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In mid-February 2023, I reported that the U.S. government has secretly been tracking those who didn’t get the COVID jab, or are only partially jabbed, through a previously unknown surveillance program

Within days, fact checkers tried to debunk the idea that individual people are being tracked, or that these data could be misused by government or third parties

COVID “vaccination” status was not considered a private medical matter at all during 2021 and 2022, yet mainstream media now want you to believe that your COVID jab status is protected by medical privacy laws

Your medical data are not nearly as private as you think. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is rife with exemptions when it comes to your privacy. Federal agencies such as Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, are exempt from the privacy clauses and can access identifiable data — especially if there’s an outbreak of infectious disease, be it real or fictitious

Government agencies and a number of third parties or “covered entities” can also use a number of loopholes to re-identify previously de-identified patient data

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In mid-February 2023, I reported that the U.S. government has secretly been tracking those who didn’t get the COVID jab, or are only partially jabbed, through a previously unknown surveillance program designed by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.¹

Within days, fact checkers were burning the midnight oil trying to debunk the idea that individual people are being tracked, or that these data could be misused by government or third parties.

Strangely enough, the most egregious “misinformation” example USA Today’s fact checker could find was a social media post that “generated nearly 200 likes in less than a month.”² Two hundred likes? To most influencers, that’s nothing, especially not over the course of 30 days.

Why is USA Today stressing over a post with 200 likes? Seems a bit panicky if you ask me. Reuters also came out with a fact check and, like USA Today, Reuters claimed there was a lack of “context:”³

“New diagnostic codes that describe a patient as under-immunized against COVID-19 were introduced to help doctors identify patients potentially at risk for more-severe COVID and to help health officials track vaccine effectiveness and mortality statistics, among other public health questions, not for U.S. government tracking of unvaccinated individuals, as some are claiming online.

The codes in an individual’s medical record, like all personal health information, are protected by U.S. privacy law and could only be analyzed at the group or population level uncoupled from individual identities …”

Your Medical Records Are Far From Private

As is so often the case, the fact checkers are the ones taking the issue out of context or, rather, not presenting the full picture. The fact is, your medical data are not nearly as private as you think. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is rife with exemptions when it comes to your privacy.

Federal agencies such as Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have every right to access identifiable information, as they are exempt from the privacy clauses, and they’re particularly justified to access your private vaccination data if there’s an outbreak of infectious disease, be it real or fictitious. As noted in the HHS’s and CDC’s HIPAA guidance:⁴

“Balancing the protection of individual health information with the need to protect public health, the Privacy Rule expressly permits disclosures without individual authorization to public health authorities authorized by law to collect or receive the information for the purpose of preventing or controlling disease, injury, or disability, including but not limited to public health surveillance, investigation, and intervention …

[T]he Privacy Rule expressly permits PHI [protected health information] to be shared for specified public health purposes. For example, covered entities may disclose PHI, without individual authorization, to a public health authority legally authorized to collect or receive the information for the purpose of preventing or controlling disease, injury, or disability …

Further, the Privacy Rule permits covered entities to make disclosures that are required by other laws, including laws that require disclosures for public health purposes.”

Loopholes Also Allow Re-Identification of Personal Data

Government agencies and a number of third parties or “covered entities” can also use a number of loopholes to re-identify previously de-identified patient data. As explained in a CDC Public Health Law document detailing the lawful sharing of private medical data:⁵

“While HIPAA limits the use and disclosure of health information, it also permits certain secondary use exceptions for public health purposes. HIPAA provides certain circumstances under which patient data can be disclosed to health departments without patient authorization.

Under HIPAA, providers may disclose identifiable patient data (protected health information or PHI) if required by law, allowing states to pass legal exceptions to HIPAA restrictions.

Providers may also disclose PHI to health departments without patient authorization for public health activities, such as communicable disease reporting, or to a public health authority to prevent or control disease, injury, or disability under the public health exemption. A covered entity may access, use, and disclose PHI for clinical research without an individual’s authorization if:

Providers may disclose EHI without patient authorization when the data have been ‘de-identified’ … but still permits re-identification by providers or regional health information organizations through randomized patient source codes should a public health alert or case report become necessary.

Finally, providers may disclose a ‘limited data set,’ including dates and zip codes, without authorization and still re-identify patients if they maintain patient codes derived from certain identifiers.”

So, can your vaccination status be accessed by federal health agencies? Yes. Can that information be identifiable? Absolutely yes. Does that mean that you, as an individual, could be surveilled and/or get caught in a forced vaccination dragnet or end up experiencing negative repercussions in other areas of your life due to your vaccination status? Probably.

U.S. “privacy” laws certainly make allowances for such scenarios, and considering the behavior of government over the past three years, it would be naïve to believe they would never use your vaccination data against you.

Reuters Muddies the Water

Reuters also muddies the water in other ways. For example, the fact check stresses that medical providers have used the general code Z28.3 (which represents “underimmunized”) since 2015, and that “these codes are not used with purposes beyond monitoring and reporting diseases and mortality statistics or for insurance billing.”

While it’s true that the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code Z28.3 has been around for years, the new subcodes that track COVID jab status were added in mid-September 2021 during a ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance Committee meeting, and during that meeting, they specified that “there is interest in being able to track people who are not immunized or only partially immunized.”

Below is a screenshot of page 194 of the agenda⁶ distributed during that meeting. There’s no ambiguity here. The new ICD-10 codes were added for the specific purpose of “tracking people” who are unjabbed or only partially jabbed against COVID-19.

They didn’t say they wanted to track “general population data.” They specifically said “people” are to be tracked. They also clearly state that this tracking is “of value for public health” — and again, the key words “public health” open the door to federal health agencies accessing identifiable data.

Moreover, additional subcodes specify the “why” a person chose not to get the COVID shot or stopped getting boosters. Those codes are listed in the screenshot below, under Z28.3 Underimmunization Status.⁷

The use of “delinquent immunization status” under code Z28.39 also tells us something about where this is all headed. “Delinquent” means being “neglectful of a duty” or being “guilty of an offense.” Is refusing boosters a criminal offense? Perhaps not today, but some day, it might be, and these codes lay the foundation for that kind of medical persecution.

All Missed Vaccinations Will Be Tracked

Another tipoff that these codes will become part and parcel of the biosecurity control grid, even if they’re not used in this way now, is the fact that code Z28.39 — “Other underimmunization status”⁸— is to be used “when a patient is not current on other, non-COVID vaccines.”⁹

In other words, they have already begun tracking ALL of your vaccinations, not just the COVID shot, and they can use the Z28.3 sub-codes to identify why you refused a given vaccine.

They’ve also added a billable ICD-10 code for “immunization safety counseling,” which explains the codes detailing “why” you refused a vaccine. So, if you didn’t get a vaccine due to “personal decision” (code Z28.2), or due to “personal beliefs or group pressure” (code Z28.1), then your doctor can bill your insurance for regurgitating vaccine propaganda and trying to change your mind.

