy document in March to reclaim its occupied territories after realizing it had completed its military preparations.”

The above, the author added, accounts for Ukraine’s increasingly assertive if not abrasive approach toward the Donetsk and Lugansk republics in the Donbass and toward Russia in recent months.

The unanimity and rapidity with which the U.S., NATO and the European Union fell into line with that new confrontational approach establishes without doubt the coordinated plan the parties had agreed on.

A statement by Polish President Andrzej Duda below hints at what may well be the larger plan. Should Ukraine with American and NATO support launch a full-scale offensive in the Donbass, diversionary actions by the four Baltic NATO members could target Belarus and Kaliningrad to throw Russia off balance.

After yesterday’s meeting in Warsaw, Polish President Duda stated, “At the NATO summit in June, it is planned to discuss a road map for Ukraine to take steps to join NATO.”

He is quoted by UKRINFORM as follows:

“We also discussed [with the president of Ukraine] the upcoming NATO summit to be held in Brussels in mid-June….The summit participants will discuss a formal definition of the path which Ukraine should follow towards membership in the North Atlantic Alliance….”

Duda also affirmed that Ukraine’s conflict with Russia was “a fundamental cause” for not only Kiev but for “other friends from this part of Europe.”

Interfax-Ukraine reminded its readers that at a briefing on April 16 after meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Ukraine’s Zelensky expected “to hear support for the provision of the Membership Action Plan at the NATO summit.”

He further elaborated:

“As for France and President Macron, we feel Ukraine’s support in the MAP issue. I would like to hear the specifics of when it can be, but it depends not only on France….There will be a NATO summit in June, and we will definitely hear if there is such a signal, and from which specific countries do we hear support on the MAP issue.”

In addition to securing the pledges of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, and of France and Germany, to support Ukraine in any future war in the Donbass and with Russia, Zelensky also garnered clear support from Turkey to the same effect.

In Warsaw yesterday the Polish president also spoke of a meeting a week from now of the Bucharest Nine (Eastern European NATO member states Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia), emphasizing,

“I think that Ukraine and Belarus will be very important topics, especially Ukraine and the Russian presence near the borders of Ukraine.”

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To add the final touch to plans for a united front against Russia and Belarus, it was announced that on his visit to Kiev starting today Secretary of State Antony Blinken is accompanied by his recently-confirmed Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, arguably the main architect of the 2014 violent overthrow of the government of President Viktor Yanukovych, which resulted in the military assault against the Donbass and the current showdown with Russia. One can’t help be reminded of the proverb that the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.

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Selected Articles: A Vaxxing Question

May 5th, 2021 by Global Research News

A Vaxxing Question

By Suzie Halewood, May 04, 2021

In 1956 German pharmaceutical company Chemie Grünenthal GmbH, licensed a new experimental drug designed to treat colds, flu, nausea and morning sickness. Known as Distaval in the UK, Distillers Biochemicals Ltd declared the drug could ‘be given with complete safety to pregnant women and nursing mothers without adverse effect on mother or child’ – a basic pre-requisite for licensing a drug.

Highly Cited COVID Doctor Comes to Stunning Conclusion: Government ‘Scrubbing Unprecedented Numbers’ of Injection-related Deaths

By Leo Hohmann, May 04, 2021

One of the world’s most prominent medical doctors with expertise in treating COVID-19 has gone on the record with a scathing rebuke of the U.S. government’s approach to fighting the virus. He says the government’s strategy, carried out in cooperation with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Nations World Health Organization, has resulted in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and is now being followed up with thousands more deaths caused by a mass-injection program.

Experimental Adenovirus COVID Injections Continuing to Kill Younger, Middle-Aged People

By Brian Shilhavy, May 04, 2021

The AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson experimental adenovirus COVID shots seem to be killing younger, middle-aged people at a higher rate than the mRNA shots from Pfizer and Moderna. Here are the stories of some of the victims who have died following the injections and devastated their families.

CDC Violated Law: Inflated COVID-19 Cases and Fatalities. “How Deaths are Reported”

By Dr. Henry Ealy and Dr. Joseph Mercola, May 04, 2021

In this interview, Dr. Henry Ealy, ND, BCHN, better known as Dr. Henele, a certified holistic nutritionist and founder/executive community director of the Energetic Health Institute,1 reviews how U.S. federal regulatory agencies have manipulated COVID-19 statistics to control the pandemic narrative.

Alan Duncan’s Diaries: An Insider’s Account of Boris Johnson, Brexit and Britain’s Middle East Secrets

By Chris Mullin, May 04, 2021

Duncan’s interest in the region dates back to his days as an oil trader. In 2014, Cameron appointed him a special envoy to Oman, a job he took very seriously. He was a member of what he refers to as the sultan’s “privy council”, a group of six prominent members of the British establishment who meet annually with the sultan to offer advice.

New Report Sheds Light on Vaccine Doomsday Cult

By Mike Whitney, May 04, 2021

An explosive new study by researchers at the prestigious Salk Institute casts doubt on the current crop of gene-based vaccines that may pose a grave risk to public health. The article, which is titled “The novel coronavirus’ spike protein plays additional key role in illness”, shows that SARS-CoV-2’s “distinctive ‘spike’ protein”..”damages cells, confirming COVID-19 as a primarily vascular disease.”

JCPOA Nuclear Talks: An Exercise in Futility?

By Stephen Lendman, May 04, 2021

According to Axios.com, Biden told Israel’s Mossad head Yossi Cohen on Friday that “the US has a long way to go in talks with Iran before it agrees a return to full compliance of the 2015 nuclear deal” — citing an unnamed senior Israeli official briefed on their talks.

The Growth of US GDP: Economic Recovery or Just Another Rebound? “If We are To Believe the Numbers”

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, May 04, 2021

This past week the US Commerce Department released its early estimates for US GDP for the 1st Quarter 2021, January through March. If we are to believe the numbers, the US economy grew a respectable 6.4% during the period. But did it really? And does it represent a strong recovery underway?

Sarah Beuckmann: 34-year-old Scotland Woman Suffers Gruesome AstraZeneca Adverse Reaction

By TheCOVIDBlog.com, May 04, 2021

Mrs. Sarah Beuckmann received her first dose of the experimental AstraZeneca viral vector shot on March 18, according to The Daily Record. She immediately felt flu-like symptoms, but was otherwise ok – until seven days later. A tingling sensation in her legs quickly turned into a rash that morphed into something you only see in horror movies.

“Salt of the Earth”: A Successful Combination of Inspiration and Perspiration

By Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin, May 04, 2021

Born in controversy but then ignored in its youth, the film Salt of the Earth has matured beautifully into a classic film in the neorealist style. Set in Zinc Town, New Mexico, a mining community with a majority of Mexican-Americans strike for working conditions equal to those of the white, or “Anglo” miners. The town and the mine is run by Delaware Zinc Inc. who refuse to negotiate with the workers and the strike goes on for months.

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***

Britain’s corporate media are suddenly awash with stories wondering whether, or to what extent, the UK’s prime minister is dishonest. Predictably in the midst of this, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg is still doing her determined best to act as media bodyguard to Boris Johnson. 

In a lengthy article on the BBC’s website over the weekend, she presents a series of soothing alternatives to avoid conceding the self-evident: that Johnson is a serial liar. According to Kuenssberg, or at least those she chooses to quote (those, let us remember, who give her unfettered “access” to the corridors of power), he is a well-intentioned, unpredictable, sometimes hapless, “untamed political animal”. A rough diamond.

In Kuenssberg’s telling, Johnson’s increasingly obvious flaws are actually his strengths:

“Yet what’s suggested time and again is that the prime minister’s attitude to the truth and facts is not based on what is real and what is not, but is driven by what he wants to achieve in that moment – what he desires, rather than what he believes. And there is no question, that approach, coupled with an intense force of personality can be enormously effective.

“In his political career, Boris Johnson has time and again overturned the odds, and that’s a huge part of the reason why.” 

The way Kuenssberg tells it, Johnson sounds exactly like someone you would want in your corner in a time of crisis. Not the narcissist creator of those crises, but the Nietzschean “Superman” who can solve them for you through sheer force of will and personality.

Lies piling up 

Slightly less enamoured with Johnson than the BBC has been the liberal Guardian, Britain’s supposedly chief “opposition” newspaper to the ruling Conservative government. But the Guardian has been surprisingly late to this party too. Typical of its newly aggressive approach to Johnson was a piece published on Saturday by its columnist Jonathan Freedland, titled “Scandal upon scandal: the charge sheet that should have felled Johnson years ago”.

As this article rightly documents, Johnson is an inveterate dissembler, and one whose lies have been visibly piling up since he entered 10 Downing Street. His propensity to lie is not new. It was well-know to anyone who worked with him in his earlier career in journalism or when he was an aspiring politician. It is not the “scandals” that are new, it’s the media’s interest in documenting them that is.

And when the liar-in-chef is also the prime minister, those lies invariably end up masking high-level corruption, the kind of corruption that has the capacity to destroy lives – many lives.

So why are Johnson’s well-known deceptions only becoming a “mainstream” issue now – and why, in particular, is a liberal outlet like the Guardian picking up the baton on this matter so late in the day? As Freedland rightly observes, these scandals have been around for many years, so why wasn’t the Guardian on Johnson’s case from the outset, setting the agenda?

Or put another way, why has the drive to expose Johnson been led not by liberal journalists like Freedland but chiefly by a disillusioned old-school conservative worried about the damage Johnson is doing to his political tradition? Freedland is riding on the coat-tails of former Telegraph journalist Peter Oborne, who wrote a recent book on Johnson’s fabrications, The Assault on Truth. Further, Johnson’s deceptions have gone viral not because of the efforts of the Guardian but because of a video compilation on social media of some of Johnson’s biggest whoppers by lawyer and independent journalist Peter Stefanovic.

Politics rigged

Part of the answer, of course, is that until recently the Guardian, along with the rest of the corporate media, had a much more pressing task than holding Britain’s prime minister to account for lies – and the corruption they obscure – that have drained the Treasury of the nation’s wealth, redirecting it towards a bunch of Tory donors, and subsequently contributed to at least a proportion of Covid-19 deaths.

The Guardian was preoccupied with making sure that Johnson was not replaced by an opposition leader who spoke, for the first time in more than a generation, about the need for wealth redistribution and a fairer society.

On the political scales weighing what was most beneficial for the country, it was far more important to the Guardian to keep then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his democratic socialist agenda out of Downing Street than make sure Britain was run in accordance with the rule of law, let alone according to the principles of fairness and decency.

Now with Corbyn long gone, the political conditions to take on Johnson are more favourable. Covid-19 cases in the UK have plummeted, freeing up a little space on front pages for other matters. And Corbyn’s successor, Keir Starmer, has used the past year to prove over and over again to the media that he has been scrupulous about purging socialism from the Labour party.

We are back to the familiar and reassuring days of having two main parties that will not threaten the establishment. One, the Labour party, will leave the establishment’s power and wealth untouched, but do so in a way that makes Britain once again look like a properly run country, conferring greater legitimacy on UK Plc. The other, the Conservative party, will do even better by the establishment, further enriching it with an unapologetic crony capitalism, even if that risks over the longer term provoking a popular backlash that may prove harder to defuse than the Corbyn one did.

For the time being at least, the elite prospers either way. The bottom line, for the establishment, is that the political system is once again rigged in its favour, whoever wins the next election. The establishment can risk making Johnson vulnerable only because the establishment interests he represents are no longer vulnerable.

Blame the voters 

But for liberal media like the Guardian, the campaign to hold Johnson to account is potentially treacherous. Once the prime minister’s serial lying is exposed and the people informed of what is going on, according to traditional liberal thinking, his popularity should wane. Once the people understand he is a conman, they will want to be rid of him. That should be all the more inevitable, if, as the Guardian contends, Starmer is an obviously safer and more honest pair of hands.

But the problem for the Guardian is that Johnson’s polling figures are remarkably buoyant, despite the growing media criticism of him. He continues to outpoll Starmer. His Midas touch needs explaining. And the Guardian is growing ever more explicit about where the fault is to be found. With us.

Or as Freedland observes:

“Maybe the real scandal lies with us, the electorate, still seduced by a tousled-hair rebel shtick and faux bonhomie that should have palled years ago… For allowing this shameless man to keep riding high, some of the shame is on us.”

Freedland is far from alone in peddling this line. Kuenssberg, in her BBC piece, offers a variant: 

“An insider told me: ‘He frequently leaves people with the belief that he has told them one thing, but he has given himself room for manoeuvre,’ believing that, ‘the fewer cast iron positions you hold the better, because you can always change political direction.’

“The verbal flourishes and rhetorical tricks are part of the reason why he has prospered. ‘A lot of his magic has been those off-the-cuff comments, that’s why a lot of the public like him,’ says an ally.”

In other words, we see what we want to see. Johnson is the vessel into which we pour our hopes and dreams, while he has the tough challenge of making our melange of hopes and dreams a tangible, workable reality.

Liberal journalists have been on this “blame the voters” path for a while. When it was Corbyn and his “dangerous” socialism being pitted against the Tories’ crony capitalism, the Guardian enthusiastically joined the smear campaign against Labour. That included evidence-free claims of an “institutional antisemitism” crisis under Corbyn’s leadership.

And yet despite the media’s best endeavours, Corbyn appalled journalists like Freedland at the 2017 general election by winning Labour’s biggest rise in vote share since 1945. Corbyn denied the Conservatives a majority and was a few thousand votes from winning outright – something Starmer can only dream of at the moment, despite Johnson’s exposure as an inveterate liar and conman. And Corbyn achieved this while the Labour party machine, and the entire corporate media, were vehemently against him.

Dangerous populism 

It was in the wake of Corbyn’s unexpected success at the polls in 2017 that the Guardian unleashed its “New Populism” series, seeking to warn of a supposedly dangerous new political phenomenon that lumped the then-Labour leader in with rightwing populists such as Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. They were all part of a new wave of authoritarian, cult-like leaders who barely concealed their sinister, racist agendas, gulled supporters with promises divorced from reality, and most likely had secret ties to Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

In short, the Guardian’s thesis was that “the people” kept voting for these leaders because they were stupid and easily duped by a smooth-tongued charlatan.

This narrative was aggressively promoted by the Guardian, even though Corbyn had nothing in common with the rightwing authoritarians with whom he was forced to share star billing. He had spent his long political career on the backbenches, cultivating a self-effacing politics of communal solidarity and “standing up for the little guy” rather than pursuing power. And far from being a nationalist or nativist, Corbyn had dedicated decades to internationalism and fighting racism – though admittedly, in challenging the anti-Palestinian racism of Israel and its Zionist supporters he had left himself prey to disingenuous claims of antisemitism.

But after several years of emotional and ideological investment in “the people are dumb” approach, the Guardian seems in no hurry to drop it – until, or unless, the people can be persuaded to vote for an eminently safe, status-quo candidate like Starmer. The paper’s target has simply switched from Corbyn to the more plausible figure of Boris Johnson.

The Guardian dares not contemplate any alternative explanation for why voters continue to prefer the narcissist, corrupt, lying Johnson over Labour’s “Clean Up Westminster” Keir Starmer. But its reluctance to consider other explanations does not mean they cannot be found.

A corrupt system 

The problem is not that most voters have failed to understand that Johnson is corrupt, though given the corrupt nature of the British corporate media – the Guardian very much included – they are hardly well positioned to appreciate the extent of Johnson’s corruption.

It is not even that they know that he is corrupt but do not care.

Rather, the real problem is that significant sections of the electorate have rightly come to the realisation that the wider political system within which Johnson operates is corrupt too. So corrupt, in fact, that it may be impossible to fix. Johnson is simply more open, and honest, about how he exploits the corrupt system.

Over the past two decades, there have been several way-stations exposing the extent of the corruption of the UK’s political system, whichever party was in power.

Labour under Tony Blair overrode popular dissent, expressed in the largest marches ever seen in the UK, and lied his way to a war on Iraq in 2003 that led to the killing and ethnic cleansing of millions of Iraqis. UK soldiers were dragged into a war that, it quickly became clear, was really about securing western control over the Middle East’s oil. And the invasion and occupation of Iraq spawned a new nihilistic Islamic cult that rampaged across the region and whose embers have yet to be snuffed out.

Five years later, Gordon Brown oversaw the near-implosion of the British economy after Labour had spent more than a decade intensifying the financial deregulation begun under Margaret Thatcher. That process had turned the financial sector into the true power behind No 10. Both Brown and his Tory successor, David Cameron, not only refused to hold to account any of the white-collar criminals responsible for the collapse of the financial system, but instead rewarded them with massive bailouts. Ordinary people, meanwhile, were forced to tighten their belts through years of austerity to pay off the debts.

And in the background throughout this period, a global and local environmental catastrophe has been gradually unfolding that the political system has shown no capacity to address because it has been captured by corporations who benefit most from continuing the environmental degradation. The system has instead dissembled on the threats we face to justify inaction.

No price to pay 

The truly astonishing thing is that those who lied us into the Iraq war, destabilising the Middle East and provoking an exodus from the region that has fuelled a surge in xenophobic politics across Europe; those who broke the financial system through their greed and incompetence and lied their way out of the consequences, forcing the rest of us to foot the bill; and those who lied about the ecological catastrophes unfolding over the past half century so that they could go on lining their own pockets; none of them paid any price at all for their mendacity, for their deceptions, for their corruption. Not only that, but they have grown richer, more powerful, more respected because of the lies.

One only needs to look at the fate of that unapologetic pair of war criminals, Tony Blair and George W Bush. The former has amassed wealth like a black hole sucks in light, and preposterously is still regularly called on by the media to pontificate on ethical issues in British politics. And the latter has been rehabilitated as a once-wayward, now beloved, irreverent uncle to the nation, one whose humanity has supposedly been underscored simply by making sure he was filmed “sneaking” a sweet to his presidential successor’s wife.

Perhaps not so surprisingly, a remedy to Britain’s self-evidently flawed political system was thrown up – in the form of Corbyn. He was a throwback, the very antithesis of the modern politicians who had brought us to the brink of ruin on multiple fronts. He was not venal, nor a narcissist. His concern was improving the lives of ordinary people, not the bank balances of corporate donors. He was against colonial-style wars to grab other countries’ resources. The things that made him a laughing stock with the political elite – his cheap clothes, his simple life, his allotment – made him appealing to large sections of the electorate.

For many, Corbyn was the last gasp for a system they had given up on. He might prove their growing cynicism about politics wrong. His success might demonstrate that the system could be fixed, and that all was not lost.

Except that is not how it played out. The entire political and media class – even the military – turned on Corbyn. They played the man, not the ball – and when it came to the man, any and all character assassination was justified. He had been a Soviet agent. He was a threat to Britain’s security. His IQ was too low to be prime minister. He was a secret antisemite.

Lying, cheating and stealing 

In the United States, then-Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer warned Donald Trump back in 2017 that the US intelligence services would “have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you” should the president try to go up against them. Maybe Trump hoped that his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, would offer some protection. Pompeo, a former head of the CIA, understood the dishonest ways of the intelligence services only too well. He explained his agency’s modus operandi to a group of students in Texas in an unusually frank manner in late 2019: “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. That’s, it was like, we had entire training courses!”

With the campaign to destroy Corbyn, many saw how the British system was just as skilled and experienced as the US one in its capacity to lie, cheat and steal. Corbyn’s treatment offered an undeniable confirmation of what they already suspected.

Over the past two decades, in an era when social media has emerged as an alternative information universe challenging that of the traditional corporate media, all these episodes – Iraq, the financial crash, ecological catastrophe, Corbyn’s political assassination – have had deeply damaging political ramifications. Because once people sensed that the system was corrupt, they became cynical. And once they were cynical, once they believed the system was rigged whoever won, they began voting cynically too.

This should be the main context for understanding Johnson’s continuing success and his invulnerability to criticism. In a rigged system, voters prefer an honestly dishonest politician – one who revels in the cynicism of the system and is open about exploiting it – over one who pretends he is playing fair, one who feigns a belief in the system’s ultimate decency, one who lies by claiming he can pursue the common good.

If the system is rigged, who is really more mendacious: Johnson, who plays dirty in a dirty system, or Starmer, who pretends he can clean up the Westminster cesspit when all he will really do is push the ordure out of view.

Johnson is transparently looking out for his mates and donors. Starmer is looking out for a rotten system, one that he intends to makeover so its corruption is less visible, less open to scrutiny.

Liberals are mystified by this reading of politics. They, after all, are emotionally invested in a supposedly meritocratic system from which they personally benefited for so long. They would rather believe the lie that a good political system is being corrupted by rotten politicians and a stupid electorate than the reality that a corrupt political system is being exploited by those best placed to navigate its corrupt ways.

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This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook’s blog: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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). Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

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British justice is a splendidly odd animal.  Its miscarriage is one of those wonders of institutional repetition.  When textbooks are written on the subject, one will feature prominently.  On April 23 this year, the convictions of 39 former sub-postmasters were quashed by the criminal division of the Court of Appeal.  They had been accused, and convicted, for theft and dishonesty after the UK Post Office installed the wonky wonder of the Horizon IT system.

There were figures such as Seema Misra, convicted for stealing £74,000 in cash from the Post Office branch under her stewardship in West Byfleet in 2010.  At the time, the press delighted in calling her the “pregnant thief”.  Her husband was assaulted by locals.  Della Robinson, who ran the Dukinfield, Greater Manchester Post Office, could not account for £17,000 by 2012.  She was suspended, reported to the police and faced a community service sentence.

The reason for their convictions lay in the accounting nightmare produced by the Horizon system.  It had ominous beginnings, growing up from a contract between the computer company ICL, the Post Office and the Benefits Agency, all part of what were termed private finance initiatives (PFI).  Developed by Japanese company Fujitsu, Horizon featured a swipe card system for paying pensions and benefits via the counters of Post Office branches.  The venture proved calamitous, ailed by chronic mismanagement, weaknesses in the technology and general human incompetence.  The cost of that endeavour to the British taxpayer: £700 million.

Refusing to wipe the slate clean, the Post Office beefed up the Horizon project, using it to convert accounting done through paper format into an electronic system.  Over time, this made it the largest IT contract in Europe not connected with the military.   But the stench refused to go away.  “Serious doubts over the reliability of the software remained,” warned the Post Office board of directors in their minutes in September 1999.

Glitches duly mounted.  Variations in revenue in some branches were noted.  Two months after Horizon began operating, the Post Office branch in Craig-y-Don in Wales showed up a “variance” totalling £6,000.  In time, these proliferated. In some cases, sub-postmasters, seeing these errors as not occasioned by computer error but their own, sought to cover revenue discrepancies with their own resources.  Their contracts did mention that shortfalls be covered in instances of “carelessness or error”.

Between 2000 and 2014, the Post Office, with witch-hunting zeal, prosecuted a stunning 736 sub-postmasters, seeking convictions for false accounting and theft.  Many were financially ruined.  A number took to addiction, suffered ill-health and premature death.  The sheer number facing charges raised an obvious question: how could there have been so many copy-cat crimes perpetrated by supposedly upstanding workers? (The Post Office itself admitted to investing time identifying and recruiting appropriate candidates.)  The more troubling, and logical reason: the continuing, near manic refusal to acknowledge the gremlins in the Horizon system.

The sub-postmasters fought back.  In December 2019, the Post Office agreed to settle with 555 claimants, accepting that it had previously erred in its “dealings with a number of postmasters”, agreeing to pay £58m in damages, with claimants receiving a £12 million share after legal fees. 

Battle that year was also waged in the High Court through several trials.  The Post Office, remarkably, attempted to tar the presiding judge Sir Peter Fraser in one case with the brush of bias, suggesting he step down.  The failed effort to recuse him had arisen because of a previous ruling that over 500 sub-postmasters had been wrongly held responsible for Horizon’s accounting bungles.   In another of Justice Fraser’s judgments handed down in December 2019, the Post Office was accused of showing “simple institutional obstinacy or refusal” in considering “any possible alternatives to their view of Horizon, which was maintained regardless of the weight of factual evidence to the contrary.”  Reality was ignored.  “It amounts to the 21stcentury equivalent of maintaining that the earth is flat.”

The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) proceeded to refer 42 sub-postmaster cases to the Court of Appeal.  The judges were charged with considering whether the prosecutions had been an abuse of court process and whether the convictions were unsafe. The salient consideration was whether the Horizon accounting system, already damned by Fraser, was reliable or not.

To the last, the Post Office, rather than conceding in full error, fought.  It did concede that 39 of the 42 former sub-postmasters “did not or could not have a fair trial.”  But in 35 of those 39 cases, it objected to the claim that the prosecutions were “an affront to the public conscience”.

In the criminal division of the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Holroyde and his fellow judges found the “failures of investigation and disclosure were in our judgment so egregious as to make the prosecution of any of the ‘Horizon cases’ an affront to the conscience of the court.”  The Post Office had effectively reversed the burden of proof by firstly assuming that the Horizon system was reliable and placing the onus upon the sub-postmasters to show why shortfalls had been registered.  “Denied any disclosure of material capable of undermining the prosecution case, defendants were inevitably unable to discharge that improper burden.”  Their prosecutions, convictions and sentences were pursued “on the basis that the Horizon data must be correct, and cash must therefore be missing, when in fact there could be no confidence as to that foundation.”

The snarling ugliness of conduct by the Post Office was laid bare.  It refused to comply with its own obligations when prosecuting the sub-postmasters using Horizon data.  It doggedly insisted that the sub-postmasters “make good all losses and could lose their employment if they did not do so.”  This was all done despite the selection of those very same individuals as trustworthy occupants of their positions.  The Post Office also dismissed claims that the shortfalls had arisen because of “an error or bug in the system”.  Internal documentation dealing with the explanation by one sub-postmaster that a system error had occurred was contemptuously swatted as “jumping on the Horizon bandwagon”.

Of the 42 original appellants, only three – Wendy Cousins, Stanley Fell and Neelam Hussain – failed to achieve their aim.  Their convictions were found to be safe, as “the reliability of Horizon data was not essential to the prosecution case”.  For the rest, a grotesque, wearing chapter of British injustice had been reversed.  An unquestioning faith and dogma, alloyed with some venality, had been repudiated.  Sadly, the Post Office executives, board members and those at Fujitsu, remain at large, ready for the next erring. 

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image: Central Post Office in Oxford, Oxfordshire (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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A Vaxxing Question

May 4th, 2021 by Suzie Halewood

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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In 1956 German pharmaceutical company Chemie Grünenthal GmbH, licensed a new experimental drug designed to treat colds, flu, nausea and morning sickness. Known as Distaval in the UK, Distillers Biochemicals Ltd declared the drug could ‘be given with complete safety to pregnant women and nursing mothers without adverse effect on mother or child’ – a basic pre-requisite for licensing a drug.

While forty-nine countries licensed the drug under multiple different names, the then head of the FDA Dr. Frances Kelsey, a physician-pharmacologist with a profound interest in fetal development, refused authorization for use in the US market due to her concerns about the lack of evidence regarding the drug’s safety.

The drug was also known as Thalidomide.

Sixty-five years on and the stringent safety measures brought in to avoid another scandal on the scale of Thalidomide have been swept aside in order to fast track the approval of experimental mRNA vaccines. This is in spite of concerns voiced by (among others) Dr Wolfgang Wodarg and Dr Michael Yeadon who petitioned the European Medical Agency (EMA) with a Administrative/Regulatory Stay Of Action in regard to the BioNtech/Pfizer study on BNT162b – not just in regard to concerns about pregnant women, the foetus and infertility – but also in regard to the effect of the mRNA vaccines on those with prior immunity, for whom immunization could lead to a hyperinflammatory response, a cytokine storm, and a generally dysregulation of the immune system that allows the virus to cause more damage to their lungs and other organs of their body.

No previous research into treating illness or disease with messenger RNA or mRNA vaccines has been successful and this is the first time mRNA vaccines have been used on humans.

The concerns of Yeadon, Wodarg and others appear to be borne out by data from the King’s College Zoe app that records adverse events from the mRNA vaccines. Taken from a pool of 700,000, data reveals that 12.2% of those vaccinated with the Pfizer jab experienced adverse events or side effects, a number which tripled to 35.7% for those with prior immunity. Adverse events from the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab were already high at 31.9% but increased to 52.7% for people with immunity.

Ellie Barnes, professor of hepatology and immunology at Oxford University and a member of the UK Coronavirus Immunology Consortium referred to the discovery – that when you’ve had a COVID-19 infection your T-cells become activated and become memory T cells – as ‘emerging’ as though this was something revelatory. Yet the dangers of over-immunization had been flagged up multiple times and well before vaccine rollout.

It gets worse.

In spite of additional research from New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital and the University of Maryland which indicated that those who had previously developed Covid-19 were effectively already immune and wouldn’t need a second dose (arguably they didn’t need the first dose if they already had immunity), Eleanor Riley, professor of infectious diseases at Edinburgh University said that ‘Incorporating this into a mass vaccination program, may be logistically complex’, adding ‘it may be safer overall to ensure everyone gets two doses’.

May be safer? Many in the study group had already had an adverse event from the first dose, so how could it be ‘safer’ when second doses have been shown to increase the adversity of an event.

And how is it logistically complex to notify those who have already experienced an adverse event? The medical data of the 700,000 patients has already been logged into the Zoe App system, otherwise the Zoe App wouldn’t be able to differentiate between those with or without prior immunity. Therefore, those with prior immunity from having had Covid-19 – or those for whom an adverse event would perhaps indicate prior immunity – can be notified that there is no need for a second dose.

Moreover, why on earth aren’t people tested for prior immunity before taking any vaccination considering the concerns associated with over-immunization?

Alarming data is also emerging from the Yellow Card Scheme.

Set up following the Thalidomide scandal, it allows both doctors and patients to record adverse medical events from drugs and vaccines circulating in the UK market. Up to and including 29 April 2021, the MHRA via Yellow Card Reporting received 149,082 suspected reactions from the COVID-19 mRNA Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine (from Dec 9 onwards) and 573,650 suspected reactions from the COVID-19 Oxford University/AstraZeneca (from Jan 4 onwards).

As of 29/4/21, the death toll from both vaccines stands at 1045. With 685 of those deaths from the AstraZeneca vaccine since Jan 4, that equates to 5.9 deaths per day for AstraZeneca alone. Deaths from COVID-19 on Monday 26th April stood at 6. And the data doesn’t cover all those vaccinated. Only 3-5 cards per 1,000 of doses (0.3-0.6%) administered have been filed (10% reported side effects during trials) which may indicate that many people are unaware of the existence of the Yellow Card Scheme and that therefore adverse events are being underreported.

The current mRNA vaccine take-up suggests many believe the vaccines will prevent transmission and that the 90-95% vaccine efficacy reported by the BBC equates to a high chance of prevention. These figures are taken from the FDA’s report on the efficacy of the mRNA Pfizer vaccine, which itself refers to the potential of reduction of the viral load – i.e. symptomatic COVID-19 – not transmission. It does not mean that 95% of people vaccinated are protected from contracting the virus, something The Lancet refers to as ‘a misconception’.

Even the 90-95% claim of reduction in viral load is questioned by a BMJ report (and others), which estimates the mRNA vaccine’s efficacy in the reduction of COVID-19 symptoms to be more within the 19-29% range – less than the 35% efficacy of dexamethasone used by the NHS.

This appears to be backed up by further reporting from Shahriar Zehtabchi, MD who explains why ‘suspected but unconfirmed’ COVID-19 cases cannot clarify which study patients had the disease in any group.

It would be hard to see therefore how vaccine efficacy could be determined if those taking the vaccine had not been tested for prior immunity or if those on trials were only ‘suspected’ of having had the disease, without having had a test to confirm it. The mRNA vaccines are also predominantly for those with high risk of complications from COVID-19 which – judging by ONS statistics – is a minority.

According to ONS figures, the number of those under sixty-five with no serious underlying health issues who died ‘due’ to Covid-19 in 2020 was 1,549. For the healthy 30-year-old age group (i.e. those with no serious underlying health issues), taking the experimental mRNA vaccine would be the statistical equivalent of 164,125 people jumping off a cliff because a hungry bear was approaching. The bear only wants one meal and he’s going to get the slowest runner. If you are fit, you have little to no chance of the bear getting you. Jumping off the cliff however can lead to injury or death. It is a leap into the unknown. As are the mRNA vaccines.

Yet there are still those who believe they need a vaccination in order to travel. Not so. Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, France, Austria and Israel are the first to announce they will accept proof of antibodies and/or a negative COVID-19 test in order to visit. Furthermore, the vaccinated will also need to show proof of a COVID-19 negative test, presumably because there are still doubts from these countries and others as to the efficacy levels of the vaccines in regard to transmission. Not even British Airways demands proof of vaccination. The airline was quick off the blocks to offer a subsidized £33 online Covid-test for those planning to travel. After the financial losses of lockdown, most airlines and countries will no doubt follow suit. Demand is what fuels the market.

Not that any of the above will slow down the UK Government’s manic roll out of the vaccine drive to the next 40-49-year-old target range of guinea-pigs. Do the majority of these 40-49-year-olds need the mRNA vaccine? Not according to WHO and ONS data. For a healthy 40-49 year old, the chances of dying from COVID-19 is 1 in 46,242. Will this next target range group be put off by the fact so many doctors and healthcare workers are refusing to take the vaccine? They should be.

It took five years after the initial licensing of Thalidomide before anyone realised Thalidomide crossed the placental barrier and caused serious birth defects, a discovery hampered by the fact the drug had been marketed under multiple different names across 49 countries. It took a further five years to mount a legal challenge. Nobody was found guilty. Not until the mid-seventies following a fierce moral crusade by the late, great investigative journalist and editor Harold Evans (who referred to investigative journalism as ‘attacking the devil’) did the families of those children who died or who were born with limb, eye and heart problems receive commensurate compensation. Fifty years later, Chemie Grünenthal GmbH apologised. Evans believed the Thalidomide scandal was a lesson in how a government can betray its duty. They’re still doing it.

Chief Executive of the MHRA Dr. June Raine was ‘delighted’ to approve the AstraZeneca vaccine for use on the citizens of the UK. ‘No stone is left unturned when it comes to our assessments’ she said. That there had been ‘a robust and thorough assessment of all the available data’ and that her staff had ‘worked tirelessly to ensure we continue to make safe vaccines available to people across the UK’.

I doubt Dr. Frances Kelsey would see it that way. Or Harold Evans.

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Suzie Halewood is a mathematician and filmmaker.

Featured image: Dr Frances Kelsey receiving the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service from President Kennedy in 1962, for successfully preventing Thalidomide being approved for use in the USA. (Source: OffGuardian)

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).

***

Denmark on Monday became the first country to exclude Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J) COVID vaccine from its vaccination program over a potential link to blood clotting disorders.The Danish Health Authority said in a statement it had concluded “the benefits of using the COVID-19 vaccine from J&J do not outweigh the risk of causing the possible adverse effect in those who receive the vaccine,” Reuters reported.

Danish health officials noted the European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) conclusion that “there is a possible link between rare but severe cases of blood clots and the COVID-19 vaccine from J&J,” referring to an investigation last month into eight U.S. reports of rare blood clots — one of which was fatal — that occurred after recent vaccination.

Unlike the Danish Health Authority however, the EMA concluded the benefits of using the J&J vaccine outweigh the risks. The EMA did recommend adding a warning to J&J’s vaccine label, and the company said it would comply with that measure.

“Taking the present situation in Denmark into account, what we are currently losing in our effort to prevent severe illness from COVID-19 cannot outweigh the risk of causing possible side effects in the form of severe blood clots in those we vaccinate,” the health authority said.

Denmark stopped using AstraZeneca’s vaccine last month after European regulators found a possible link between AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine and “very rare” blood clots.

Both J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines use a modified adenovirus vector technology as opposed to the mRNA technology used in the Moderna and Pfizer’s COVID vaccines.

The EMA noted in its findings on the J&J vaccine that one plausible explanation for the combination of blood clots and low blood platelets could be an immune response leading to a condition similar to heparin-induced thrombocytopenia.

Scientists in Norway and Germany who studied blood clots after vaccination with AstraZeneca suggested some people may experience an abnormal immune response causing them to form antibodies that attack their own platelets after being vaccinated.

It’s not yet clear if there might be a similar mechanism with the J&J vaccine, but J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines, as well as Russia’s COVID vaccine and China’s, are made with the same technology.

On April 13, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevent (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) called for an immediate halt to the use of J&J’s COVID vaccine, marketed under the company’s Janssen subsidiary, while they investigated at least six cases of potentially dangerous blood clots in people who received the vaccine. All six occurred in women between the ages of 18 and 48, and symptoms occurred six to 13 days after vaccination. One death was reported.

As The Defender reported, one of the six cases included a Nevada teen who underwent three brain surgeries to repair blood clots she developed about a week after being vaccinated.

On April 14, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) postponed a vote on whether to lift the pause on the J&J vaccine, effectively extending the pause pending further analysis of data relating to blood clots in people who received the vaccine.

That same day, J&J revealed two more cases of blood clots — one in a 25-year-old man who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage during a clinical trial and another case of deep-vein-thrombosis in a 59-year-old woman.