Codes Could Be Put to Good Use

Giving credit where credit is due, Reuters Fact Check did point out a potentially beneficial purpose for the new ICD-10 codes:¹⁰

“[Eric Burnett, who specializes in hospital and internal medicine at Columbia University] said the ICD-10 codes could also help track data on vaccine efficacy, including comparisons between vaccination statuses of hospital or ICU patients with COVID, or patient mortality data based on vaccination status.”

That would be great, but the risk of these data being misused by the government is, I believe, greater than the possibility of them being used to protect the public from dangerous mRNA shots, seeing how overwhelming amounts of data showing harms are already being willfully ignored.

CDC Refuses to Answer Questions About the New Codes

Another red flag is the fact that the CDC has refused to answer questions about how it intends to use the new ICD-10 codes. In mid-February 2023, nine House Republicans sent a letter to the CDC demanding answers to these five questions:¹¹

1. Why did the CDC and National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) decide to start gathering data on why Americans chose not to take the COVID-19 vaccine?
2. How do the CDC and NCHS intend to use these new COVID-19 vaccination ICD codes?
3. What steps are the CDC and NCHS taking to ensure that Americans’ private health information contained in the ICD system is protected?
4. Will the CDC and NCHS confirm that they have not, will not, and cannot create a database of Americans based on their COVID-19 vaccination status?
5. Can the CDC and NCHS confirm that private companies do not have access to lists of Americans’ COVID-19 vaccination status through the ICD system, or any other database overseen by the CDC and NCHS

As reported by The Daily Signal February 28, 2023, the CDC for some reason does not want to answer these questions:¹²

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told The Daily Signal that it ‘will not be tracking’ the reasons Americans give for refusing to take a COVID-19 vaccine … Meanwhile, congressional Republicans told The Daily Signal that the CDC failed to respond to their questions by a deadline last week.

‘Two weeks ago, we sent a letter to the CDC demanding answers about its new COVID-19 vaccine database,’ Rep. Josh Brecheen, R-Okla., told The Daily Signal in a statement …

‘The CDC is stonewalling us and refusing to respond. Why won’t the CDC explain why it’s gathering data about Americans’ personal choices? House Republicans are not afraid to use the budgetary process to keep the CDC accountable to the American people,’ Brecheen warned.

House Republicans raised the alarm about the CDC’s involvement with the World Health Organization’s recently codified International Classification of Disease, or ICD, codes related to COVID-19 vaccination status, which went into effect last April. The codes enable the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to collect data on the reasons Americans refuse to take one of the vaccines …

‘The ICD codes were implemented in April 2022, however the CDC/NCHS does not have any data on the codes and will not be tracking this information,’ Nick Spinelli, a CDC spokesman, said in an emailed statement. ‘The codes are developed and managed by the World Health Organization to enable healthcare providers to track within their practices …'”

End Goal Is Global Database for the Vaccine Passport System

The mention of the WHO brings me to my next point, which is that all of this information will likely, eventually, be transferred into a global vaccination database. Hence the reason why the WHO develops and manages the ICD-10 codes. It’s to allow for the “harmonization” of health care across the world.

Incidentally, the fact that the WHO develops and manages these codes also means that the WHO has approved these new codes that track vaccination status, and we already know that the WHO is working on a global vaccine passport.

To work properly, a global vaccine passport system needs a global vaccination database, and there’s no telling what privacy measures, if any, such a database might end up with. What we do know is that white papers¹³ and proposed legislation¹⁴ published during the COVID era that discuss health tracking and/or vaccine passports have stressed that privacy concerns must be relaxed or dropped altogether to ensure global biosecurity.

We also saw how COVID “vaccination” status was not considered a private medical matter at all during 2021 and 2022. In many places, you had to disclose your status and show proof that you’d been jabbed. Yet mainstream media now want you to believe that your COVID jab status is protected by medical privacy laws. What a joke.

As noted by Dr. Robert Malone in a January 25, 2023, Substack article, this vaccine passport system is being put into place right under our noses, and it would be incredibly naïve to think that these new ICD-10 codes are not part of that scheme:¹⁵

“The administrative state is busy building a vaccine passport system that will be active before most Americans are aware of what is being done to them. No one is going to knock on your door asking for your vaccine status because they already know …

They don’t need approval from Congress or the courts because we have given them the information through our health care providers. The CDC is the governmental organization tasked with tracking vaccine status on individuals.

They already have the records, as well as updated booster information. They just need to tweak a definition here and there, or get President Biden to keep the COVID-19 public health emergency in place indefinitely and the vaccine passports will be a fait accompli.”

A Data Collection Dragnet

As of January 1, 2014, the U.S. government required public and private health care providers to adopt and use electronic medical records (EMR) if they wanted to quality for full Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement.

The government also financially incentivized physicians and hospitals to adopt electronic HEALTH records or EHR.¹⁶ The difference between EMR and EHR is that EHR provides a far more comprehensive patient history than EMR, as it contains a patient’s medical history from more than one medical practice.

In essence, EHR is what you get when doctors share your medical data to create one comprehensive file that covers all your interactions with the medical system. While that sounds good in theory, Big Pharma immediately seized the opportunity to misuse it by placing drug ads within the EHR system.

This in turn has driven up medical costs and resulted in poor prescribing decisions that put patients at risk.¹⁷ Patients are also directly targeted with drug marketing through patient portals.

Physicians and hospitals who adopted EHR got paid extra. Between January 1, 2011 and December 31, 2016, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) paid out EHR incentive payments to hospitals totaling $14.6 billion.¹⁸ Meanwhile, those who chose not to capture, share and report clinical data on patients were financially penalized through reduced Medicare reimbursements.^19,20

Needless to say, these “sticks” and “carrots” led to the rapid adoption of both EMR and EHR, both of which government requires if it wants the power to control the population through medicine, and we now know that’s exactly what government intends to do.

Transhumanism Is Being Implemented Through Food and Medicine

At the end of September 2022, President Biden laid out a “bold goal” to “end hunger and increase healthy eating and physical activity by 2030” through a federally-backed “Food Is Medicine” campaign.²¹

Integrating food and nutrition with health care so that food and health policies are under one umbrella will facilitate the creation of new policies, funding and control over both areas. Eventually, food purchases and health records will be linked to your vaccine passport/digital identity, which also holds your educational records, travel records, work records and bank accounts.

That this “Food Is Medicine” campaign has nothing to do with promoting real nutrition or whole food is obvious, as that same month Biden also signed the “Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe and Secure American Bioeconomy.”²²

This specifies that biotechnology and genetic engineering be used to transform the food and medical industries in order to promote a transhumanist agenda. It’s all about creating fake, synthetic and genetically manipulated foods and tinkering with the human genome.