On April 23, the ACIP voted 10 – 4 to lift the pause and continue use of the J&J shot without restrictions or an additional warning about the risk of blood clotting disorders after analyzing 15 cases of rare blood clots, including three deaths, according to a slide presentation shared during the meeting.

The ACIP said the link between blood clots and J&J’s COVID vaccine was “plausible,” but concluded the vaccine’s benefits outweigh the risks and recommended the vaccine for persons 18 years of age and older in the U.S. under the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).

Children’s Health Defense queried the VAERS data for a series of adverse events associated with the formation of clotting disorders and other related conditions. VAERS yielded a total of 1,845 reports for all three vaccines from Dec. 14, 2020, through April 23.

Of the 1,845 cases reported, there were 655 reports attributed to Pfizer, 577 reports to Moderna and 608 reports to J&J. U.S. health officials only acknowledged 15 blood clot cases associated with the J&J vaccine at the April 16 meeting.

Though J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines have been under the microscope for their potential to cause blood clots, scientists warned, as far back as December 2020, that mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna pose similar risks.

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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

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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The AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson experimental adenovirus COVID shots seem to be killing younger, middle-aged people at a higher rate than the mRNA shots from Pfizer and Moderna.

Here are the stories of some of the victims who have died following the injections and devastated their families.

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Francine Boyer: 54-year-old Canadian woman develops blood clots, dead 14 days after experimental AstraZeneca shot

by The COVID Blog

A 54-year-old woman is dead, and Canadian mainstream media are reaching for the stars with their propaganda.

Mrs. Francine Boyer and her husband, Alain Serres, both received experimental AstraZeneca shots on April 9, according to a family press release. Mr. Serres suffered no apparent adverse effects. But Mrs. Boyer suffered from extreme fatigue and debilitating headaches. She checked into a local hospital, but doctors could not figure out what was wrong. She was transferred to Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital.

Doctors diagnosed her with cerebral thrombosis, aka blood clots in her brain. She died on April 23. Canadian mainstream media and politicians commenced a Fauci-Biden-like public relations campaign defending experimental viral vector shots after Mrs. Boyer died. Quebec Premier François Legault told state-run CBC/Radio Canada, “we knew there was a once chance in 100,000 this could happen.” He said the death of Mrs. Boyer is “sad,” but the benefits of experimental AstraZeneca shots outweigh the risks.

National Director of Public Health Dr. Horacio Arruda offered even more big pharma propaganda. He said Mrs. Boyer’s death is “very rare” and “sometimes, unfortunately, there are complications.” Health Canada, a Canadian hybrid equivalent to the CDC and FDA, also said in a statement that the benefits of AstraZeneca shots outweigh the risks.

Mrs. Boyer is survived by her husband, who posted on social media the other day “I love you and I will love you forever!” She is also survived by two grown children, two grandchildren, and her siblings.

Read the full story at The COVID Blog.

Genene Norris: 48-year-old Australian woman develops blood clots, dead six days after AstraZeneca shot

by The COVID Blog

A 48-year-old woman is dead after yet another “rare coincidence” involving COVID-19 shots.

Ms. Genene Norris received the experimental AstraZeneca viral vector shot on April 8, according to the Daily Mail. She almost immediately fell ill. Doctors diagnosed her with “rare” blood clots and placed her on dialysis in the ICU four days after the shot. That indicates kidney failure. She died on April 14.

The Australia Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) is at least being semi-honest about the situation. A spokesperson said the blood clots were “likely linked to the vaccine.” But the agency doesn’t have much choice after a string of deaths related to the experimental shots.

The Northern Daily Leader reported that a “fit and healthy” 55-year-old died in Tamworth, New South Wales on April 21. The newspaper did not name him. But we’re told his name is Darren Lee Missen. He had “massive blood clots” in his lungs after a COVID-19 shot. There were at least four other cases of blood clots in Australia after AstraZeneca shots in the last several weeks. Despite the TGA’s kind-of-honest statement, deputy secretary John Skerritt told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the benefits of AstraZeneca shots outweigh the risks. He did not articulate any tangible benefits in his statement.

Ms. Norris worked for Sanitarium Health Food Company. It is solely owned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which encourages adherents to “responsibly participate in protective and preventive immunization programs.” The company said in a statement that it is “saddened by the loss of a much loved employee.”

Read the full story at The COVID Blog.

Jack Last: 27-year-old British engineer dead 21 days after experimental AstraZeneca viral vector shot

by The COVID Blog

Mr. Jack Last had a pilot license, traveled everywhere from New Zealand to Antarctica, and was a scuba diver. His life was tragically cut short because of yet another coincidence.

Mr. Last received the experimental AstraZeneca viral vector shot on March 30, according to The Sun U.K. He suffered from excruciating headaches thereafter, which forced him to check into A&E at West Suffolk Hospital on April 9. His condition worsened, prompting doctors to transfer him to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. But they could do nothing to save the “fit and healthy” young man, as described by his family. He died on April 20.

A kangaroo “inquest” has been launched into Mr. Last’s death. He obviously died from blood clots in his brain, as nearly every experimental viral vector victim does. The Medical Healthcare Products and Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is the U.K. equivalent to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The agency admitted last week that the risk factor for these “rare” blood clots doubled last week.

Meanwhile the European Medicines Agency says the alleged benefits of experimental viral vectors still outweigh the risks of “rare” blood clots. Many European countries temporarily paused use of AstraZeneca shots due to blood clots, just like the United States did for the experimental Johnson & Johnson viral vector shots.

Mr. Last told family that he was surprised to be offered the shot because of his young age. He had also just recently purchased a home.

Read the full story at The COVID Blog.

Ionia Co. woman’s death after getting J&J vaccine reported to the CDC

by FOX 17 Western Michigan

An Ionia family is mourning the death of a wife and mother after they say she died due to complications after receiving the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine.

The family of 35-year-old Anne VanGeest released a statement following her death on April 19.

“It is with profound sadness that we share the news of Anne’s passing as the result of complications after receiving the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. Anne (Annie), who was 35, was a loving mother, wife, sister and daughter. An active member in the animal rescue community, Annie will be remembered as a fierce advocate, a master-multi-tasker and a caring friend by her colleagues, fellow volunteers and family. We ask for privacy for her family as they mourn Annie’s passing and celebrate her life.”

In an email to the VanGeest family, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed her death had been reported through the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) by a healthcare provider. VAERS is a vaccine safety system managed by the CDC and the FDA.

VanGeest died on April 19. According to her family, VanGeest received the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine 11 days before her death.

VanGeest’s death certificate lists her cause of death as “acute subarachnoid hemorrhage non-traumatic.”

Read the full story at FOX 17 Western Michigan.

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Featured image is from Health Impact News

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This story is not for the queasy. So fair warning – stop reading now if you can’t handle the sight of ghastly human injuries.

Mrs. Sarah Beuckmann received her first dose of the experimental AstraZeneca viral vector shot on March 18, according to The Daily Record. She immediately felt flu-like symptoms, but was otherwise ok – until seven days later. A tingling sensation in her legs quickly turned into a rash that morphed into something you only see in horror movies.

Photo Credit: MirrorPix

Extended hospital stay

Her husband took her to the A&E (accident and emergency department) at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital. Doctors immediately placed her on an EKG machine, as her resting heart rate exceeded 160 beats per minute.

The hospital performed tests to determine if she had herpes or HIV, to no avail. Two biopsies determined that she had an adverse reaction to the experimental shot. Doctors treated the condition with steroids. But not before it spread to her fingers and face.

Photo Credit: MirrorPix

Photo Credit: MirrorPix

Doctors gave her morphine to mitigate the pain. Mrs. Beuckmann told the Daily Record that she thought her legs would need amputating if the condition did not improve.

The mother of one ended up spending 16 days in the hospital before being released on April 12. However she will require physiotherapy to restore strength in her legs. Nurses come to her home to change the dressing on her legs daily.

Mrs. Beuckmann is “ineligible” to get the second shot due to the adverse reaction. But she is encouraging others to get the shots despite her adverse reaction. “I’m not an anti-vaxxer or anything,” she said. “I still believe people should be vaccinated and the amount of people that have had it and have been okay shows that it is safe for most.”

We’ve seen this before

This is at least the third time we’ve covered experimental Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca viral vector shots causing this reaction, known as Stevens-Johnson Syndrome. It is the second time in Scotland. All three times, none of the original sources mention Stevens-Johnson.

Further, this is probably the 100th time we’ve covered a victim or their families encouraging others to get experimental shots despite their experiences. It is a waste of time trying to make sense of this seemingly contagious psychological disposition among the inoculated. All you can do is stay vigilant and protect your friends and loved ones.

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Featured image: Mrs. Sarah Beuckmann is likely to be wheelchair-bound for the foreseeable future. (Source: TheCOVIDBlog.com)

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Dr. Henry Ealy and his team started looking at CDC data on COVID-19 cases and fatalities in mid-March 2020, quickly realizing the agency was vastly exaggerating fatalities

Over-reporting of fatalities was enabled by a March 2020 change in how cause of death is reported on death certificates. Rather than listing COVID-19 as a contributing cause in cases where people died from other underlying conditions, it was to be listed as the primary cause

As of August 23, 2020, the CDC reported 161,392 fatalities caused by COVID-19. Had the long-standing, original guidelines for death reporting been used, there would have only been 9,684 total fatalities due to COVID-19

The CDC violated federal law, as the Paperwork Reduction Act requires data collection and publication to be overseen by the Office of Management and Budget. Proposed changes must be published in the Federal Register and be open to public comment. None of these transparency rules were followed

We don’t yet know who was responsible for altering the reporting rules in violation of federal law. To identify the culprits, formal grand jury investigation petitions have been sent to all U.S. attorneys and the U.S. Department of Justice, requesting a thorough, independent and transparent investigation; a direct public effort to gather signatures also commenced on the one-year anniversary of the CDC reporting change

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In this interview, Dr. Henry Ealy, ND, BCHN, better known as Dr. Henele, a certified holistic nutritionist and founder/executive community director of the Energetic Health Institute,1 reviews how U.S. federal regulatory agencies have manipulated COVID-19 statistics to control the pandemic narrative.

Watch the interview here.

He earned his doctorate in naturopathic medicine from SCNM. After graduating from UCLA with a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering, he worked for a major aerospace company as a primary database developer for the International Space Station program.

He holds over 20 years of teaching and clinical experience and was the first naturopathic doctor to regularly teach at a major university in the U.S., when he headed up a program at Arizona State University on bioanxiety management.

As he points out, he’s an avid data collector. In October 2020, Henele and a team of other investigators published a paper2 in Science, Public Health Policy and the Law, titled, “COVID-19 Data Collection, Comorbidity & Federal Law: A Historical Retrospective,” which details how the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has enabled the corruption of case- and fatality-reporting data in violation of federal law.

Accuracy of Data Is Paramount for Public Health Policies

The team started looking at CDC data on COVID-19 cases and fatalities in mid-March 2020. He explains:

“What I started doing on March 12 was going through all the data we could find from the Italian Ministry of Health and South Korea. We couldn’t validate any of the data coming out of China. There was just no independent way to do it. What we were seeing out of Italy and South Korea was that we were going to be concerned about people who are over 60, over 70 years of age with preexisting conditions.

That was the main thing coming out of that data. So, we were expecting the same kind of trends here … I started tracking the data on a daily basis from each state health department, and then making sure that what the CDC was reporting was matching up.

What we started to see, very early on, were some significant anomalies between what the states were reporting and what the CDC was saying. It was concerning, because the variance was growing with each day. We have an old saying: ‘Garbage in equals garbage out.’ And that was the concern, because we knew public health policies are going to be based upon the data, so accuracy is of paramount importance.

Then we started delving in a little deeper into how the CDC was supposedly collecting their data. That’s where we saw the National Vital Statistics Systems (NVSS) March 24 guidelines, which were very concerning, and we saw the CDC adopt the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists paper on April 14.

What was incredibly concerning about this was that it was all done without any federal oversight, and it was all done without any public comment, especially scientific comment. That became increasingly problematic. We started to see discrepancies in the state of New York alone, in the thousands of fatalities.”

Special Rules for COVID-19 Fatalities Were Implemented

Importantly, in March 2020, there was a significant change made to the definition of what a COVID-19 fatality was. As explained by Henele, there’s a handbook on death reporting, which has been in use since 2003. There are two key sections on a death certificate. In the first part, the cause of death is detailed. In the second part, contributing factors are listed.

Contributing factors are not necessarily statistically recorded. It’s the first part, the actual cause of death, that is most important for statistical accounting. March 24, 2020, the NVSS updated its guidelines on how to report and track COVID-19-related deaths.

“They were saying that COVID-19 should be listed in Part 1 for statistical tracking, but [only] in cases where it is proven to have caused death, or was assumed to have caused death,” Henele explains.

“What was really concerning about this document was that it specifically stated that any preexisting conditions should be moved from Part 1, where it has been put for 17 years, into Part 2.

So, it was basically taking this and saying, ‘We’re going to create exclusive rules for COVID-19 and we’re going to do a 180 for this single disease …’ The big problem with that is that now you remove the ability for a medical examiner, a coroner, a physician, to interpret [the cause of death] based upon the collective health history of that patient …

You remove their expertise, and you say, ‘You have to count this as COVID-19.’ That takes on an added measure when you incentivize it financially, and that’s what we saw with some of the Medicare and Medicaid payouts …”

Who’s Responsible?

Who has the authority to do this? The answer is “no one.” A federal agency has the ability to propose a data change, at which time it would be registered in the Federal Register. At that point, federal oversight by the Office of Management and Budget kicks in, and the proposed change is opened up for public comment.

Since they did not register the proposed change, there was no oversight and no possibility for the public to comment on the change. Basically, what happened is that these changes were simply implemented without following any of the prescribed rules. “They acted unilaterally, and that’s not how [it] is supposed to work,” Henele says.

As to who took it upon themselves to alter the reporting rules, we don’t know. To identify the culprits, Henele and his team have sent out formal grand jury investigation petitions to every U.S. attorney and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), requesting a thorough, independent and transparent investigation.

“We did it at both state and federal levels. We have sent physical copies to every U.S. attorney and their aides. We sent out over 247 mailings in October [2020],” Henele explains. “We sent out an additional 20 to 30 to various people at the Department of Justice …

They would have the ability to call a grand jury, and that grand jury would have the ability to subpoena all those records to determine who were at fault … All we need is one U.S. attorney. All we need is one person at the Department of Justice to take up the cause.”

Dramatic Implications

The consequences of that change in the definition of the cause of death where COVID-19 is involved have been dramatic. For the full implications, I recommend reading through Henele’s peer-reviewed paper, “COVID-19: CDC Violates Federal Law to Enable Corruption of Fatality-Reporting Data.”3

“We’ve accumulated about 10,000 hours of collective team research into this [paper]. It’s been reviewed by nine attorneys and a judge for accuracy. It’s gone through the peer-review process before being published. We feel it’s tight.

On page 20 of the paper, we have a big graphic showing what the estimated actual fatality count should have been as of August 23, 2020. What was reported on August 23 was 161,392 fatalities caused by COVID-19 …

Comparison Of Fatalities

Cause of Death Form COVID-19

Cause of Death Form H1N1

Had we used the 2003 guidelines, our estimates are that we would have roughly 9,684 total fatalities due to COVID-19. That’s a significant difference. That’s a difference on the scale of as much as 96%. The range that we calculated was 88.9% to 96% inflation.”

Indeed, this matches up with an admission by the CDC in late August 2020, at which time they admitted that only 6% of the total death count had COVID-19 listed as the sole cause of death. The remaining 94% had had an average of 2.6 comorbidities or preexisting health conditions that contributed to their deaths.4

“For absolute 100% accuracy, we’d have to do something like what we were just alerted to by a whistleblower in Florida, where they’ve actually gone in and reexamined every single death certificate and the medical records with them. What they found was that roughly 80% of the fatalities were wrongfully classified as COVID-19 fatalities,” Henele says.

Science Foundations Have Been Violated

Mainstream media have justified pandemic measures “based on the science,” yet the very foundation of science has been violated. The ramifications are enormous, from the destruction of local economies and skyrocketing suicide rates to people being forced to die alone, their family members being barred from being at their bedside during their last moments.

“I lost my mother in in 2002,” Henele says. “The grace of it all was that we were able to get her out of the hospital and fulfill her last request, which was to pass away in her bed with family around her. I grieve for every single person who’s lost someone [during this pandemic] who was not able to be there.

Americans should not have to die alone because we’re worried about some virus that they’re telling us is a problem, when the data, even the data that we know to be inflated and fraudulent, still doesn’t suggest the virility that they want us to believe.”

COVID-19 Timeline

In their paper, Henele and his team detail a timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic and federal laws that impact data handling. Here’s a summary:

In 1946, certain administrative procedures were implemented. The Administrative Procedures Act requires federal agents and agencies to follow certain rules to get things done. These rules are to ensure transparency in government.

“If you’re a federal agency, you have an obligation to the people of this country to make sure that the data you’re publishing is not only accurate, but that it is transparent,”Henele explains.

In 1980, the Paperwork Reduction Act was written into law. In 1995, the Act was amended, designating the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as the oversight body for all federal agencies’ data.

In October 2002, the Information Quality Act was implemented, which doubles down even further on the accuracy and integrity and data gathering. This act requires federal agencies to meet explicit criteria in order for their data to be published and analyzed.

In 2005, the Virology Journal published research demonstrating that hydroxychloroquine has strong antiviral effects against SARS-CoV (the virus responsible for SARS) primate cells. This finding was hailed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, Henele notes. In other words, 15 years ago, Fauci admitted that hydroxychloroquine works against coronaviruses. This is public record.

As reported in “The Lancet Gets Lanced With Hydroxychloroquine Fraud” and “How a False Hydroxychloroquine Narrative Was Created,” the myth that this drug was useless at best and dangerous at worst was purposely created using falsified research and trials in which the drug was given in toxic doses.

This fraudulent research was then used to discourage and in some cases block the use of hydroxychloroquine worldwide. As noted by Henele, “It’s not science. We’re in this very weird faith-based model of science, which isn’t science at that point.”

In 2014, Fauci authorized $3.7 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). In 2019, WIV received another $3.7 million. In both instances, this funding was for gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.

October 18, 2019, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted Event 201, in conjunction with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and a few other financial partners. November 17, 2019, China recorded the first known case of COVID-19.

“Now, they could be completely unrelated,” Henele says, “but for us, it’s a very incredible coincidence that you run a simulation a month before a pandemic breaks out. It’s a little tough for me to digest as just a coincidence.”

January 29, 2020, the White House installed a coronavirus task force, which included Fauci and then-CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield, as well as Derek Kan, then-deputy director of the OMB.

I found this to be a little interesting,” Henele says. “Why would you need an OMB person on a coronavirus task force?”

March 9, 2020, the CDC alerted Americans over 60 with preexisting conditions that they might be in for a long lockdown out of safety concerns.

March 24, the CDC changed how COVID-19 is recorded on death certificates, de-emphasizing preexisting conditions and comorbidities, and basically calling all deaths in which the patient had a positive SARS-CoV-2 test a COVID-19 death.

“We have, legitimately on record, people who’ve died in a motorcycle accident listed as a COVID-19 death. These are not fictitious things that we’ve made up. Rhode Island had over 80% of their fatalities at one point in either assisted living centers or hospice care. Why are we testing people in hospice care and life care? That’s another interesting question,” Henele says.

April 14, 2020, the CDC adopted a position paper from a nonprofit, the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists, which identifies every single methodology for how to report a probable COVID-19 case, a confirmed COVID-19 case, an epidemiologically-linked or contact-traced COVID case.

“What’s so incredible about this is the standard of proof for a probable case is literally one cough. That’s all a physician needs, [according to] this document, to validate that that person is a probable COVID case,” Henele says.

“And it gets worse. On Page 6 of that document, Section 7B, it explicitly states that they are not going to define a methodology to ensure that the same person cannot be counted multiple times. So, what we end up with is a revolving door.

Now, in terms of new cases, the same person can be counted over and over and over again, without being tested, without having any symptoms. All they need to do is be within 6 feet of someone [who has been deemed positive for SARS-CoV-2] and then a contact tracer can say, ‘OK, well, that person is [also] positive.’

When we looked at data from last week, roughly 27% of the people who were said to be positive actually had a positive test. That means 73% were just told ‘Yeah, we think you got it.’ And that’s good enough, because we’re in this faith-based model of science, instead of a verifiable framework for science, which we’re supposed to be based on.

That person then cannot go back to work until they show a negative test. Well, let’s say they get tested 13 times. Guess what happens? That’s 13 new cases, when it really should only be one.

So, there are major flaws, and the issue that I think a lot of scientists like myself … have with this document and its adoption is that there was no oversight, and there was no public comment period to question some of the obvious flaws in what they were defining as data collection — let alone to ask a very simple question: ‘You’re the CDC, you’re supposed to be the pinnacle of this.

Why do you need to outsource rules and criteria for data collection to a nonprofit entity?’ That doesn’t make much sense to me.”

Transparency Rules Have Been Grossly Violated

So, what exactly is the connection between the Paperwork Reduction Act and the COVID-19 fatality data? Why is it so important?

“Well, the Paperwork Reduction Act is really about establishing oversight,” Henele explains. “It established the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, which is under the executive branch. It established them as the key agency for oversight of all data in the entire federal government.

So, when you start seeing IHME [Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation] out of the University of Washington — which is heavily funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to the tune of $384 million in two installments — when you see their data being used at federal levels, you go and look at the Federal Register and you say, ‘OK, where is the 30 to 60 days that we were supposed to have to comment on the use of that data?’

Public comment is part of the Paperwork Reduction Act. That’s what it’s all about. What we saw instead was just, ‘Hey, this is what the IHME is putting out there. We’re going to go with it.’ Well, you can’t do that if you’re a federal agency … IHME is … technically an independent organization, but they don’t have any governmental designation.

They’re not a 501(c)(3), they’re not a 501(c)(4), they’re not a 501(c)(6). They’re just this amorphous nongovernmental organization within our country, and it’s kind of concerning. We’re doing more research on that, but it’s very, very concerning because they don’t have anybody to account to.”

Test-Based Strategy Has Been an Egregious Fraud

In addition to the manipulation of fatality statistics, the statistics of “cases” were also manipulated. Traditionally, a “case” is a patient who is symptomatic; someone who is actually ill. When it comes to COVID-19, however, a “case” suddenly became anyone who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 using a PCR test, or worse, assumed positive based on proximity to someone who tested positive.

I’ve detailed this fraud in many previous articles over the past year, including “Coronavirus Fraud Scandal — The Biggest Fight Has Just Begun” and “The Insanity of the PCR Testing Saga.” “Cases” were also counted multiple times, as explained above. Henele expounds on this issue, noting:

“The CDC specifically enacted what’s called a test-based strategy, which we’ve never done before in medicine for anything. What that test-based strategy means is if you test positive, you got [COVID-19]. But what they didn’t do for the PCR testing was they didn’t identify the agreed upon number of cycles across all states across all labs that are testing.

What most people don’t know is that the closer you get to zero in terms of cycle times, the more likely that the result is going to be negative. The closer you get to 60, the more likely that it’s going to be positive.

Well, we’ve never seen a document coming out of the FDA, coming out of the CDC, coming out of any of the state health departments, that says, ‘We need all labs to be at this specific cycle [threshold]. And if a person is not deemed positive with that number of cycles, then they are not positive.’ So, there’s just flaw after flaw after flaw.”

Data Manipulation Created COVID-19 Pandemic

Most labs used cycle thresholds above 40 — as recommended by the CDC and the World Health Organization — which exponentially increased the likelihood of a positive test, even among completely healthy and noninfectious individuals. The only justification for all of this is that it was done to perpetuate the narrative that we were in a raging pandemic, which was then used to justify the unprecedented destruction of personal freedom and the economy.

“The thing I have to give the folks that have been involved in this credit for is the incredible number of sleights of hands,” Henele says. “It’s a little bit here, a little bit here, a little bit here, a little bit here.

And when that happens, it leads to something that is very dangerous scientifically, and very dangerous for public health policy, which is control of data — the ability to manipulate data … and if you can control the data, you get to control the narrative …

If we’re not going to have an absolute, transparent and verifiable data collection process that is based upon accuracy and integrity of that data, then you can turn that [pandemic emergency] dial up and down at your whim. My hope is that the objective scientist within all of us understands that this is bigger than politics. This is beyond it. This is a severely broken system that we have to fix, and we better do it.”

As discussed in many other articles, it appears the COVID-19 pandemic has in fact been a preplanned justification for the implementation of a global technocrat-led control system, which includes a brand-new financial system to replace the central bank-manufactured fiat economy that is now at the end of its functional life. Fiat currency is manufactured through the creation of debt with interest attached, and the whole world is now so laden with debt it can never be repaid.

If people understood how the central banks of the world have pulled the wool over our eyes, we would simply demand an end to the central banks. Currency ought to be created and managed nationally.

The central banks, of course, do not want this reality to become common knowledge, because then they will no longer be able to manipulate all the countries of the world, so they need the economic breakdown to appear natural. For that, they need a global catastrophe, such as a major war, or a fearsome pandemic necessitating the shutdown of economies.

Through this willful manipulation of case- and fatality statistics, the CDC has been complicit in willful misconduct by generating needless fear that has then been used against you to rob you of your personal freedoms and liberties and help usher in this massive transfer of wealth and global tyranny. As noted by Henele, “People are going to be complicit in their own slavery. People are complicit in putting digital shackles around themselves and really restricting their civil liberties.”

Hopefully, people will begin to understand how pandemic statistics have been, and still are, manipulated to control the narrative and generate unjustified fear for no other reason than to get you to comply with tyrannical measures designed to enslave you, not just temporarily but permanently.

More Information

To understand how we got to this point, please consider reading Henele’s paper, “COVID-19: CDC Violates Federal Law to Enable Corruption of Fatality-Reporting Data.” As noted by Henele:

“I’m looking forward to the day when we look back on this, and go, ‘Oh, we almost fell for one, but we woke up in time and we figured this out. And now we have a good balance of technology, but technology that doesn’t have the right to censor us, technology that doesn’t have the right to control us; we have figured out that having too much control in the hands of too few is not a good recipe for us as a species on this planet.’

We know it doesn’t pass the smell test, so it’s important to get informed and educated and it’s papers like this — and this isn’t the only one out there — that have done the homework. If we’re going to trust someone, it’s important to me that we trust people who’ve done the homework and have no vested interest in the outcome.

My team is a team of volunteers. We all do this in our spare time. We’re not making any money. We’re not going to seek to make any money off of this. We’re doing this because we believe in this country. We love this country and we love the people of this country. When I see people suffering, I have to help. I got to get in and help.

So, if you are an American that wants to help, we are setting up resources for you to be able to get engaged and help us push this forward, maybe grease some of these wheels of justice, so we can get an independent grand jury investigation.”

For additional information, or if you want to help, you can email Henele and his team at [email protected]. You can also use your voice and actions to support an investigation into the CDC’s actions.

Two Easy Ways You Can Take Action

  1. Add your signature to this petition to help mount public pressure to convene a formal grand jury to investigate allegations of willful misconduct by federal agencies during COVID-19 through Stand For Health Freedom, a nonprofit advocacy organization that Henele and his team have collaborated with
  2. Send a predrafted, customizable letter through Stand For Health Freedom urging key members of Congress to thoroughly investigate alleged violations of federal law by the CDC that compromised COVID-19 data

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Notes

1 Energetic Health Institute Dr. Henele

2 Science, Public Health Policy and the Law October 12, 2020; 2: 4-22

3 Metabolic Healing October 12, 2020

4 CDC.gov August 26, 2020, Comorbidities Table 3, updated October 14, 2020

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Airlines Struggle to Police Fake Certificates 

In Europe, Fake Covid-19 Certificates Hit Airlines, Which Now Have to Police Them

Airlines are battling a scourge of passengers traveling with falsified Covid-19 health certificates.

Deutsche Lufthansa AG has been fined up to 25,000 euros, or about $29,800, by Germany for allowing passengers with false or incorrect documents to board, according to people familiar with the penalties. 

Complications? You Bet!

At London Heathrow Airport, the additional checks by border control have led to lines of more than six hours for arriving passengers. That is with just 541,000 passengers passing through the airport in March, down 91.7% from the comparable period in 2019.

The EU wants airlines to enforce restrictions that it sets up, but that makes the airlines responsible for detecting easily faked documents.

The six hour wait time with traffic down 91.7% is a perfect of government sponsored madness that happens more in Europe than the US although we are not totally immune to such nonsense either.

Negative Tests Required in the US

On January 24, I noted new CDC Guidelines Require Proof of Negative Test on inbound international flights to the US.

It’s unclear how well the US is enforcing that requirement.

Where Can You Go?

Hooray! You are vaccinated and ready to travel. But where can you go?

You may be vaccinated but the World Still Isn’t Ready For US Travelers

US Vax Pass 

No doubt the “solution” will be government-mandated heath passports in Europe.

What About the US and Canada?

  • Chicago – Yes: Chicago’s public health commissioner, said the “Vax Pass” will be required to attend concerts and other summer events starting in May.
  • Illinois – Up to Local Officials: The Sun Times says Gov. J.B. Pritzker is taking a pass on the “Vax Pass.” Instead of a passport, the governor said residents across the state will be provided with something more akin to a doctor’s note — and only if they ask for it.
  • Missouri – Will Bar: The Missourian reports Missouri Senate renews push to bar vaccine passports and limit local health orders.
  • US – Yes: On March 28, the Washington Post reported “Vaccine Passports are on the Way. The Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials “
  • US – No: On April 6, the BBC reported US Rules Out Federal Vaccine Passports.
  • Canada – Yes: Forbes reports Canada Will Require Using A Vaccine Passport For Entry.

40 States Will Ban Covid-19 Passports

Who’s in charge? That’s the key question as 40 States Creating Legislation to Ban Vaccine Passport Requirements.

At state Capitols across the country, lawmakers are advancing legislation to ban COVID-19 vaccine passport requirements for businesses and schools.

The vaccination passports currently exist in one state — a limited government partnership in New York with a private company — but that hasn’t stopped GOP lawmakers in a handful of states, including Pennsylvania, from rushing out legislative proposals to ban their use.

“Government should not require any Texan to have proof of vaccination,” said Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

While New York rolled out the “Excelsior Pass,” a digital vaccine passport, lawmakers in Indiana worked on a bill that includes a vaccine passport ban. It passed by a wide margin, just as many Hoosier state health departments saw an uptick in no-shows for COVID-19 shots.

Confusing Mess

It’s not at all clear what the procedure will be for international flights into the US. And if you wish to travel to Europe, expect long lines on top of needing a Vax Pass.

The EU and US are messes of a different kind. The result is a hodgepodge of conflicting and confusing regulations depending on where you are at and where you are headed.

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Even if “won,” endless wars like our 20 year assault on Afghanistan would not benefit our actual national interest in the slightest. So why do these wars continue endlessly? Because they are so profitable to powerful and well-connected special interests. In fact, the worst news possible for the Beltway military contractor/think tank complex would be that the United States actually won a war. That would signal the end of the welfare-for-the-rich gravy train.

In contrast to the end of declared wars, like World War II when the entire country rejoiced at the return home of soldiers where they belonged, an end to any of Washington’s global military deployments would result in wailing and gnashing of the teeth among the military-industrial complex which gets rich from other people’s misery and sacrifice.

Would a single American feel less safe if we brought home our thousands of troops currently bombing and shooting at Africans?

As Orwell famously said, “the war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.” Nowhere is this more true than among those whose living depends on the US military machine constantly bombing people overseas.

How many Americans, if asked, could answer the question, “why have we been bombing Afghanistan for an entire generation?” The Taliban never attacked the United States and Osama bin Laden, who temporarily called Afghanistan his home, is long dead and gone. The longest war in US history has dragged on because…it has just dragged on.

So why did we stay? As neocons like Max Boot tell it, we are still bombing and killing Afghans so that Afghan girls can go to school. It’s a pretty flimsy and cynical explanation. My guess is that if asked, most Afghan girls would prefer to not have their country bombed.

Indeed, war has made the Beltway bomb factories and think tanks rich. As Brown University’s Cost of War Project has detailed, the US has wasted $2.26 trillion dollars on a generation of war on Afghanistan. Much of this money has been spent, according to the US government’s own Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, on useless “nation-building” exercises that have built nothing at all. Gold-plated roads to nowhere. Aircraft that cannot perform their intended functions but that have enriched contractors and lobbyists.

President Biden has announced that the US military would be out of Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the attacks of 9/11. But as always, the devil is in the details. It appears that US special forces, CIA paramilitaries, and the private contractors who have taken an increasing role in fighting Washington’s wars, will remain in-country. Bombing Afghans so that Max Boot and his neocons can pat themselves on the back.

But the fact is this: Afghanistan was a disaster for the United States. Only the corrupt benefitted from this 20 year highway robbery. Will we learn a lesson from wasting trillions and killing hundreds of thousands? It is not likely. But there will be an accounting. The piper will be paid. Printing mountains of money to pay the corrupt war profiteers will soon leave the working and middle classes in dire straits. It is up to non-interventionists like us to explain to them exactly who has robbed them of their future.

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Every British government has its diarist; a secret scribbler, usually one who dwells in the foothills of power, quietly observing the comings and goings of the big beasts and the events that preoccupy them.  

It was Alan Clark, a middle-ranking defence minister, whose bestselling diaries sensationally illuminated the Thatcher decade. In the mid-1990s, Gyles Brandreth, a lowly whip, provided the best inside account of John Major’s disintegrating government. Then, as now, the Tories were tearing themselves apart over Europe.

My own three volumes of diaries (two of which scraped into the bestseller lists) charted the rise and fall of New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. More recently, Sasha Swire, the wife of Hugo Swire, who served as a minister in David Cameron’s government, provided glimpses of life inside the tiny elite who governed us between 2010 and 2016.

Now Alan Duncan, a middle-ranking Foreign Office minister, delivers a behind-the-scenes account of these last five turbulent years of political life in Britain, titled In the Thick of It. The stakes are high. Brexit, the rise of Boris Johnson and Britain’s diminishing role in the world are the big themes.

In passing, he also sheds light on a little-known area: Britain’s close relationship with the strategically vital Gulf state of Oman. It is no secret that Britain has long been heavily involved in Oman, one of the UK’s last remaining outposts in the Middle East. British officers staff the Omani armed forces, and the communications monitoring agency, GCHQ has a base there.  In addition, the sultanate, like many of its neighbours, is an important market for British weapons.

Omani sultan’s ‘privy council’

Duncan’s interest in the region dates back to his days as an oil trader. In 2014, Cameron appointed him a special envoy to Oman, a job he took very seriously. He was a member of what he refers to as the sultan’s “privy council”, a group of six prominent members of the British establishment who meet annually with the sultan to offer advice.

Duncan says he has attended 14 such meetings since 2001, and one has only to run an eye down the cast list to gauge the importance the UK attaches to the relationship. Fellow members of the so-called privy council have included serving and former heads of the Secret Intelligence Service, a former private secretary to the Queen, several former chiefs of the armed forces, and Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England.

The entertainment is lavish. Duncan writes of the sultan’s New Year’s dinner in 2019:

“I was in the same seat I’ve occupied for the last 20 years … it was not so much a buffet as a sumptuous feast with two lines of tables, each perhaps 15 yards long groaning with massive platters of lobster, prawns, chicken etc. That’s just for starters. We come back again beneath domed silver lids. Then puddings and the New Year cake which is eight feet high … Dinner finished about 2am and then we had a concert until 4.30am.”

Oman’s Sultan Qaboos, who reigned for almost 50 years, died in January 2020 and was succeeded by his cousin. A high-level delegation had to be scrambled at short notice to pay respects to the new ruler: Prince Charles, the prime minister, the defence secretary and the chief of defence staff. Be in no doubt: Oman matters to the UK.

Given his longstanding interest in the region, the author might reasonably have expected that his Foreign Office responsibilities would include the Middle East. But the Conservative Friends of Israel, noting his pro-Palestinian sympathies, had other ideas.

Duncan’s entry for 16 July 2016 notes:

“At 5.30pm I go to the Foreign Office. All seems clear and agreed that I will be minister for the Middle East, as expected … But when I see Boris [Johnson] at 6pm it seems a massive problem has arisen … Boris says the Conservative Friends of Israel are going ballistic … As I see it, it is for no other reason than that I believe in the rights of Palestinians and whereas they pretend to believe in two parallel states, it is quite clear that they don’t and so they set out to destroy genuine advocates for Palestine.”

Cowards in the face of Israel

It seems that pro-Israel groups were also lobbying the prime minister’s office: “Now Number 10 are telling Boris I cannot have the Middle East … In any other country [this] … would in my view be seen as entrenched espionage.” In fairness, there were other objections, with Duncan’s former business connections in the Middle East were also seen as a problem. He was ultimately allocated responsibility for Europe and the Americas, with the exception of Oman, which he was allowed to keep.