On a larger scale, this plan is also promoted by the World Health Organization, which is trying to seize power over health care globally through International Health Regulation (IHR) amendments and the Pandemic Treaty. For more information on that, see “Pandemic Treaty Will Usher In Unelected One World Government.”

The WHO is also seeking to put food, medicine and climate under one umbrella. This would allow it to control the global population in any number of ways, as a climate issue could be positioned as a public health issue, or a food issue, and vice versa. In other words, people could be forced to eat bugs instead of beef because it “benefits the climate.” Private vehicle use could be restricted because it helps lower vehicular pollution that endangers public health, and so on.

So, to bring us full circle back to where we started, while media are now trying to lull you to sleep with “promises” that there’s nothing nefarious about tracking the unvaccinated or “undervaccinated,” think long and hard before you close your eyes to the possibility that this is all part of biosecurity-based totalitarian control grid.

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Notes

¹ PJ Media April 8, 2023

² USA Today March 10, 2023

^3, 10 Reuters February 21, 2023

⁴ CDC HIPAA Privacy Rule and Public Health

⁵ CDC Public Health Law

⁶ CDC ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance Committee Meeting September 14-15, 2021

⁷ Naked Emperor Substack January 27, 2023

⁸ ICD10data Underimmunization

⁹ AAFP New Diagnosis Codes

^11, 12 The Daily Signal February 28, 2023

¹³ The Rockefeller Foundation, National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan — Strategic Steps to Reopen Our Workplaces and Our Communities, April 21, 2020 (PDF)

¹⁴ Congress.gov HR 6666

¹⁵ RW Malone Substack January 25, 2023

^16, 20 USF Health February 16, 2017, Updated March 4, 2023

¹⁷ AMA June 16, 2021

¹⁸ OIG HHS EHR Incentive Payments to Hospitals

¹⁹ AMA EHR Incentive Programs

²¹ Health.gov Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health

²² Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe and Secure American Bioeconomy

Featured image is from Mercola

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Lavrov’s trip showcased the significant role that Russia attaches to Brazil when it comes to the Latin American dimension of Moscow’s grand strategy. Both parties’ rhetoric was positive, but it remains to be seen if anything of tangible substance ultimately comes from it, which will be greatly determined by whether or not Lula attends this year’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in less than two months’ time like he was just invited to do.

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov’s latest visit to Brazil went exactly as expected with respect to these two BRICS countries promising to comprehensively expand cooperation, but there were also five very important details that evaded the notice of most observers. The first is that the official Brazilian press release informed everyone that bilateral trade reached the historic record of $9.8 billion last year, which occurred entirely under the tenure of Lula’s predecessor Bolsonaro.

This fact contradicts the Alt-Media Community’s narrative that this former leader was a US puppet since no such proxy would ever take trade with Russia to its highest-ever level, especially in the context of the ongoing NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine over the past year. The basis upon which both sides pledged to further enhance their ties was therefore partially built by Bolsonaro, who in turn continued the trajectory that Temer and Rousseff kept in place from Lula’s first two terms.

Second, Lavrov’s expression of gratitude “to our Brazilian friends for a correct understanding of the genesis of this situation and their striving to contribute to a search for ways of settling it” that was reported in the Russian Foreign Ministry’s official transcript of his joint statement has a deeper meaning.  It extends credence to a recently leaked report alleging that his country approves of the optics surrounding Lula’s peace rhetoric, but this crucially isn’t the same as endorsing the substance thereof.

About that, the third detail is the time that Russia’s top diplomat devoted to explaining Moscow’s stance towards the conflict and desire to see it end “as soon as possible”. This follows Lula’s condemnation of Russia in his joint statement with Biden, Brazil’s vote in support of an anti-Russian UNGA Resolution, and then Lula lying just the day prior to Lavrov’s trip about President Putin supposedly being disinterested in peace. Accordingly, his words can thus be seen as a polite response to those preceding developments.

Fourth, Lavrov’s reaffirmation of support for Brazil’s envisaged permanent UNSC seat proves the de-ideologization of Russia’s relations with Latin America, especially after Lula’s abovementioned political unfriendliness and his reported plans to launch a global influence network with the US Democrats. Even though China and the US are Brazil’s two most important partners in Lula’s grand strategy, Russia can still help it advance their shared goal of accelerating the global systemic transition to multipolarity.

And finally, Lavrov’s counterpart confirmed that he passed along President Putin’s invitation for Lula to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in mid-June, which TASS reported was first extended during his chief foreign policy advisor’s trip to Moscow last month. Lula earlier pledged that he won’t visit either Russia or Ukraine due to their conflict, and the ICC demands that Brazil arrest President Putin if he ever sets food there, so it’s unclear whether Lula will take him up on this offer.

This last-mentioned detail from Lavrov’s trip to Brazil is by far the most important since it’s a clever and polite way to assess the sincerity of Lula’s stated intentions to continue building ties with Russia in spite of US pressure. He can of course just say that there are so-called “scheduling conflicts” or possibly claim to be sick right before he’s supposed to depart for St. Petersburg, but the point is that this will prove whether Lula is serious about making good on everything that Lavrov and his counterpart discussed.

All told, Lavrov’s trip showcased the significant role that Russia attaches to Brazil when it comes to the Latin American dimension of Moscow’s grand strategy. Both parties’ rhetoric was positive, but it remains to be seen if anything of tangible substance ultimately comes from it, which will be greatly determined by whether or not Lula attends this year’s SPIEF in less than two months’ time. In the meantime, the US is expected to maximally pressure him into not going, so it’s difficult to predict what he’ll do.

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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

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Watching a once great nation commit suicide is not pretty. President Joe Biden does not seem to understand that his role as elected leader of the United States is to take actions that directly or indirectly benefit the folks who voted for him as well as the other Americans who did not do so. That is how a constitutional democracy is supposed to work.

Instead, Biden and the gang of introverts and neocon war criminals that the has surrounded himself with have done everything that can to inflict fatal damage on the economy through rash initiatives both overseas and at home. A spending spree to buy support from the bizarre constituencies that make up the Democrat Party base while also fighting an undeclared war in Europe have meant that nearly two trillion dollars has been added to the national debt under Biden’s rule, a debt that was already unsustainable at nearly $30 trillion, larger than the United States’ gross national product. Plans to cancel student loan debts will add hundreds of billions of dollars more to the red ink.

And those actions undertaken overseas, to include continuing to expand the war in Ukraine against Russia, will do immeasurable more damage. Consider how the Democratic Party has long had it in for Russian Federal President Vladimir Putin, dating back to when Putin took power in 2000 and started kicking out the western scallywags who were looting his country.

Subsequently, false intelligence and other innuendoes were contrived by Hillary Clinton and her team in 2016 to implicate Donald Trump as a Russian stooge who was secretly working for Putin. When that didn’t work and Trump was elected, the Russians were accused by the media and Democrats of willy-nilly interfering in US elections more generally speaking, a much-exaggerated claim in contrast to the overwhelming silence surrounding the real electoral and policy interference, which has been coming from Israel and its fifth column inside the United States, who, not coincidentally, are the chief proponents of the war against Russia.

Placing a target on Vladimir Putin’s back appears to have an unfortunate consequence which Biden has yet to wake up to, namely the fact that the United States now has what might be described as a Ponzi scheme faux economy which is very vulnerable, particularly as much of the world has become disenchanted with the US style of global leadership. Note for example the recent state visit by French President Emmanuel Macron to Beijing, where he embraced a “global strategic partnership with China” to bring about a “multipolar” world, freed of “blocs” that is not sheltering behind “Cold War mentality.” Macron also criticized the “extraterritoriality of the US dollar.”

And threats made by the Bidens against both China and Russia have accomplished little beyond drawing the two major political and military powers closer together. Beijing and Moscow entered into a trade agreement in their own currencies in 2014 and have openly taken steps to challenge US dominance of international currency exchanges, creating instead a global multipolar trading environment. Europe aside, many nations are now eager to cut the tie that binds, which is the decades long American dominance of international financial mechanisms and also the general use of dollars to pay for oil and other energy supplies. The widespread use of petrodollars enables the buffoonish Janet Yellen at the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve banks to print unlimited unbacked fiat currency, knowing that there will always be a market for it.

Which brings us back to the Ukraine war, pursued “until we win” by Biden and his somnolent Secretary of State Antony Blinken. One of the first moves when Russia intervened in Ukraine was to block and eventually confiscate Russia’s 300 billion dollars-worth of foreign reserves in banks in the US and Europe. That sent a shock wave across currency markets all around the world. Biden and Yellen had weaponized the US’s own national currency, which hitherto had been an untouchable step in international relations for nations that were not actually at war. Countries like China and India with large economies then realized that the US Treasury Department and the dominance of the dollar as an exchange currency had now become a weapon of war and a serious threat to the economies of all other nations.

As a consequence, the US Dollar is right now being rejected by many nations as the world’s reserve currency. Some nations all over the world have agreed to use the Chinese Yuan and Indian Rupee for any-and-all international currency transactions. Saudi Arabia continues to use the petrodollar but does not demand it. Recently, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to permit the Saudis to sell oil to China in Yuan. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, is now allowing multiple currencies to be used to purchase its oil, a major attack on the primacy of the US dollar and it also has accepted Chinese mediation to mend fences with the US and Israel’s arch enemy Iran. And the Saudis have even more recently refused a Biden Administration request that it start pumping more oil to reduce energy costs, signaling that the shift is both political and economic in nature. Japan, a major economy, has also started purchasing oil and gas directly from Russia against the US imposed energy embargo while Brazil, another major economy, has agreed to use the Yuan in its increasing trade with China. As fewer nations utilize the US dollar, America’s ability to export and ignore its burgeoning domestic debt and inflation to other countries is being diminished.

This might have a decisive impact on the US currency as the drive to break with the petrodollar continues to grow and could produce something like a “perfect storm” impacting on the US economy. It threatens to drastically lower the standards of living of nearly all Americans within the next several years as the dollar loses value and purchasing power. As the US economy is heavily interconnected with many European economies, Europe is also likely to be a victim of the coming disaster.

The good news, of course, is that the United States will no longer be able to afford its endless wars and international interventions. Lacking its economic power, it will no longer be able to declare itself “exceptional” and the enforcer of a “rules based international order.” It would mean an ending of the funding of developments like the Ukraine proxy war and the troops will have to come home from places like Syria and Somalia. And it might even mark the ending of sending billions of dollars annually to a wealthy Israel.

Ending dollar supremacy would inevitably have an immediate impact on what passes for US foreign policy, making it more difficult for Washington to initiate and sustain Treasury Department sanctions on countries like Iran and North Korea. It could also create economic turmoil for many countries until the situation resolves itself by producing greater volatility in currency markets worldwide. The Federal Reserve Bank will no doubt respond to the unfolding crisis by acting as it always does by raising interest rates to astronomical levels, thereby hurting most the Americans who can least afford the shock therapy.

And it did not have to turn out this way. It could have been avoided. If the US, which had no horse in the race, had left Ukraine alone Vladimir Putin would not have become a symbol of defiance against the “Rules Based International Order” and he would not have worked with China to establish multipolarity in the way the financial world operates. Instead, we have a situation where Europe is being de-industrialized due to soaring energy prices and Washington’s destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines while the US is potentially confronting economic disaster as the dollar’s relevance to international trade sinks. The ultimate irony is that Russia, and also the US/Israeli arch enemy Iran, are by comparison doing quite well economically as they sell their oil and gas to anyone in any currency. One has to conclude that when US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently made her secret trip to Kiev to promise the despicable Volodymyr Zelensky billions of taxpayer dollars the United States might just have been better served if she had stayed in Washington and made some minimal effort to address the mounting economic problems confronting us here at home.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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*** 

Several former military and intelligence professionals have contacted me and voiced similar doubts about the pat story being circulated regarding National Guard Airman Jack Texeira and the allegations that he removed TOP SECRET documents from a SCIF, photographed them and then posted them to a gamer chat. They all agree, something is not right. The media account does not make sense.

The biggest oddity are the two separate documents from the CIA’s Operations Center. Neither are complete and both deal only with the Ukrainian/Russian war. To reiterate a point from my previous article, that CIA Operations Center produces two daily reports — one in the morning and one in the afternoon. It is not a “Community” product, i.e., it is not distributed to the other intelligence agencies. It is an internal CIA document (of course, it is available to the Director of National Intelligence).

Texeira’s alleged possession of two separate reports is doubly odd because he did not copy the full reports. The one dated 1 March 2023 only shows 3 of 8 pages. If he was taking the documents to impress the youngsters on the gamer chat, why did he not take the whole enchilada? And why did he only publish the portions of the intel report that dealt exclusively with Ukraine and Russia?

There has been some media reports that he also posted a State Department EXDIS cable. I have not seen it and cannot confirm that it exists. If it does, that would be another huge red flag. EXDIS is bureaucratic speak for EXCLUSIVE DISSEMINATION. It has a cousin, NODIS — i.e., NO DISTRIBUTION. The U.S. military does not have access to such cables.

There was a time when State EXDIS was available to U.S. military commands on a restricted basis. That was pre-Chelsea Manning. After Manning’s leaks in 2010, that access was cut off. I know this first hand because I was part of a team scripting military exercises for all U.S. regional commands (i.e., EUCOM, NORTHCOM, AFRICOM, PACOM, CENTCOM and SOUTHCOM) during the course of a year. I was the State Department Subject Matter Expert. That means I had the job of creating cable traffic from the Secretary of State or U.S. Embassies that the U.S. military might see during a terrorist crisis. Prior to the Manning/Wikileaks leak, I had full access to State Department messages, including EXDIS. After Manning, that access was terminated. Not just for me but for all the uniformed personnel I worked with. All held TS SCI clearances. There has been no change in that policy, which means there is no way that Jack Texeira would have had any access to copy and take a State Department EXDIS message.