There was a curious sequel to this little episode. Shai Masot, an Israeli diplomat, was caught on camera talking of “taking down” Duncan. The Israeli ambassador called to apologise, asserting that the individual concerned had been hired locally and did not have diplomatic status.

“All total bollocks,” writes Duncan. “Masot is a first or second secretary, a member of military intelligence, employed specifically as a parliamentary and undercover propagandist.”

The incident was quickly brushed under the carpet. Masot, who also had Labour Party contacts, was sent home. The British government, anxious to avoid a row with the Israelis, did not pursue the matter. Neither did the Labour Party, which has been cowed by allegations of antisemitism.

Duncan, despite being a model of discretion in public, was privately scathing about the UK’s attitude towards Israel.

“We are supine, lickspittle, insignificant cowards,” he remarks after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was feted at Downing Street.

“Where is the British reaction?” he asks after a pro-settlement Israeli politician asserted that all of the occupied West Bank belonged to Israel.

“It is not just the end of the two-state solution. It is the end of any principled stand on the issue by the UK, given that this has always been a red-line for us and we intend to do nothing,” he writes of an Israeli plan to evict 500 Bedouin from land on the edge of Jerusalem to make way for settlers.

Haunted by Brexit

But it is Brexit, not Israel, that haunts this volume. Indeed, it haunts the entire Conservative Party.

In February 2016, Duncan, a long-time Eurosceptic, briefly flirted with the Leave campaign, but one visit to the Vote Leave headquarters was enough to bring home to him the company he would be keeping and, thereafter, he was solidly behind the Remain campaign.

He explains his conversion thus:

“Somewhere along the line from the early 1990s the cause of honest and thoughtful Euro-scepticism mutated into a form of simplistic nationalism which strikes me as ugly and demeaning. Instead of campaigning for the reform of outdated EU institutions and seeking a better deal for the UK, too many Euro-sceptics retreated instead into crude sloganeering. There was a rational and pragmatic case to be made for leaving the EU, but few bothered to make it. Instead we faced a wave of populist nonsense, emotive platitudes and downright lies.”

Although sympathetic to the impossible task she faced and publicly loyal throughout to the then-prime minister, Theresa May, Duncan, like others, despaired at her lack of empathy: “No poise or presence. Charisma by-pass. No personality.”

In July 2016, Boris Johnson was appointed foreign secretary and Duncan, his deputy in all but name, was well-placed to observe. His opinion of Johnson was low. Six days before May was due to make a major speech on Europe, Johnson published a lengthy essay setting out what were described as his “red lines” on the subject, thereby entirely undermining her.

Once again, Duncan was scathing:

“[He] thinks he is the next Churchill. He has a self-deluding, mock-romantic passion which is not rooted in realism. He is disloyal. A decade of press attention has gone to his head and he doesn’t appreciate that the gloss has gone. His comedy routine has gone stale; his lack of seriousness in a serious job rankles … He is a clown, a self-centred ego, an embarrassing buffoon, with an untidy mind and sub-zero diplomatic judgement. He is an international stain on our reputation … a lonely, selfish, shambolic, ill-disciplined, shameless clot.”

Maybe. But it is a measure of Britain’s decline in the world that this man is now our prime minister. Somewhere in the bowels of government, another secret scribbler will be at work continuing to chart the UK’s remorseless slide into insularity and irrelevance. Oh yes, and I have it on good authority that the Queen keeps a diary, too. I wonder what she makes of it all.

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Chris Mullin is a former Labour minister. He was a member of the House of Commons from 1987-2010. His latest novel, The Friends of Harry Perkins, is now available in paperback.

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Since the Mexican government published its much-awaited presidential decree on New Year’s Eve to restrict the use of the herbicide glyphosate and genetically modified corn, IATP has actively worked to defend the government against threats from U.S. agribusiness using the revised North American Free Trade Agreement, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

I covered the decree and the looming threats in a February article. Now agribusiness interests have filed for an injunction in Mexican courts to stop the government phaseout of glyphosate.

On April 16, IATP joined the National Family Farm Coalition and the Rural Coalition on a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack calling for respect for Mexico’s right to regulate in the public interest.

“We read with concern the March 22, 2021 letter to you from food and agricultural trade associations raising objections to health, consumer and farmer protections and agricultural policies of the government of Mexico and seeking your intervention,” states the letter. “We urge both USTR and USDA to respect Mexico’s domestic policy choices and refrain from any action to interfere with policies that support healthy food and diets and that advance sustainable and environmentally sound agroecological practices. Mexico is well within its rights to adopt these provisions, as the U.S. would be if it implemented similar policies.”

IATP signed on to a similar letter drafted by Pesticide Action Network, along with 80 other organizations and nearly 7,000 citizens. The IATP and PAN letters support a letter signed by hundreds of Mexican organizations objecting to the agribusiness lobbying effort and calling on the U.S. government to respect Mexico’s sovereignty.

Bayer/Monsanto, Mexican agribusiness seek glyphosate injunction 

The pressure by agribusiness interests continues. Bayer/Monsanto and Mexico’s National Agribusiness Council (CNA) filed for an injunction in Mexico courts to stop the glyphosate regulations. The coalition Sin Maiz No Hay Pais (Without Corn There is No Country) is collecting signatures on a petition opposing the injunction. Please sign on.

IATP will continue to work with its Mexican partners to ensure the U.S. government does not invoke trade agreements to undermine Mexico’s right to legislate and regulate in the public interest. As Mexico’s Undersecretary of Agriculture Victor Suarez told us, “We are a sovereign nation with a democratic government, which came to power with the support of the majority of citizens, one that places compliance with our constitution and respect for human rights above all private interests.”

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At the beginning of May, the time of spring cleaning in central Syria may have arrived.

The Russian Aerospace Forces carried out a series of airstrikes on ISIS hideouts in the region, and specifically the Jebel Bishri region located along the administrative border between Raqqa and Deir Ezzor, the Hama-Aleppo-Raqqa triangle and other parts of the region.

These strikes took place in anticipation of a large-scale operation that the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) will carry out with Russian support.

Several units from the SAA 5th Corps, 11th Division and the 25th Special Forces Division, known as the Tiger Forces, will take part in the operation. Syrian troops will move from Hama and Raqqa simultaneously.

ISIS has ramped up its activities in the last several weeks. The Amaq News Agency even shared footage of terrorists going about their daily chores in Homs. Likely to show that being a terrorist isn’t so bad and there’s some sort of normality to the entire scenario.

In the northern part of Syria, despite no ISIS, chaos is ever present. Not least thanks to Turkey’s crusade on the Kurdish groups in the region.

On May 2nd, a child was reportedly killed when at least 12 rockets landed in Afrin city center and nearby farms. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which control a strip of land to the south of Afrin, was blamed for the deadly rocket attack.

On the previous day, six artillery shells hit Afrin city. No human losses were reported, Turkish forces responded by shelling two nearby towns held by the SDF.

Several units of the SAA and the Russian Military Police are present in the SDF-held pocket south of Afrin.

On April 30th, the Russian Aerospace Forces targeted militants preparing to attack Turkish forces in the northern region. Militants near the town of Shuarghat al-Arz in northern Aleppo and Khurbat al-Ruzz in northern Raqqa were targeted with several FOTAB 100-80 flash bombs.

On the same day, nearby, in Greater Idlib, militants of the al-Fateh al-Mubeen Operations Room, that’s led by al-Qaeda-affiliated Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, attacked Syrian army positons near the town of Kafr Nabl in the southern part of the province.

The militants targeted SAA troops with heavy machine guns, and a battle tank was struck by an anti-tank guided missile.

According to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the SAA responded to the attack by pounding militants’ positions in the towns of Kansafra and Fatterah.

The “moderate opposition” in Idlib wastes no chance to remind of itself by violating the ceasefire regime in the countryside and shell SAA units and positions.

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On April 16, the journalist Andre Mate, spoke to the UN Security Council concerning the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) report about Syria which has been exposed as a cover-up scandal.

His address challenges the US and UK on their role in the OPCW’s lies and fraud.  Mate meticulously takes apart each fabrication and exposes the truth for all to see.

OPCW inspectors found no evidence to support allegations of a Syrian government chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. However, their findings were suppressed, and the team was sidelined.

Mate shows why the claims of the OPCW are false by using their own published reports which claims that “most of the analytical work took place” in the “last six months” of the Douma investigation, when the original team was sidelined.

The investigation was carried out by the original investigative team during the first weeks of the probe, and the work conducted after they were sidelined is insignificant and full of deceptions and unsubstantiated accusations.

OPCW Director General Fernando Arias claims he doesn’t know why the OPCW final report would not be accepted as true, and Mate points to Arias’ prior statements which prove his claim is untrue.

Mate had asked the US and UK ambassadors if they would support a new proposal by five former OPCW officials, and others, to allow the Scientific Advisory Board of the OPCW to consider the claims of the dissenting inspectors; however, the US and UK ambassadors left the meeting prior to the request.

One reoccurring accusation of the west against the Syrian government, has been the alleged use of chemical weapons.  The first substantial accusation came from an event in Khan al Asal in 2013.  At first glance, the UN investigator Carla Del Ponte felt it must be the so-called ‘rebels’ who carried it out in order to blame the Syrian government, and thus illicit US military intervention in Syria because of President Obama’s speech concerning the ‘Red Line’ of chemical useDel Ponte was a seasoned prosecutor and criminal investigator, and following her instincts, the first question to be answered was:” Who will benefit most from a chemical attack?”

The terrorists, called ‘rebels’ in the west, would benefit the most from any and all chemical attacks.

President Obama did not follow through on his threat of military intervention in Syria because the UK Defense Lab at Porton Down advised the sample obtained from a chemical attack in East Ghouta in 2014 was not from a Syrian source.

The so called chemical event in Douma in 2018 was followed up with a OPCW investigation which was later exposed to be a fraud and full of misinformation.  From the outset, we must have suspected fraud when just days after the alleged attack, veteran Middle East journalist, Robert Fisk, traveled legally from Beirut to Douma and carried out his own on-site investigation which included personal interviews with Doctors and others on the ground.  Fisk searched for and told the truth, that the event was fabricated by the White Helmets, who are portrayed in western media as heroes, but in fact support the armed terrorists and their goal to destroy Syria.

Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse interviewed Dr. Al Hakam Dandy, a Counselor at the Permanent Mission of the Syrian Arab Republic to the United Nations, to gain further insight into the matter.

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Steven Sahiounie (SS):  Why does the OPCW continue to accuse Syria of chemical attacks?

As you know, the OPCW is a technical organization with noble goals, However, some countries, led by the United States, are working to transform OPCW into a platform for them to promote lies and targeting Syria for their own political goals.

Al Hakam Dandy (HD):  Who benefits from accusations of chemical attacks in Syria?

The main beneficiaries are terrorist organizations. Syria has been a victim of these terrorists’ use of chemical weapons since Khan al-Asal incident on March 19, 2013. Although Syria continued to provide OPCW and the United Nations with information collected by the competent Syrian authorities regarding the preparations made by terrorist groups to stage incidents of chemical weapons use to accuse the Syrian Arab Army of them, unfortunately, OPCW and the United Nations ignored this important information.

SS:  Who brought these newest accusations against Syria to the OPCW?

HD:  Some Western countries before any investigation of information about the alleged use of chemical weapons, they launched unilateral and tripartite acts of aggression that destroyed civilian facilities. Moreover, these countries established illegal mechanism that were approved in violation of the provisions of CWC, so-called “Investigation and Identification Team” (ITT), and they rely on the reports of this team that lacked of credibility and professional elements such as the report of Al-Lataminah alleged incidents, and the recent report on Saraqib alleged incident which issued before convening the States Parties Conference to the CWC in order to facilitate adopting the French decision in The Hague.

SS:  Are these accusations from the OPCW actually political pressure on Syria before the coming presidential election?

HD:  Certainly, some Western countries are seeking to exercise all means of political and economic pressures to implement their policy of so-called “regimes changing” in the region. In case of Syria, these countries politicized the OPCW, supported and financed terrorist organizations, launched foreign military aggression, and imposed unilateral coercive measures. But Syria, despite all the grave challenges will remain committed to defending its sovereignty and independence, and the rights of its people. And let me stress here that only Syrian people have the right to choose their president.

SS:  What role has the UN Security Council played in the Syrian conflict?

HD:  Unfortunately, the Security Council has not been able to exercise its primary responsibility under the United Nations Charter for the maintenance of international peace and security as a result of the negative role that the United States and other Western countries play.

These countries misused the Security Council to implement their hostile agendas against Syria, through politicizing issues such as chemical file or humanitarian assistance, including their attempts to prevent any condemnation of the unilateral coercive measures that deprive Syrian people of their simple living needs and basic medical supplies.

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Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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JCPOA Nuclear Talks: An Exercise in Futility?

May 4th, 2021 by Stephen Lendman

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Reported JCPOA nuclear talks progress in Vienna — between Iran, E3 countries, Russia and China — is more illusion than reality.

According to an unnamed European source over the weekend:

“We have yet to come to an understanding on the most critical points.” 

“Success is by no means guaranteed, but not impossible.”

On Friday, Biden regime national security advisor Jake Sullivan said talks are in “an unclear place” — implying uncertainty about whether an agreement can be reached.

Last week Blinken’s spokesman Price said the following:

“(W)e are considering removing only those sanctions that are inconsistent with the JCPOA,” adding:

“Even if we rejoin the JCPOA – which remains a hypothetical – we would retain and continue to implement sanctions on Iran for activities not covered by the JCPOA, including Iran’s missile proliferation (sic), support for terrorism (sic), and human rights abuses (sic).”

According to Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Saturday, representatives of participating nations are returning home for consultations, talk to resume on May 7.

Russia’s representative Mikhail Ulyanov said “(w)e have yet to come to an understanding on the most critical points,” adding: 

“We should not expect breakthroughs in the days to come.”

Ulyanov remains optimistic, expecting a successful outcome of talks — despite little evidence that they’ll turn out this way.

Over the weekend, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister/chief JCPOA negotiator Abbas Araqchi said the following:

“Sanctions…on Iran’s energy sector, which include oil and gas, or those on the automotive industry, financial, banking and port sanctions, all should be lifted based on agreements reached so far.”

Since talks began, Araqchi stressed that all US sanctions on Iran since Trump took office must be lifted.

Other Iranian officials stressed the same thing, rejecting the notion of partial lifting alone.

According to Axios.com, Biden told Israel’s Mossad head Yossi Cohen on Friday that “the US has a long way to go in talks with Iran before it agrees a return to full compliance of the 2015 nuclear deal” — citing an unnamed senior Israeli official briefed on their talks.

On Thursday, Blinken met with Mossad’s Cohen and Israel’s US envoy Gilad Erdan.

According to the Times of Israel, Cohen warned that “bad deal will send the region spiraling into war,” adding:

“Anyone seeking short-term benefits should be mindful of the longer term.” 

“Israel will not allow Iran to attain nuclear arms” it doesn’t seek and wants eliminated everywhere — including the Jewish state’s undeclared nuclear arsenal. 

Israeli officials in Washington also said they’ll operate freely as they see fit against Iran.

Last month’s attack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility is believed to have been a Netanyahu regime operation.

As for striking Iran militarily, it’s highly unlikely that Israel would go this far without US permission and involvement.

What hasn’t happened is unlikely ahead but clearly possible because of longstanding US plans to transform Iran into a client state.

Separately according to AP News:

“Top Biden (regime) officials and US senators crisscrossed the Middle East on Monday, seeking to assuage growing unease among Gulf Arab partners over America’s re-engagement with Iran and other policy shifts in the region.”

Senator Chris Coons was quoted, saying JCPOA talks continue in Vienna, no imminent deal in the works at this stage.

Since taking office, Biden regime hardliners continued maximum pressure on Iran.

Nothing so far was achieved on rolling back illegally imposed US sanctions.

Indirect US involvement in Vienna talks are unrelated to good faith outreach to Iran.

What hasn’t existed since its liberating 1979 revolution is highly unlikely ahead.

Whatever may be agreed on in Vienna, if anything, will be at risk of unraveling ahead.

By executive order in May 2018, Trump unilaterally abandoned the JCPOA in flagrant violation of international and US constitutional law.

Time and again, the US says one thing, then goes another way. 

Its ruling authorities walked away from numerous international agreements, showing they can never be trusted.

Iran is mindful of all of the above. Its officials know what they’re up against in dealing with the US directly or indirectly like things are proceeding in Vienna.

If anything positive is achieved, the US can reverse it ahead with a stroke of a pen.

As long as Iran remains free from US control, normalizing relations are off the table.

War by other means on nonbelligerent Iran will continue unchanged.

So will the risk of things turning hot because of Washington’s longstanding aim to control the Islamic Republic by whatever it takes to achieve its aim.

*

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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

India, COVID and the Need for Scientific Integrity Not Sensationalism

By Colin Todhunter, May 04, 2021

In his report, Tengra offers scientific evidence that strongly indicates asymptomatic transmission is not significant. He asserts that as these cases comprise most of India’s case numbers, we should be questioning the data as well as the PCR tests and the cycles being used to detect the virus instead of accepting the figures at face value.

From Mind Control to Viruses: How the US Government Keeps Experimenting on Its Citizens

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, May 04, 2021

Fifty years from now, we may well find out the whole sordid truth behind this COVID-19 pandemic. However, this isn’t intended to be a debate over whether COVID-19 is a legitimate health crisis or a manufactured threat. It is merely to acknowledge that such crises can—and are—manipulated by governments in order to expand their powers.

US’ New “Foreign Malign Influence” Center Is Just Official Cover for American Intelligence Interference in Domestic Politics

By Scott Ritter, May 03, 2021

The Director of National Intelligence has ostensibly created a new “center” for the sharing and analysis of information and intelligence about foreign interference in US elections. Its real focus is much more nefarious.

Just How Much COVID-19 Vaccine Money (And How Many Doses Per Person) Is on the Table?

By Dr. Meryl Nass, May 03, 2021

It is hard for me to fathom what is going on.  The article quoted below indicates that the Pharma industry does not think Covid will be going away; instead it will switch from pandemic to endemic, with outbreaks here and there–apparently justifying lots of vaccine boosters.

Two-year-old Baby Dies During Pfizer’s COVID-19 Vaccine Experiments on Children

By Ethan Huff, May 03, 2021

The ongoing trials include more than 10,000 children aging in range from five to 11 in one of the groups, and another 10,000 children as young as six months old in the other. These trials have been taking place since mid-March with the soon expectation that the jab will be “authorized” for use in children and babies.

Video: Coronavirus Crisis Wrecking Havoc Worldwide. Dr. Richard Urso with Kristina Borjesson

By Dr. Richard Urso and Kristina Borjesson, May 03, 2021

My guest today is a physician from Texas whose medical license was briefly threatened because he prescribed hydroxychloroquine to his COVID patients. Hydroxychloroquine is a cheap drug that’s been around for a long time and is proven to be highly effective as part of the protocol for treating COVID patients.

CDC Officially Recommends COVID Jab for Pregnant Women

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, May 03, 2021

Giving pregnant women unlicensed COVID-19 gene therapies is reprehensibly irresponsible experimental medicine, and to suggest that safety data are “piling up” is pure propaganda. Everything is still in the experimental stage and all data are preliminary. It’ll take years to get a clearer picture of how these injections are affecting young women and their babies.

19,916 ‘Eye Disorders’ Including Blindness Following COVID Vaccine Reported in Europe

By Celeste McGovern, May 03, 2021

More than half of the eye disorders (10, 667) were also reported to the U.K.’s Yellow Card adverse event reporting system. These would have followed injection primarily of AstraZeneca’s and Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines but included eight reports of eye disorders among the 228 reports concerning Moderna’s vaccine, of which only 100,000 first doses had been administered by April 21.

Significant Jump this Week in Reported Injuries, Deaths After COVID Vaccine

By Megan Redshaw, May 03, 2021

The Defender reached out to the CDC on March 8 with a written list of questions about reported deaths and injuries related to COVID vaccines, the status of ongoing investigations reported in the media, if autopsies are being done, the standard for determining whether an injury is causally connected to a vaccine, and education initiatives to encourage and facilitate proper and accurate reporting.

Kent State, April 4, 1970: Was It about Civil Rights or 
Murdering Student Protesters?

By Laurel Krause and Prof. Mickey Huff, May 03, 2021

In 2010, compelling forensic evidence emerged showing that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) were the lead agencies in managing Kent State government operations, including the cover-up. At Kent State, lawful protest was pushed into the realm of massacre as the US federal government, the state of Ohio, and the Ohio National Guard (ONG) executed their plans to silence antiwar protest in America.

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***

This past week the US Commerce Department released its early estimates for US GDP for the 1st Quarter 2021, January through March. If we are to believe the numbers, the US economy grew a respectable 6.4% during the period. But did it really? And does it represent a strong recovery underway? Or just a rebound, as the economy reopens in the services sector; and once the reopening concludes, will the economy flatten out again—as it did with last summer’s 2020 partial reopening that collapsed in late 2020?

The first thing for readers to understand is the 6.4% is not really 6.4% for the first three months of 2021. The US is one of the few countries that reports its GDP figures in an ‘Annual Rate’ (AR) percentage. Most other advanced economies do not. Annual Rate reporting takes the actual growth for the period and then multiplies it by four. In other words, a 6.4% annual rate GDP means if the economy continues to grow as it did in the first quarter 2021 than it will amount to a 6.4% for the next twelve months! That means the actual GDP growth for the first quarter was about one-fourth of 6.4%. That actual growth was 1.6% over the previous, fourth quarter of 2020.

Another obfuscation in the official numbers is that the US sometimes reports the gain for the quarter compared to the same quarter a year ago, and therefore not the previous calendar quarter. What is important is how much the economy grew in the quarter compared to the preceding quarter—and not compared to a quarter twelve months ago.

Real GDP: Percent Change from Preceding Quarter

Source: US Bureau of Economic Analysis

On top of all this, it’s important to understand that ‘real GDP’ (the 6.4% annual rate overestimation) is obtained by reducing what’s called ‘money GDP’ from the rate of inflation. So if the rate of inflation is underestimated, then real GDP appears higher than it actually is. And the US always underestimates inflation in order to get a higher real GDP number. It does this in many ways. For example, it doesn’t use the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to estimate the inflation. It uses another price index, called the ‘GDP Deflator’. Its number for the overall level of inflation is always much less than the CPI. There are many ways the US further underestimates inflation. Without going into boring statistical details, another way is called ‘chained pricing’. Another is to reduce prices based upon absurd assumptions that improvements in the quality of various products subtracts from their actual price increases. For example, rising prices for computers and smart phones actually show up as price declines. Apple may charge $800 for a new edition smart phone, a hike of $100-$200, but the Commerce Dept. will include it in its inflation estimate as a price decline!

The actual 1st quarter 2021 US GDP growth is therefore only 1.6%–when the ‘annual rate’ puffery is discounted; and that still ignores the manipulation of inflation in order to boost real GDP still further.

So does this 1.6% represent a robust growth? And what is causing it? And will the cause continue?

It’s important to distinguish between an economic REBOUND which is temporary and an actual economic RECOVERY that is sustained. Rebounds dissipate. Real recoveries continue to show a rise in GDP over several quarters into the future.

Last summer 2020 at this time the US economy partially reopened. Especially in the red states that ignored the shutdowns. The US economy experienced a Rebound as a result of the reopening from roughly mid-June 2020 to mid-August. That rebound then faded and in September the economy began to weaken again. That weakening continued through the last three months of 2020 as the economy almost totally stagnated. Here’s the actual quarter to quarter GDP numbers (not reflecting the ‘annual rate’ puffery):

In the first half of 2020 the US economy collapsed by an historic -10.5%. That included the decline that set in during February as the Covid virus began to hit the economy. April-May were the hardest hit months, followed by early June. By mid-June the economy was reopening (prematurely it turned out). The reopening resulted in a REBOUND from mid-June through August. That produced a 3rd Quarter GDP rise of roughly 7.4% (discounting the annual rate nonsense again). So the US economy recovered about two-thirds of its historic collapse in the first half mostly due to the reopening.

The alleged $2.2 Trillion ‘Cares Act’ fiscal stimulus passed in March contributed some to the REBOUND of the summer, but not all that much. It was mostly due to the reopening. The Cares Act, as reported by the media, amounted to $2.2T stimulus. But that was misrepresented by half! It provided only $1.3 trillion—not $2.2T. Here’s why: $500 billion was provided by the $1200 income checks households received plus the expanded unemployment benefits. Another $525 billion was provided by the PPP small business loan/grants (mostly latter) program. (An initial $350 billion was provided in March but then another emergency supplement was added to bring the total spending on PPP to $525 billion by August). So that’s just a little over $1 trillion. Another $1.1 trillion was earmarked for loans to medium and large businesses, to be distributed through the Federal Reserve US central bank. But only $175 billion was actually loaned out through the Fed’s so-called ‘Main St.’ program by year end. (The Fed sat on $455 billion and then returned it to the US Treasury in December 2020).

So the actual first stimulus, Cares Act, only provided $1.3 trillion into the US economy ($1.025T in checks, benefits, and PPP) plus $175 billion from the Fed. A good part of all that did not get into the economy, but was ‘hoarded’ by better off households and businesses and not spent or used to buy down their debt loads. Probably no more than $800 billion actually got into the economy. In short, the 3rd quarter GDP growth of 7.4% was thus mostly due to the reopening and not the inadequate fiscal stimulus called the CARES Act.

Politicians knew, by the way, that the Cares Act was not a stimulus measure. It was a ‘mitigation’ bill and they called it that. Mitigation means putting a floor under the economic collapse for 2-3 months. It doesn’t mean a spending surge that would result in a sustained economic recovery. Mitigation bills produce REBOUNDs, at best; not sustained recoveries. And that’s what the Cares Act did. It bought some time over the summer, as the economy partially reopened.

But the Cares Act spending ($1.3T minus hoarding and debt repayment) dissipated by the end of summer 2020. And only part of the economy reopened by summer’s end 2020. Consequently the US economy faltered and stagnated in the final months of 2020.

US GDP growth in the 4th quarter 2020 thus registered a mere 1.1% actual growth, which was probably zero growth due to inflation underestimation. This was followed by the 1st quarter 2021 initial GDP numbers reported last week showing a 2021 growth of only 1.6%. That too was due largely to the reopening of the US economy, and not to the emergency fiscal stimulus of another $866 billion passed at the end of December, which provided a continuation of unemployment benefits and a small $600 check to households. The December emergency measure was also a ‘mitigation’ measure, not a stimulus. It dissipated by end of February 2021, indicated clearly by a new collapse in consumer retail spending after a brief boost in January.

In short, the 1st quarter 2021 GDP growth of only 1.6% is due to the second reopening of the US economy in 2021 as the vaccines for the virus were distributed.

So here’s a summary of the actual growth of the US economy from February 2020 through March 2021:

  • January-June 2020: -10.5%
  • July-September 2020: 7.4%
  • October-December 2020: 1.1%
  • January-March 2021: 1.6%

The average historical GDP growth rate in recent decades has been around 1.8% to 2.2%. So the current 1.6% is not even average! Moreover, it will slow as the reopening of the service sectors of the economy hardest hit by the virus become more or less concluded. The question then is: will Biden’s much heralded recent ‘American Rescue Plan’ (Covid relief) fiscal spending measure of another $1.9 trillion, passed by Congress last month, be sufficient to provide spending stimulus to push the economy beyond just a REBOUND to an actual sustained RECOVERY in the second half of 2021?

That remains to be determined. But it should be noted the $1.9T reported by the media is actually only $1.8 trillion. (US Senate cut it by $100B). Moreover, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the research arm of Congress, the actual spending out of the $1.8T for this year 2021 is only $1 trillion, not $1.8T! And one must assume that a good part of that $1T will be hoarded and not spent by wealthier households as they get their $1400 checks, and that they, as well as many small businesses, will undoubtedly use their stimulus to pay down debt. Neither hoarded or debt directed money will get into the actual US economy to boost GDP in the second half of the year, 2021. In reality, it’s likely no more than $800 billion stimulus will hit the US economy in 2021. And that’s about the same amount compared to the $866 billion passed last December; and less than the Cares Act passed last March 2020!

If the Cares Act and the December emergency stimulus turned out to be mere ‘mitigation’ fiscal spending, will the current Biden ‘American Rescue Plan’ $800B result in just another mitigation measure as well?
Is the Biden stimulus of around $800 billion therefore sufficient to generate a sustained RECOVERY and not just another REBOUND after this summer and the effects of the 2021 economy reopening run their course?

Another way of looking at the course of US GDP for the remainder of the year is to break down 1st quarter US GDP by its components. Most of the 1.6% was due to a continuing surge of manufacturing. About three fourths of the growth was manufacturing. Can that sector continue to surge? And it is only about 12% of total US GDP.

Services—80% of the economy—began to recover in the 1st quarter but are still doing so only moderately. Business investment is not surging and inventories—a part of investment—actually continued to collapse in the quarter. The trade deficit was another negative contributor to US GDP. Will it turn around? Residential housing growth is plagued by shortages of homes; it won’t contribute much (and is only 4% of GDP anyway). Commercial properties (factories, hotels, parks, malls, office buildings, etc.) are busted. Don’t expect growth here either.
Government spending in the 1st quarter was not all that great a contributor to GDP, as the impact of the Biden act won’t begin to hit until summer. But again, will $800 billion be enough?

Probably not. Much more government spending will be necessary. But isn’t that coming with Biden’s ‘Infrastructure spending’ proposals (i.e. the American Jobs Act’) of reportedly another $2.2 trillion. And his recently announced additional ‘American Families Plan’ of another $1 trillion? Don’t hold your breath. Those two bills won’t be passed, if at all, until 2022. And if passed, no doubt in much lower amounts and over longer periods of time to have much effect on the US economy—and none on 2021.

To conclude: it is to be determined whether the US economy, based on recent GDP numbers and legislation, will look fundamentally different than what happened in 2020. There is a reopening of the economy underway that will certainly boost GDP some. And there’s another $800 billion in mitigation spending. But fiscal stimulus measures in 2020 of roughly that amount show their effects dissipate after a couple months. So will the reopening prove sufficient to generate something more than just another REBOUND 2.0 and a true sustained economic RECOVERY by year end 2021?

That remains to be seen. However, in a number of ways the economic trajectory looks a lot like 2020, in terms of REBOUND and not sustained RECOVERY.

And then there’s the economic ‘wild card’ of Covid. The refusal of 40% of the US population to take advantage of the vaccines indicates there will be no herd immunity attained. The virus will be with use for some time. And the risk is growing that new mutations may prove resistant to the vaccines. What happens then? Another shutdown next winter? If so, expect another fourth quarter 2021 collapse of US GDP growth, just as it did last winter 2020.

Whatever the scenarios, readers should not fall for the statistical hype in the absurd ‘annual rate’ and inflation adjusted misrepresentations of US real GDP and actual economic growth.

*

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Jack Rasmus.

Dr. Rasmus is author of the recent book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump’, Clarity Press, 2020. He blogs at http://jackrasmus.com. His twitter handle is @drjackrasmus. And he hosts the weekly radio show, Alternative Visions, on the Progressive Radio Network on Fridays at 2pm eastern time. Check out his website for further books, articles, video presentations, reviews, etc., at http://kyklosproductions.com.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Pixabay

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***

“They were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.” — Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

***

The U.S. government, in its pursuit of so-called monsters, has itself become a monster.

This is not a new development, nor is it a revelation.

This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

Mind you, there is no greater good when the government is involved. There is only greater greed for money and power.

Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government.

These horrors have been meted out against humans and animals alike. For all intents and purposes, “we the people” have become lab rats in the government’s secret experiments.

Fifty years from now, we may well find out the whole sordid truth behind this COVID-19 pandemic. However, this isn’t intended to be a debate over whether COVID-19 is a legitimate health crisis or a manufactured threat. It is merely to acknowledge that such crises can—and are—manipulated by governments in order to expand their powers.

As we have learned, it is entirely possible for something to be both a genuine menace to the nation’s health and security and a menace to freedom.

This is a road the United States has been traveling for many years now. Indeed, grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions have become synonymous with the U.S. government, which has meted out untold horrors against humans and animals alike.

For instance, did you know that the U.S. government has been buying hundreds of dogs and cats from “Asian meat markets” as part of a gruesome experiment into food-borne illnesses? The cannibalistic experiments involve killing cats and dogs purchased from Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam, China and Ethiopia, and then feeding the dead remains to laboratory kittens, bred in government laboratories for the express purpose of being infected with a disease and then killed.

It gets more gruesome.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been removing parts of dogs’ brains to see how it affects their breathing; applying electrodes to dogs’ spinal cords (before and after severing them) to see how it impacts their cough reflexes; and implanting pacemakers in dogs’ hearts and then inducing them to have heart attacks (before draining their blood). All of the laboratory dogs are killed during the course of these experiments.

It’s not just animals that are being treated like lab rats by government agencies.

“We the people” have also become the police state’s guinea pigs: to be caged, branded, experimented upon without our knowledge or consent, and then conveniently discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.

Back in 2017, FEMA “inadvertently” exposed nearly 10,000 firefighters, paramedics and other responders to a deadly form of ricin during simulated bioterrorism response sessions. In 2015, it was discovered that an Army lab had been “mistakenly” shipping deadly anthrax to labs and defense contractors for a decade.

While these particular incidents have been dismissed as “accidents,” you don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins.

At the time, the government reasoned that it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society such as prisoners, mental patients, and poor blacks.

In Alabama, for example, 600 black men with syphilis were allowed to suffer without proper medical treatment in order to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis. In California, older prisoners had testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts implanted in them to test their virility. In Connecticut, mental patients were injected with hepatitis.

In Maryland, sleeping prisoners had a pandemic flu virus sprayed up their noses. In Georgia, two dozen “volunteering” prison inmates had gonorrhea bacteria pumped directly into their urinary tracts through the penis. In Michigan, male patients at an insane asylum were exposed to the flu after first being injected with an experimental flu vaccine. In Minnesota, 11 public service employee “volunteers” were injected with malaria, then starved for five days.

As the Associated Press reports, “The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs … because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.”

Moreover, “Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the ’60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.”

Media blackouts, propaganda, spin. Sound familiar?

How many government incursions into our freedoms have been blacked out, buried under “entertainment” news headlines, or spun in such a way as to suggest that anyone voicing a word of caution is paranoid or conspiratorial?

Unfortunately, these incidents are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the atrocities the government has inflicted on an unsuspecting populace in the name of secret experimentation.

For instance, there was the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. As NPR reports, “All of the World War II experiments with mustard gas were done in secret and weren’t recorded on the subjects’ official military records. Most do not have proof of what they went through. They received no follow-up health care or monitoring of any kind. And they were sworn to secrecy about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment for their injuries, because they couldn’t tell doctors what happened to them.”

And then there was the CIA’s MKULTRA program in which hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel were dosed with LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug slipped into their drinks at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants. As Time reports, “before the documentation and other facts of the program were made public, those who talked of it were frequently dismissed as being psychotic.”

Now one might argue that this is all ancient history and that the government today is different from the government of yesteryear, but has the U.S. government really changed?

Has the government become any more humane, any more respectful of the rights of the citizenry? Has it become any more transparent or willing to abide by the rule of law? Has it become any more truthful about its activities? Has it become any more cognizant of its appointed role as a guardian of our rights?

Or has the government simply hunkered down and hidden its nefarious acts and dastardly experiments under layers of secrecy, legalism and obfuscations? Has it not become wilier, more slippery, more difficult to pin down?

Having mastered the Orwellian art of Doublespeak and followed the Huxleyan blueprint for distraction and diversion, are we not dealing with a government that is simply craftier and more conniving that it used to be?

Consider this: after revelations about the government’s experiments spanning the 20th century spawned outrage, the government began looking for human guinea pigs in other countries, where “clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules.”

In Guatemala, prisoners and patients at a mental hospital were infected with syphilis, “apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease.” In Uganda, U.S.-funded doctors “failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study… even though it would have protected their newborns.” Meanwhile, in Nigeria, children with meningitis were used to test an antibiotic named Trovan. Eleven children died and many others were left disabled.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Case in point: back in 2016, it was announced that scientists working for the Department of Homeland Security would begin releasing various gases and particles on crowded subway platforms as part of an experiment aimed at testing bioterror airflow in New York subways.

The government insisted that the gases released into the subways by the DHS were nontoxic and did not pose a health risk. It’s in our best interests, they said, to understand how quickly a chemical or biological terrorist attack might spread. And look how cool the technology is—said the government cheerleaders—that scientists can use something called DNATrax to track the movement of microscopic substances in air and food. (Imagine the kinds of surveillance that could be carried out by the government using trackable airborne microscopic substances you breathe in or ingest.)

Mind you, this is the same government that in 1949 sprayed bacteria into the Pentagon’s air handling system, then the world’s largest office building. In 1950, special ops forces sprayed bacteria from Navy ships off the coast of Norfolk and San Francisco, in the latter case exposing all of the city’s 800,000 residents.

In 1953, government operatives staged “mock” anthrax attacks on St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg using generators placed on top of cars. Local governments were reportedly told that “‘invisible smokescreen[s]’ were being deployed to mask the city on enemy radar.” Later experiments covered territories as wide-ranging as Ohio to Texas and Michigan to Kansas.