Another curiosity with the story, apart from Jack’s youth and the claim that he held TS SCI clearances and had access to CIA internal reports, is the schedule of his Massachusetts Air National Guard unit. That outfit had not been called up and assigned a 24 x 7 mission. Instead, the Air National Guard unit meets one weekend a month. In other words, Jack had to work his magic over a two or three day period surrounded by peers and those in command of the unit. You do not just show up and pursue your own interests. There are drills and assigned work, which is supervised by Non-Commissioned Officers (i.e., Sergeants) and Officers.

The documents I have seen posted on Twitter and Telegram, were dated 28 February, 1 March and 2 March, i.e., Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. According to the MI-6 funded Bellingcat, those documents were published on 4 March, a Saturday. Let’s assume that Texeira’s National Guard unit assembled for drill on March 4. We’re asked to believe that Jack Texeira showed up for monthly Air National Guard duty on Saturday, quickly scoured the high side computer for sensitive documents, printed them off, smuggled them out of the SCIF, returned home sometime after 5 pm (normal end of duty day), photographed the documents and quickly uploaded them to the Discord server. If that is what happened, it smacks of urgency. Most young airmen, after a long day at work, want to go out and party rather than stay at home photographing documents.

I remain skeptical of the narrative and hope by raising these questions that some genuine journalists will explore the oddities and try to get to the ground truth.

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Why is the Pentagon budget so high?

On March 13th, the Biden administration unveiled its $842 billion military budget request for 2024, the largest ask (in today’s dollars) since the peaks of the Afghan and Iraq wars. And mind you, that’s before the hawks in Congress get their hands on it. Last year, they added $35 billion to the administration’s request and, this year, their add-on is likely to prove at least that big. Given that American forces aren’t even officially at war right now (if you don’t count those engaged in counter-terror operations in Africa and elsewhere), what explains so much military spending?

The answer offered by senior Pentagon officials and echoed in mainstream Washington media coverage is that this country faces a growing risk of war with Russia or China (or both of them at once) and that the lesson of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is the need to stockpile vast numbers of bombs, missiles, and other munitions. “Pentagon, Juggling Russia, China, Seeks Billions for Long-Range Weapons” was a typical headline in the Washington Post about that 2024 budget request. Military leaders are overwhelmingly focused on a potential future conflict with either or both of those powers and are convinced that a lot more money should be spent now to prepare for such an outcome, which means buying extra tanks, ships, and planes, along with all the bombs, shells, and missiles they carry.

Even a quick look at the briefing materials for that future budget confirms such an assessment. Many of the billions of dollars being tacked onto it are intended to procure exactly the items you would expect to use in a war with those powers in the late 2020s or 2030s. Aside from personnel costs and operating expenses, the largest share of the proposed budget — $170 billion or 20% — is allocated for purchasing just such hardware.

But while preparations for such wars in the near future drive a significant part of that increase, a surprising share of it — $145 billion, or 17% — is aimed at possible conflicts in the 2040s and 2050s. Believing that our “strategic competition” with China is likely to persist for decades to come and that a conflict with that country could erupt at any moment along that future trajectory, the Pentagon is requesting its largest allocation ever for what’s called “research, development, test, and evaluation” (RDT&E), or the process of converting the latest scientific discoveries into weapons of war.

To put this in perspective, that $145 billion is more than any other country except what China spends on defense in toto and constitutes approximately half of China’s full military budget. So what’s that staggering sum of money, itself only a modest part of this country’s military budget, intended for?

Some of it, especially the “T&E” part, is designed for futuristic upgrades of existing weapons systems. For example, the B-52 bomber — at 70, the oldest model still flying — is being retrofitted to carry experimental AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapons (ARRWs), or advanced hypersonic missiles. But much of that sum, especially the “R&D” part, is aimed at developing weapons that may not see battlefield use until decades in the future, if ever. Spending on such systems is still onlyin the millions or low billions, but it will certainly balloon into the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in the years to come, ensuring that future Pentagon budgets soar into the trillions.

Weaponizing Emerging Technologies

Driving the Pentagon’s increased focus on future weapons development is the assumption that China and Russia will remain major adversaries for decades to come and that future wars with those, or other major powers, could largely be decided by the mastery of artificial intelligence (AI) along with other emerging technologies. Those would include robotics, hypersonics (projectiles that fly at more than five times the speed of sound), and quantum computing. As the Pentagon’s 2024 budget request put it:

“An increasing array of fast-evolving technologies and innovative applications of existing technology complicates the [Defense] Department’s ability to maintain an edge in combat credibility and deterrence. Newer capabilities such as counterspace weapons, hypersonic weapons, new and emerging payload and delivery systems… all create a heightened potential… for shifts in perceived deterrence of U.S. military power.”

To ensure that this country can overpower Chinese and/or Russian forces in any conceivable encounter, top officials insist, Washington must focus on investing in a major way in the advanced technologies likely to dominate future battlefields. Accordingly, $17.8 billion of that $145 billion RDT&E budget will be directly dedicated to military-related science and technology development. Those funds, the Pentagon explains, will be used to accelerate the weaponization of artificial intelligence and speed the growth of other emerging technologies, especially robotics, autonomous (or “unmanned”) weapons systems, and hypersonic missiles.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is of particular interest to the Department of Defense, given its wide range of potential military uses, including target identification and assessment, enhanced weapons navigation and targeting systems, and computer-assisted battlefield decision-making. Although there’s no total figure for AI research and development offered in the unclassified version of the 2024 budget, certain individual programs are highlighted. One of these is the Joint All-Domain Command-and-Control system (JADC2), an AI-enabled matrix of sensors, computers, and communications devices intended to collect and process data on enemy movements and convey that information at lightning speed to combat forces in every “domain” (air, sea, ground, and space). At $1.3 billion, JADC2 may not be “the biggest number in the budget,” said Under Secretary of Defense Michael J. McCord, but it constitutes “a very central organizing concept of how we’re trying to link information together.”

AI is also essential for the development of — and yes, nothing seems to lack an acronym in Pentagon documents — autonomous weapons systems, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and unmanned surface vessels (USVs). Such devices — far more bluntly called “killer robots” by their critics — typically combine a mobile platform of some sort (plane, tank, or ship), an onboard “kill mechanism” (gun or missile), and an ability to identify and attack targets with minimal human oversight. Believing that the future battlefield will become ever more lethal, Pentagon officials aim to replace as many of its crewed platforms as possible — think ships, planes, and artillery — with advanced UAVs, UGVs, and USVs.

The 2024 budget request doesn’t include a total dollar figure for research on future unmanned weapons systems but count on one thing: it will come to many billions of dollars. The budget does indicate that $2.2 billion is being sought for the early procurement of MQ-4 and MQ-25 unmanned aerial vehicles, and such figures are guaranteed to swell as experimental robotic systems move into large-scale production. Another $200 million was requested to design a large USV, essentially a crewless frigate or destroyer. Once prototype vessels of this type have been built and tested, the Navy plans to order dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, instantly creating a $100 billion-plus market for a naval force lacking the usual human crew.

Another area receiving extensive Pentagon attention is hypersonics, because such projectiles will fly so fast and maneuver with such skill (while skimming atop the atmosphere’s outer layer) that they should be essentially impossible to track and intercept. Both China and Russia already possess rudimentary weapons of this type, with Russia reportedly firing some of its hypersonic Kinzhal missiles into Ukraine in recent months.

As the Pentagon put it in its budget request:

“Hypersonic systems expand our ability to hold distant targets at risk, dramatically shorten the timeline to strike a target, and their maneuverability increases survivability and unpredictability. The Department will accelerate fielding of transformational capability enabled by air, land, and sea-based hypersonic strike weapon systems to overcome the challenges to our future battlefield domain dominance.”

Another 14% of the RDT&E request, or about $2.5 billion, is earmarked for research in even more experimental fields like quantum computing and advanced microelectronics. “The Department’s science and technology investments are underpinned by early-stage basic research,” the Pentagon explains. “Payoff for this research may not be evident for years, but it is critical to ensuring our enduring technological advantage in the decades ahead.” As in the case of AI, autonomous weapons, and hypersonics, these relatively small amounts (by Pentagon standards) will balloon in the years ahead as initial discoveries are applied to functioning weapons systems and procured in ever larger quantities.

Harnessing American Tech Talent for Long-Term War Planning

There’s one consequence of such an investment in RDT&E that’s almost too obvious to mention. If you think the Pentagon budget is sky high now, just wait! Future spending, as today’s laboratory concepts are converted into actual combat systems, is likely to stagger the imagination. And that’s just one of the significant consequences of such a path to permanent military superiority. To ensure that the United States continues to dominate research in the emerging technologies most applicable to future weaponry, the Pentagon will seek to harness an ever-increasing share of this country’s scientific and technological resources for military-oriented work.

This, in turn, will mean capturing an ever-larger part of the government’s net R&D budget at the expense of other national priorities. In 2022, for example, federal funding for non-military R&D (including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) represented only about 33% of R&D spending. If the 2024 military budget goes through at the level requested (or higher), that figure for non-military spending will drop to 31%, a trend only likely to strengthen in the future as more and more resources are devoted to war preparation, leaving an ever-diminishing share of taxpayer funding for research on vital concerns like cancer prevention and treatment, pandemic response, and climate change adaptation.

No less worrisome, ever more scientists and engineers will undoubtedly be encouraged— not to say, prodded — to devote their careers to military research rather than work in more peaceable fields. While many scientists struggle for grants to support their work, the Department of Defense (DoD) offers bundles of money to those who choose to study military-related topics. Typically enough, the 2024 request includes $347 million for what the military is now calling the University Research Initiative, most of which will be used to finance the formation of “teams of researchers across disciplines and across geographic boundaries to focus on DoD-specific hard science problems.” Another $200 million is being allocated to the Joint University Microelectronics Program by the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, the Pentagon’s R&D outfit, while $100 million is being provided to the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics by the Pentagon’s Joint Hypersonics Transition Office. With so much money flowing into such programs and the share devoted to other fields of study shrinking, it’s hardly surprising that scientists and graduate students at major universities are being drawn into the Pentagon’s research networks.

In fact, it’s also seeking to expand its talent pool by providing additional funding to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In January, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that Howard University in Washington, D.C., had been chosen as the first such school to serve as a university-affiliated research center by the Department of Defense, in which capacity it will soon be involved in work on autonomous weapons systems. This will, of course, provide badly needed money to scientists and engineers at that school and other HBCUs that may have been starved of such funding in the past. But it also begs the question: Why shouldn’t Howard receive similar amounts to study problems of greater relevance to the Black community like sickle-cell anemia and endemic poverty?

Endless Arms Races vs. Genuine Security

In devoting all those billions of dollars to research on next-generation weaponry, the Pentagon’s rationale is straightforward: spend now to ensure U.S. military superiority in the 2040s, 2050s, and beyond. But however persuasive this conceit may seem — even with all those mammoth sums of money pouring in — things rarely work out so neatly. Any major investment of this sort by one country is bound to trigger countermoves from its rivals, ensuring that any early technological advantage will soon be overcome in some fashion, even as the planet is turned into ever more of an armed camp.

The Pentagon’s development of precision-guided munitions, for example, provided American forces with an enormous military advantage during the Persian Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003, but also prompted China, Iran, Russia, and other countries to begin developing similar weaponry, quickly diminishing that advantage. Likewise, China and Russia were the first to deploy combat-ready hypersonic weapons, but in response, the U.S. will be fielding a far greater array of them in a few years’ time.

Chinese and Russian advances in deploying hypersonics also led the U.S. to invest in developing — yes, you guessed it! — anti-hypersonic hypersonics, launching yet one more arms race on planet Earth, while boosting the Pentagon budget by additional billions. Given all this, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the 2024 Pentagon budget request includes $209 million for the development of a hypersonic interceptor, only the first installment in costly development and procurement programs in the years to come in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow.

If you want to bet on anything, then here’s a surefire way to go: the Pentagon’s drive to achieve dominance in the development and deployment of advanced weaponry will lead not to supremacy but to another endless cycle of high-tech arms races that, in turn, will consume an ever-increasing share of this country’s wealth and scientific talent, while providing negligible improvements in national security. Rather than spending so much on future weaponry, we should all be thinking about enhanced arms control measures, global climate cooperation, and greater investment in non-military R&D.

If only…

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Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change. He is a founder of the Committee for a Sane U.S.-China Policy.

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“Global Power Struggles Signal An End to An Era of Diplomacy.” So ran a page one headline to New York Times April 11 print edition for an article marking Joe Biden’s ceremonial visit to Ireland to commemorate the 25^th anniversary of the Good Friday Accords.

The commemoration served as an “unspoken reminder that such diplomatic breakthroughs remain a thing of the past,” bemoaned reporter Peter Baker.

Certainly, he is correct if one confines one’s view to the record of the US and its vassal states on the Ukraine crisis. Sec. of State Blinken has made it abundantly clear that the US wants nothing to do with negotiations to end the US proxy war in Ukraine.

Likewise, the US and its allies cynically used negotiations over the Minsk Accords for eight years as a cover for war preparations. Then the US and UK torpedoed the very promising negotiations between Russia and Ukraine to end the war in April of 2022.