In 1965, the government’s experiments in bioterror took aim at Washington’s National Airport, followed by a 1966 experiment in which army scientists exposed a million subway NYC passengers to airborne bacteria that causes food poisoning.

And this is the same government that has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.

So, no, I don’t think the government’s ethics have changed much over the years. It’s just taken its nefarious programs undercover.

The question remains: why is the government doing this? The answer is always the same: money, power and total domination.

It’s the same answer no matter which totalitarian regime is in power.

The mindset driving these programs has, appropriately, been likened to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews. As the Holocaust Museum recounts, Nazi physicians “conducted painful and often deadly experiments on thousands of concentration camp prisoners without their consent.”

The Nazi’s unethical experiments ran the gamut from freezing experiments using prisoners to find an effective treatment for hypothermia, tests to determine the maximum altitude for parachuting out of a plane, injecting prisoners with malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and infectious hepatitis, exposing prisoners to phosgene and mustard gas, and mass sterilization experiments.

The horrors being meted out against the American people can be traced back, in a direct line, to the horrors meted out in Nazi laboratories. In fact, following the second World War, the U.S. government recruited many of Hitler’s employees, adopted his protocols, embraced his mindset about law and order and experimentation, and implemented his tactics in incremental steps.

Sounds far-fetched, you say? Read on. It’s all documented.

As historian Robert Gellately recounts, the Nazi police state was initially so admired for its efficiency and order by the world powers of the day that J. Edgar Hoover, then-head of the FBI, actually sent one of his right-hand men, Edmund Patrick Coffey, to Berlin in January 1938 at the invitation of Germany’s secret police, the Gestapo.

The FBI was so impressed with the Nazi regime that, according to the New York Times, in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen.

All told, thousands of Nazi collaborators—including the head of a Nazi concentration camp, among others—were given secret visas and brought to America by way of Project Paperclip. Subsequently, they were hired on as spies, informants and scientific advisers, and then camouflaged to ensure that their true identities and ties to Hitler’s holocaust machine would remain unknown. All the while, thousands of Jewish refugees were refused entry visas to the U.S. on the grounds that it could threaten national security.

Adding further insult to injury, American taxpayers have been paying to keep these ex-Nazis on the U.S. government’s payroll ever since. And in true Gestapo fashion, anyone who has dared to blow the whistle on the FBI’s illicit Nazi ties has found himself spied upon, intimidated, harassed and labeled a threat to national security.

As if the government’s covert, taxpayer-funded employment of Nazis after World War II wasn’t bad enough, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—have since fully embraced many of the Nazi’s well-honed policing tactics, and have used them repeatedly against American citizens.

It’s certainly easy to denounce the full-frontal horrors carried out by the scientific and medical community within a despotic regime such as Nazi Germany, but what do you do when it’s your own government that claims to be a champion of human rights all the while allowing its agents to engage in the foulest, bases and most despicable acts of torture, abuse and experimentation?

When all is said and done, this is not a government that has our best interests at heart.

This is not a government that values us.

Perhaps the answer lies in The Third Man, Carol Reed’s influential 1949 film starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. In the film, set in a post-WW II Vienna, rogue war profiteer Harry Lime has come to view human carnage with a callous indifference, unconcerned that the diluted penicillin he’s been trafficking underground has resulted in the tortured deaths of young children.

Challenged by his old friend Holly Martins to consider the consequences of his actions, Lime responds, “In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we?

“Have you ever seen any of your victims?” asks Martins.

“Victims?” responds Limes, as he looks down from the top of a Ferris wheel onto a populace reduced to mere dots on the ground. “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax — the only way you can save money nowadays.”

This is how the U.S. government sees us, too, when it looks down upon us from its lofty perch.

To the powers-that-be, the rest of us are insignificant specks, faceless dots on the ground.

To the architects of the American police state, we are not worthy or vested with inherent rights. This is how the government can justify treating us like economic units to be bought and sold and traded, or caged rats to be experimented upon and discarded when we’ve outgrown our usefulness.

To those who call the shots in the halls of government, “we the people” are merely the means to an end.

“We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become obsolete, undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that, in the words of Rod Serling, “has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom.”

In this sense, we are all Romney Wordsworth, the condemned man in Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man.”

The Obsolete Man” speaks to the dangers of a government that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State. Yet—and here’s the kicker—this is where the government through its monstrous inhumanity also becomes obsolete. As Serling noted in his original script for “The Obsolete Man,” “Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man…that state is obsolete.

How do you defeat a monster?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, you start by recognizing the monster for what it is.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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***

Imagine this scenario: 

A month before the vote on the federal budget, progressives in Congress declared, “We’ve studied President Biden’s proposed $753 billion military budget, an increase of $13 billion from Trump’s already inflated budget, and we can’t, in good conscience, support this.”

Now that would be a show stopper, particularly if they added, “So we have decided to stand united, arm in arm, as a block of NO votes on any federal budget resolution that fails to reduce military spending by 10-30 percent. We stand united against a federal budget resolution that includes upwards of $30 billion for new nuclear weapons slated to ultimately cost nearly $2 trillion. We stand united in demanding the $50 billion earmarked to maintain all 800 overseas bases, including the new one under construction in Henoko, Okinawa, be reduced by a third because it’s time we scaled back on plans for global domination.”

“Ditto,” they say, “for the billions the President wants for the arms-escalating US Space Force, one of Trump’s worst ideas, right up there with hydroxychloroquine to cure COVID-19, and, no, we don’t want to escalate our troop deployments for a military confrontation with China in the South China Sea. It’s time to ‘right-size’ the military budget and demilitarize our foreign policy.”

Progressives uniting as a block to resist out-of-control military spending would be a no-nonsense exercise of raw power reminiscent of how the right-wing Freedom Caucus challenged the traditional Republicans in the House in 2015. Without progressives on board, President Biden may not be able to secure enough votes to pass a federal budget that would then green light the reconciliation process needed for his broad domestic agenda.

For years, progressives in Congress have complained about the bloated military budget. In 2020, 93 members in the House and 23 in the Senate voted to cut the Pentagon budget by 10% and invest those funds instead in critical human needs. A House Spending Reduction Caucus, co-chaired by Representatives Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan, emerged with 22 members on board.

Meet the members of the House Defense Spending Reduction Caucus:

Barbara Lee (CA-13); Mark Pocan (WI-2); Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ-12); Ilhan Omar (MN-5); Raùl Grijalva (AZ-3); Mark DeSaulnier (CA-11); Jan Schakowsky(IL-9); Pramila Jayapal (WA-7); Jared Huffman (CA-2); Alan Lowenthal (CA-47); James P. McGovern (MA-2); Peter Welch (VT-at large); Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14); Frank Pallone, Jr (NJ-6).;  Rashida Tlaib (MI-13); Ro Khanna (CA-17); Lori Trahan (MA-3); Steve Cohen (TN-9); Ayanna Pressley (MA-7), Anna Eshoo (CA-18).

We also have the Progressive Caucus, the largest Caucus in Congress with almost 100 members in the House and Senate. Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal is all for cutting military spending. “We’re in the midst of a crisis that has left millions of families unable to afford food, rent, and bills. But at the same time, we’re dumping billions of dollars into a bloated Pentagon budget,” she said. “Don’t increase defense spending. Cut it—and invest that money into our communities.”

Now is the time for these congresspeople to turn their talk into action.

Consider the context. President Biden urgently wants to move forward on his American Families Plan rolled out in his recent State of the Union address. The plan would tax the rich to invest $1.8 trillion over the next ten years in universal preschool, two years of tuition-free community college, expanded healthcare coverage and paid family medical leave.

President Biden, in the spirit of FDR, also wants to put America back to work in a $2-trillion infrastructure program that will begin to fix our decades-old broken bridges, crumbling sewer systems and rusting water pipes. This could be his legacy, a light Green New Deal to transition workers out of the dying fossil fuel industry.

But Biden won’t get his infrastructure program and American Families Plan with higher taxes on the rich, almost 40% on income for corporations and those earning $400,000 or more a year, without Congress first passing a budget resolution that includes a top line for military and non-military spending. Both the budget resolution and reconciliation bill that would follow are filibuster proof and only require a simple majority in the House and Senate to pass.

Easy.

Maybe not.

To flex their muscles, Republicans may refuse to vote for a budget resolution crafted by the Democratic Party that would open the door to big spending on public goods, such as pre-kindergarten and expanded health care coverage. That means Biden would need every Democrat in the House and Senate on board to approve his budget resolution for military and non-military spending.

So how’s it looking?

In the Senate, Democrat Joe Manchin from West VA, a state that went for Trump over Biden more than two-to-one, wants to scale back Biden’s infrastructure proposal, but hasn’t sworn to vote down a budget resolution. As for Senator Bernie Sanders, the much-loved progressive, ordinarily he might balk at a record high military budget, but if the budget resolution ushers in a reconciliation bill that lowers the age of Medicare eligibility to 60 or 55, the Chair of the Senate Budget Committee may hold his fire.

That leaves anti-war activists wondering if Senator Elizabeth Warren, a critic of the Pentagon budget and “nuclear modernization,” would consider stepping up as the lone holdout in the Senate, refusing to vote for a budget that includes billions for new nuclear weapons. Perhaps with a push from outraged constituents in Massachusetts, Warren could be convinced to take this bold stand. Another potential hold out could be California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who co-chairs the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, the committee that oversees the budgeting for nuclear weapons. In 2014, Feinstein described the US nuclear arsenal program as “unnecessarily and unsustainably large.”

Over in the House, Biden needs at least 218 of the 222 Democrats to vote for the budget resolution expected to hit the floor in June or July, but what if he couldn’t get to 218? What if at least five members of the House voted no—or even just threatened to vote no—because the top line for military spending was too high and the budget included new “money pit” nuclear land-based missiles to replace 450 Minute Man missiles.

The polls show most Democrats oppose “nuclear modernization”—a euphemism for a plan that is anything but modern given that 50 countries have signed on to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons making nuclear weapons illegal and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) requires the US pursue nuclear disarmament to avoid a catastrophic accident or intentional atomic holocaust.

Now is the time for progressive congressional luminaries such as the Squad’s AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Presley to unite with Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, as well as Barbara Lee, Mark Pocan and others in the House Spending Reduction Caucus to put their feet down and stand as a block against a bloated military budget.

Will they have the courage to unite behind such a cause? Would they be willing to play hardball and gum up the works on the way to Biden’s progressive domestic agenda?

Odds improve if constituents barrage them with phone calls, emails, and visible protests. Tell them that in the time of a pandemic, it makes no sense to approve a military budget that is 90 times the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Tell that that the billions saved from “right sizing” the Pentagon could provide critical funds for addressing the climate crisis. Tell them that just as we support putting an end to our endless wars, so, too, we support putting an end to our endless cycle of exponential military spending.

Call your representative, especially If you live in a congressional district represented by one of the members of the Progressive Caucus or the House Spending Reduction Caucus. Don’t wait for marching orders from someone else. No time to wait.  In the quiet of the COVID hour, our Congress toils away on appropriations bills and a budget resolution. The showdown is coming soon.

Get organized. Ask for meetings with your representatives or their foreign policy staffers. Be fierce; be relentless. Channel the grit of a Pentagon lobbyist.

This is the moment to demand a substantial cut in military spending that defunds new nuclear weapons.

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Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. @MedeaBenjamin

Marcy Winograd, Coordinator, CODEPINK Congress, also co-chairs the foreign policy team for Progressive Democrats of America. In 2020, she was a DNC delegate for Bernie Sanders.  @MarcyWinograd  [email protected] 

Featured image is from ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons)

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***

Poster promoting the theatrical premiere of the 1954 American film Salt of the Earth at a (now demolished) theater on 86th Street in Manhattan. Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas, who played the leading role, is shown.

Born in controversy but then ignored in its youth, the film Salt of the Earth has matured beautifully into a classic film in the neorealist style. Set in Zinc Town, New Mexico, a mining community with a majority of Mexican-Americans strike for working conditions equal to those of the white, or “Anglo” miners. The town and the mine is run by Delaware Zinc Inc. who refuse to negotiate with the workers and the strike goes on for months. The story focuses on Ramon Quintero (Juan Chacón) and his wife Esperanza Quintero (Rosaura Revueltas) who is pregnant with their third child. Ramon is arrested by police and beaten in prison at the same time his wife gives birth to their new baby.

When Ramon is released he counters resistance to his activities by Esperanza and he points out their struggle is for their children’s futures too. The company then uses the Taft-Hartley Act injunction on the union forbidding picketing. However, the wives realise there was nothing to stop them from taking the men’s places on the picket line. A lot of the men are quite traditional and are not happy seeing their wives on what can be a dangerous and violent place on picket lines. Ramon forbids Esperanza to go but eventually relents. However, as the full film is freely available online for you to watch on the Salt of the Earth wikipedia.org page, I will not go into full details here.

The involvement of the women is one of the most interesting aspects of the film as they rather timidly, at first, assert that their issues regarding hygiene (sanitation and ‘decent plumbing’) are as important as the safety of the men, and Esperanza is annoyed that ‘what the wives want always comes later’. Over time the women gain more experience dealing with the police and scabs, and consequently gain more confidence in their demands too. As the mine had already been unionised the film’s real narrative dwells more on showing the men how the union is strengthened by the involvement of the whole community.

Union Meeting

The production of Salt of the Earth faced many difficulties from locations, cameramen to actors. A small plane buzzed overhead and anti-communists fired at the sets. They eventually found a documentary cameraman who was willing to take the risks involved with working on the project. Later, Rosaura Revueltas (Esperanza Quintero) the lead actor, was deported to Mexico and the editors had to cut in previously filmed footage to finish the narrative.

The origin of the film’s woes stretched back some years when the director Herbert Biberman refused to answer the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947 on questions of affiliation to the Communist Party USA, and he became known as one of the Hollywood Ten who were cited and convicted for contempt of Congress and jailed. This meant that Biberman (as well as actors, screenwriters, directors, and musicians) were denied employment in the entertainment industry for years after.  During the making of Salt of the Earth Biberman was hounded by Roy Brewer. Roy Martin Brewer (1909–2006) was an American trade union leader who was prominently involved in anti-communist activities in the 1940s and 1950s. He accompanied Ronald Reagan on his first visit to the Whitehouse.

Brewer tried many times to stop the production of Salt of the Earth. He believed that “officers of the Writers’ Guild were under the domination of the Communist Party until the hearings of 1947. During that time they began to change the mind, the creative minds, of the people who made these pictures and they didn’t do it by selling them communism. They got them to accept the idea that it was the obligation of a writer to put a message in the film.”

Paul Jarrico (1915–1997) the blacklisted American screenwriter and film producer of Salt of the Earth commented on Brewers statements:

“The studio reluctance to make message movies started long before the blacklist and Brewer’s attribute to our cleverness in manipulating the culture of America is undeserved. We were unable to get anything more than the most moderate kind of reform messages into our films and if we thought we got some women treated as human beings rather than as sex objects we thought it was a big victory and in fact one of the reasons we made Salt of the Earth after we were blacklisted was to commit a crime worthy of the punishment having already been punished for subverting American films, it was all ridiculous.”

Members of the Hollywood Ten and their families in 1950, protesting the impending incarceration of the ten

To make matters worse, Salt of the Earth had been sponsored by a Union (the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers) and many blacklisted Hollywood professionals helped produce it. After editing in secret, the release of the film was met with an American Legion call for a nationwide boycott and the majority of theaters refused to show it. For ten years the film was ignored in the USA while finding an audience and accolades in Eastern and Western Europe. In the 1960s the film was seen by larger audiences in union halls, women’s associations, and film schools.

The narrative of the film was based on an actual strike which had occurred only a couple of years before the production of Salt of the Earth:

“The film recreates the 1951-2 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in New Mexico where a court injunction barred workers of the Local 890 chapter of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Works from the picket line. As the strike continued, the community’s women assumed increasingly active leadership roles in the protests, defiantly picketing Empire Zinc themselves. The 15-month strike ultimately led to considerable gains for the workers and their families.”

The film not only laudably covered labour rights and women’s rights but also minority rights. As Mercedes Mack writes:

“On October 17, 1950, in Hanover, New Mexico, workers at the Empire Zinc mine finished their shifts, formed a picket line, and began a fifteen-month strike after attempts at union negotiation with the company reached an impasse. Miner demands included: equal pay to their White counterparts, paid holidays and equal housing. As a larger objective, the Local 890 Chapter of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers was to end the racial discrimination they suffered as a product of the institutions created by the Empire Zinc company in their town. For example, Mexican-American workers were subject to separate pay lines, unequal access to sanitation, electricity and paved streets as a result of discrimination by company sponsored housing, segregated movie theaters, etc. […]  While women continued the strike, men assumed household duties and were not the center of the movement anymore. In January 1952, the strikers returned to work with a new contract improving wages and benefits. Several weeks later, Empire Zinc also installed hot water plumbing in Mexican American workers’ houses–a major issue pushed by the women of these households.”

The producers and director used actual miners and their families as actors in the film in neorealist style. Christopher Capozzola describes how:

“Paul and Sylvia Jarrico heard of the strike and went to Grant County to walk the picket line; within a year, Michael Wilson was in town. Although Wilson started the script, the men and women of Local 890 finished it, insisting in the era of Ricky Ricardo that Latino/a characters would be favorably presented in the mass media. Biberman cast only five professional actors, among them a young Will Geer (better known to television viewers as the folksy Grandpa Walton) and the leftist Mexican actress Rosaria Revueltas, who called Salt of the Earth “the film I wanted to do my whole life.” Strike participants filled the ranks, most memorably Juan Chacón, who played the leading role of Ramón Quintero. His emotional richness and sly humor make him far and away the film’s best performer.”

In 1982, a documentary about the making of Salt of the Earth was released, titled A Crime to Fit the Punishment and was directed by Barbara Moss and Stephen Mack. The full documentary can be seen online here.

The making of Salt of the Earth was also the subject of a Spanish-British bio-picture in 2000. The film, titled One of the Hollywood Ten, was written and directed by Karl Francis and stars Jeff Goldblum and Greta Scacchi.

Salt of the Earth still stands up there as one of the great union films along with Blue Collar (1978) and Norma Rae (1979). However, its authenticity and sincerity arising from working directly with workers, and its successful production despite so many obstacles put in its way, will make it one of the most inspiring union films ever produced.

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Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. 

All images in this article are from the author unless otherwise stated

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***

Western media outlets are currently paying a great deal of attention to India and the apparent impact of COVID-19. The narrative is that the coronavirus is ripping through the country – people are dying, cases are spiralling out of control and hospitals are unable to cope.

There does indeed seem to be a major problem in parts of the country. However, we need to differentiate between the effects of COVID-19 and the impacts of other factors. We must also be very weary of sensationalist media reporting which misrepresents the situation.

For instance, in late April, the New York Post ran a story about the COVID ‘surge’ in India with the headline saying, “footage shows people dead in the streets”. Next to it was an image of a woman lying dead. But the image was of a woman lying on the floor from a May 2020 story about a gas leak in Andhra Pradesh.

To try to shed some light on the situation and move beyond panic and media sensationalism, I recently spoke with Yohan Tengra, a political analyst and healthcare specialist based in Mumbai.

Tengra has carried out a good deal of research into COVID-19 and the global response to it. He is the co-author of a new report: ‘How the Unscientific Interpretation of RT-PCR & Rapid Antigen Test Results is Causing Misleading Spikes in Cases & Deaths’.

For India, he says:

“We will never know statistically if the infections have really increased. To be certain, we would need data of symptomatic people who have tested positive with either a virus culture test or PCR that uses 24 cycles or less, ideally under 20.”

He adds that India is experiencing mainly asymptomatic cases:

“For example, in Mumbai, they declared two days back that of total cases in the city, 85 per cent were asymptomatic. In Bangalore, over 95 per cent of cases were asymptomatic!”

In his report, Tengra offers scientific evidence that strongly indicates asymptomatic transmission is not significant. He asserts that as these cases comprise most of India’s case numbers, we should be questioning the data as well as the PCR tests and the cycles being used to detect the virus instead of accepting the figures at face value.

As in many countries across the globe, Tengra says people in India have been made to fear the virus endlessly. Moreover, they are generally under the impression that they need to intervene early in order to pass through the infection successfully.

He notes:

“The medical system itself works to boost the number of positive cases. Even with a negative PCR test, they are using CAT scans and diagnosing people with COVID. These scans are not specific to SARS-CoV-2 at all. I personally know of people who have been asked to be hospitalised by their doctors just based on a positive test (doctors can get a cut of the total bill made when they refer a patient to a hospital). This also happened to a Bollywood celebrity, who was asked to be admitted by his doctors with no symptoms and just a positive PCR.”

Faulty PCR testing and misdiagnosis, says Tengra, combined with people who want to intervene early with the mildest symptoms, have been filling up the beds, preventing access to those who really need them.

Addressing the much-publicised shortage of oxygen, Tengra implies this too is a result of inept policies, with exports of oxygen having increased in recent times, resulting in inadequate back-up supplies when faced with a surge in demand.

According to Tengra, the case fatality rate for COVID-19 in India was over three per cent last year but has now dropped to below 1.5 per cent. The infection fatality rate is even lower, with serosurvey results showing them to be between 0.05 per cent to 0.1 per cent.

The directors of the All India Institute of Medical Science and the India Council of Medical Research have both come out and said that there is not much difference between the first and second wave and that there are many more asymptomatic cases this time than in the so-called ‘first wave’.

Tengra argues that the principle is the same for all infectious agents: they infect people, most can fight it off without even developing symptoms, some develop mild symptoms, a smaller number develop serious symptoms and an even smaller number die.

Although lives can be saved with the right prevention plus treatment strategies, Tengra notes that most of the doctors in India are using ineffective and unsafe drugs. As a result, he claims that mortality rates could increase due to inappropriate treatments.

As has occurred in many other countries, Tengra notes the way that death certificate guidelines are structured in India makes it easy for someone to be labelled as a COVID death just based on a positive PCR test or general symptoms. It is therefore often difficult to say who has died from the virus and who has been misdiagnosed.

And the issue of misdiagnosis should not be brushed aside lightly. In a recent article by long-term resident of India Jo Nash, ‘India’s Current ‘COVID Crisis’ in Context’, it is noted that the focus of the media’s messaging and the source of many of the horrifying scenes of suffering – Delhi – is among the most toxic cities in the world which often leads to the city having to close down due to the widespread effects on respiratory health.

Nash also argues that respiratory diseases like TB and respiratory tract infections such as bronchitis leading to pneumonia are always among the top ten killers in India. These conditions are severely aggravated by air pollution and often require oxygen which can be in short supply during air pollution crises as happens at this time of the year.

As a result, it is reasonable to state that all is not what it might seem to be with regard to media reporting on the current situation.

It is interesting that this ‘second wave’ has correlated with the vaccine rollout (Nash provides official sources to support this claim). Tengra feels this might not be coincidental. He says that the ‘aefi’ (adverse events following immunisation) data vastly underestimates how many vaccine adverse reactions are taking place in the country.

Tengra says that, based on ground surveys and data collected by himself, there is a tremendous number of people who have fallen ill post vaccination, many of them then testing positive for COVID and becoming hospitalised.

The financial incentive for doctors to diagnose people with COVID could also mean many of the people who are ill with other conditions are being placed as COVID patients, while beds are under occupied for people for non-COVID health issues.

Two months ago, there was a lot of vaccine hesitancy in India and many people were not taking the jabs. Tengra notes that the government has had to up the ante in order to get people scared.

He argues:

“We are at a crossroads right now in terms of deciding the fate of our country and it will be interesting to see how this plays out.”

Tengra is working with lawyers and other concerned citizens to file legal cases to challenge the idea of asymptomatic transmission and the testing of healthy people. The aim is to also improve the testing in line with evidence-based protocols.

But that is not all:

“We will also be challenging the current vaccine rollout, highlighting the issues with trials that have been conducted, adverse events, deaths, vaccine passports and other issues surrounding the subject.”

Tengra is not alone in challenging the mainstream narrative.

A recent article in India’s National Herald newspaper by clinical epidemiologist Professor Dr Amitav Banerjee argues that the current situation in India is not due to the lethality of the virus but by the numbers who are ending up in hospital, which are exposing cracks in India’s public health infrastructure and the inequitable distribution of health services. Even at the best of times, he argues, there is a mismatch of supply and demand. Little wonder, therefore, that we now see an emergency – not squarely due to COVID.

Like Yohan Tengra, Bannerjee questions the scientific integrity of the responses to COVID and this includes the rollout of vaccines and the problems which this in itself could bring:

“Going all out for mass vaccination with uncertain input on effectiveness is a big gambit. We have a vaccine against tuberculosis for decades which has zero effectiveness in preventing tuberculosis in the Indian population. Moreover, there are concerns that haphazard and incomplete vaccination of the population can trigger mutant strains.”

Referring to an editorial in the British Medical Journal by K. Abbasi (‘Covid-19, Politicisation, Corruption, and Suppression of Science’), Bannerjee raises concerns about the suppression of science by politicians and governments and the conflicts of interest of academics, researchers and commercial lobbies.

He says:

“In a global disaster, world leaders, their scientific advisers, including career scientists, are under tremendous pressure. They have to give the impression of being in control and may resort to authoritarian ways to camouflage their uncertainties. Such tactics deviate from the scientific approach. The present pandemic is full of such uncertainties and therefore a vicious cycle of repression has set in when the authorities and their advisers are faced with rising case numbers.”

None of what has been presented here is meant to deny the existence or impact of COVID-19. People in India are dying – some from the virus, others ‘with’ the virus but most likely mainly due to their pre-existing underlying conditions, and there are others who are being misdiagnosed.

Although excess mortality figures are currently unavailable, Yohan Tengra notes the average age of those who died in the first wave was 50. This time it is 49.

Professor Bannerjee says that there is opacity and obfuscation instead of transparency. He calls for moral courage among scientists in advisory positions to the Indian government: scientific integrity is the need of the hour.

In finishing, let us place COVID and the global media reporting of the situation in India in context by returning to Jo Nash.

“Even as the alleged COVID deaths reach their peak, more people die of diarrhoea every day in India and have done for years, mostly due to a lack of clean water and sanitation creating a terrain ripe for the flourishing of communicable disease.”

Readers can access the report ‘How the Unscientific Interpretation of RT-PCR & Rapid Antigen Test Results is Causing Misleading Spikes in Cases & Deaths’ by Yohan Tengra and Ambar Koiri here

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The Director of National Intelligence has ostensibly created a new “center” for the sharing and analysis of information and intelligence about foreign interference in US elections. Its real focus is much more nefarious.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) announced in a statement on Monday that it was creating a new intelligence “center” focused on tracking so-called “foreign malign influence,” reported Politico.  This new entity, known as the Foreign Malign Influence Center, was mandated in the recent intelligence and defense budget authorization acts, representing the reality that the impetus for its creation came from Congress, and not the intelligence community.

For example, the most recent defense expenditure authorization required that the ODNI establish a “social media data analysis center” to coordinate and track foreign social media influence operations by analyzing data voluntarily shared by US social media companies. Based upon this analysis, the ODNI would report to Congress on a quarterly basis on trends in foreign influence and disinformation operations to the public. As envisioned by Congress, the intelligence community would determine jointly with US social media companies which data and metadata will be made available for analysis.

In short, the intelligence community, using data obtained from the social media accounts of American citizens, will report to Congress how this data influences the political decision making of these same American citizens.

If this does not make the most ardent defender of the US Constitution ill, nothing will.

It is not as if the US intelligence community wasn’t trending in this direction on its own volition. The straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, was the publication in March 2021 of an intelligence community assessment entitled ‘Foreign Threats to the US 2020 Presidential Election’. In this document, the US intelligence community assessed that “Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US.”

But the most damning portion of this assessment came when it delved into the specific methodology employed by Russia to achieve these nefarious aims.

Throughout the election cycle”, the assessment declared, “Russia’s online influence actors sought to affect US public perceptions of the candidates, as well as advance Moscow’s long standing goals of undermining confidence in US election processes and increasing sociopolitical divisions among the American people. During the presidential primaries and dating back to 2019, these actors backed candidates from both major US political parties that Moscow viewed as outsiders, while later claiming that election fraud helped what they called ‘establishment’ candidates. Throughout the election, Russia’s online influence actors sought to amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of voter fraud.

As an American citizen who is politically engaged, I read the intelligence community assessment with a combination of interest, concern, and outrage. The notion of “Russian online influence actors” affecting “US public perceptions of the candidates” is as intellectually vacuous as it is factually unsustainable. The stupidity encapsulated by such analysis can only be excused by the fact that the intelligence community assessment is a document produced more for the benefit of domestic political consumption than a genuine effort at identifying and quantifying legitimate threats to the US.

The assessment itself is short on hard data. However, the House Intelligence Committee has documented some 3,000 social media ads bought by Russian “troll farms” between 2015-2017, at a cost of some $100,000. These ads were in addition to so-called “organic posts,” some 80,000 of which were published on US social media, free of charge, by alleged Russian “bots” resulting in 126 million “views” by Americans. These ads were crude, unfocused, and simply inane in terms of their content.

To put the alleged Russian influence campaign into perspective, one need only reflect on the fact that during his short bid for the Democratic nomination, Michael Bloomberg spent nearly $1 billion underwriting the single most sophisticated public relations campaign, including hundreds of millions of targeted social media ads put together by the most brilliant political minds money could buy. All this money, time and effort, however, could not change the reality that, to the American public, Michael Bloomberg was an unattractive candidate – in the end his $1 billion bought him exactly two delegates.

The fact is, the political opinions of most American citizens are formed based upon a lifetime of exposure to issues that matter for them the most, whether it be education, right-to-life, gun control, social justice, agriculture, energy, environment, law enforcement, or any other of the multitude of sources of causation that impact the day-to-day existence of the American electorate.

Some of these beliefs are inherited, such as the working-class attachment to unions. Some are driven by current affairs, such as the growing awareness of climate change. But all are derived from the life experience of each American, and the thought that these deeply held beliefs could be bought, changed, or otherwise manipulated by social media posts published by foreign actors, malign or otherwise, is deeply insulting to me, and should be to every other American as well.

The irony is that by creating an intelligence organization whose task it is to help prevent the political Balkanization of America by analyzing the social media accounts of Americans who hold differing political beliefs than “the establishment” the newly minted Foreign Malign Influence Center ostensibly serves, the resulting process will only cause the further political division of the United States.

Some 74 million Americans voted for a candidate, Donald Trump, who has promulgated the very issues that the Democratic-controlled Congress seeks to denigrate and suppress through the work of this new intelligence center. These ideas will not simply disappear because the Democrats in Congress have empowered a “center” within the intelligence community whose sole function is to demonize any political thought that does not conform with the powers that be.

As it is currently focused, the Foreign Malign Influence Center is the living, breathing embodiment of politicized intelligence, two words which, when put together, represent the death knell for any intelligence organization. Worse, the work it will be doing, when turned over to a Democratically controlled Congress desperate to undermine the political viability of those 74 million American citizens, will only further fracture an already divided nation.

The Foreign Malign Influence Center was specifically mandated to examine the social media influence campaigns operated by Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. It is particularly telling that they were not directed to investigate the two largest foreign sources of political influence in America today, namely the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee and the Murdoch media empire. President Putin could only dream about being able to buy congressional seats the way AIPAC does, or control what information becomes magnified (and, by extension, suppressed) by the newspapers, television and radio enterprises owned by Rupert Murdoch.

These are the true villains when it comes to foreign corruption of American politics. These foreigners, however, have a seat at the establishment table. Their malign influence will never be labeled as such, and they will never have to withstand the ignominy of having their work scrutinized under the politicized microscope of an intelligence community that has allowed itself to be corrupted by domestic American politics to the point that it no longer serves the American people as a whole, but only a select class of American persons.

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Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter

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According to data in the national Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a 15-year-old boy in Colorado died of a heart attack only two days after being injected with the controversial Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine despite having no previous history of allergic reactions.

The case, listed in the database as VAERS ID 1242573, reveals that the 15-year-old boy was “vaccinated with Pfizer/Biontech” on April 18, 2021. He began to experience adverse reactions to the vaccine on April 19, 2021, and “died 04/20/2021, 2 days after vaccination.” The VAERS database also reveals that he had no other illnesses, no preexisting conditions, no known allergies, no birth defects, and no permanent disabilities. He merely died of “cardiac failure” exactly two days after receiving the controversial vaccine.

Source: National File

The revelation comes as the mainstream media and Biden regime have repeatedly criticized those suggesting healthy, young people should consider skipping the COVID-19 vaccine. Joe Rogan famously made this suggestion on the April 23 episode of his Joe Rogan Experience podcast, provoking a litany of leftist responses and criticism.

However, the science appears to agree with Rogan: Healthy young people have virtually no chance of dying from COVID-19, but are more likely than older demographics to suffer severe adverse reactions to the vaccine, as National File reported extensively.

The report also comes as a woman experienced near total body paralysis and intense pain after taking the same Pfizer vaccine that taken before the 15-year-old’s death. Tennessee woman Brandy Parker McFadden was shaken awake by searing pain after taking the vaccine, and soon realized she could not move her arms or legs. taken to the hospital, where doctors began panicking. “I woke up. I can’t move my arms. I can’t move my legs. So, he’s freaking out. The doctors are panicking,” said McFadden.

Despite horrifying reports of death and disability that appear to be connected to the Pfizer, vaccine, the company insisted its vaccines are safe. A statement sent to WKRN News 2 by Pfizer following the incident read in part,

“To date, more than 200 million people around the world have been vaccinated with our vaccine. It is important to note that serious adverse events that are unrelated to the vaccine are unfortunately likely to occur at a similar rate as they would in the general population,” National File reported.

The Pfizer CEO recently suggested, however, that two doses of the controversial vaccine may not be enough. The CEO claims that a booster shot will likely be necessary around six months after the second injection, and then annual vaccinations will be required to maintain immunity from an illness that over 99% of young, healthy people should expect to recover from naturally.

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It is hard for me to fathom what is going on.  The article quoted below indicates that the Pharma industry does not think Covid will be going away; instead it will switch from pandemic to endemic, with outbreaks here and there–apparently justifying lots of vaccine boosters.

Moderna says it will produce up to 1 billion doses of vaccine in 2021, but it is expanding and expects to produce 3 billion doses/year starting next year.

Netanyahu says Israelis need to anticipate another shot for themselves, and their children (after the first 2 Pfizer doses) in 6 months.  Two month ago, Netanyahu was looking to buy 36 million more doses, 3 times what had already been purchased.

On March 11, 2021, the Washington Post reported that the US had bought enough vaccine to fully immunize 3 times as many adults as live in the US–nearly 8 doses per person, since most comes from Moderna and Pfizer.

So, if we are truly anticipating that Covid will become an endemic illness, don’t we instead require a better, more long-lasting vaccine, instead of untested shots that need to be repeated every six months, and whose longterm side effects are a huge question mark?

Why does the EU (9 shots pp), Israel (8 shots pp) and the US (almost 8 shots pp) need so many shots? 

Since there is no need to vaccinate those who have recovered, and some estimates are that they include half the population, but doses have been bought for everyone, and CDC insists we all need them–is this not actually about Covid protection?

It is certainly possible the immunity the shots provide will last for years.

Do the powers that be have an hourglass into the future? How can they possibly know that everyone need so many shots?

Or that the shots will be safe in children and babies?

Why is there no visible concern for possible side effects?

More and more studies are showing that the Spike protein, the main immunizing ingredient in all the licensed Covid vaccines, is actually dangerous.

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What is really going on? 

FiercePharma:  April 29, 2021

Drugmakers who seized the opportunity to develop vaccines against the coronavirus are on their way to reaping significant revenues.

Exactly how much money is on the table?

In its annual forecast for global drug spending, the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science put the figure at $157 billion through 2025.

It’s one of the many intriguing projections in this edition of IQVIA’s annual drug spending forecast, the group’s first since the coronavirus pandemic put the worldwide economy on tilt.

For example, IQVIA projects global spending on medicines to reach $1.6 trillion by 2025, an increase from $1.25 trillion in 2019, representing annual growth of 3% to 6%. The $1.6 trillion figure does not include spending on coronavirus vaccines.

“We reflect what we expect to be happening over the next five years in terms of the drivers of change in demand for medicines and spending on medicines,” IQVIA executive director Murray Aitken explained in an interview.

In regard to global COVID-19 vaccine spending, IQVIA projects roughly $53 billion this year and $51 billion in 2022. The group sees a precipitous drop in total spending in 2023, to roughly $23 billion.

The spending decrease over time can be attributed mostly to a drop in price rather than demand, Aitken said. While IQVIA puts the average cost per dose at $22 this year and $19 in 2022, Aitken sees prices falling to approximately $9 per dose by 2023, then to $7 by 2024 and all the way to $5 by 2025.

“We think the prices will keep coming down as we get beyond this immediate period of trying to get everyone vaccinated,” Aitken said. “There are 11 vaccines in use in one part of the world or the other and there may be more coming, so we can expect that prices will decline over time.”