But to declare diplomacy dead simply because US diplomacy is a corpse indicates a blinding tunnel vision. If we look at nations outside the West, the future of diplomacy looks brighter all the time. The Middle East provides a clear example, one among too many to be considered here.

China Brokers Saudi Arabia, Iran Deal

Early in March, Iran and Saudi Arabia restored diplomatic relations after a seven year lapse, a deal brokered by China and announced at a meeting of foreign policy officials of the two countries in Beijing in early April. This followed a visit by Xi Jinping to Riyadh in December and a visit of Iran’s President Raisi to Xi in Beijing in February. By early June the countries will reopen embassies and consulates and they look to cooperate on trade, technology, and combatting terrorism.

Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official summed things up as follows: “This is a victory for dialogue, a victory for peace, and is major positive news for the world which is currently so turbulent and restive, and it sends a clear signal.”

The antagonism between Riyadh and Tehran has shaped much of the conflict in the Middle East including the horrific war in Yemen, a humanitarian catastrophe that has consumed 230,000 lives in fighting and famine. There is now movement to get a “permanent ceasefire” and end the war, perhaps the first dividend of the “clear signal,” Wang Yi mentioned.

As The Intercept remarked, “To help end the Yemen war, all China had to do was be reasonable. With Joe Biden nowhere to be found, China’s diplomacy set the stage for Saudi concessions and cease-fire talks.” As this is written, there comes news of a swap of nearly 900 prisoners over three days between the warring Yemeni factions, unimaginable just weeks ago.

Moscow Mediates Syria-Saudi Reconciliation

Diplomacy seems to be spreading like a contagion in the region. In the wake of the Syrian-Saudi agreements mediated by Beijing, Moscow has moved to broker a reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Syria which is leading to Syria’s rejoining the Arab League. The Saudis plan to invite Bashar al-Assad to an Arab League Summit on May 19. This is something that Washington has worked to prevent for over a decade by threat and sanctions.

It is clear that the Moscow-Beijing “no limits” partnership facilitated the reconciliation between Syria, a Russian ally, and Saudi Arabia, the newfound friend of Beijing. A hint of things to come perhaps.

Much of this diplomatic effort is simply to undo the damage inflicted on Syria after the Arab Spring unrest of 2011 which the US turned into a full-scale regime change op and civil war. As part of its anti-Syrian vendetta, the US has used any and all means to keep Syria down and isolated from its Arab neighbors for the last 12 years.

It has also left nearly 1000 US soldiers (the official count) fighting in Syria to this day in an undeclared war unknown to most of the American people. Those troops occupy a region that is the agricultural breadbasket and source of oil for Syria which is starved for food and energy after the great damage caused by years of war.

The claim has always been made that US troops are there to fight ISIS or its latest incarnation, but as Aaron Mate has demonstrated most persuasively, the real purpose remains regime change in Syria. (As the wise Jimmy Dore often asks, If Syria is fighting ISIS, why is the US fighting Syria?)

Diplomacy for Peace, an alien idea in Washington

All these diplomatic moves in such a short time are almost dizzying. They were opened up by China’s masterful initiative with Iran and Saudi Arabia. And they are designed to bring stability and peace to the region which the developing nations there desperately need if they are to move forward. And that development can help the economies of the world.

The US made its own unique contribution to the process by dispatching CIA Director William Burns in an unannounced visit to Saudi Arabia with a complaint that the US was “blind-sided’ by the move to reconcile with the Saudis. Some see the Burns visit as a warning or perhaps even a threat. Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud will want to beef up his security detail.

To return to the New York Times account of Biden’s failure at diplomacy, one success in the eyes of the Times was mentioned: “Mr. Biden and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken have successfully unified NATO against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and won support from other countries as well.” This may be a premature announcement of success, if one examines the situation in the EU more closely. But whatever the case, this is a “diplomatic” initiative to further Biden’s cruel proxy war to bring down Russia, cynically using Ukrainians as cannon fodder. Diplomacy for war.

Quite a contrast. Diplomacy for war versus diplomacy for peace.

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John V. Walsh, until recently a Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience at a Medical School in Massachusetts, has written on issues of peace and health care for the San Francisco Chronicle, EastBayTimes/San Jose Mercury News, Asia Times, LA Progressive, Antiwar.com, Consortium News, CounterPunch, and others.

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A delegation from Saudi Arabia has arrived in Yemen’s capital Sana’a alongside Omani negotiators with the aim of reaching a resolution to the protracted war in Yemen. This marks a major turning point in a conflict that began more than eight years ago and has been characterized as a stalemate between Yemen’s Houthis and a coalition of anti-Houthi forces backed and led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

This arguably unexpected turn of events — surprising given Saudi Arabia’s years-long war against a group they characterize as ​“Iran-allied rebels” — is the result of talks that began in early 2022 between the Saudi Arabian government and Yemen’s government in Sana’a, led by Ansar Allah — also known as the Houthis. The Houthis have in effect been ruling much of northern Yemen for the past eight years. 

This is ​“the closest Yemen has been to real progress towards lasting peace,” Hans Grundberg, the United Nations envoy to Yemen, remarked to the Associated Press earlier this month. Grundberg urged both parties to ​“start an inclusive political process under UN auspices to sustainably end the conflict.” 

While the terms of any settlement have yet to be made public, this moment signals the seriousness of the talks and the likelihood of a lasting political agreement among warring parties following years of asymmetrical warfare in which hundreds of thousands of Yemenis were killed, millions more were starved, and Yemen was virtually left in ruins.

War and Famine

In the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring, peaceful country-wide protests began in Yemen that eventually ended with Yemen’s longtime dictator, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, transferring power to his then-Vice President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi in 2011. 

In the following years, Hadi clinged to power after failing to address the demands of all of the country’s various factions. Meanwhile, Ansar Allah rose to power following protests against the government’s curbing of fuel subsidies, and eventually seized the capital Sana’a in late 2014, and forced Hadi into house arrest.

Despite these tumultuous events, a UN-negotiated settlement was reached between Hadi, the Houthis and other factions, but this settlement was derailed. Soon after the new Saudi king appointed his son, Mohammed bin Salman, as deputy crown prince and defense minister in early 2015, Saudi Arabia amassed a coalition of several neighboring countries and, together with Western support – primarily from the Obama administration—launched airstrikes against the Houthis and imposed a naval blockade targeting food, medicine, fuel and other essential supplies in an effort to reinstate Hadi as the main head of the government. This was ratified in UN resolution 2216, which provided cover for these attacks and the imposition of the blockade under the guise of an ​“arms embargo.”

Meanwhile, Hadi fled to Riyadh and continued to enjoy Saudi support for years to come, while the UAE trained and funded the Southern Transitional Council (STC), a separatist group whose stated goals are to secede from the Yemeni union.