Other factors that will influence global vaccine spending include an increased availability of single-shot options, an increased supply to developing countries and the need for booster shots for those who have already been vaccinated.

In coming to its estimates, IQVIA also took into consideration planned global manufacturing capacity, vaccinations to date, announced rollout strategies and company contracts.

The group assumed an average of 1.8 vaccine doses per person this year and next. From 2023 to 2025, when boosters will presumably be in use and more single-shot vaccinations will be available, IQVIA shifts the average to 1.3 doses per person.

Another assumption in the model: IQVIA believes that by the end this year, 40% of the world’s population will be in countries that have achieved herd mentality. By the end of 2022, 70% of the world’s population will be vaccinated.

For the purpose of the estimate, IQVIA also assumed one-shot boosters on a two-year cycle in the 2023 to 2025 period, though this issue has yet to be resolved by vaccine producers.

Making projections during a pandemic is risky business, IQVIA admits in its report.

“The impact of COVID-19 defied expectations throughout 2020 but the evolution from pandemic to endemic is reasonably certain even if the interplay between vaccination levels and periodic outbreaks around the world remains challenging to predict,” the group said.

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A coalition of 80 U.S. agricultural, consumer, environmental, public health, and worker groups sent a letter Thursday to key figures in the Biden administration calling for them to “respect Mexico’s sovereignty and refrain from interfering with its right to enact health-protective policies”—specifically, the phaseout of the herbicide glyphosate and the cultivation of genetically modified corn.

“Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador quietly rocked the agribusiness world with his New Year’s Eve decree,” Timothy A. Wise of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (ITAP) noted earlier this year. “His administration sent an even stronger aftershock two weeks later, clarifying that the government would also phase out GM corn imports in three years and the ban would include not just corn for human consumption but yellow corn destined primarily for livestock.”

“Mexico imports about 30% of its corn each year, overwhelmingly from the United States,” Wise added. “Almost all of that is yellow corn for animal feed and industrial uses. López Obrador’s commitment to reducing and, by 2024, eliminating such imports reflects his administration’s plan to ramp up Mexican production as part of the campaign to increase self-sufficiency in corn and other key food crops.”

The groups’ letter on the Mexican policies and U.S. interference—published in English (pdf) and Spanish (pdf)—is addressed to recently confirmed U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. Its lead author is Kristin Schafer, executive director of Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA).

“We call on Secretary Vilsack and Trade Representative Tai, as key leaders in the new administration, to respect Mexico’s decision to protect both public health and the integrity of Mexican farming,” Schafer said in a statement. “It is completely unacceptable for U.S. public agencies to be doing the bidding of pesticide corporations like Bayer, who are solely concerned with maintaining their bottom-line profits.”

Fernando Bejarano, director of Pesticide Action Network in Mexico, explained that

“we are part of the No Maize No Country Campaign, a broad coalition of peasant organizations, nonprofit NGOs, academics, and consumers which support the presidential decree and fight for food sovereignty with the agroecological transformation of agricultural systems that guarantee the right to produce and consume healthy, nutritious food, free of pesticides and transgenics.”

“We reject the pressure from corporations such as Bayer-Monsanto—and their CropLife trade association—which are working in both the United States and Mexico to undermine the presidential decree that phases out the use of glyphosate and transgenic corn,” Bejarano said.

The letter highlights Guardian reporting on U.S. government documents obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity through a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents revealed that CropLife America and Bayer AG—which acquired glyphosate-based herbicide developer Monsanto in 2018—worked with U.S. officials to lobby against Mexico’s plans.

According to journalist Carey Gillam’s mid-February report:

The emails reviewed by the Guardian come from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) and other U.S. agencies. They detail worry and frustration with Mexico’s position. One email makes a reference to staff within López Obrador’s administration as “vocal anti-biotechnology activists,” and another email states that Mexico’s health agency (Cofepris) is “becoming a big time problem.”

Internal USTR communications lay out how the agrochemical industry is “pushing” for the U.S. to “fold this issue” into the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) trade deal that went into effect July 1. The records then show the USTR does exactly that, telling Mexico its actions on glyphosate and genetically engineered crops raise concerns “regarding compliance” with USMCA.

Citing discussions with CropLife, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) joined in the effort, discussing in an inter-agency email “how we could use USMCA to work through these issues.”

The Guardian also noted correspondence involving the Foreign Agricultural Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

As the letter to Vilsack and Tai points out:

“This interference and pressure from the agrochemical industry is continuing. On March 22nd, industry representatives sent a letter directed to your attention as leaders of USTR and USDA, identifying Mexico’s planned phaseout of glyphosate and genetically modified corn as a ‘leading concern’ for agribusiness interests and the pesticide industry (represented by the pesticide industry’s trade group, CropLife America).”

“We strongly object to any interference by U.S. government officials or agribusiness interests in a sovereign state’s right to enact policy measures to protect the health and well-being of its people,” the letter states. “We urge your agencies to resist and reject these ongoing efforts.”

“We welcome the administration’s stated commitment to listening to the science, improving public health, protecting the environment, and limiting exposure to dangerous chemicals and pesticides, while holding polluters accountable and prioritizing environmental justice, particularly for communities of color and low-income communities,” it adds. “We trust that these stated commitments, as well as your dedication to ‘fairness for farmers,’ extend equally to other countries and include respect for other nations’ and peoples’ rights to self-determination.”

Other signatories to the letter include the American Sustainable Business Council, Beyond Pesticides, Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace USA, Indigenous Environmental Network, ITAP, and Organic Consumers Association.

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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On April 29, Russian President Vladimir Putin held videoconference with leaders of several French companies-members of the Franco-Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI France-Russia) to discuss some aspects of Russian-French trade, economic and investment cooperation, including the implementation of large joint projects as well as the prospects for collaborative work.

Putin noted that the Economic Council of the Franco-Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry is still operational in spite of difficulties, and the late April meeting was the fourth time since 2016. From the historical records, France has been and remains a key economic partner for Russia, holding a high but not sufficiently high, 6th place among EU countries in the amount of accumulated investment in the Russian economy and 5th place in the volume of trade.

Despite a certain decline in mutual trade in 2020 (it went down by 14 percent compared to 2019) the ultimate figure is quite acceptable at $13 billion. French investment in Russia is hovering around $17 billion, while Russian investment in France is $3 billion.

Over 500 companies with French capital are operating in various sectors of the Russian economy. French business features especially prominently in the Russian fuel and energy complex, automobile manufacturing and, of course, the food industry.

“It could have been more if the French regulatory and state authorities treated Russian businesses as Russia is treating French businesses. We appreciate that in a difficult economic environment, French companies operating in Russia have not reduced their activity,” Putin pointed out.

The Russian Government established the Foreign Investment Advisory Council, which includes six French companies. Further, there is an opportunity to discuss specific issues related to the economic and investment climate in Russia, and that opportunity is traditionally provided at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, which will be held on June 2-5.

French companies are involved in the implementation of globally famous landmark projects, such as the construction of the Yamal LNG and Arctic LNG 2 facilities and the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project. This, Putin regrettably said “We are aware of and regret the amount of political speculation concerning the latter. I would like to point out once again that it is a purely economic project, it has nothing to do with present-day political considerations.”

Russia intends to increase assistance to the development of science and technology. Funds will be directed primarily to innovation sectors such as pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, nuclear and renewable energy, and the utilisation of carbon emissions.

“We are interested in involving foreign companies that would like to invest in Russia and in projects we consider high priority. In order to do this, we will continue to use preferential investment regimes and execute special investment contracts, as you know. A lot of French companies successfully use these tools on the Russian market. For example, more than one third of 45 special investment contracts have been signed with European, including French, partners,” he explained during the meeting.

He also mentioned continuous efforts to attract foreign companies to localise their production to state purchases and to implementing the National Development Projects, as well as existing opportunities for French businesses in special economic zones. Today there are 38 such zones created throughout the Russian Federation.

Russia pays particular attention to attracting high-quality foreign specialists. Their employment is being fast-tracked, and their families can now obtain indefinite residence permits. There is a plan to launch a special programme of ‘golden visas’ whereby to issue a residence permit in exchange for investment in the real economy, a practice is used in many other countries.

Taking his turn, Co-Chair of the CCI France-Russian Economic Council, Gennady Timchenko, noted that the pandemic has changed the world, people and business, and that French companies in Russia are responsible employers and socially responsible members of Russian society.

Despite the crisis and the geopolitical situation, a number of French companies have launched production in 2020–2021. Companies such as Saint-Gobain and Danone have renewed their investments. French companies have increased their export of products manufactured in Russia; they are investing in priority sectors of the Russian economy. For example, this year the French company Lidea is launching a plant called Tanais to produce seeds. Russia is dependent on the import of 30 to 60 percent of these seeds, according to various estimates.

Despite the current geopolitical conditions and information field, there are important signals for French business and the Russian side to strengthen economic cooperation, attract investment, and create partnerships on a new mutually beneficial basis.

Co-Chair of the CCI France-Russian Economic Council, Patrick Pouyanne, noted that the meeting has become an excellent tradition, the presence of 17 CEOs and deputy CEOs of French companies shows the importance of these joint meetings, and further reflect the deep interest of French business in Russia.

In addition, Patrick Pouyanne further offered some insights into Russia-French cooperation. By 2020, twenty members of the Economic Council invested a total of 1.65 trillion rubles, supporting 170,000 jobs. These companies have operated in Russia for decades and continue investing in the Russian economy despite the sanctions and the epidemic. These companies help France maintain its status as the second largest investor in Russia. In 2020, France invested over $1 billion in Russia despite the economic difficulties caused by the pandemic.

Concluding his remarks, Patrick Pouyanne stressed that the economic operators believe everyone will benefit if Russia, France and all of Europe are not divided or isolated. This is the challenge today. Indeed, diplomacy has to continue playing an important role in settling differences, and businesses are convinced that meetings like this create bridges between Russia and France to strengthen investment and economic cooperation. 

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Kester Kenn Klomegah who previously worked for Inter Press Service (IPS) is now a frequent and passionate contributor to Global Research.

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After Heike Schotten, Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMB), co-organized and moderated a webinar at the University of Massachusetts Boston entitled We Will not Be Silenced: The Repression of Academic Freedom and Resistance, from Leila Khaled to UMass Boston, UMB’s public records access office received a request from the Zionist Advocacy Center in New York “pursuant to the provisions of the Massachusetts Public Record Law” for emails from and to the webinar participants that use the terms “Israel,” “Palestine,” “Leila Khaled,” or “We Will Not Be Silenced” between June 1, 2020-October 25, 2020.

There was and is nothing secretive or illegal about the webinar We Will Not Be Silenced aired at the University of Massachusetts Boston on October 23, 2020. It was part of a Day of Action Against the Criminalization and Censorship of Campus Speech organized and widely publicized by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). Furthermore, the whole webinar was recorded and published on YouTube. [Also see: Zoom Censorship of Palestine Seminars Sparks Fight Over Academic Freedom]

In the context of USACBI’S Day of Action, the request served under the federal freedom of information law or FOIA by the Zionist group on the university is nothing more than an attempt to silence and erase the Palestinian narrative and liberation struggle by intimidating and harassing Professor Schotten and her colleagues.

Terrorism is a focus of Professor Schotten’s academic inquiry and the subject of her book Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony (Columbia University Press, 2018), described on the publisher’s book page as follows: “In Queer Terror, C. Heike Schotten offers a critique of U.S. settler-colonial empire that draws on political, queer, and critical indigenous theory to situate Bush’s either/or moralism and reframe the concept of terrorism.”

In the process of this academic inquiry Schotten finds occasion to critique the “contemporary facts of Israeli colonization and apartheid” and expose, as false, “the already-agreed-upon presupposition [and one widely propagated by Israel as a rationale for the existence of the Zionist Jewish state] that the Jews are history’s quintessential victims — and not, in fact, complicit, in ideological and state forms, with today’s aggressors in a civilizational War on Terror.”

To learn more about the context that drove Professor Schotten to organize the webinar that revolves around Leila Khaled’s censorship by Zoom, I asked her and she was kind to answer the following questions. Her insightful responses throw light on a host of interlocking concepts — the Palestine exception, terrorism, Islamophobia, queerness, colonial power, pseudo-democracy and why solidarity is important. She is remarkable in her honesty and directness and her responses are guaranteed to re-frame your vision of our world:

“Just as it is hard for people to speak out about Palestine when they will find their jobs and academic credentials targeted and destroyed, so too it is hard for activists and everyday people to speak out about Palestine when they will be accused of being ‘terrorists’ or ‘terrorist’-sympathizers.”

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Rima Najjar: There have been several examples of Zionist organizations serving harassment FOIAs to academics that tied them up with unnecessary legal wrangling for a long time. The harassment of Professor Simona Sharoni at the hands of Jonathan Slosser comes to mind, as reported in the 2016 Electronic Intifada report Women’s studies professor harassed by Israel-backed group. What do you know about the Zionist organization serving the FOIA in your case and have you made a decision yet on how you will be addressing the request?

Heike Schotten: My understanding is that the Zionist Advocacy Center (ZAC) is essentially a one-man operation run by David Abrams and receives direct funding from the Israeli government. The ZAC and Abrams make it their job to instigate lawsuits against Palestine advocates and movements on campus in order to harass, intimidate, and, ultimately, shut them down entirely. Palestine Legal has a helpful primer on Abrams here.

In total, the ZAC submitted a public records request for emails from three faculty at UMass Boston (myself included) who were involved in the USACBI Day of Action Leila Khaled webinar. We continue to learn more about the nature of this organization and our legal rights to free speech and academics as tenured professors at a public university and as unionized public sector workers.

One thing we clearly decided upon, however, is that we will make all our decisions together and insist on dealing with this harassment and with our university as an indivisible group. We understand all too well that this sort of harassment and intimidation — not to mention potential university discipline and punishment — are more likely to succeed if they can pit us against one another or divide us up. For example, one of us is much more vulnerable to this sort of targeting and harassment because she is Palestinian. We will not allow either the ZAC or the university administration to separate her from us or single her out as either uniquely vulnerable or somehow “problematic” or “troublesome.” Solidarity is our unifying commitment in this case and whatever struggle this entails — and we worry this signals the beginning of a long series of public records requests in a fishing expedition to find something to be cobbled together to issue in a lawsuit — and however long it takes, we have committed to be in it with one another together.

One last thing on this: despite many conversations with our university administration well before the Day of Action ever existed, there has been a real refusal on the part of the university to take these sorts of right-wing and Zionist attacks on faculty and academic freedom seriously. Most often, university administrators mistake them for accurate portrayals of faculty misconduct, rather than sloppy, misleading, and ideologically-driven attacks that seek to destroy higher education. But as we know, and as Isaac Kamola recommends in his excellent research on this subject, the best approach for university administrations to take is to go on the offensive: not simply actively defend their faculty from such attacks, but call out the vast, well-funded network of right-wing donors and activists who are organizing these attacks not from an interest in protecting academic freedom but rather in destroying liberatory knowledges and the possibility academic life itself.

In the wake of administrators’ failure to do precisely this, our only recourse is one another, which is why solidarity is so important. We also have been very heartened by having the backing of our Faculty Staff Union and amazing support from the brilliant legal minds at Palestine Legal.

“The primary basis for the attacks was claims about ‘terrorism’: that Leila Khaled is a ‘terrorist,’ that the PFLP is a ‘terrorist’ organization, or that hosting her in an online classroom constitutes material support for ‘terrorism.’ In all cases, the word ‘terrorist’ was used simultaneously to name Khaled as Muslim, Palestinian, ‘savage,’ and intolerable.”

RN: This is not the first time you defend academic freedom or Palestinian rights. In your article titled “Against academic freedom: ‘terrorism’, settler colonialism, and Palestinian liberation,” for example, you write about the work of academic boycott against Israel and situate it within a critique of settler colonialism. How long have you been engaged in this work, and is this the first time you have personally come up against the poisonous and destructive slandering of people and movements advocating justice and liberation for the Palestinian people?

HS: I have been involved in the Palestine solidarity movement since 2006, and thinking in my scholarly work about the connections between settler colonialism, the War on Terror, and queer critique for almost that long. The motivation for the latter project was not simply, as you put it so well, “the poisonous and destructive slandering of people and movements advocating justice and liberation for the Palestinian people,” but also the really intractable and insidious discourse of “terrorism” which, in the US at least, functions similarly not only to demonize and punish Palestine advocates, but also to racialize an entire category of people, Muslims, and the thing that ostensibly unites them, a monolith caricature of “Islam” as essentially “radical” or “fundamentalist.”

“Islamophobia is not a uniform phenomenon and takes many different forms across the globe: US ‘terrorism’ Islamophobia is not the same as French secularist Islamophobia, which are surely not the same as the anti-Muslim animus in Gujarat and India vis-a-vis Pakistan and Kashmir, in Russia vis-a-vis Chechens, or in China vis-a-vis Uighur Muslims.”

RN: One of the conclusions of Queer Terror is that the attack on “terror” levied by George W Bush is so familiar and so entrenched because it is both an echo and a continuation of the kind of ideological position espoused by settler colonialism. Can you speak to that?

HS: Settler colonialists everywhere encounter indigenous inhabitants and characterize them as fundamentally hostile, irrational, and “savage”; i.e., a threat to “civilization” and everything that latter category may entail, whether that’s Christianity, Enlightenment reason, or the rules of private property (usefully called, by 16th and 17th century British rationalizers of colonization, “propriety”).

What’s set up in this bizarre ideological universe is fundamentally (1) a reversal of hierarchy, wherein the oppressors set themselves up as the oppressed and (2) a characterization of the meeting between settler and “savage” as an existential threat that portends the elimination of the settler (when, of course, the reality is that settler colonialism portends the elimination of the native).

This is the exact same ideological logic at work in accusations of “terrorism” and, quite frequently, Zionist fear-mongering around “anti-Semitism.” On college campuses, this takes place when those with the actual money and power smear individual academics — often, but not always, Palestinian — and completely unfunded grassroots movements as the main instigators of racism and aggression against Jewish people. Their aim is the elimination of these academics and movements and, regretfully, they have been very successful in some cases: as I discuss in that article, the firing of tenured Palestinian-American professors Sami Al-Arian and Steven Salaita are premier examples. Others, like Nadia Abu El-Haj and Joseph Massad, managed somehow to survive what were harrowing campaigns against them waged by well-funded Zionist organizations, often with direct support from the Israeli government itself.

“…’terrorism’ typically designates Arab, Muslim, and specifically Palestinian people… calling any and all acts of political violence ‘terrorism,’ especially if Muslim people are involved, allows for the de-politicization of violence and the smearing of Muslims as fundamentally ‘savage,’ irrational, and inassimilable to Western ways of life, which go unmarked as culturally specific but instead masquerade as a universal recognition of the value of human life.”

RN: Alasdair Soussi, writing in Aljazeera, explains how the powerful Israeli lobby along with “reporting fatigue and the fear of being accused of anti-Semitism” have harmed coverage of the Israel/Palestine issue, resulting in the publication of reports on Palestine that are consistently inaccurate. Even the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) letter to New York University president Andrew Hamilton protesting Zoom’s cancellation of a webinar hosted by the NYU chapter of the AAUP, and co-sponsored by several NYU departments and institutes has an inaccuracy right in the first paragraph, as in the reference to Leila Khaled as a “Palestinian activist previously convicted of terrorist activity.” What do you make of that as well as of the unquestioning references to “terrorism” that are constantly being made in the media?

HS: The word “terrorist” has a number of specific functions, all of which are fully on display in the coordinated mass censorship of webinars featuring Leila Khaled. While “terrorism” as a term has been in use for hundreds of years, it has a specific set of contemporary meanings that were manufactured by Israel and the US in the late 20th century and became essential to the War on Terror in the 21st.

First, of course, “terrorism” designates ideologically motivated, irrational, and unjustifiable violence against innocents. Indeed, “terrorism” is a way of talking about political violence that removes the politics entirely, rendering anyone accused of “terrorism” into a brainwashed tool or an irrational “savage.” Second, however, “terrorism” typically designates Arab, Muslim, and specifically Palestinian people. This is because the depoliticization of political violence that occurs in the first step requires some other, non-political explanation of otherwise incomprehensible violence, and Islam is the racialized placeholder that unifies the otherwise non-homogenous conglomerate of “Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian” and functions ideologically to “radicalize” people into committing these inexplicable acts of violence.

Finally, and more broadly, “terrorism” indicates the “savagery” of all those who refuse or fail to conform to the dictates of American and Israeli imperial and settler colonial hierarchies of human worth. “Terrorism” discourse is thus, to be sure, a form of racism; it is also a continuation of genocidal settler colonial ideologies about native peoples and a rationalization of American imperial military exploits abroad.

“The real problem with ‘terrorism’ discourse, which is not solely its inaccuracy in blaming victims but, more importantly, its insistence that political violence is off the table and anyone who engages in it, talks about it, or defends it is beyond the pale of humanity. That is, ‘terrorism’ discourse functions as a kind of moralism: a social system of valuation and de-valuation that sorts populations into proper, upright, and innocent, on the one hand, and populations deemed irremediably perverse, evil, nihilistic, or ‘savage,’ on the other.”

RN: Would you say, then, that the attacks on Prof. Abdulhadi’s and Prof. Kinukawa’s webinar are important evidence that this form of anti-Muslim racism is alive and well in the US?

HS: Yes absolutely: The primary basis for the attacks was claims about “terrorism”: that Leila Khaled is a “terrorist,” that the PFLP is a “terrorist” organization, or that hosting her in an online classroom constitutes material support for “terrorism.” In all cases, the word “terrorist” was used simultaneously to name Khaled as Muslim, Palestinian, “savage,” and intolerable. “Terrorism” is the phenomenon that cannot be tolerated without it threatening to destroy all goodness, decency, morality, and truth. More specifically, of course, the Zionist deployment of this term renders “terrorism” the fundamental threat to Jews and Jewish people, since Zionism is a Jewish supremacist settler colonial ideology that casts Palestinians as “savages” whose very existence poses a mortal threat to Jewish survival. Thus, it was unsurprising to also see the webinar and Khaled’s participation in it cast as an unprecedented and insupportable attack on Jewish people.

RN: You also write about the targeting and punishment (by Zionist and US forces) of Muslims and all those in alliance with “Muslim” goals. What do you make of French president Emmanuel Macron seizing upon the gruesome killings by a young Muslim of a French schoolteacher who had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class to denounce terrorism and champion “French values,” such as freedom of speech when at the same time, as Kim Petersen puts it in Terrorism and French Values- Sowing and Reaping?, “21st century France engages in overseas militarism, otherwise known as state terrorism, in places with large Muslim populations — places that never attacked France — such as Afghanistan, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Chad, Somalia, Libya, North Mali, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen then what is to be expected? Is it okay for France to engage in militarism abroad and expect no blowback on French soil? Must not the French terrorism be condemned?”

HS: The French situation is a specific one, and I am wary to draw too many generalizations from an analysis of “terrorism” discourse and anti-Muslim racism that draws primarily on the US.

Islamophobia is not a uniform phenomenon and takes many different forms across the globe: US “terrorism” Islamophobia is not the same as French secularist Islamophobia, which are surely not the same as the anti-Muslim animus in Gujarat and India vis-a-vis Pakistan and Kashmir, in Russia vis-a-vis Chechens, or in China vis-a-vis Uighur Muslims. Each of these places has their own history of colonization and decolonization, not to mention ethnic and religious conflict, that cannot and should be assimilated into an American narrative.

That said, it is also the case that the War on Terror and the racist “terrorism” discourse that attends it is one of the United States’ most powerful exports. “Terrorism” discourse has been taken up by oppressive regimes all over the world to justify authoritarian crackdowns on their own people, expansive security state measures, and general militarism. It is also the case that France is, like the US and Israel, a settler colonial power that is dealing with Islam and Muslims in the form of an “immigration question” that they persist in seeing as the intrusion of foreigners with anti-European, anti-West, and anti-modern culture that threatens to destroy French values and French civilization. So, in that sense, there are continuities between US and Israeli Islamophobia and what is happening in France. And, to repeat a point I made earlier, calling any and all acts of political violence “terrorism,” especially if Muslim people are involved, allows for the de-politicization of violence and the smearing of Muslims as fundamentally “savage,” irrational, and inassimilable to Western ways of life, which go unmarked as culturally specific but instead masquerade as a universal recognition of the value of human life.

“US ‘terrorism’ discourse is fully of a piece with its democracy-promotion: both are toxic, ideological formations that veil the violent, settler colonial destruction of indigenous lifeworlds, instead passing it off as freedom and the protection of innocent life.”

RN: Would you go as far as to turn the tables and say that it is actually the colonial and imperial states who are the “real” “terrorists?”

HS: While such a statement would be a powerful rhetorical maneuver, I think it sidesteps the real problem with “terrorism” discourse, which is not solely its inaccuracy in blaming victims but, more importantly, its insistence that political violence is off the table and anyone who engages in it, talks about it, or defends it is beyond the pale of humanity. That is, “terrorism” discourse functions as a kind of moralism: a social system of valuation and de-valuation that sorts populations into proper, upright, and innocent, on the one hand, and populations deemed irremediably perverse, evil, nihilistic, or “savage,” on the other.

As we saw, this is fundamentally a settler colonial moralism, since the innocent and upright are existentially threatened by the evil and perverse. (The word “perverse” reminds us that this is also how heteronormative ideologies function, which are premier examples of moralism par excellence.) Rather than understanding morality as a social good, I follow Nietzsche in understanding it as the will to power of those who resent and feel victimized by others’ very existence. Hence morality is also, as Nietzsche explains, essentially a punishment project. This is why “terrorism” discourse is inherently tied to the actual policies of surveillance, disappearance, torture, invisibilitization, and demonization of Muslims punishment of Muslims for the very fact of being Muslims (or being perceived as such) is both a moral mandate and an existential necessity, if the integrity of good people and the coherence of meaning and truth itself are to be preserved.

However satisfying it may be, then, to flip the script and declare that the US and Israel are “real” “terrorists,” I think doing so implicates us in the moralizing logic of “terrorism” discourse that will keep us tied to resentment and invested in punishment. As Atiya Husain has so powerfully argued, if we are truly committed to an abolitionist politics, then we should not be re-deploying “terrorism” as an epithet but, instead, seeking to abolish the very conditions of social and political life that render it meaningful to begin with. Which means, in effect, decolonizing this place and leaving “terrorism” and its attendant acculturation in the dustbin of history.

RN: In Queer Terror, you locate what you call the problem of “terrorism” within the framework of “the moralized value of life,” the idea that “settler life” is the only life “worthy of protection and preservation.” Do you think that if more journalists understood the concept of “terrorism” in the way you do, the result might be more accurate reporting about Palestine?

HS: I’m not sure the problem is one of knowledge or ignorance, really, so I don’t know that education would solve it. Rather, the problem is twofold: (1) the Israel and Zionist lobby is extraordinarily powerful and well-resourced and works very effectively (although this is changing now) to intimidate and silence anyone engaged in critical discourse regarding Israel and (2) the ideological apparatus in place that secures American and Israeli settler colonial empire is quite powerful and difficult to refuse. Just as it is hard for people to speak out about Palestine when they will find their jobs and academic credentials targeted and destroyed, so too it is hard for activists and everyday people to speak out about Palestine when they will be accused of being “terrorists” or “terrorist”-sympathizers. These work hand in hand to ensure not simply journalistic inaccuracy but, even more profoundly, an entire socio-political order that literally renders other views unthinkable because they are such a profound offense to decency and human values.

RN: You write about the targeting and punishment of all those who undermine Zionism and US settler-imperialism. Keeping in mind the following headline in The Times of Israel, After Corbyn, UK Labour elects Keir Starmer, Zionist with Jewish wife, what do you make of the punishment in the form of wrongful suspension by the current leader of his own party meted out to former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn for his commitment to the Palestinian struggle for self-determination?

HS: I can’t speak to the specific situation in the UK as I am unversed in British politics, but I can say that the notion that there is a “Palestine exception” even in progressive politics is a very familiar one. The Arab Women’s Solidarity Association paper, “The Forgotten -Ism,” makes the case quite powerfully for the oversight of Zionism by feminists — even women of color feminists — as a form of racism that harms Arab and Arab-American and Palestinian women. We saw how this endures in the coordinated campaigns against Linda Sarsour and Zahra Billoo in the US as directors of the Women’s March. Palestine Legal has an invaluable report on what they call The Palestine Exception to Free Speech. And, in the SFSU webinar held on the Day of Action, Hatem Bazian spoke very powerfully about his experience being part of virtually every liberatory people’s movement in the Bay Area, but how participation in only one of them — Palestine solidarity — consistently results in punishment, attack, surveillance, and outrage.

RN:
As far as Palestine and US policy are concerned, the Biden presidency might produce cosmetic adjustments such as the restoration of US economic assistance to the Palestinians and reopening the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington. The irony now, however, is that the US, which allowed the elections of President Mahmoud Abbas for a four-year term in 2005, has been afraid of Palestinian popular will and has not allowed elections since. In 2017, for example, Hillary Clinton was caught on tape boasting about the need of “rigging” Palestinian elections. Do you see a link between the hypocrisy of US rhetoric on “democracy” that the Trump re-election campaign has now exposed to the world and its rhetoric on “terrorism?”

HS: US “terrorism” discourse is fully of a piece with its democracy-promotion: both are toxic, ideological formations that veil the violent, settler colonial destruction of indigenous lifeworlds, instead passing it off as freedom and the protection of innocent life.

Two things attest to the above: (1) the US is not a democracy and (2) hypocrisy is a failing that, while very pleasing to point out in our adversaries, rarely advances our political agendas insofar as it relies on the erroneous assumption that our adversaries actually give a damn about being (or being seen as) inconsistent. The Republicans, for example, have demonstrated quite clearly with the Barrett confirmation hearings that they don’t care one whit about being hypocrites.

Realizing and really reckoning with the fact that the US is not a democracy requires not only a clear-eyed assessment of decades and centuries of voter disenfranchisement, the elitism of the nation’s founding documents, the profound influence of what is anodynely referred to as “money in politics,” and the consistent tethering of all of these to white supremacy. It also demands reckoning with the fact that the US, like Israel, is a settler state and, as such, cannot ever be or become a democracy without decolonizing down to the ground — literally.

In that sense, yes, there is a deep connection between the farcical “democracy” paraded before the world in the form of US exceptionalism and “terrorism” discourse. The “terrorist” is contemporarily imperial America’s version of the settler’s “savage” of an ostensible yesterday. The presumption is that indigenous people are no more — which we know to be false — and they have been replaced by external threats “abroad” to a benign American imperial venture that simply seeks to spread democracy throughout the world.

RN: Your book is entitled Queer Terror. Could you explain what queerness has to do with this conversation?

HS: I argue that queerness occupies the same ideological and affective space that “terrorism” does. Not in the sense that we can understand queer people and Muslims (an already ridiculous and reductive formulation that presumes an antagonism between otherwise intersectional categories) as analogously oppressed or stigmatized but, rather, in the sense that both “queers” and “terrorists” are figures of those who are perceived as impossible to be absorbed or accepted within a “civilized” social order without threatening that order’s very survival.

Admittedly, there is a substantial scholarship that persuasively shows the ways that some queer people and lives have been fully incorporated into the life of the community, the state, and the nation — typically through regimes of white supremacy and economic upward mobility. That said, however, the perhaps outdated but nevertheless not at all outmoded derogatory usage of the term “queer” has the same abjecting echoes as the term “terrorist,” because both are functions of a moralizing agenda promoted by those interested primarily in the policing of propriety and the punishment of indecency.

RN: George W. Bush issued an ultimatum after September 11, 2001: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” What do you make of such rhetoric?

HS: It is the same kind of ultimatum with the same affective, psychic, and material consequences presented to queer and trans people exiled from families, housing, jobs, communities, or countries because of their queerness.

It is a condemnation that exceeds judgment about harmful behavior and bleeds into an absolutist condemnation of people and ways of being that cannot be allowed to stand, because such allowance is an existential threat: we cannot allow you to be queer or trans just as we cannot stand with the terrorists, because health, family, kinship, community, indeed human decency itself are at stake. There is no arguing with such ultimatums, and they entail an impossible choice: side with your oppressor and accept your abjection, or choose to be abjected.

My own argument in Queer Terror is that all those so confronted with such ultimatums choose abjection, the only choice that is truly off the table. As with the “terrorism” epithet, we should not take it up or “reclaim” it to name those who truly are anti-social; instead, we need to get out of the moralizing business altogether, and we do so by accepting the one thing that moralizers everywhere agree we cannot accept: unthinkable immorality. This means, then, that we stand with queers, that we are queers, that we stand with the “terrorists,” that we are the terrorists.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.

Featured image: Professor Heike Schotten — Still captured from We Will Not Be Silenced webinar at the University of Massachusetts Boston

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Within six days of receiving a second injection of Pfizer’s experimental Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccine, a two-year-old baby enrolled in the company’s clinical trials for children passed away, new reports indicate.

The ongoing trials include more than 10,000 children aging in range from five to 11 in one of the groups, and another 10,000 children as young as six months old in the other. These trials have been taking place since mid-March with the soon expectation that the jab will be “authorized” for use in children and babies.

Moderna is also running a similar series of clinical trials on children that it is calling “KidCOVE.” Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and AstraZeneca are also both running their own respective clinical trials on children to get them jabbed at “warp speed.”

As reported in the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), the two-year-old girl received her second dose of Pfizer’s DNA-modifying mRNA injection on February 25. On March 1, she suffered some kind of serious adverse reaction. On March 3, she died. No further details were provided.

The VAERS report does indicate that the child had been hospitalized since February 14, which suggests she may have gotten sick from the first shot. Despite this, someone administered a second shot to the already sick and suffering child, which caused her to die.

To learn more about the wave of sickness and death affecting those who were jabbed for Chinese germs, be sure to check out ChemicalViolence.com.

Parents who inject their children with vaccine poisons should be ashamed of themselves

Early in the week, it was also reported that Pfizer’s experimental gene therapy injection can cause brain damage and neurodegenerative disease.

A paper published in the journal Microbiology & Infectious Diseases explains the process by which these injections alter human DNA and cause the body to basically go haywire over time.

Despite all this, hordes of not-so-bright Americans are lining right up to get injected, believing that the vaccine will protect them against “catching” the Wuhan flu. They are also subjecting their children to it based on lies from Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, and others who are aggressively pushing the jabs.

Michell Lynam, an anesthesiologist who calls herself “Dr. United States of America,” has been bragging all over Facebook about how she subjected her own children to the experimental shots. She enrolled her two teenage daughters in Pfizer’s clinical trial, and her six-year-old daughter in Moderna’s clinical trial.

Should anything happen to these poor kids, Lynam probably will not tell her Facebook followers about it. Lynam will probably also not report any potential injuries or deaths to VAERS.

The only reason the death of the two-year-old in the Pfizer trial is known about is because independent sleuths dug it out of VAERS. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is certainly not going to report on it, and neither will the mainstream media.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is also complicit, having recently lifted its recommended pause on J&J’s experimental injection, which causes deadly blood clots. Rather than ban the jab, the FDA is instead affixing a tiny warning label on the package that says the J&J injection comes with blood clot risks.

“I read this and wept,” wrote one commenter at Great Game India. “Children that age should NEVER be given any vaccines. Shame on the parents who allowed such a thing to happen.”

“Now, they are paying with broken hearts. How sad is that? These vaccines contain aluminum, mercury, and formaldehyde. Why on earth would anyone allow themselves to be injected with these poisons?”

Others offered similar sentiments of sadness and disgust that this mass genocide of humans under the guise of “public health” is even happening at all.

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Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe

May 3rd, 2021 by VAXXED The Movie

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This was aired on February 17, 2017.

In 2014, biologist Dr. Brian Hooker received a call from a Senior Scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who led the agency’s 2004 study on the Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine and its link to autism.

The scientist, Dr. William Thompson, confessed that the CDC had omitted crucial data in their final report that revealed a causal relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism.

Over several months, Dr. Hooker records the phone calls made to him by Dr. Thompson who provides the confidential data destroyed by his colleagues at the CDC.

Dr. Hooker enlists the help of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the British gastroenterologist falsely accused of starting the anti-vax movement when he first reported in 1998 that the MMR vaccine may cause autism. Wakefield directs this documentary examining the evidence behind an appalling cover-up committed by the government agency charged with protecting the health of American citizens.

Interviews with pharmaceutical insiders, doctors, politicians, and parents of vaccine-injured children reveal an alarming deception that has contributed to the skyrocketing increase of autism and potentially the most catastrophic epidemic of our lifetime.

Watch the trailer below.

The Most Controversial Documentary of 2016 http://VaxxedTheMovie.com

Stream only, available now in US, Canada, UK, Ireland, & Australia.

Coming soon in more territories.

DVD available via VaxxedTheMovie.com

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“As the coronavirus continues to wreak havoc around the world, evidences are piling up to show that powerful forces have been working to keep it that way.

My guest today is a physician from Texas whose medical license was briefly threatened because he prescribed hydroxychloroquine to his COVID patients. Hydroxychloroquine is a cheap drug that’s been around for a long time and is proven to be highly effective as part of the protocol for treating COVID patients.

In his testimony before the Texas Senate last March, Dr. Richard Urso talked about roadblocks and disinformation getting in the way of his efforts to treat his patients.”

Watch the interview below. OR CLICK HERE 

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This interview was aired on Progressive Radio Network.

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It’s one thing to have policies against violence, abuse, and harassment. But in “protecting” users, Twitter is hell-bent on censoring voices that rock the boat, even when all they have tweeted is a peer-reviewed scientific paper.

Last week, Simon Goddek, who has a PhD in biotechnology and researches system dynamics, tweeted a link to a scientific study titled, “Is a Mask That Covers the Mouth and Nose Free from Undesirable Side Effects in Everyday Use and Free of Potential Hazards?”

Some time later, his account was frozen and he received a notice from Twitter that it would remain frozen until he deleted the offending tweet, and for the 12 hours following that.

In his Telegram group, he wrote:

I was put into Twitter jail for citing a peer-reviewed scientific paper. Cancel science is real.

What’s especially concerning is that I didn’t make any personal comment on the paper’s content. I only said that regarding that paper, masks CAN lead to massive health damages. It’s the conclusion of a scientific piece of work that has been peer-reviewed by at least 2 experts in the field.

According to Twitter, Goddek violated their policy on, “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to Covid-19.”

The article in question wasn’t even as risqué as others and merely addressed undesirable side effects of mask wearing. How is that “misinformation”?

I spoke with Goddek to learn more about what happened. Turns out, it’s not the first time.

The first time I got censored because I cited a scientific, peer-reviewed paper on masks. I was just citing their work, and I got put into Twitter jail. In that tweet, I was saying, ‘Look, it seems masks don’t work.’ So, I also said my opinion.

This time, I found another study on masks, which says there are adverse effects if you wear masks. So, I was citing the paper without putting my own opinion, and they censored me again, made me delete it and put me into Twitter jail again.

On April 17, Naomi Wolf tweeted she had been locked out of Twitter for the fourth time for sharing a Stanford study, “proving the lack of efficacy of masks.” That study was also peer-reviewed.

This isn’t merely a case of Twitter deciding that Goddek and Wolf were not in the position to be discussing the efficacy or dangers of masks. Twitter is censoring pretty much anything about Covid that doesn’t match the narrative promoted by the WHO, CDC, and other such bodies.

Even a well-known epidemiologist has faced Twitter’s wrath. An article in the American Institute for Economic Research noted:

Harvard Professor Martin Kulldorff and co-creator of the Great Barrington Declaration, one of the most cited epidemiologists and infectious -disease experts in the world has been censored by Twitter. His tweet on how not everyone needs a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 was not taken down. He had a warning slapped on it and users have been prevented from liking or retweeting the post.

That article also emphasized:

“Dr. Kulldorff serves on the Covid-19 vaccine safety subgroup that the CDC, NIH, and FDA rely upon for technical expertise on this very subject.”

On April 10, a group called Drs4CovidEthics tweeted:

Not a month on Twitter & we were locked out of our account, forced to delete our pinned tweet. We must self-censor or be banned says Twitter (paraphrasing) We mustn’t contradict official sources. But our letters contradict official sources. With good reason. Which we can’t tweet.

What do they know better than Twitter censors? They’re merely “doctors & scientists from 25+ countries, including heads of ICU, world leading immunologists, experts in public health, drug safety, respiratory illness, GPs, researchers in vaccines, pharmacology, virology, biochemistry…”

I searched for more examples of extreme Twitter censorship and found further censorship of vaccine related information, and one person’s hypothesis on why vaccine talk is so particularly taboo: “$157 billion buys a lot of Facebook and Twitter bans.”

The popular independent website Off Guardian recently was locked out of Twitter for sharing one of its own articles on Covid vaccines, they told me.

In fact, Twitter has been censoring Off Guardian for at least a year. When users try to open a tweet to an Off Guardian article, they are met with a warning that the link could be potentially spammy or unsafe.

The warning continues with a large blue button advising to return to the previous page, and a teeny tiny “continue” on to the article option. Same thing for the independent Canadian website Global Research.

Last year, I tried to tweet an article written by respected journalist F. William Engdahl for New Eastern Outlook (NEO). Twitter wouldn’t allow me to even tweet it, instead giving me an error message about the link being “potentially harmful.”

And it’s not only matters of Covid. Just now, I tried to tweet another NEO article, not related to Covid, and was again met with the same message.

A Twitter account focusing on the propaganda around Xinjiang had his account suspended.

And when the New York Post wrote exposés about Hunter Biden’s emails, Twitter locked the Post’s account.

Which makes it all the more clear this isn’t about “facts” or “safety” but blatant censorship.

Whether or not you agree with a point or comment being made by one of the people censored by Twitter, we should be allowed to access their perspective, research for ourselves and come to our own conclusions. We don’t need Twitter to hold our hands and spoon-feed us establishment narratives.

Twitter’s “rules” page reads:

Twitter’s purpose is to serve the public conversation. Our rules are to ensure all people can participate in the public conversation freely and safely.

If you believe that, as the saying goes, I have a bridge to sell you.

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Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years). Follow her on Twitter @EvaKBartlett

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CDC Officially Recommends COVID Jab for Pregnant Women

May 3rd, 2021 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now recommending pregnant women to get the COVID-19 vaccine, based on preliminary postmarketing surveillance data

Postmarketing surveillance data are not a sufficient substitute for randomized placebo-controlled safety trials

All postmarketing surveillance data are preliminary, so it seems incredibly foolhardy to make a blanket recommendation for all pregnant women at this early stage. It’s also based solely on voluntary self-reporting

As of February 28, 2021, the combined miscarriage and preterm birth rate (per V-Safe) was 23.3%. As of April 1, 2021, the miscarriage or premature birth rate (per VAERS) was 29%. So, it appears the rate of miscarriage and premature births is rising as more reports come in

These ratios are said to be comparable to the miscarriage rate normally seen among unvaccinated women, yet statistical data show the risk of miscarriage drops from an overall, average risk rate of 21.3% for the duration of the pregnancy as a whole, to just 5% between Weeks 6 and 7, all the way down to 1% between Weeks 14 and 20

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The beyond conflicted U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has struck again: Pregnant women are now urged to get the COVID-19 gene manipulation jab, based on preliminary findings.

The postmarketing surveillance data, published in The New England Journal of Medicine,1 found “no obvious safety signals” among the 35,691 pregnant women who got either the Moderna or Pfizer shots between December 14, 2020, and February 28, 2021. The women ranged in age from 16 to 54 years old. CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky issued a statement saying:2

“No safety concerns were observed for people vaccinated in the third trimester or safety concerns for their babies. As such, CDC recommends pregnant people receive COVID-19 vaccines.”

Can Self-Reported Data Be Trusted?

There is more than one reason to be suspicious of this green-lighting for pregnant women. First of all, as noted by Jeremy Hammond in a recent Tweet:3

“This was NOT a randomized placebo-controlled trial. There is no data from clinical trials showing that it is safe for pregnant women to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Postmarketing surveillance is NOT a sufficient substitute for proper safety studies.”

The authors themselves state that data on mRNA “vaccines” in pregnancy are limited, and that without longitudinal follow-up of large numbers of women, it’s not possible to determine “maternal, pregnancy and infant outcomes.”4

Secondly, all postmarketing surveillance data are preliminary, so it seems incredibly foolhardy to make a blanket recommendation for all pregnant women at this early stage. Thirdly, this data is solely based on voluntary self-reporting to one of two sources:

  • The Vaccine Safe (V-Safe) After Vaccination Health Checker program,5 a vaccine safety registry set up specifically for the monitoring of COVID-19 “vaccine” side effects
  • The U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)

By using voluntary self-reporting, we have no way of knowing how many side effects have gone unreported and cannot confirm that the data present an accurate picture. Historically, we know that voluntary reporting of vaccine side effects range from less than 1%6,7 to a maximum of 10%,8 so it’s likely we’re not getting the full story.

A hint that an enormous amount of data concerning pregnancy outcomes are being overlooked or hidden can be discerned by the fact that the paper only looked at 11% of the total number of pregnancies reported to V-Safe. While they state that a total of 35,691 pregnant women were included in the analysis, they actually only looked at 3,958 of them. Here’s how the paper reads:9

“A total of 35,691 v-safe participants 16 to 54 years of age identified as pregnant … Among 3,958 participants enrolled in the v-safe pregnancy registry, 827 had a completed pregnancy, of which 115 (13.9%) resulted in a pregnancy loss and 712 (86.1%) resulted in a live birth (mostly among participants with vaccination in the third trimester).”

If there were 35,691 pregnant V-Safe participants, why are they looking at just 11% of them?

Experimentation of the Worst Kind

Giving pregnant women unlicensed COVID-19 gene therapies is reprehensibly irresponsible experimental medicine, and to suggest that safety data are “piling up” is pure propaganda. Everything is still in the experimental stage and all data are preliminary. It’ll take years to get a clearer picture of how these injections are affecting young women and their babies.

Pregnancy is a time during which experimentation is extremely hazardous, as you’re not only dealing with potential repercussions for the mother but also for the child. Any number of things can go wrong when you introduce drugs, chemicals or foreign substances during fetal development.

The CDC has absolutely no way of gauging safety for pregnant women and babies as of yet, so to do so is reprehensible beyond words, in my opinion — especially seeing how women of childbearing age have virtually no risk of dying from COVID-19, their fatality risk being a mere 0.01%.10

Contrast this to the potential benefits of the vaccine. You can still contract the virus if immunized and you can still spread it to others.11,12,13,14 All it is designed to do is lessen your symptoms if or when you get infected. Pregnant women simply do not need this vaccine, and therefore any risk is likely excessive. I have little doubt we’ll end up with a second Nuremberg Trial over this at some point in the future.

Are These Miscarriage Ratios ‘Normal’?

Getting back to the NEJM study, the authors report the following findings, based on data collected from VAERS and V-Safe:15

“Among 3,958 participants enrolled in the v-safe pregnancy registry, 827 had a completed pregnancy, of which 115 (13.9%) resulted in a pregnancy loss and 712 (86.1%) resulted in a live birth (mostly among participants with vaccination in the third trimester). Adverse neonatal outcomes included preterm birth (in 9.4%) and small size for gestational age (in 3.2%); no neonatal deaths were reported.

Although not directly comparable, calculated proportions of adverse pregnancy and neonatal outcomes in persons vaccinated against COVID-19 who had a completed pregnancy were similar to incidences reported in studies involving pregnant women that were conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Among 221 pregnancy-related adverse events reported to the VAERS, the most frequently reported event was spontaneous abortion (46 cases).”

So, in VAERS, the miscarriage rate was 20.8% (46 of 221 reports), and in V-Safe (looking at just 11% of pregnant participants), the miscarriage rate was 13.9% (115 of 827). Again, these data were reported between December 14, 2020, and February 28, 2021.

The combined miscarriage and preterm birth rate, per V-Safe, was 23.3% (13.9% + 9.4%). As of April 1, 2021, 379 VAERS reports16 had been filed by pregnant women, 110 of which involved miscarriage or premature birth, giving us an updated rate of 29%. In other words, it appears the rate of miscarriage and premature births is rising as more reports come in.

According to the authors of the NEJM report, these ratios are comparable to the miscarriage rate normally seen among unvaccinated women, while admitting that the data is “not directly comparable.”

I find that dubious, seeing how sources17 reviewing statistical data stress that the risk of miscarriage drops from an overall, average risk rate of 21.3% for the duration of the pregnancy as a whole, to just 5% between Weeks 6 and 7, all the way down to 1% between Weeks 14 and 20.

And, while the NEJM study18 report that 92.3% of spontaneous abortions occurred before 13 weeks of gestation, it specifies that very little is as yet known about the effects of the injections when given to women during the periconception period and the first and second trimesters, as “limited follow-up calls had been made at the time of this analysis.”

Now, if the miscarriage rate is normally 5% and declining after Week 6, then miscarriage rates of 13.9%, 20.87% or 29% before Week 13 is clearly excessive. As for the preterm birth rate, 9.4% does appear relatively “normal” based on historical data, which in 2019 ranged from 7.28% to 18.8% depending on the region, with an average right around 10%.19

Time will tell whether that percentage will remain within the norms as the outcomes of pregnant women are entered into databases. If preterm birth rates do rise above the norm, then that too is a significant public health issue, as the impact of premature birth on society is enormous, averaging at $26.2 billion annually, as is.20

Toxicology Expert Calls for End to mRNA Experiment

The featured video below is the recording of a public comment by Janci Chunn Lindsay, Ph.D., director of toxicology and molecular biology for Toxicology Support Services LLC, given to the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), April 23, 2021.

Lindsay’s expertise is analysis of pharmacological dose-responses, mechanistic biology and complex toxicity dynamics. In her comment, Lindsay describes how she aided the development of a vaccine that caused unintended autoimmune destruction and sterility in animals which, despite careful pre-analysis, had not been predicted.

She calls for an immediate halt to COVID-19 mRNA and DNA vaccines due to safety concerns on multiple fronts. She notes there is credible concern that they will cross-react with syncytin (a retroviral envelope protein) and reproductive genes in sperm, ova and placenta in ways that may “impair fertility and reproductive outcomes.”

I’ve touched on this in previous articles, including “How COVID-19 Is Changing the Future of Vaccines” and “Pfizer Bullies Nations to Put Up Collateral for Lawsuits.” Not a single study has disproven this hypothesis, Lindsey notes.

Another theory of how these injections might impair fertility can be found in a 2006 study,21 which showed sperm can take up foreign mRNA, convert it into DNA, and release it as little pellets (plasmids) in the medium around the fertilized egg. The embryo then takes up these plasmids and carries them (sustains and clones them into many of the daughter cells) throughout its life, even passing them on to future generations.

It is possible that the pseudo-exosomes that are the mRNA contents would be perfect for supplying the sperm with mRNA for the spike protein. So, potentially, a vaccinated woman who gets pregnant with an embryo that can (via the sperms’ plasmids) synthesize the spike protein according to the instructions in the vaccine, would have an immune capacity to attack that embryo because of the “foreign” protein it displays on its cells. This then would cause a miscarriage.

“We could potentially be sterilizing an entire generation,” Lindsey warns. The fact that there have been live births following COVID-19 vaccination is not proof that these injections do not have a reproductive effect, she says.

Lindsay also points out that reports of menstrual irregularities and vaginal hemorrhaging in women who have received the injections number in the thousands,22,23,24 and this too hints at reproductive effects.

I agree with her conclusion that we simply cannot inject children and women of childbearing age with these experimental technologies until more rigorous studies have been done and we have a better understanding of their mechanisms.

Rare Blood Clotting Disorders Being Reported 

Lindsay also points out there have been hundreds of reports of rare blood clotting disorders following all COVID-19 “vaccines” among people with no underlying risk factors, including immune thrombocytopenia25,26,27,28 (ITP), a rare autoimmune disease that causes your immune system to destroy your platelets (cells that help blood clot), resulting in hemorrhaging. Serious blood clots are also occurring at the same time.

Here, she points out the obvious: COVID-19 has been found to cause blood clotting disorders due to the virus’ unique spike protein. The COVID-19 “vaccines” instruct your body to make that very spike protein. Why would one assume that this spike protein cannot have similar effects when produced by your own cells?

One hypothesis that has been presented is that platelet-antagonistic antibodies are being formed against the spike antigen.29 Another novel hypothesis30 is that the lipid-coated nanoparticles, which transport the mRNA, may be carrying that mRNA into the megakaryocytes in your bone marrow.

Megakaryocytes are cells that produce platelets. According to this hypothesis, once the mRNA enters your bone marrow, the megakaryocytes would then begin to express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which would tag them for destruction by cytotoxic T-cells. As your platelets are destroyed, thrombocytopenia sets in.

Avoid This Risky Milk-Sharing Practice

Women who have received the COVID-19 jab are also making what I believe is a huge mistake by sharing breast milk in a misguided effort to inoculate unvaccinated mothers’ babies. As reported by The New York Times:31

“Multiple studies32,33 show that there are antibodies in a vaccinated mother’s milk. This has led some women to try to restart breastfeeding and others to share milk with friends’ children.”

Again, there’s scarcely any data on what these gene therapies might do to infants, which is reason alone not to experiment. So far, only one suspected case34 of an infant dying has been attributed to breastfeeding. A 5-month-old infant died with a diagnosis of thrombotic thrombocytopenia purpura within days of his mother receiving her second dose of the Pfizer vaccine.35,36

But while fact checkers roundly dismiss the idea that the child could have developed thrombocytopenia from mRNA-contaminated breast milk,37 it’s important to realize they have no evidence for that. It’s pure opinion.

As of right now, we have no idea how or why the infant developed this rare blood disorder, but it would be premature and irresponsible to say that nursing children cannot be affected and that there is no risk at all. In addition to that lethal case, there are at least 20 other cases where children have had an adverse reaction to breast milk from a vaccinated mother.38

At present, all we can confidently say is that short-term harmful effects of COVID-19 vaccines are being reported at a staggering rate, and that the long-term effects are completely unknown.

In addition to the more immediate effects already discussed, there are mechanisms by which COVID-19 “vaccines” may actually worsen disease upon exposure to the wild virus, as detailed in “How COVID-19 Vaccine Can Destroy Your Immune System,” “Will Vaccinated People Be More Vulnerable to Variants?” and several other articles.

As noted in a February 4, 2021, New England Journal of Medicine paper39 reporting on the safety and effectiveness of the mRNA-1273 vaccine developed by Moderna, “Whether mRNA-1273 vaccination results in enhanced disease on exposure to the virus in the long term is unknown.”

Report All COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects

On the whole, injecting pregnant women with novel gene therapy technology that can trigger systemic inflammation, cardiac effects and bleeding disorders (among other things), violates both the Hippocratic Oath that admonishes doctors to “First, do no harm,” and the precautionary principle that, historically, has governed health care for pregnant women.

In my view, this mass experiment is a humanitarian crime. That said, if you or someone you love — pregnant or not — has received a COVID-19 vaccine and are experiencing side effects, be sure to report it, preferably to all three of these locations.40 As we move forward, it’s absolutely crucial that people report their experiences with these vaccines, so that we can start getting a clearer idea of what their effects are.

  1. If you live in the U.S., file a report on VAERS
  2. Report the injury on VaxxTracker.com, which is a nongovernmental adverse event tracker (you can file anonymously if you like)
  3. Report the injury on the Children’s Health Defense website

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Notes

1, 4, 9, 15, 18 NEJM April 21, 2021 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2104983

2 CNBC April 23, 2021

3 Twitter Jeremy Hammond April 23, 2021

5 CDC V-Safe

6 AHRQ December 7, 2007

7 The Vaccine Reaction January 9, 2020

8 BMJ 2005;330:433

10 Annals of Internal Medicine September 2, 2020 DOI: 10.7326/M20-5352

11 Harvard Health March 25, 2021

12 CDC April 2, 2021

13 NBC Chicago April 8, 2021

14 The Defender April 6, 2021

16 The Defender April 9, 2021

17 Medical News Today January 12, 2020

19 CDC.gov Preterm births by state 2019

20 March of Dimes, the Impact of Premature Birth on Society

21 Molecular Reproduction and Development 73(10):1239-46

22 MSN April 10, 2021

23 UK Gov Yellow Card Report Unspecified Brand March 28, 2021 (PDF)

24 Life Site News April 19, 2021

25 Hopkins Medicine ITP

26, 29 The Defender April 13, 2021

27 The Defender February 9, 2021

28 New York Times February 8, 2021, Updated February 10, 2021 (Archived)

30 Medium March 19, 2021

31 New York Times April 8, 2021 (Archived)

32 Fox 4 April 7, 2021

33 Healio April 19, 2021

34, 35 Twitter Alex Berenson April 23, 2021

36 Twitter VAERS detail

37 USA Today April 9, 2021

38 Medalerts.org 4/16/2021 VAERS data

39 NEJM 2021; 384:403-416

40 The Defender January 25, 2021

Breakthrough in Afghan Peace Process!

May 3rd, 2021 by M. K. Bhadrakumar

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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The “extended Troika” on the Afghan problem comprising the United States, Russia, and China — and Pakistan — have announced in Doha on Friday a road map in consultation with the Ashraf Ghani government and Taliban as regards the way forward in immediate terms for reaching a peace settlement.

The announcement followed consultations in Doha with the involvement of the Qatari authorities as hosts, and it coincides with the formal commencement of the US and NATO troop withdrawal from Afghanistan today, 1st of May. 

The announcement builds on the Biden Administration’s stated plans to complete the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan by September 11, which now takes a note of finality notwithstanding the continuing calls by interest groups in the US for a review of the withdrawal decision. Put differently, President Biden’s decision now would also assume the nature of an international commitment given by Washington to Russia and China. This altogether lifts the cloud of uncertainty regarding the US decision on troop withdrawal.  

The announcement in Doha is in the nature of a joint statement, to be issued in Washington, Moscow, Beijing and Islamabad. It envisages the following signposts, so to speak: 

  • An orderly withdrawal of foreign troops by Sept 11 is assured; 
  • During withdrawal period, peace process to continue, no fighting will take place between Afghan parties, and a “steady transition of the situation” is to be expected; 
  • Safety of US & NATO troops and foreign embassies and diplomats to be ensured; 
  • Afghan govt counterterrorism operations shall be in cooperation with international community; 
  • Taliban to shelve its annual “Spring Offensive”; 
  • Open engagement between Kabul set-up and the Taliban is visualised; 
  • Any takeover by force by any Afghan party will be unacceptable;
  • UN Security Council will review the sanctions against Taliban individuals and assets; 
  • Doha will continue to be the venue of intra-Afghan negotiations;
  • UN will be having an expanded role to navigate the peace process. 

Most important, the announcement calls for a settlement that envisages the creation of an “independent, sovereign, unified, peaceful, democratic, neutral and self-sufficient Afghanistan.” Significantly,  “neutral and self-sufficient” is an altogether new formulation, which implies, conceivably, that there shall be no foreign security presence remaining on Afghan soil; Afghanistan shall not join any military alliance or blocs; future Afghan governments will be committed to the pursuit of independent non-aligned foreign policies. 

This goes a long way to address the apprehensions in Moscow and Beijing that in a post-settlement scenario, the US might use Afghan soil to deploy extremist groups (Chechens, Uighurs, etc.) as geopolitical tool to undertake covert operations in the Central Asian region — specifically, to destabilise Xinjiang, North Caucasus, etc. Equally, this provision of a “neutral” Afghanistan also addresses a major Iranian concern. Effectively, this amounts to a moratorium on the pursuit of the “great game”, which has been a negative factor historically contributing to the instability and conflict in Afghanistan dating back to the era of King Zahir Shah. 

From a larger perspective, this mutual accommodation means a  carefully balanced “win-win” for all the three big powers, notwithstanding the present international climate characterised by new cold war conditions. The big question is how far this newfound spirit of mutual accommodation will moderate the US’ hostile policies toward Russia and China. In this case, the US is a net gainer out of the cooperation from Russia and China as Washington’s prestige and NATO’s future critically would depend on the ability to successfully navigate an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

Therefore, some positive fallout on the US’ relations with Russia and China cannot be ruled out. This sets a precedent, no doubt, for other situations such as the Iran nuclear issue or the North Korea problem, conflicts in Syria and Yemen, etc.  

As regards Pakistan, it can draw great satisfaction from the above outcome as it is assured of a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan guaranteed by the UN Security Council members. In the 1980s, when the Geneva Accords were signed in February 1989, the focus was on the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan, while no thought was given to what would follow in the aftermath of the withdrawal. That lacuna, of course, led to a mad scramble for power in Kabul resulting in the Mujahideen takeover in 1992 and the rise of the Taliban. 

Therefore, Pakistan has great stakes in ensuring that history doesn’t repeat in Afghanistan. Besides, the commitment of the international community virtually guarantees that the heavy burden of sustaining a new power structure in Kabul will not fall on Pakistan’s shoulders once again. Pakistan is greatly interested in firming up assistance from the international community, US in particular, for post-settlement Afghanistan’ reconstruction and development.    

From a security perspective too, the above road map addresses Pakistan’s legitimate concerns  that “spoilers” may exploit any power vacuum in Kabul. Pakistan’s non-negotiable concern lies in having a friendly government in Kabul. And Pakistan has repeatedly underscored its angst that India may manipulate the volatility in Afghanistan to its advantage. Clearly, that fear is no longer tenable.  

In the emergent scenario, a transitional govt may become unavoidable in Kabul at some point. That is not going to be easy but the good part is that in a climate with such a high degree of international commitment and UN involvement, the Afghans would rise to the occasion. Conceivably, Ghani is nearing the end of the road. It is highly improbable that he or his circle of associates would show the audacity to undermine a “code of conduct” which is underwritten jointly by 3 big powers — and, significantly, by Pakistan as well. Equally, no regional state in its senses would act as a “spoiler” to derail a road map which carries the imprimatur of the three big powers and the UN Security Council.  

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***

It seems like a basic transparency measure. But some Senate Democrats worry that an amendment quietly added to a China-related bill could be a stealth poison pill for diplomacy with Iran.

Shortly before the Strategic Competition Act was set to be marked up by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chairman Bob Menendez (D–N.J.) and ranking member Jim Risch (R–Idaho) inserted an amendment that vastly expands the reporting requirements for international agreements.

The amendment requires the State Department to provide detailed reports to Congress within five days after it “approves the negotiation or conclusion” of an international agreement or “non-binding instrument” with “an important effect on the foreign policy of the United States.”

While the amendment was backed by some legal experts, two congressional aides and an activist speaking on condition of anonymity expressed concern to Responsible Statecraft that it could affect ongoing negotiations in Vienna, where the Biden administration is in talks with five other world powers to constrain Iran’s nuclear program.

“In our view, the language was concerning because it could be interpreted as requiring congressional notification for any negotiation of an international agreement (not just Iran) once it has begun,” one congressional aide told Responsible Statecraft. “That felt vague and open-ended that it could potentially derail efforts that diplomats do all the time to quietly test waters on issues.”

The activist was more blunt, stating that the amendment “could give opponents of [the Vienna negotiations] in Congress an opportunity to try and frustrate those talks.”

Menendez and Risch both opposed the original 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which the Biden administration is seeking a return to.

Menendez has also worked to frustrate the Biden administration’s current diplomatic approach, cooperating with Senate Republicans and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in an attempt to pressure the Biden administration to take a harder line on Iran.

Menendez’s office did not respond to a request for comment as of press time.

Democrats were also concerned with the way the amendment was introduced, one of the congressional aides and the activist claimed. Menendez used his prerogative as chairman to insert it into the text of the bill shortly before markup — the debate on the bill — began.

“This was done last-minute, very little notice to other Democratic members of the committee,” the second aide said. “People were caught unaware of it, it seems, by design.”

The State Department declined to comment, but Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) claimed that the Biden administration is worried.

“I know the State Department has some concerns about when they would be required to make that initial notification of Congress,” he said during the April 21 markup meeting. “It’s sometimes difficult to know when a negotiation begins, and so I would hope we would work with the State Department moving forward to make sure that we get that provision right.”

The Strategic Competition Act has passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but it still has a long way to go before becoming law. It will still have to pass the full Senate and the House of Representatives, with plenty of opportunities to amend the text.

The bill itself is widely expected to pass, with bipartisan support and the backing of the administration. But the fate of Menendez and Risch’s amendment is less certain.

“Chairman Menendez, working with Republicans, used his position as chair of the committee to slip in and try to hide from his fellow Democrats language that could frustrate one of his party’s and his president’s most significant foreign policy objectives,” the activist said. “The administration feels completely blindsided by this.”

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In the last few days, the Colombian police showed what it is capable of: between eight and 14 people were reportedly murdered by police officers, depending on accounts by different human rights organizations.

Scores more were injured and dozens arrested for joining a national strike and protesting on the streets of Bogota, Cali and other major Colombian cities.

It turns out that for the last three years Colombia’s cops have been receiving training from the United Kingdom, according to the British publication The Canary.

“Documents obtained by The Canary can reveal that the UK’s College of Policing has been training Colombian police over the past three years. This is despite Colombia being one of only 30 countries the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCD) lists as “Human rights priority countries,” journalist John McEvoy says.

“The issue is of public concern in light of the UK government’s possible complicity in human rights abuses abroad. But the College has refused to disclose where exactly the training occurred, the nature of the training, and the cost,” McEvoy says.

“In recent years, the College has come under fire for receiving millions of pounds to train repressive police regimes. These include Saudi Arabia, where the death penalty remains legal,” he adds.

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Featured image: Colombian riot police harassing reporters in Popayan | Photo: Twitter/@col_informa

It happened 51 years ago, at Ohio’s Kent State University on May 4th, 1970.

This article was first published in September 2012. It is contained as a chapter in the authors Project Censored book published in 2013. 

***

When Ohio National Guardsmen fired sixty-seven gun shots in thirteen seconds at Kent State University (KSU) on May 4, 1970, they murdered four unarmed, protesting college students and wounded nine others.

For the last forty-two years, the United States government has held the position that Kent State was a tragic and unfortunate incident occurring at a noontime antiwar rally on an American college campus.

In 2010, compelling forensic evidence emerged showing that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) were the lead agencies in managing Kent State government operations, including the cover-up. At Kent State, lawful protest was pushed into the realm of massacre as the US federal government, the state of Ohio, and the Ohio National Guard (ONG) executed their plans to silence antiwar protest in America.

The new evidence threatens much more than the accuracy of accounts of the Kent State massacre in history books. As a result of this successful, ongoing Kent State government cover-up, American protesters today are at much greater risk than they realize, with no real guarantees or protections offered by the US First Amendment rights to protest and assemble. This chapter intends to expose the lies of the state in order to uncensor the “unhistory” of the Kent State massacre, while also aiming toward justice and healing, as censoring the past impacts our perspectives in the present.

The killing of protesters at Kent State changed the minds of many Americans about the role of the US in the Vietnam War. Following this massacre, there was an unparalleled national response: hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed across America in a student strike of more than four million. Young people across the nation had strong suspicions the Kent State massacre was planned to subvert any further protests arising from the announcement that the already controversial war in Vietnam had expanded into Cambodia.

Yet instead of attempting to learn the truth at Kent State, the US government took complete control of the narrative in the press and ensuing lawsuits. Over the next ten years, authorities claimed there had not been a command-to-fire at Kent State, that the ONG had been under attack, and that their gunfire had been prompted by the “sound of sniper fire.” Instead of investigating Kent State, the American leadership obstructed justice, obscured accountability, tampered with evidence, and buried the truth. The result of these efforts has been a very complicated government cover-up that has remained intact for more than forty years.1

The hidden truth finally began to emerge at the fortieth anniversary of the Kent State massacre in May 2010, through the investigative journalism of John Mangels, science writer at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, whose findings supported the long-held suspicion that the four dead in Ohio were intentionally murdered at Kent State University by the US government.

Mangels commissioned forensic evidence expert Stuart Allen to professionally analyze a tape recording made from a Kent State student’s dormitory window ledge on May 4, 1970, forever capturing the crowd and battle sounds from before, during, and after the fusillade.2 For the first time since that fateful day, journalists and concerned Americans were finally able to hear the devastating soundtrack of the US government murdering Kent State students as they protested against the Vietnam War.

The cassette tape—provided to Mangels by the Yale University Library, Kent State Collection, and housed all these years in a box of evidence admitted into lawsuits led by attorney Joseph Kelner in his representation of the Kent State victims—was called the “Strubbe tape” after Terry Strubbe, the student who made the recording by placing a microphone attached to a personal recorder on his dormitory window ledge. This tape surfaced when Alan Canfora, a student protester wounded at Kent State, and researcher Bob Johnson dug through Yale library’s collection and found a CD copy of the tape recording from the day of the shootings. Paying ten dollars for a duplicate, Canfora then listened to it and immediately knew he probably held the only recording that might provide proof of an order to shoot. Three years after the tape was found, the Plain Dealer commendably hired two qualified forensic audio scientists to examine the tape.

But it is really the two pieces of groundbreaking evidence Allen uncovered that illuminate and provide a completely new perspective into the Kent State massacre.

First, Allen heard and verified the Kent State command-to-fire spoken at noon on May 4, 1970. The command-to-fire has been a point of contention, with authorities stating under oath and to media for forty years that “no order to fire was given at Kent State,” that “the Guard felt under attack from the students,” and that “the Guard reacted to sniper fire.”3 Yet Allen’s verified forensic evidence of the Kent State command-to-fire directly conflicts with guardsmen testimony that they acted in self-defense

The government claim—that guardsmen were under attack at the time of the ONG barrage of bullets—has long been suspect, as there is nothing in photographic or video records to support the “under attack” excuse. Rather, from more than a football field away, the Kent State student protesters swore, raised their middle fingers, and threw pebbles and stones and empty tear gas canisters, mostly as a response to their campus being turned into a battlefield with over 2,000 troops and military equipment strewn across the Kent State University campus.

Then at 12:24 p.m., the ONG fired armor-piercing bullets at scattering students in a parking lot—again, from more than a football field away. Responding with armor-piercing bullets, as Kent State students held a peaceful rally and protested unarmed on their campus, was the US government’s choice of action.

The identification of the “commander” responsible for the Kent State command-to-fire on unarmed students has not yet been ascertained. This key question will be answered when American leadership decides to share the truth of what happened, especially as the Kent State battle was under US government direction. Until then, the voice ordering the command-to-fire in the Kent State Strubbe tape will remain unknown.

The other major piece of Kent State evidence identified in Allen’s analysis was the “sound of sniper fire” recorded on the tape. These sounds point to Terry Norman, FBI informant and provocateur, who was believed to have fired his low-caliber pistol four times, just seventy seconds before the command-to-fire.

Mangels wrote in the Plain Dealer, “Norman was photographing protestors that day for the FBI and carried a loaded .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model . . . five-shot revolver in a holster under his coat for protection. Though he denied discharging his pistol, he previously has been accused of triggering the Guard shootings by firing to warn away angry demonstrators, which the soldiers mistook for sniper fire.”4

Video footage and still photography have recorded the minutes following the “sound of sniper fire,” showing Terry Norman sprinting across the Kent State commons, meeting up with Kent Police and the ONG. In this visual evidence, Norman immediately yet casually hands off his pistol to authorities and the recipients of the pistol show no surprise as Norman hands them his gun.5

The “sound of sniper fire” is a key element of the Kent State cover-up and is also referred to by authorities in the Nation editorial, “Kent State: The Politics of Manslaughter,” from May 18, 1970:

The murders occurred on May 4. Two days earlier, [Ohio National Guard Adjutant General] Del Corso had issued a statement that sniper fire would be met by gunfire from his men. After the massacre, Del Corso and his subordinates declared that sniper fire had triggered the fusillade.6

Yet the Kent State “sound of sniper fire” remains key, according to White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, who noted President Richard Nixon’s reaction to Kent State in the Oval Office on May 4, 1970:

Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman told him [of the killings] late in the afternoon. But at two o’clock Haldeman jotted on his ever-present legal pad “keep P. filled in on Kent State.” In his daily journal Haldeman expanded on the President’s reaction: “He very disturbed. Afraid his decision set it off . . . then kept after me all day for more facts. Hoping rioters had provoked the shootings—but no real evidence that they did.” Even after he had left for the day, Nixon called Haldeman back and among others issued one ringing command: “need to get out story of sniper.”7

In a May 5, 1970, article in the New York Times, President Nixon commented on violence at Kent State:

This should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy. It is my hope that this tragic and unfortunate incident will strengthen the determination of all the nation’s campuses, administrators, faculty and students alike to stand firmly for the right which exists in this country of peaceful dissent and just as strong against the resort to violence as a means of such expression.8

President Nixon’s comment regarding dissent turning to violence obfuscated and laid full blame on student protesters for creating violence at Kent State. Yet at the rally occurring on May 4th, student protester violence amounted to swearing, throwing small rocks, and volleying back tear gas canisters, while the gun-toting soldiers of the ONG declared the peace rally illegal, brutally herded the students over large distances on campus, filled the air with tear gas, and even threw rocks at students. Twenty minutes into the protest demonstration, a troop of National Guard marched up a hill away from the students, turned to face the students in unison, and fired.

The violence at Kent State came from the National Guardsmen, not protesting students. On May 4, 1970, the US government delivered its deadly message to Kent State students and the world: if you protest in America against the wars of the Pentagon and the Department of Defense, the US government will stop at nothing to silence you.

Participating American militia colluded at Kent State to organize and fight this battle against American student protesters, most of them too young to vote but old enough to fight in the Vietnam War.9 And from new evidence exposed forty years after the massacre, numerous elements point directly to the FBI and COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) as lead agencies managing the government operation of the Kent State massacre, including the cover-up, but also with a firm hand in some of the lead-up.

Prior to the announcement of the Cambodian incursion, the ONG arrived in the Kent area acting in a federalized role as the Cleveland-Akron labor wildcat strikes were winding down. The ONG continued in the federalized role at Kent State, ostensibly to protect the campus and as a reaction to the burning of a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) building. Ohio Governor James “Jim” Rhodes claimed the burning of the ROTC building on the Kent State University campus was his reason for “calling in the guard,” yet in this picture of the burning building, the ONG are clearly standing before the flames as the building burns.10

From eyewitness accounts, the burning of the ROTC building at Kent State was completed by undercover law enforcement determined to make sure it could become the symbol needed to support the Kent State war on student protest.11

According to Dr. Elaine Wellin, an eyewitness to the many events at Kent State leading up to and including May 4th, there were uniformed and plain-clothes officers potentially involved in managing the burning of the ROTC building. Wellin was in close proximity to the building just prior to the burning and saw a person with a walkie-talkie about three feet from her telling someone on the other end of the communication that they should not send down the fire truck as the ROTC building was not on fire yet.12

A memo to COINTELPRO director William C. Sullivan ordered a full investigation into the “fire bombing of the ROTC building.” But only days after the Kent State massacre, every weapon that was fired was destroyed, and all other weapons used at Kent State were gathered by top ONG officers, placed with other weapons and shipped to Europe for use by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), so no weapons used at Kent could be traced.

From these pieces of evidence, it becomes clearer that the US government coordinated this battle against student protest on the Kent State campus. Using the playbook from the Huston Plan, which refers to protesting students as the “New Left,” the US government employed provocateurs, staged incidents, and enlisted political leaders to attack and lay full blame on the students. On May 4, 1970, at Kent State University, the US government fully negated every student response as they criminalized the First Amendment rights to protest and assemble.13

The cover-up adds tremendous complexity to an already complicated event, making it nearly impossible to fairly try the Kent State massacre in the American justice system. This imposed “establishment” view that Kent State was about “civil rights”—and not about murder or attempted murder—led to a legal settlement on the basis of civil rights lost, with the US government consistently refusing to address the death of four students and the wounding of nine.14

Even more disheartening, efforts to maintain the US government cover-up at Kent State recently went into overdrive in April 2012, when President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) formally announced a refusal to open a new probe into the wrongs of Kent State, continuing the tired 1970 tactic of referring to Kent State as a civil rights matter.15

The April 2012 DOJ letters of response also included a full admission that, in 1979, after reaching the Kent State civil rights settlement, the FBI Cleveland office destroyed what they considered a key piece of evidence: the original tape recording made by Terry Strubbe on his dormitory window ledge. In a case involving homicides, the FBI’s illegal destruction of evidence exposes their belief to be “above the law,” ignoring the obvious fact that four students were killed on May 4, 1970. As the statute of limitations never lapses for murder, the FBI’s actions went against every law of evidence. The laws clearly state that evidence may not be destroyed in homicides, even when the murders are perpetrated by the US government.

The destruction of the original Strubbe tape also shows the FBI’s intention to obstruct justice: the 2012 DOJ letters on Kent State claim that, because the original Strubbe tape was intentionally destroyed, the copy examined by Allen cannot be compared to the original or authenticated. However the original Strubbe tape, destroyed by the DOJ, was never admitted into evidence.

The tape examined by Stuart Allen, however, is a one-to-one copy of the Kent State Strubbe tape admitted into evidence in Kent State legal proceedings by Joseph Kelner, the lawyer representing the victims of Kent State. Once an article has been admitted into evidence, the article is considered authentic evidentiary material.

Worse than this new smokescreen on the provenance of the Kent State Strubbe tape and FBI efforts to destroy evidence is that the DOJ has wholly ignored or refuted the tremendous body of forensic evidence work accomplished by Allen, and verified by forensic expert Tom Owen.16 If the US Department of Justice really wanted to learn the truth about what happened at Kent State and was open to understanding the new evidence, DOJ efforts would include organizing an impartial examination of Allen’s analysis and contacting him to present his examination of the Kent State Strubbe tape. None of this has happened.

Instead, those seeking justice through a reexamination of the Kent State historical record based on new evidence have been left out in the cold. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, involved in Kent State from the very beginning as a Cleveland city council person, asked important questions in a letter to the DOJ on April 24, 2012, titled, “Analysis of Audio Record of Kent State Shooting Leaves Discrepancies and Key Questions Unaddressed”:

While I appreciate the response from the Justice Department, ultimately, they fail to examine key questions and discrepancies. It is well known that an FBI informant, Terry Norman, was on the campus. That FBI informant was carrying a gun. Eyewitnesses testified that they saw Mr. Norman brandish that weapon. Two experts in forensic audio, who have previously testified in court regarding audio forensics, found gunshots in their analysis of the audio recording. Did an FBI informant discharge a firearm at Kent State? Did an FBI informant precipitate the shootings?

Who and what events led to the violent encounter that resulted in four students dead and nine others injured? What do the FBI files show about their informant? Was he ever debriefed? Has he been questioned to compare his statement of events with new analysis? How, specifically, did the DOJ analyze the tape? How does this compare to previous analysis conducted by independent sources that reached a different conclusion? The DOJ suggested noises heard in the recording resulted from a door opening and closing. What tests were used to make that determination? Was an independent agency consulted in the process?

For more than a year, I have pushed for an analysis of the Strubbe tape because Kent State represented a tragedy of immense proportions. The Kent State shooting challenged the sensibilities of an entire generation of Americans. This issue is too important to ignore. We must demand a full explanation of the events.17

Concerned Americans may join Congressman Kucinich in demanding answers to these questions and in insisting on an independent, impartial organization—in other words, not the FBI—to get to the bottom of this.

The FBI’s cloudy involvement includes questions about Terry Norman’s relationship to the FBI, addressed in Mangels’s article, “Kent State Shootings: Does Former Informant Hold the Key to the May 4th Mystery?”:

Whether due to miscommunication, embarrassment or an attempted cover-up, the FBI initially denied any involvement with Norman as an informant.

“Mr. Norman was not working for the FBI on May 4, 1970, nor has he ever been in any way connected with this Bureau,” director J. Edgar Hoover declared to Ohio Congressman John Ashbrook in an August 1970 letter.

Three years later, Hoover’s successor, Clarence Kelley, was forced to correct the record. The director acknowledged that the FBI had paid Norman $125 for expenses incurred when, at the bureau’s encouragement, Norman infiltrated a meeting of Nazi and white power sympathizers in Virginia a month before the Kent State shootings.18

Even more telling, Norman’s pistol disappeared from a police evidence locker and was completely retooled to make sure that the weapon—used to create the “sound of sniper fire” on May 4—would not show signs of use. Indeed, every “investigation” into Kent State shows that the FBI tampered, withheld, and destroyed evidence, bringing into question government involvement in both the premeditated and post-massacre efforts at Kent State. In examining all inquiries into Kent State, an accurate investigation has never occurred, as the groups involved in the wrongs of Kent State have been investigating themselves.19

The Kent State students never had a chance against the armed will of the US government in its aim to fight wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos back in 1970. Further, the First Amendment rights to protest and assemble have shown to be only vacuous platitudes. Forty-two years later, the Obama administration echoes the original drone of the US government denying the murder of protesters, pointing only to civil rights lost. When bullets were fired on May 4th at Kent State, US government military action against antiwar protesters on domestic soil changed from a civil rights breach to acts of murder and attempted murder.

Congressman Kucinich, in an interview with Pacifica Radio after his exchanges with DOJ by May of 2012, said,

There are some lingering questions that could change the way that history looks at what happened at Kent State. And I think that we owe it to the present generation of Americans, the generation of Americans that came of age during Kent, the students on campus, we owe it to the Guardsmen, who it was said opened fire without any provocation what so ever . . . we have to get to the truth.20

As long as American leadership fails to consider killing protesters a homicidal action and not just about civil rights lost, there is little safety for American protesters today, leaving the door wide open for more needless and unnecessary bloodshed and possibly the killing of American protesters again. This forty-two-year refusal to acknowledge the death of four students relates to current US government practices toward protest and protesters in America, as witnessed at Occupy Wall Street over the past year. When will it ever become legal to protest and assemble in America again? Will American leadership cross the line to kill American protesters again?21

In a rare editorial addressing this issue, journalist Stephen Rosenfeld of AlterNet wrote,

History never exactly repeats itself. But its currents are never far from the present. As today’s protesters and police employ bolder tactics, the Kent State and Jackson State anniversaries should remind us that deadly mistakes can and do happen. It is the government’s responsibility to wield proportionate force, not to over-arm police and place them in a position where they could panic with deadly results.22

Though forty-two years have passed, the lessons of Kent State have not yet been learned.

No More Kent States23

In 2010, the United Kingdom acknowledged the wrongs of Bloody Sunday, also setting an example for the US government to learn the important lessons of protest and the First Amendment. In January 1972, during “Bloody Sunday,” British paratroopers shot and killed fourteen protesters; most of the demonstrators were shot in the back as they ran to save themselves.24

Thirty-eight years after the Bloody Sunday protest, British Prime Minister David Cameron apologized before Parliament, formally acknowledging the wrongful murder of protesters and apologized for the government.25 The healing in Britain has begun. Considering the striking similarity in events where protesters were murdered by the state, let’s examine the wrongs of Kent State, begin to heal this core American wound, and make a very important, humane course correction for America. When will it become legal to protest in America?

President Obama, the Department of Justice, and the US government as a whole must take a fresh look at Stuart Allen’s findings in the Kent State Strubbe tape. The new Kent State evidence is compelling, clearly showing how US covert intelligence took the lead in creating this massacre and in putting together the ensuing cover-up.

As the United States has refused to examine the new evidence or consider the plight of American protest in 2012, the Kent State Truth Tribunal formally requested the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague consider justice at Kent State.26

Who benefited the most from the murder of student protesters at Kent State? Who was really behind the Kent State massacre? There is really only one US agency that clearly benefited from killing student antiwar protesters at Kent State: the Department of Defense.

Since 1970 through 2012, the military-industrial-cyber complex strongly associated with the Department of Defense and covert US government agencies have actively promoted never-ending wars with enormous unaccounted-for budgets as they increase restrictions on American protest. These aims of the Pentagon are evidenced today in the USA PATRIOT Act, the further civil rights–limiting National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and new war technologies like CIA drones.

Probing the dark and buried questions of the Kent State massacre is only a beginning step to shine much-needed light on the United States military and to illuminate how the Pentagon has subverted American trust and safety, as it endeavors to quell domestic protest against war at any cost since at least 1970.

Laurel Krause is a writer and truth seeker dedicated to raising awareness about ocean protection, safe renewable energy, and truth at Kent State. She publishes a blog on these topics at Mendo Coast Current. She is the cofounder and director of the Kent State Truth Tribunal. Before spearheading efforts for justice for her sister Allison Krause, who was killed at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, Laurel worked at technology start-ups in Silicon Valley.

Mickey Huff is the director of Project Censored and professor of social science and history at Diablo Valley College.  He did his graduate work in history on historical interpretations of the Kent State shootings and has been actively researching the topic more since his testimony to the Kent State Truth Tribunal in New York City in 2010.

Notes

[1.] For more background on Kent State and the many conflicting interpretations, see Scott L. Bills, Kent State/May 4: Echoes Through a Decade (Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1982). Of particular interest for background on this chapter, see Peter Davies, “The Burning Question: A Government Cover-up?,” in Kent State/May 4, 150–60. For a full account of Davies’s work, see The Truth About Kent State: A Challenge to the American Conscience (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973). For a listing of other works see Selected Bibliography on the Events of May 4, 1970, at Kent State University, http://dept.kent.edu/30yearmay4/source/bib.htm.

[2.] John Mangels, “New Analysis of 40-Year-Old Recording of Kent State Shootings Reveals that Ohio Guard was Given an Order to Prepare to Fire,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland), May 9, 2010, updated April 23, 2012, http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/05/new_analysis_of_40-year-old_re.html; Interview with Stuart Allen analyzing new evidence who said of the efforts, “It’s about setting history right.” See the footage “Kent State Shootings Case Remains Closed,” CNN, added April 29, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2012/04/29/justice-department-will-not-reopen-kent-state-shootings-case.cnn.

[3.] Submitted for the Congressional Record by Representative Dennis Kucinich, “Truth Emerging in Kent State Cold Case Homicide,” by Laurel Krause, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r111%3AE14DE0-0019%3A. For a brief introduction on the history and emerging historiography of the Kent State shootings, see Mickey S. Huff, “Healing Old Wounds: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Conflicts Over Historical Interpretations of the Kent State Shootings, 1977–1990,” master’s thesis, Youngstown State University, December 1999, http://etd.ohiolink.edu/view.cgi?acc_num=ysu999620326.

For the official government report, see The Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1970), also known as the Scranton Commission. It should be noted that the Scranton Commission stated in their conclusion between pages 287 and 290 that the shootings were “unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable” but criminal wrongdoing was never established through the courts and no one was ever held accountable for the shootings. Also, it should be noted, that the interpretation that the guard was ordered to fire conflicts with Davies’s interpretation, in note 1 here, that even though he believes there was a series of cover-ups by the government, he has not attributed malice. For more on the Kent State cover-ups early on, see I. F. Stone, “Fabricated Evidence in the Kent State Killings,” New York Review of Books, December 3, 1970, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1970/dec/03/fabricated-evidence-in-the-kent-state-killings.

[4.] Mangels, “Kent State Tape Indicates Altercation and Pistol Fire Preceded National Guard Shootings (audio),” Plain Dealer (Cleveland), October 8, 2010, http://www.cleveland.com/science/index.ssf/2010/10/analysis_of_kent_state_audio_t.html.

[5.] Kent State Shooting 1970 [BX4510], Google Video, at 8:20 min., http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3727445416544720642.

[6.] Editorial, “Kent State: The Politics of Manslaughter,” Nation, April 30, 2009 [May 18, 1970], http://www.thenation.com/article/kent-state-politics-manslaughter.

[7.] Charles A. Thomas, Kenfour: Notes On An Investigation (e-book), http://speccoll.library.kent.edu/4may70/kenfour3.

[8.] John Kifner, “4 Kent State Students Killed by Troops,” New York Times, May 4, 1970, http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0504.html#article.

[9.] Voting age was twenty-one at this time, until the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1971, which lowered the voting age to eighteen, partially in response to Vietnam War protests as youth under twenty-one could be drafted without the right to vote.

[10.] It should also be noted, that Rhodes was running for election the Tuesday following the Kent shootings on a law and order ticket.

[11.] “My Personal Testimony ROTC Burning May 2 1970 Kent State,” YouTube, April 28, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ppBkB4caY0&feature=youtu.be; Freedom of Information Act, FBI, Kent State Shooting, File Number 98-46479, part 7 of 8 (1970), http://vault.fbi.gov/kent-state-shooting/kent-state-shooting-part-07-of-08/view.

[12.] The Project Censored Show on The Morning Mix, “May 4th and the Kent State Shootings in the 42nd Year,” Pacifica Radio, KPFA, 94.1FM, May 4, 2012 live at 8:00 a.m., archived online at http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/80293 and http://dl.dropbox.com/u/42635027/20120504-Fri0800.mp3. For Wellin on ROTC, see recording at 28:45.

Show description: The May 4th Kent State Shootings 42 Years Later: Justice Still Not Served with Congressman Dennis Kucinich commenting on the DOJ’s recent refusal to reopen the case despite new evidence of a Kent State command-to-fire and the ‘sound of sniper fire’ leading to the National Guard firing live ammunition at unarmed college students May 4, 1970; Dr. Elaine Wellin, Kent State eyewitness shares seeing undercover agents at the ROTC fire in the days before, provocateurs in staging the rallies at Kent, and at Kent State on May 4th; we’ll hear from investigator and forensic evidence expert Stuart Allen regarding his audio analysis of the Kent State Strubbe tape from May 4th revealing the command-to-fire and the ‘sound of sniper fire’ seventy seconds before; and we hear from Kent State Truth Tribunal director Laurel Krause, the sister of slain student Allison, about her efforts for justice at Kent State and recent letter to President Obama..

Also see Peter Davies’ testimony about agents provocateurs and the ROTC fire cited in note 1, “The Burning Question: A Government Cover-up?,” in Kent State/May 4, 150–60.

[13.] The Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), “Volume 2: Huston Plan,” http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_church_reports_vol2.htm.

[14.] Associated Press, “Kent State Settlement: Was Apology Included?,” Eugene Register-Guard, January 5, 1979, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19790105&id=xvJVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=BuIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3696,963632.

[15.] Mangels, “Justice Department Won’t Reopen Probe of 1970 Kent State Shootings,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland), April 24, 2012, http://www.cleveland.com/science/index.ssf/2012/04/justice_department_wont_re-ope.html; and kainah, “Obama Justice Dept.: No Justice for Kent State,” Daily Kos, May 2, 2012, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/02/1086726/-Justice-Dept-No-Justice-for-Kent-State.

[16.] Mangels, “New Analysis.”

[17.] Letters between the Department of Justice and Representative Dennis Kucinich, archived at the Congressman’s website, April 20 and April 24 of 2012, http://kucinich.house.gov/uploadedfiles/kent_state_response_from_doj.pdf and http://kucinich.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=292306.

[18.] Mangels, “Kent State Shootings: Does Former Informant Hold the Key to the May 4 Mystery?,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland), December 19, 2010, http://www.cleveland.com/science/index.ssf/2010/12/kent_state_shootings_does_form.html.

[19.] Freedom of Information Act, FBI.

[20.] The Project Censored Show on The Morning Mix, “May 4th and the Kent State Shootings in the 42nd Year.”

[21.] Steven Rosenfeld, “Will a Militarized Police Force Facing Occupy Wall Street Lead to Another Kent State?,” AlterNet, May 3, 2012, http://www.alternet.org/rights/155270/will_a_militarized_police_force_facing_occupy_wall_street_lead_to_another_kent_state_massacre.

[22.] Ibid.

[23.] Laurel Krause, “No More Kent States,” Mendo Coast Current, April 21, 2012, http://mendocoastcurrent.wordpress.com/2012/04/21/13-day-for-kent-state-peace.

[24.] Laurel Krause, “Unjustified, Indefensible, Wrong,” Mendo Coast Current, September 13, 2010, http://mendocoastcurrent.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/unjustified-indefensible-wrong.

[25.] Associated Press, “Bloody Sunday Report Blames British Soldiers Fully,” USA Today, June 15, 2010, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2010-06-15-Bloody-Sunday-Ireland_N.htm; and Cameron’s direct quote from Henry McDonald, Owen Bowcott, and Hélène Mulholland, “Bloody Sunday Report: David Cameron Apologises for ‘Unjustifiable’ Shootings,” Guardian, June 15, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/15/bloody-sunday-report-saville-inquiry.

[26.] Laurel Krause, “To the Hague: Justice for the May 4th Kent State Massacre?,” Mendo Coast Current, May 7, 2012, http://mendocoastcurrent.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/may-4th-kent-state-massacre-a-call-for-truth-justice; for more on the Kent State Truth Tribunal, see www.TruthTribunal.org.

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Murdering Student Protesters?

Selected Articles: Our Humanity, Our Identity

May 3rd, 2021 by Global Research News

Our Humanity, Our Identity

By Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, May 02, 2021

Identity politics has been on the ascendancy in many parts of the world in the last few decades. Its relationship to ethnicity, culture and religion is what concerns us at this point. To understand this relationship one has to consider the context. We should also try to explain the impact of identity politics upon religion itself.

Is a Mask that Covers the Mouth and Nose Free from Undesirable Side Effects in Everyday Use and Free of Potential Hazards?

By Kai Kisielinski, Paul Giboni, and et al., May 02, 2021

The study below was reported in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (Publication date April 20, 2021) and details the harm caused by mask wearing and adds to a growing body of under-reported, censored and suppressed public health information that contradicts the biomedical narrative that masks are safe and effective and recommended by the CDC.

Efforts to Silence the Debate on Vaccination Safety: The Weaponization of the CDC Against Public Health

By Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null, May 02, 2021

What if you were to know that a cabal of corrupt bureaucrats and scientists at the heart of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have known for almost two decades that vaccines, including the MMR, can lead to autism and other neurological disorders? Most people are unaware that the CDC is a militarized federal agency further influenced by private pharmaceutical interests.

Killing Democracy Once and for All: The Global Elite’s Coup d’Etat that Is Destroying Life as We Know It

By Robert J. Burrowes, May 02, 2021

Politically savvy individuals know that democracy has rarely existed and probably never outside small groups of humans who deliberately organize themselves to share power or grant it temporarily to one or a small number of people for a particular purpose. In most contexts, ‘democracy’ is simply a label used to deceive the unwary into believing that ordinary people have a say in how we are governed. But this has never been the case in any political framework on a larger scale.

Nuclear War and the Future of Humanity. Conversations with Fidel Castro

By Fidel Castro Ruz and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, May 02, 2021

This interview with Fidel Castro provides an understanding of the nature of modern warfare: Were a military operation to be launched against the Islamic Republic of Iran, the US and its allies would be unable to win a conventional war, with the possibility that this war could evolve towards a nuclear war.

The Crash of Flight 3804 – A Lost Spy, A Daughter’s Quest, and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil

By Jim Miles, May 02, 2021

The history begins with the personal element, the killing/murder of her father in Flight 3804 from Jidda to Addis Abbab in March 1947.  From that came the revelation that her father Daniel Dennett was a U.S. master spy examining the events in the Middle East before Israel created its state in the 1948 nakba and before the creation of the CIA, but not before oil, pipelines and big money had already shaped the political and geographical landscapes.

Big Pharma’s Covid Vaccine

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, May 01, 2021

The Covid-19 vaccine is profit driven. The US government had already ordered 100 million doses back in July 2020 and the EU is to purchase 300 million doses. It’s Big Money for Big Pharma, generous payoffs to corrupt politicians, at the expense of tax payers.

The objective is ultimately to make money, by vaccinating the entire planet of 7.8 billion people for SARS-CoV-2.

Moderna, Pfizer Test mRNA Experimental Biologics on Children

By Barbara Caceres, May 01, 2021

On Dec. 10, 2020, American biotechnology company Moderna, Inc., which is pioneering the development of experimental messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics and vaccines, gave a 12-year old a dose of the company’s mRNA-1273 vaccine in a Phase 2/3 study of the new vaccine. Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said, “Our goal is to generate data in the spring of 2021 that will support the use of mRNA-1273 in adolescents in advance of the 2021 school year”.

Twitter Censors Peer Reviewed Mask Study

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, May 01, 2021

March 26, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) tweeted a post against the use of masks for the general public: “If you do not have any respiratory symptoms, such as fever, cough, or runny nose, you do not need to wear a medical mask. When used alone, masks can give you a false feeling of protection and can even be a source of infection when not used correctly.”

Ten Years after Fukushima, Canada Still Embraces the Atom: The Debut of the Small Moderate Reactors

By Michael Welch, Robert Hunziker, and Prof. M. V. Ramana, May 01, 2021

According to standard accounts, the death toll from the Chernobyl meltdown ranged from 4,000 to 200,000 although the scientific studies by Doctors Yablokov, Vassily and Nesterenkoin their book Chernobyl: Consequences of a Catastrophe for People and the Environment placed the numbers closer to 1,000,000.

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Data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the number of injuries and deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following COVID vaccines showed a significant jump in reports of injuries and deaths compared with last week’s numbers.

VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed.

Every Friday, VAERS makes public all vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date, usually about a week prior to the release date. Today’s data show that between Dec. 14, 2020 and April 23, a total of 118,902 total adverse events were reported to VAERS, including 3,544 deaths — an increase of 358 over the previous week — and 12,619 serious injuries, up 2,467 since last week.

From the 4/23/2021 release of VAERS data.

In the U.S., 222.3 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of April 23. This includes 97 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine, 117 million doses of Pfizer and 8 million doses of the Johnson &Johnson (J&J) COVID vaccine.

Of the 3,544 deaths reported as of April 23, 25% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination, 17% occurred within 24 hours and 40% occurred in people who became ill within 48 hours of being vaccinated.

This week’s data included three reports of deaths among teens under age 18, including two 15-year-olds and one 16-year-old who died unexpectedly from a blood clot 11 days after receiving her first Pfizer dose.

A 15-year-old female died of cardiac arrest after receiving the second dose of the Moderna vaccine, and a 15-year-old male died of cardiac failure two days after receiving the Pfizer vaccine.

This week’s VAERS data show:

CDC ignores The Defender, no response after 53 days

According to the CDC website, “the CDC follows up on any report of death to request additional information and learn more about what occurred and to determine whether the death was a result of the vaccine or unrelated.”

The Defender reached out to the CDC on March 8 with a written list of questions about reported deaths and injuries related to COVID vaccines, the status of ongoing investigations reported in the media, if autopsies are being done, the standard for determining whether an injury is causally connected to a vaccine, and education initiatives to encourage and facilitate proper and accurate reporting.

We made numerous attempts to contact the CDC via phone and email. As of April 30, 53 days after our initial inquiry, we still have yet to receive answers to our questions.

First ‘acknowledged’ case of J&J blood clots in a male

On April 27, The Defender reported a 30-year-old California man was hospitalized with blood clots after receiving J&J’s COVID vaccine. It is the first time U.S. public health officials have specifically acknowledged “vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia syndrome” in a male who received J&J’s shot.

The news came days after an independent advisory panel for the CDC on April 23 voted 10 to 4 to recommend the continued use of the J&J vaccine with no restrictions after acknowledging a “possible link” between the vaccine and rare blood clotting disorders, mostly in young people. The panel concluded the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks.

Children’s Health Defense queried the VAERS data for a series of adverse events associated with the formation of clotting disorders and other related conditions. VAERS yielded a total of 1,845 reports for all three vaccines from Dec. 14, 2020, through April 23.

Of the 1,845 cases reported, there were 655 reports attributed to Pfizer, 577 reports to Moderna and 608 reports to J&J — an increase of 448 J&J-related cases in just one week. U.S. health officials only acknowledged 15 blood clot cases associated with the J&J vaccine at the April 16 meeting.

Children as young as 6 months in COVID vaccine trials

On April 27, ABC News reported children as young as 6 months old are now in COVID vaccine trials. Dr. Zinaida Good, research fellow and immunologist at the Stanford Medicine Cancer Center, enrolled both her sons in Stanford Hospital’s Pfizer trial. Good said she and her husband are confident in the safety of the vaccine.

“It would be wonderful if we knew how to communicate better the benefits of the vaccine and its safety. The data is very clear,” Good said. “Those who get vaccines like this, mRNA vaccines, at least they are protected and they don’t really have any real side effects, not any real long-term consequences.”

Dr. Angelica Lacour’s 3-year-old daughter, Eloise, is also participating in the trial for young children. Lacour said she was told about potential side effects. “They said that it’s incredibly rare, but anyone can have an anaphylactic reaction to it. But it’s so rare they couldn’t even give us an example,” Lacour said. “So [side effects were] not something I was very concerned about.”

It is unknown whether Pfizer informed parents of potential side effects beyond just “anaphylaxis.” According to VAERS data, 45,508 of the 118,902 total reported adverse events were attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine. Of those 45,508 adverse events, 13,116 were related to anaphylactic reactions.

Possible link between Pfizer vaccine and heart inflammation

The Defender reported April 26 on details leaked from an Israeli Health Ministry report that raised concerns among experts about a possible link between the Pfizer vaccine and myocarditis.

The preliminary report found 62 cases of myocarditis, including two deaths, in people who received the Pfizer vaccine. Fifty-six of the cases occurred after the second dose of the vaccine, and 55 cases occurred in men — most between the ages of 18 and 30.

Israel’s pandemic response coordinator, Nachman Ash, confirmed “tens of incidents” of myocarditis occurred in vaccinated people, primarily after the second dose, but emphasized the health ministry had yet to draw any conclusions.

Pfizer said it had not detected similar findings in the rest of the world but would look deeper into the phenomenon. Yet a search for “myocarditis” in VAERS revealed 75 cases of myocarditis, with 73% occurring in people between the ages of 17 and 44. Of the reported cases, 33 were reportedafter the Pfizer vaccine.

COVID vaccines and menstrual cycle disruption

Researchers this week called for clinical trials to track and document menstrual changes in vaccinated women after some women reported changes to their menstrual cycles after receiving a COVID vaccine, The Defender reported April 28.

Women have reported hemorrhagic bleeding with clots, delayed or absent periods, sudden pre-menopausal symptoms, month-long periods and heavy irregular bleeding after being vaccinated with one or both doses of a COVID vaccine.

There’s no data linking COVID vaccines to changes in menstruation because clinical trials omit tracking menstrual cycles. But two Yale University experts wrote in The New York Times last week there could be a connection.

“There are many reasons vaccination could alter menstruation,” wrote Alice Lu-Culligan, an M.D./Ph.D. student at Yale School of Medicine, and Dr. Randi Epstein, writer in residence at Yale School of Medicine.

“Periods involve the immune system, as the thickening and thinning of the uterine lining are facilitated by different teams of immune cells and signals moving in and out of the reproductive tract,” Lu-Culligan and Epstein explained. “Vaccines are designed to ignite an immune response, and the female cycle is supported by the immune system, so it’s possible vaccines could temporarily change the normal course of events.”

To find out whether the COVID vaccine truly disrupts menstrual cycles, experts say there needs to be a controlled study with a placebo group. Rather than treat menstrual cycles as unimportant or too complicated, researchers should view tracking periods in future studies as a potential opportunity, Lu-Culligan and Epstein said. Clinical trials should track and document menstrual changes as they do other possible side effects.

Government considering COVID vaccine mandate for U.S. troops

President Joe Biden said today he has not ruled out requiring all U.S. troops to get the COVID vaccine after the shots win final clearance from federal regulators, but cautioned that such a decision would be a “tough call,” Politico reported.

The comments come as the Pentagon sounded the alarm that roughly one-third of troops and 40% of Marines had declined the vaccine as of February, according to congressional testimony from military officials.

In March, a group of Democratic lawmakers demanded Biden make the vaccine a requirement for service members, while Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby confirmed the military’s top brass was weighing a mandatory vaccination order.

As The Defender reported this week, military officials held a virtual town hall this month in which leaders touted the vaccines and urged service members to get vaccinated, or miss out on perks granted exclusively to those who get the vaccine.

Children’s Health Defense asks anyone who has experienced an adverse reaction, to any vaccine, to file a report following these three steps.

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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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***

There is a fast increasing trend in cattle breeding towards sex semen technology which will result in birth of only female calves. 90 per cent success in ensuring success (in terms of having only female calves) is claimed by promoters of this technology.  Although the drift towards this shockingly reductionist technology was initially restricted in India to some extent by the high costs of the technology patents vesting with USA firms, there have been increasing efforts to develop Indian technology and there has been increasing emphasis   by the union government during the  last six years towards supporting it, with a minister claiming to set up ‘ cow factories’.

The Hindu Business Line reported on December 27 2019, —The country has found an innovative solution to control stray animal population. It is implementing the sex-sorting semen technology for artificial insemination, which will produce only female animals. This will reduce the number of male calves.

Tracing the advent of this technology in India earlier The Times of India had reported on November 26, 2014—For the first times in the country an artificial insemination centre has been set up by dairy giant Amul which plans to develop sexed semen technology and then  impregnate  into newly matured young cows. This will ensure that the cows inseminated with ‘sexed semen’ only give birth to young female calves…Amul officials claim that they have already partnered with some of the country’s premier institutes for developing this technology. In sexed semen, the fractions of the X-bearing (female) and Y-bearing (male) sperm are modified from the natural semen through sorting and selection.

More recently the Business Standard quoted a minister and  BJP leader as stating that we will set up cow birth factories (ham gai paida karne ki factory laga denge). He said that 30 lakh doses of sex-sorted semen will be given in a year and by 2025 there will be 10 crore female cows. (September 2019).

Regarding the new technology being developed in India the Business Standard reported on June 20 2016—This sex semen technology involves clearing of all Y-chromosomes from a male sperm and then injecting into a female.

Further, on November 8 2020 the Business Line reported—India now has an indigenous technology for sex sorting bovine sperms which would ensure birth of only female calves.

It is clear that these developments which take forward the technology of sexed semen for producing only female calves has been generally welcomed by the media as well as by scientists and politicians placed in very important official positions. Nevertheless it is important to raise questions about this.

This is all the more important at this point of time when the world has been ravaged by a pandemic and several scientists and environmentalists now trace the linkages of several pandemics to disruptions in animal life and in animal-human inter-actions, as well as in the wider environmental changes which relate to this. The balance of nature, the balance of various species within it is very important and when this is disrupted many unintentional and unpredicted  disruptions in other areas including health can result which can be very harmful. This is all the more important in the case of a species like cow which is so close and integral to rural communities in India and several other countries.

What is the guarantee that human-animal inter-actions will be as harmless in the case of the cows produced with sexed semen technology as these have been with normal cows? What is the guarantee that the milk obtained from these cows will be as  nourishing and fit for human and particularly child use as has been the case with the milk from the normal cows? Surely all these questions should at least be asked and examined before we rush on the super highway towards very fast spread of highly dubious  technologies and realize mistakes when it is too late.

Another question is—once such short-vision technologies get established and accepted where will these stop. If these are used for eliminating bullocks today, won’t it be the turn of the male species of some other animals tomorrow. Eventually where will this stop and what will be the overall impact in totality on nature and on animal life and on human-animal inter-actions?

In the rush to push highly  reductionist and short-vision technologies such as sexed semen, has anyone cared to consider all the potential hazards and  adverse impacts? Are the promoters willing to give a guarantee that no serious adverse impacts will emerge? Have they at least considered all the possible adverse impacts?

Bullocks have been such an integral part of rural community life in India as well as several other countries. Farmers have been taking great pride in the health of their bullocks. Bullocks have been celebrated in folklore which indicate the equal affection cows and bullocks received in farmer households with no gender discrimination. Prem Chand  wrote a famous story ( Do Bailon Ki Katha ) which brings out this affection for bullocks vividly and a film with great music was made ( Hira-Moti) based on this story.  True tractors have displaced them from ploughing in many villages, but they are still used for ploughing in many other villages. In addition they have been used for help in food processing and irrigation and for transport. Bullock carts have been the pride of several rural households and bullock cart races have been organized in many villages. In times of climate change with growing need to reduce fossil fuels the importance of bullocks increases further. Organic and natural farming is becoming more important in times of climate change and cows and bullocks are now so important also for their urine and dung. Methods exist in cattle sheds and go-shalas for obtaining these in clean  ways. So science should contribute to better protection for both cows and bullocks instead of upsetting the entire balance.

Questions need to be asked about so human-centric a view of world that a few powerful humans with a tunnel vision become the arbiters of which animal will survive and which will not. It is  nightmarish and dystopian to realize that a few reductionist and short-vision men have been given the power to almost eliminate a species—bullocks—which, apart from being a very noble animal in its own right and having every right to life,  has  served humanity so well. It is  equally alarming to know that the union government and a political party which announce their commitment  to cow-protection from the housetop actually have such a narrow and distorted view of this issue that they vigorously promote a technology which seeks to almost eliminate   the male species.

Surely the sexed semen technology should be opposed widely before it can cause further harm.

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Bharat Dogra is a veteran journalist and author. He has received several prestigious journalism awards for his public interest writings. His recent books include Protecting Earth for Children, Planet in Peril and Man over Machine.

Featured image is from Countercurrents

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Gun Violence Starts at the Top

May 3rd, 2021 by Margaret Kimberley

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***

If the state reserves the right to commit mass murder no one should be surprised that the people follow suit.

Mass shootings happen with appalling regularity in the United States. It is bad enough that recent shootings took place in Atlanta, Boulder, and Indianapolis, but the horror is always followed by the same useless faux debates. Half the population wants to limit gun ownership, the other half doesn’t and continues a gun buying spree to prove their point. Politicians pretend to take action, victims are mourned, thoughts and prayers are uttered, and the cycle repeats itself with the next awful event.

What very few people dare to discuss is how these acts are connected with U.S. history and with the state in its current form. This country exists as a result of genocides and terrorism. The indigenous inhabitants were attacked with wars and disease and the survivors were driven from their ancestral lands. Africans were enslaved and treated like chattel, all Black people were deprived of their legal rights, and Jim Crow lasted for 100 years. Lynch law prevailed and the torture and killing of black people was a spectator sport across the land. The fits and starts of anything resembling justice have been far outweighed by institutional resistance which maintains the status quo.

The police continue to kill three people every day, more than 1,000 people every year. While George Floyd’s police murderer was on trial, young Daunte Wright was killed in a nearby community. Video footage revealed that 13-year old Adam Toledo was unarmed with his hands raised when he was shot and killed by Chicago police. Lest anyone forget, Chicago is the city which holds hundreds of people at Homan Square, a city jail that operates like a CIA black-ops site. Chicago should forever be known as the city where black men were tortured by police for years.

When this nation wasn’t practicing state sanctioned terror within its boundaries, it committed atrocities internationally. Wars, interventions and coups have been committed from Chile to Haiti to Guatemala to Iraq to Ukraine. There are U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and more than 800 bases under U.S. or other NATO nation control around the world.

Joe Biden has undone the Trump administration agreement to leave Afghanistan  by May 1. He cynically uses the date of September 11 to forestall what should have happened years ago. The occupation of Afghanistan has gone on so long that people born after it began are now old enough to join the military themselves. But no one should be fooled. Biden is privatizing war  with contractors and intelligence operatives and moving troops to create havoc elsewhere in the world.

If the state reserves the right to commit mass murder no one should be surprised that the people follow suit. They are taught that their violent country is exceptionally good, fair, benevolent and democratic. The U.S. leads the world in military spending and brings wars home by militarizing local police. Of course the bloodletting doesn’t end. It would be shocking if it did.

The phony concern must come to an end. Foolish and false platitudes such as, “This is not who we are,” should disappear from discourse and be replaced with honesty. Biden has proposed increasing defense spending to $753 billion and after the rhetorical dust settles, there will be a bipartisan congressional consensus to approve what he wants. Military spending takes up 60% of the discretionary budget and is the reason why people in this country cannot have nice things.

State violence is like background music that seeps into the collective consciousness. The same people who express shock when an individual goes on a killing spree in this country are silent when their government is responsible for killings around the world. They may support the mass incarceration state, which makes the U.S. the world’s number one jailer.

It is all connected. State sanctioned violence tells the people that individual violence is just fine. The hand wringing over the latest shooting doesn’t mean anything if the wars and law enforcement brutality continue. The hypocrisy is obvious and no one should be surprised when a well-armed population makes use of their personal arsenals.

The United States of America is and will remain violent without some revolutionary change. The carnage is both official and personal. If this country is honest the next mass shooting should be ignored by the media, politicians, and by the people too. Any consternation is temporary because it is dishonest. For now the most that can be expected is that Americans will finally end the pretense of concern and treat the inevitable results of their history and politics with nonchalance. It is the only honest thing they can do.

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Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at patreon.com/margaretkimberley and she regularly posts on Twitter @freedomrideblog. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

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***

On April 29 the U.S. Senate confirmed Victoria Nuland as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, which has been described as the fourth most important position in the State Department. Though as the first three are filled by political appointees and the other by a career foreign service officer, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs is the highest-ranking member of the U.S. Foreign Service.

In an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April as part of her confirmation process, she reflected on her thirty-two years in the Foreign Service working for five presidents of both parties and nine secretaries of state. She retailed some of her “historic moments” in that career, among them “working on tough arms control problems and conflicts from Rwanda to Haiti to Bosnia and Kosovo.” But what she expressed as her last-listed and perhaps proudest moment was, while she served as Deputy Chief of Mission at NATO, the military bloc for the first time activating its Article 5 collective defense clause, which contributed to the now twenty-year-old war in Afghanistan, a comprehensive naval interdiction mission in the Mediterranean Sea (Operation Active Endeavor) and European AWACS flights over the U.S. along with several other missions.

A major part of her career has been spent at NATO headquarters: she was Deputy Permanent Representative (ambassador) to NATO from 2000-2003 and Permanent Representative from 2005-2008. In both positions she was instrumental in recruiting military forces from NATO allies and partners for the war in Afghanistan, with NATO military personnel also stationed in Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan. At one point 130,000 of the 150,000 foreign troops in the country served under NATO command in the International Security Assistance Force: service members from 54 countries. Never before or since have troops from so many nations fought in a war, much less in one theater of war or one country.

She also worked on promoting seven nations to NATO membership at the historic Istanbul, Turkey summit in 2004: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia. All are in Eastern Europe; all but Slovenia were members of the defunct Warsaw Pact; three – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – were Soviet republics. Bulgaria and Romania provided the U.S. and NATO with eight military bases in the following two years. NATO has flown fighter jets from air bases in Latvia and Lithuania for years, in the case of the second nation since 2004.

Her State Department biography states she also served as Deputy to the Ambassador­-at-Large for the Newly Independent States of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s (That was likely under Strobe Talbott, later president of the Brookings Institution.) She had a brief stint as a faculty member at the National War College. And she was Principal Deputy National Security Advisor for Vice President Dick Cheney from 2003 to 2005; that is, during and immediately after the invasion of Iraq.

During the transition period in Russia immediately following the dissolution of the Soviet Union she worked at what is described as covering Russian internal politics at the American embassy in Moscow and served on what the State Department termed the Soviet Desk in Washington. She is, in short, a seasoned Russia hand. She is reported to speak Russian and “a smattering” of Chinese, having worked in Guangzhou, China (1985-86) and at the State Department’s Bureaus of East Asian and Pacific Affairs the following year. She was in Mongolia in 1988 where she has been credited with assisting in setting up the first American embassy in the nation that is wedged between Russia and China.

She was a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations twice, and the second time, as a State Department fellow, she directed a Council on Foreign Relations task force on “Russia, its Neighbors and an Expanding NATO.” She has also been a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a senior counselor at the Albright Stonebridge Group of former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. And she is on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy. (Her husband, Robert Kagan, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a member of the defunct Project for the New American Century, of which he was a key founder along with Bruce P. Jackson, also past president the U.S. Committee on NATO/Expand NATO. Both Nuland and Kagan are now Democrats.)

But the world would likely never have heard of her until now except for her role in engineering the overthrow of the government of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Her face was first revealed to viewers outside the State Department, the National War College and major think tanks as she was handing out food to anti-government rioters in Kiev at the beginning of that year.

Having been appointed Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs the preceding year, she became the major American official assigned to Ukraine during the crisis of late 2013 and early 2014. In a leaked phone conversation of January 28, 2014 between her and American ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, the two provided future historians with a textbook-perfect specimen of engineering a coup, replete with the exact people who would lead the post-coup “transitional government.” Three and a half weeks before President Yanukovych was deposed.

When the tape appeared on YouTube it created an international furor, not because of what it revealed about plotting the overthrow of a government which shares a 1,200-mile border with the U.S.’s nuclear rival Russia, not because it exposed the most naked form of interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, not because shortly afterward the plot resulted in a what is now a seven-year war with the ever-worsening prospect of a direct military confrontation between the U.S. and NATO on one side and Russia on the other – no, but because the diplomat with decades of diverse experience said, when the ambassador raised the issue of the European Union’s role in the transition, “F-ck the EU.” That made the conversation noteworthy. The only outrage in the West was over the fact that the contents of a private conversation has been divulged. Russia was blamed of course. Three years later Hillary Clinton denounced the leak as an example of Russia “weaponizing” intelligence information. She had no objection to overthrowing a friendly government and plunging Europe into a new war.

Yesterday no doubt there was rejoicing and exultation in Kiev. There should have been weeping and gnashing of teeth in the Donbass and Crimea. And grave concern in Moscow. Nuland like her boss Joe Biden may have unfinished business in Ukraine.

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***

Turkey launched two brand-new operations in Iraq’s Kurdistan region.

The operations against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) began in the provinces of Sirnak and Hakkari on April 29th.

The operation in Sirnak province is code-named Eren Cudi-Besta and the one in Hakkari province is code-named Eren Kazan-Ogul.

They are named after a 15-year-old boy who was a collateral damage death in a clash between Turkish Forces and the PKK in Iraq’s Trabzon province.

Ankara also said that these two new operations are in conjunction with the Claw-Lightning and Claw-Thunderbolt operations, launched in the Kurdistani Duhok province less than 7 days ago.

As of April 26th, Turkey reported on their wild success – armed forces struck about 460 targets, and have neutralized at least 42 members of the PKK.

It should be noted that Ankara greatly enjoys overestimating its achievements in such operations.

On the other side, the PKK claimed that its fighters killed 21 Turkish service members in a series of operations between April 27th and 29th, while Turkey reported a single serviceman losing his life and two others being injured.

Furthermore the PKK said that its fighters had had attacked a secret Turkish base near the village of Sheladize in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region on April 27th.

The group targeted two M60 battle tanks, which were parked in the base, with anti-tank guided missiles.

Even beyond operations, hostilities between Turkey, Turkish-backed forces and Kurdish groups are commonplace.

All of this takes place in addition to regular airstrikes by the Turkish air force.

Ankara’s encroachment on Iraq’s borders simply adds to the chaos that Baghdad has to deal with.

On April 29, Iraqi security forces foiled a terrorist attack and killed a suicide bomber in the center of the northern province of Kirkuk.

ISIS hasn’t claimed responsibility for the attack, but the terrorist group is quite active in the province.

On April 24, ISIS terrorists attacked a post of the Iraqi Federal Police near the town of al-Suss.

On April 28, the terrorists carried out a second, bolder attack by pounding a base of the Iraqi military in al-Zarkah with five mortar shells.

Further south in Iraq, ISIS terrorists raided a post of the Iraqi military in the southern countryside of the western province of al-Anbar.

The militants stormed the post, which is located on the border with Saudi Arabia, without facing any real resistance.

The post’s personnel fled, leaving behind their weapons and equipment.

They set it on fire and simply left.

Meanwhile, United States supply convoys continue blowing up as a result of constant IED attacks.

Thus, US forces are focused on their general security rather than assisting the Iraqi Armed Forces and the Popular Mobilization Units in containing ISIS.

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***

Titles can be deceptive – “The Crash of Flight 3804” meant nothing for all my readings of history and geopolitics.  It was not about the crash that killed Dag Hammerskjold, nor about any of the more recent crashes like the U.S. navy shoot down of Iran Air 655 in 1988.   Even the subtitle seemed deceptively uninteresting until it read “and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil.”   As usual, the determining factor became the author – a lawyer, an investigative journalist, and a Middle East reporter of the kind that has actually been on the ground in a few of the controversial areas.   Hesitantly, I decided to give it a read.

Frequently I am asked if there is a book I would recommend to give a primer or an overview for certain geopolitical arenas – usually the Middle East, and Israel/Palestine.  And quite frequently it is difficult to find a book that covers the requested topics in a way to serve as both an introduction and as a significant, accurate, and highly readable ‘story’, although there are many excellent books on specific topics.   This book, “The Crash of Flight 3804”  is now that recommendation.

Apart from the personal aspects of the story, which is the fine and not overstated thread throughout as well as the motivation, Charlotte Dennett has written an excellent book summarizing the geopolitics of the Middle East historically through to current events.  Her main theme is essentially follow the pipelines, follow the money, and by doing so she traces a history of espionage, geopolitical gamesmanship, and terror that defines what makes the Middle East today.

History

The history begins with the personal element, the killing/murder of her father in Flight 3804 from Jidda to Addis Abbab in March 1947.  From that came the revelation that her father Daniel Dennett was a U.S. master spy examining the events in the Middle East before Israel created its state in the 1948 nakba and before the creation of the CIA, but not before oil, pipelines and big money had already shaped the political and geographical landscapes.

The history works mostly forwards but traces back to World War I, the intrigues of the Germans with the Ottoman empire, the attempts by the British, French, and Russians to establish controlling interests in the oil rich region as oil became the power for the military and the industrialists of the era.  It puts in place the Zionist proposals and actions, the Balfour letter (and it was just a letter, not a law), and the situation with the Saudis and other relationships within the declining Ottoman empire.

The focal point for the geopolitics is the story of pipelines, for whoever controls the pipelines controls the movement and endpoint of the vast oil fields of the Middle East.   Fortunately Dennett has included many maps drawing the outlines of the region and the many planned and built pipelines, and for current events, the location of newer oil fields that are and will cause current and  not so future problems – the Levantine Basin in the Eastern Mediterranean, the untapped sources in Yemen, and new potentially large discoveries in the illegally occupied Golan Heights.

Money

As a story of money and oil the names of traditional bankers rise reasonably frequently – the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds predominating.  As I read it occurred to me that she was not really discussing the development of the petrodollar until –

“…the wars [all Middle East wars] have been linked to the US command of the oil-based petrodollar, much as they have been linked to the control of oil, and most significantly Saudi oil…and oil in Iraq…and possibly the oil in Yemen….the larger part of what is known as ”dollar hegemony” is the control of oil.”

The reader is introduced to the wars in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria in particular as part of the need to control petrodollar hegemony, as “a switch by OPEC from a dollar standard to a euro standard would be the Federal Reserve’s biggest nightmare.”  Dennett does not develop this idea but if it needs stating:  without oil being mandated as priced in US dollars, the economy of the US. would collapse as its dollar would become worthless – no one would need the dollars to purchase oil with and the huge U.S. debts supported by the advantage of being the global reserve currency would collapse.

So oil pipelines are big money, the petrodollar is the global reserve currency and the U.S. uses its vast military to support it,

…the country that espouses liberty for all is in fact an economic empire backed by military legions, one only needs to look at the number of US troops and military bases that the United States commands around the world….

Israel

Dennett’s chapter “The Hidden History of Pipeline Politics in Palestine and Israel” provides an insightful summary by way of examining who controls pipelines within the problems that currently beset Israel/Palestine and the general Middle East.  Not many historians mention it but the military-oil aspect of the creation of Israel is well supported.  Using old maps as her guide to some of her research and questions, she asked,

“Where, I asked myself, was the military base that would protect the Trans-Arabian Pipeline?  It wasn’t in Lebanon.  It wasn’t in Syria.  And then it hit me.  It wasn’t in Israel.  It was Israel.”

Historically Dennett begins with World War I,

“…fought, in large part, not to make the world safe for democracy but to help robber barons reap enormous profits and establish spheres of influence in resource-rich parts of the world, including the Middle East.”

The British Empire straddled the world, and the Zionists “advocated for a Jewish state in Palestine as a European outpost to protect the Red Sea and Britain’s vital trade route to India.”  The Balfour Letter among its several purposes was related to British “imperial interests” in Mesopotamian and Palestine.

During World War II, arguably the last battle of World War I,  the geopolitical positioning of the U.S. played an important role in the holocaust.  The U.S. became aware of the genocide in 1943, but worried about Ibn Saud and possible threats to “end the United States’ exclusive oil concession in Saudi Arabia if increased Jewish immigration to Palestine were allowed” the U.S. decided against bombing Auschwitz in order to end that part of the German program.

At the end of the war, British imperial power was in sharp decline and the U.S. was the global leader in military and economic power. At this point,   “Protection of the Saudi oil concession and the Saudi pipeline “at all costs” trumped all other considerations,” and a “strong militarized Israel could serve as the key regional protector of the Saudi pipeline.”  The result is that today, “a powerful coalition comprised of the Zionist lobby,evangelical Protestants and armsmakers now constitutes significant domestic constraint on those who might seek to alter U.S. policy towards Israel.”

Recent events concerning Palestine – in particular Gaza and its Mediterranean coast – and Israel focus on pipelines not yet built as the countries of the Levant argue over the newly discovered oil and gas resources under the Mediterranean.  Once again, a clear map shows the outlines of the gas and oil fields and the coastal water limits of each of the littoral countries.

In sum Dennett argues,

“…as we consider what has happened in the Middle East over the past seven decades, and what is happening today in Syria, Iraq, Gaza, and now Yemen, we have question whether the timeworn quest for oil – to be pursued “at all costs” – lies at the heart of many of these tragedies.”

Afterwords

In her afterwords, Dennett becomes a bit soft and fuzzy towards the CIA as they finally recognize the contribution her father made to espionage efforts in the Middle East and the knowledge he displayed concerning the region.  She and her family are visited by three CIA agents – one a psychiatrist, one in the role of the consoling historian (with the official version) , and the big guy who did not play much of a verbal role.  They presented arguments that Flight 3804 crashed due to bad weather, without knowing that Dennett’s own research indicated the weather was clear and stable for the flight.

Yet after being wined and dined and fêted by the CIA she implies that she accepts their efforts to save American democracy, and wonders about the “marauding militias [Middle East terrorists] killing civilians and frankly undoing the well-intentioned efforts to win over hearts and minds.”  Her last perspective offers two possibilities:  a lifetime of being filled with American exceptionalism and indispensability; or perhaps a caution for herself not to be persecuted and targeted by the CIA.

Surely if she read her own words she would not think the efforts were “well intentioned” except for anyone but the monied oil barons and the interlocking corporations of the military-industrial-financial institutions of the U.S.  As for hearts and minds, she unfortunately reduces her own presentation by denying the  force of her arguments that this had nothing to do with either good intentions or hearts and minds, that killing civilians – as per her own arguments – is what the militarized U.S. does, and above all it is about oil and money.

Better to let her father have the main afterward:

“Pray to God that wherever else we may choose to intervene, the United States will be spared the disgrace of intervening in the Near East.” [Clark University Speech, 1942.]

Read it!

Regardless of her short softened ending, this is an amazing piece of historical writing.  Her unique focus on pipelines quite literally creates a web of intrigue throughout the Middle East.  It can serve as an historical primer for many events concerning the Middle East.  It serves as an excellent summary, introducing and clearly explaining without huge detail, the machinations of U.S. and other imperial interests in the region.  Students, foreign affairs ‘experts’ and officials should have this work as required reading.

This is an engaging insightful book that I recommend as a primer or an overview for the Middle East and the U.S.’ overall imperial drive around the world.

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Jim Miles is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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May 8: International Festival of Whistleblowing, Dissent and Accountability

May 2nd, 2021 by Centre for Global Justice, Peace and Accountability

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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Join us on Saturday 8th May for an enlightening journey into the heart of some of the world’s most grave injustices. Through, art, music, film & theatre as well as practical workshops, panels, interviews and mini-lectures we pause to reflect on how we find out about these injustices, what price was paid for the truth and by whom, how these grave circumstances are understood, spun and reported, and what can be done to facilitate justice.

Which topics will the festival cover? How are these topics selected?

Our aim is to inspire, rejuvenate and refresh all those who contribute and participate. Contributions to the festival cover the law, journalism, technology, psychology, finance, propaganda, social issues and activism, as well as art and music. In addition to respecting the broad themes of the festival, we have tried to spend time with each contributor to understand their passions and interests and then to construct a schedule that is enriching for contributors as well as for participants.

Who will join us on this journey?

Here’s our alphabetical list of confirmed contributors. This list is being refreshed daily. In the next few days, we will also give you a schedule of contributions. In addition to contributions from those listed below, we will also be sharing art, music and more through the day.

  • Mads Andenæs, Lawyer and former chair of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention
  • Diani Barreto, Painter and activist
  • Somerset Bean, Graphic designer
  • Max Blumenthal, Investigative journalist and author
  • Jonathan Cook, Journalist and author
  • John Christensen, Founder of the Tax Justice Network
  • Eileen Chubb, Whistleblower and founder of Compassion in Care
  • Marjorie Cohn, Law Professor, writer and former President of the National Lawyers Guild
  • Naomi Colvin, Whistleblower advocate
  • Sevim Dagdelen, Politician and German MP
  • Viktor Dedaj, Author and activist
  • Kareem Dennis (Lowkey), Rapper and activist
  • John Doe, Hacktivist
  • Davide Dormino, Sculptor
  • Suelette Dreyfus, Technology researcher, journalist and writer
  • Rod Driver, Writer
  • Andrew Feinstein, Writer, campaigner and former politician
  • Denzil Forrester, Artist
  • Marianna Fotaki, Academic and Public health expert
  • Andrew Fowler, Investigative journalist
  • Nathan Fuller, Writer and campaigner
  • George Galloway, Politician, broadcaster and writer
  • Chamira Gamage, Campaigner
  • Martin Garbus, Attorney and author
  • Cristina Godoy-Navarrete, Human rights activist
  • Kevin Gosztola, Journalist and filmmaker
  • Deepa Govindarajan Driver, Academic and trade unionist
  • Tareq Haddad, Writer and investigative journalist
  • Nicky Hager, Author and investigative journalist
  • Jeremy Hammond, Hactivist
  • Charles Hector, Lawyer and human rights activist
  • Nancy Hollander, Lawyer
  • Selma James, Writer and activist
  • Lissa Johnson, Psychologist and writer
  • Eva Joly, Lawyer and former magistrate and politician
  • John Jones, Journalist
  • Ögmundur Jónasson, Politician and former interior minister of Iceland
  • Torsten Jurell, Visual artist
  • Peter Kennard, Artist and professor of visual art
  • Kate Kenny, Academic specialising in whistleblowing
  • John Kiriakou, Author and CIA whistleblower
  • Niki Konstantinidou, Playwright and lawyer
  • Niels Ladefoged, Filmmaker
  • Richard Lahuis, Photographer
  • Joe Lauria, Journalist and author
  • Lisa Longstaff, Women’s rights activist
  • Clara López Rubio, Filmmaker
  • Lauri Love, Activist and technology expert
  • David McBride, Lawyer and whistleblower
  • Ray McGovern, Activist and former CIA officer
  • Alan MacLeod, Journalist
  • Franck Magennis, Lawyer and activist
  • Stefania Maurizi, Investigative journalist
  • Barbara Meister, Journalist and author
  • Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on torture and arbitrary detention
  • David Miller, Academic
  • Federica Morelli, Journalist and activist
  • Moritz Mueller, Journalist
  • Iain Munro, Academic
  • Craig Murray, Author and human rights activist
  • Fidel Narvaez, Human rights activist
  • Peter Oborne, Journalist
  • Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Former Guantanamo detainee, engineer and writer
  • Iain Overton, Investigative journalist
  • Juan Passarelli, Filmmaker
  • John Pilger, Journalist and author
  • Sami Ramadani, Academic and anti-war activist
  • Afshin Rattansi, Journalist
  • Margaret Ratner Kunstler, Attorney and author
  • John Rees, Anti-war activist and journalist
  • Piers Robinson, Academic
  • Stephen Rohde, Writer and political activist
  • Maggie Ronayne, Academic, trade unionist and women’s rights campaigner
  • John Russell, Academic and artist
  • Arne Ruth, Retired editor
  • Justin Schlosberg, Academic and media activist
  • Prem Sikka, Academic and tax-justice campaigner
  • Norman Solomon, Journalist
  • Jeffrey Sterling, Lawyer and CIA whistleblower
  • Serena Tinari, Investigative journalist
  • Fred Turnheim, Journalist and academic
  • Cathy Vogan, Journalist and academic
  • Sam Weinstein, Social justice campaigner and trade unionist
  • Chris Williamson, Politician
  • Asa Winstanley, Journalist
  • Andy Worthington, Journalist
  • NHS Whistleblower
  • Probation Whistleblower
  • Support Not Separation

Will it be another set of webinars / Zoom panels with talking heads?

We take an active position of resisting surveillance capitalism. We want to encourage means of participation and organisation through free/libre software, decentralized services and federated platforms, and through the use of end-to-end encryption. We think these are essential building blocks towards our collective goals.

Our festival is an attempt to organise ourselves through decentralized tools such as Mobilizon (for announcements of events and session, scheduling, registration, etc.) and through Big Blue Button (virtual conference rooms) and Jitsi for online gatherings. Unless absolutely necessary, you won’t have to register to attend.

I’m not a techie! Can I have a test drive so I feel confident about using the software on the day

Yes. We are scheduling two drop-in sessions for attendees (on May 6th and 7th) so its all easy for you to use on the day.

Can I watch it afterwards? Will it be live streamed?

Yes, it will be live-streamed via Peertube, Youtube and Twitter. The Courage Foundation will be live-streaming the event, and Consortium News, TruthDefence will also re-stream and cover the festival.

Where is the schedule? How can we pick and choose what we want to go to ?

We are a tiny organising team, so please bear with us. The schedule and the links for each session will be posted here in due course. Typically, all you will need to do is to click the relevant link to attend a session. Please bookmark this page so you can return to it nearer the time and check the most updated plans.

Any institutional sponsors or promoters?

The festival is not sponsored by any organisations. We are grateful that a number of civil society organisations are supporting this festival by promoting it widely. The list includes the Courage Foundation, Blueprint for Free Speech, Resistance TV,  Truth Defence, Labour Campaign for Free Speech and the Global Women’s Strike and we are very grateful for their practical help and solidarity.

Click here for more information.

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Many people couldn’t help but laugh when Biden told Boris Johnson on March 26 that the USA and it’s NATO allies should create “an infrastructure plan to rival the Belt and Road Initiative” post haste. What would such a program look like? How would it be funded when the USA is so embarrassingly bankrupt? Who among the nations of the world would ever consider buying a ticket onto such a sinking ship?

It took a few weeks for details to finally emerge, but by the end of the April 22-23 Climate Summit hosted by Biden, John Kerry and Anthony Blinken, it has become abysmally clear what delusions possessed the poor president.

After having announced a 52% carbon reduction policy below 2005 levels by 2050, Biden swiftly committed the USA to what he called the most comprehensive infrastructure plan in history with a $2 trillion Green New Deal-like infrastructure program designed to revive the policy of America’s 32nd president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Mirroring FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, Biden has even planned a Civilian Climate Corps, along with a Green Climate Bank to parallel FDR’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

The catch? Biden’s version was written by the same financial technocrats that FDR went to war with 80 years ago and unlike FDR’s version, the modern green version of the New Deal will have the effect of destroying the productive industrial powers and living standards of the nation once green grids are built.

A Comparison of Two New Deals

Where FDR’s New Deal was premised the removal of Wall Street’s hegemony over national sovereignty via the Pecora Commission, Glass-Steagall, and SEC, Biden’s Green New Deal is shaped by Central Bankers’ Climate Compacts and green finance strategies authored by the richest oligarchs on the planet like the Bloomberg-Carney Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures. In fact, it shouldn’t come as a coincidence that the first legislative effort to establish a Green New Deal, was not American at all, but was submitted by Britain’s Lord Adair Turner in 2009 while he was acting head regulator of the City of London which remains the nerve center of world finance today as it was a century ago. Up until 2019, Lord Turner was the chair of George Soros’ Institute for New Economic Thinking- an organization devoted to making Huxley’s Brave New World a practical reality and upon which he still serves as Senior Fellow.

Where FDR created large scale infrastructure megaprojects like the Tennessee Valley Authority, Rural Electrification Project, Hoover Dam, Colorado River Basin programs, and St Lawrence Seaway which all had the effect of leap frogging to higher rates of industrial power than at any other time in history, Biden’s Green New Deal professes to do the opposite. Yes, jobs will be created in insulating a few million homes and building windmills and solar panels, however those jobs will be short lived. For once they are built there will be nothing left to do but maintain the solar panels with unionized squeegees in an imaginary world of no change and zero-technological growth that might look good in computer models, but has very little correspondence with humanity’s actual requirements for long term survival.

It appears to be genuinely believed by ivory tower technocrats managing the Biden Administration that financing a green infrastructure program won’t be difficult. The 2020-21 pandemic showed the enlightened elite that money can always just be printed from thin air. The U.S. debt has already risen to 27 trillion, so what’s a few trillion more?

Where that fails, just compensate by imposing Carbon Pricing onto all carbon sinners. Many nations have already gotten onboard that bandwagon with Sweden, Lichtenstein and Canada leading the race charging $129, $96, and $91 per ton of carbon emissions respectively. Coming out of Biden’s Climate Summit, Canada’s Justin Trudeau committed to raising this cost to $170/ton by 2030 while U.S. National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy announced will soon rise to $56/ton in the USA (a seven fold increase from the $1-7/ton price under Trump).

Additionally, cap and trade schemes are always there for wealthy polluters to purchase unused carbon quotas from poorer polluters at home or abroad, so revenue can certainly be found that way. If all else fails, just raise taxes.

In case poor nations of the world might feel like avoiding this sinking ship in order to work more closely with Russia and China, Biden was kind enough to announce a new international green finance strategy to assist the developing sector in their decarbonizing aspirations.

The Problem with Green Energy

For those who doubt the idea that the USA can or even should meet those 2035 carbon reduction targets, they might have solid reasons for their assumptions. For one thing, the USA currently relies upon 1,852 coal fired power plants which would mean that 11 plants would need to be shut down every month until 2035. What would compensate for this loss of capacity?

Obviously not nuclear, since that has become politically-radioactive in the minds of most of Biden’s liberal constituency.

Would it be green energy that fills the gap? Considering that green energy is magnitudes more costly, and unreliable relative to fossil fuels, hydro or nuclear power, that is also unlikely. The truth is, as Germany discovered recently, shutting down coal and nuclear at home, simply forces a nation to keep fossil fuel plants running as back up for the unreliable green energy grids while increasing imports of coal/natural gas-driven electricity from other countries. In Germany’s case, imports of nuclear and coal-generated electricity from Poland and the Czech Republic increased by 60% since the nation’s industrial base understood that green energy sources could never meet it’s needs. In the USA’s case, Mexico would most likely be the top supplier. Across the European Union where most nations have entirely submitted to pressure to “decarbonize” by 2050, coal, gas and crude oil imports now make up 2/3rds of all energy imports.

While some advocates of the Green New Deal applaud the amazing breakthroughs in green energy tech over the past years which they say has reduced the price per kilowatt hour from an unreasonably high 35 cents to as low as 4 cents today… the truth is that the technology remains largely identical to the photovoltaic cells and windmills of yesterday with the only difference being the massively increased infusions of government subsidies given to private companies producing the green energy which the IMF calculated to be $5.2 trillion in 2017 alone (aka: 6.5% of the global GDP). And where do those subsidies come from? you guessed it. The tax payers.

Lest we forget the oft-overlooked fuel source of bioethanol, over 40% of the USA’s corn production currently gets burned in the form of biodiesel and ethanol while billions starve and suffer food shortages around the world. The high cost of being green.

Geopolitical Incompetence 101

You might now be asking: Why would the USA which has admittedly chosen to define itself as an existential rival to Russia and China to the point of risking a full-scale nuclear war, be so intent on subverting its own economic foundations at a moment that both Russia and China (and over 136 nations of the world) have chosen to move on toward a diametrically opposing paradigm of large-scale infrastructure growth and scientific progress?

If we take the old adage “whom the gods would destroy they first make mad” as a truism, then signs for a bright future for the Green New Dealing western community poor indeed.

Since Biden’s first days as president of the USA, the entire fabric of U.S. governance from top to bottom was completely overhauled in the form of omnibus executive orders designed to make the global climate emergency the top priority for all branches and levels of government- economic, military, intelligence, health and beyond. Under this green geostrategic paradigm, vast starvation, migration patterns, and wars have much less to do with imperial abuse, and everything to do with global warming.

Biden created new directorates of climate policy with offices in the White House, demanded that the Director of National Intelligence and State Department overhaul their governance around dealing with the climate crisis and even passed executive orders banning all oil and natural gas drilling and exploration projects on land or offshore where government land is held. Biden even went so far as to assert that 30% of the entire surface of the USA would be brought off limits to all development by 2030.

Sustained vs Sustainable Development

Compare this with China which has simultaneously committed to building green energy systems without deluding itself into thinking that fossil fuels, nuclear or hydro could be taken out of their energy baskets.

In fact, the primary fuel sources driving the large-scale development corridors of the New Silk Road are considered “dirty” sources verboten by the west like coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear and hydro. This fact even drove a delusional Biden to attempt to pressure Xi Jinping to speed up their phase out of coal by 2030 to which the Chinese leader responded “no”.

Biden had earlier described China as the primary climate offender of the world saying: “China is far and away the largest emitter of carbon in the world, and through its massive Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing is also annually financing billions of dollars of dirty fossil fuel energy projects across Asia and beyond.” He even demanded that leaders of the west “rally a united front of nations to hold China accountable to high environmental standards in its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure projects, so that China can’t outsource pollution to other countries.”

In his remarks at the Climate Summit, President Putin re-emphasized to the western puppet heads of state who were busy massaging each other and chanting “build back better” in unison, that “green growth” should not occur at the expense of “sustainable growth”. Simply put, Putin is committed to putting people before ivory tower energy policies that may demand human sacrifices at the alter of Gaia, and emphasized Russia’s commitment to nuclear power, raising its fertility rate, raising average life expectancy which has already grown from 56 years/male and 61/female in the mid-1990s to 70 years today and plans are to increase that to 78 years by 2030.

The irony about all of this is that China and Russia are increasingly adopting a system of political economy which is fundamentally OPEN and driven by scientific and technological progress without any supposed limits on its potential for improvement. This paradigm is fundamentally in harmony with the original New Deal policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt who himself envisioned a post-imperial world of win-win cooperation (in opposition to a dystopic closed-system world envisioned by Winston Churchill). The USA on the other hand, which professes to be the heir to the New Deal reforms of Franklin Roosevelt has come to embody the worst aspects of the Malthusian elite managing the British Empire for centuries which FDR devoted his life to stop.

It was this empire that considered it “scientifically necessary” to subjugate India, China, Ireland, Africa and every other rival to lives of poverty, war, famine and stupidification.

This was the empire which the republican revolution of 1776 aimed at overthrowing- not only from the Americas, but internationally. It is this same empire which was nearly destroyed by the Russian-U.S. alliance that shaped much of the 19th century and which again arose during WW2 as FDR and Stalin recognized they had much more in common with each other than either had with arch-racist Churchill. The British Empire was always run as a “closed system”, scientifically managed intelligence operation following Malthusian principles and adherence to strict mathematical equilibrium. In this formula for domination, military forces have typically been less important than control of nerve centers of finance, narcotics and other levers of corruption mental and spiritual corruption than many people- even among the most educated historians realize.

And so we have come full circle. The gods have certainly made those elites managing the west mad, but whether or not the entire world will have to pay the price of their insanity yet remains to be seen.

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Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review.

Featured image: US President Joe Biden departs after delivering remarks on Russia in the East Room at White House, Washington, DC, April 15, 2021 (Source: Indian Punchliine)

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The study below was reported in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (Publication date April 20, 2021) and details the harm caused by mask wearing and adds to a growing body of under-reported, censored and suppressed public health information that contradicts the biomedical narrative that masks are safe and effective and recommended by the CDC.

65 German Studies: Face Masks Cause Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome (MIES)

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(8), 4344; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18084344 ,  April 20, 2021

See: Face Masks (Lack of Safety and Ineffectiveness Research)

Mask Induced Exhaustion Syndrome (MIES)

Here are the pathophysiological changes and subjective complaints:

1.   Increase in blood carbon dioxide

2.   Increase in breathing resistance

3.   Decrease in blood oxygen saturation

4.   Increase in heart rate

5.   Decrease in cardiopulmonary capacity

6.   Feeling of exhaustion

7.   Increase in respiratory rate

8.   Difficulty breathing and shortness of breath

9.   Headache

10. Dizziness

11. Feeling of dampness and heat

12. Drowsiness (qualitative neurological deficits)

13. Decrease in empathy perception

14. Impaired skin barrier function with acne, itching and skin lesions

Results from Mask Wearer Studies

This first-of-its-kind literature review on the adverse effects of face masks, titled “Is a Mask That Covers the Mouth and Nose Free from Undesirable Side Effects in Everyday Use and Free of Potential Hazards?,” reveals there are clear, scientifically demonstrable adverse effects for mask wearers, both on psychological, social and physical levels.

For complete abstract download this.

Abstract

Many countries introduced the requirement to wear masks in public spaces for containing SARS-CoV-2 making it commonplace in 2020. Up until now, there has been no comprehensive investigation as to the adverse health effects masks can cause. The aim was to find, test, evaluate and compile scientifically proven related side effects of wearing masks. For a quantitative evaluation, 44 mostly experimental studies were referenced, and for a substantive evaluation, 65 publications were found.

The literature revealed relevant adverse effects of masks in numerous disciplines. In this paper, we refer to the psychological and physical deterioration as well as multiple symptoms described because of their consistent, recurrent and uniform presentation from different disciplines as a Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome (MIES). We objectified evaluation evidenced changes in respiratory physiology of mask wearers with significant correlation of O2 drop and fatigue (p < 0.05), a clustered co-occurrence of respiratory impairment and O2 drop (67%), N95 mask and CO2 rise (82%), N95 mask and O2 drop (72%), N95 mask and headache (60%), respiratory impairment and temperature rise (88%), but also temperature rise and moisture (100%) under the masks. Extended mask-wearing by the general population could lead to relevant effects and consequences in many medical fields.

Summary

1. Masks in everyday use risk  self-contamination by the wearer both inside and outside, including via contaminated hands [5,16,88]. Masks are soaked by exhaled air, which potentially accumulates infectious agents from the nasopharynx and also from the ambient air on the outside and inside of the mask.

2. Serious infection-causing bacteria and fungi should be mentioned here [86,88,89], but also viruses [87].

3. Masks worn by the general public, are considered by scientists to pose a risk of infection because the standardized hygiene rules of hospitals cannot be followed by the general public [5].

4. History shows that influenza pandemics of 1918-1919, 1957-58, 1968, 2002, in SARS 2004-2005  and 2009, masks DID NOT fight against viral infections [67,144].

5. Even later, scientists and institutions rated the masks as unsuitable to protect the user safely from viral respiratory infections [137,146,147]. Even in hospital use, surgical masks lack strong evidence of protection against viruses [67].

6. The mask is nothing more than a symbol of the wearers fear of infection – reinforced by the collective fear mongering, which is constantly nurtured by mainstream media [137].

7. The mask represents psychological support for the general population as a false sense of security to reduce anxiety.  [152]

8. The WHO’s recommendation of the mask is about giving mask wearers the feeling of a contribution made to preventing the spread of the virus, as well as the reminder to adhere to other measures.  [2].

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We thank Dr. Gary G. Kohls for bringing this article to our attention.

Full authors

Kai Kisielinski;

Paul Giboni;

Andreas Prescher;

Bernd Klosterhalfen;

David Graessel;

Stefan Funken;

Oliver Kempski and

Oliver Hirsch

Featured image is from Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

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