Despite full military support from the United States and other allies, including weapon sales, intelligence, logistics, training, targeting support, and, until late 2018, mid-air refueling, the Saudi-led coalition failed to capture Yemen’s most populous region from the Houthis. The Houthis, on the other hand, joined forces with their longtime enemy, former president Saleh, and formed a government and armed resistance to the Saudi-led coalition.

Even after their fallout and subsequent killing of Saleh in December 2017 after he switched to the Saudi-coalition’s side, the Houthis continued to control much of the pre-1990 unity north Yemen, where 70% to 80% of the population resides. However, the Houthis’ attempts to capture Marib, a key oil- and gas-rich province, failed.

As the fighting continued and the blockade on Yemen was tightened, the Yemeni population faced a crumbling economy and destruction of its healthcare systems. This led to outbreaks such as cholera and diphtheria, reduced functional healthcare facilities to 50%, and left more than 80% of Yemenis in need of food, water and medicine. With more than 17 million people facing food insecurity in 2022, the UN warned that ​“catastrophic” and ​“famine-like” conditions were projected to increase five-fold for those most vulnerable.

Previous Talks

In early 2022, after a series of Saudi-led attacks that killed at least 80 civilians and shut down Yemen’s internet for four days, and Houthi attacks that reached an oil facility in Jeddah and a storage facility in Abu Dhabi, warring parties began ceasefire talks in Oman. 

Though far from being the first peace — a ceasefire agreement was reached in April 2022, and extended twice until October of that year — they brought a halt to U.S.-supported airstrikes for the first time since March 2015.

Despite the U.S. and Saudi’s insistence that this war was waged on behalf of Hadi — Yemen’s ​“legitimate” head of government — he was virtually powerless and remained in Riyadh since leaving Yemen in 2015. This facade came down when the Saudi and UAE governments set aside Hadi and replaced him with a council of eight men, all of whom were backed by Saudi Arabia or the UAE. While the Council was formed to unify anti-Houthi groups given that most had already waged battles against the Houthis, their conflicting interests soon led to in-fighting, especially in Shabwa where UAE-backed STC forces fought Saudi-backed Islah forces.

Peace Now?

In the year since the first ceasefire was achieved in 2022, fighting on the ground continued in key southern areas including Shabwa and al-Mahra. And when Houthi demands to pay government workers their long overdue salaries using oil and gas revenues were not met, they responded by attacking oil facilities to prevent the export of oil and gas. 

Now, this key condition seems to have been met in a draft deal last month, and reports of a roadmap toward peace include issuing payments to government employees using gas and oil revenues in exchange for the Houthis allowing exports to take place.

But to achieve a lasting peace deal, Yemen’s sovereignty must be restored and the blockade must be fully lifted. While talks with Saudi Arabia are a major first step toward alleviating Yemenis’ suffering, the UAE must also give up control over strategic areas such as Bab al-Mandab strait and the island of Socotra, which they occupied and recently militarized.

The coalition’s failure to consolidate power among warring groups in southern Yemen, which they have controlled since 2015 underscores the importance of ceasing all foreign intervention and financial backing of warring factions. This includes the U.S.’s role, which has been instrumental in furthering the war over the past eight years despite legislative efforts to end this unconstitutional involvement.

While the meetings in Sana’a between Saudi and Houthi officials hold promise for peace with the Saudi-led coalition, a meaningful end to the war can only take place when all Yemenis who fought on either side of the war — the Houthis, Saleh and Hadi’s General People’s Congress, the Islah party, the STC, and others — face one another in direct talks and draft a way forward without the financial and military backing of foreign governments. When overt and covert foreign interventions cease, Yemen will finally have a chance to chart its own course.

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Shireen Al-Adeimi is an assistant professor of education at Michigan State University. Since 2015, she has played an active role in raising awareness about the Saudi-led war on her country of birth, Yemen, and works to encourage political action to end U.S. support. She is a non-resident fellow at Quincy Institute.

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The new president of the BRICS Bank has revealed that the Global South-led bloc is advancing toward de-dollarization, gradually moving away from use of the US dollar.

The New Development Bank plans to give nearly one-third (30%) of its loans in the local currencies of the financial institution’s members.

Dilma Rousseff, the left-wing former president of Brazil, took over the leadership of the Shanghai, China-based New Development Bank (NDB) this March.

The new chief of the BRICS' New Development Bank, Brazil’s leftist ex-President Dilma Rousseff, revealed they are gradually moving away from the US dollar, promising at least 30% of loans in local currencies of members.

More here: https://t.co/CyJKBODc2D pic.twitter.com/PUGokEHYxw

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 15, 2023

The NDB was created in 2014, by the BRICS bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, as a Global South-oriented alternative to the US-dominated World Bank, which is infamous for imposing neoliberal economic reforms on impoverished countries, which hinder their development.

In an interview with China’s major media outlet CGTN on April 14, Rousseff explained, “It is necessary to find ways to avoid foreign exchange risk and other issues, such as being dependent on a single currency, such as the US dollar”.

“The good news is that we are seeing many countries choosing to trade using their own currencies. China and Brazil, for instance, are agreeing to exchange with RMB (renminbi) and the Brazilian real”, she said.

“At the NDB, we have committed to it in our strategy. For the period from 2022 to 2026, the NDB has to lend 30% in local currencies, so 30% of our loan book will be financed in the currencies of our member countries”, Rousseff added.

“That will be extremely important to help our countries avoid exchange rate risks and shortages in finance that hinder long-term investments”, the new NDB president stressed.

H.E. Mrs. Dilma Rousseff, the NDB newly elected President, has started her first day in office in the NDB Headquarters in Shanghai, China. pic.twitter.com/JOLblXhhzQ

— New Development Bank (@NDB_int) March 28, 2023

Members of the NDB not only include the founders of the BRICS but also Bangladesh, the UAE, and Egypt. Uruguay is likewise in the process of joining, and many other countries have expressed interest.

Argentina, Iran, and Algeria have formally applied to join the extended BRICS+ bloc, and according to the foreign minister of Russia, Sergei Lavrov, other nations that are interested “include Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Argentina, Mexico, and a number of African nations”.

Flags of the members of the BRICS bloc’s New Development Bank (NDB) 

South Africa’s foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, revealed in January that BRICS plans to “develop a fairer system of monetary exchange” in order to weaken the “dominance of the dollar”.

“The systems currently in place tend to privilege very wealthy countries and tend to be really a challenge for countries, such as ourselves, which have to make payments in dollars, which costs much more in terms of our various currencies”, she said.

“So I do think a fairer system has to be developed, and it’s something we’re discussing with the BRICS ministers in the economic sector discussions”, Pandor added.

BRICS is making “a fairer system of monetary exchange” to challenge the “dominance of the dollar”, South Africa revealed.

Saudi Arabia, which applied to join BRICS, is considering selling oil in other currencies.

China says it will by Gulf energy in yuanhttps://t.co/fDWhqExVAw

— Geopolitical Economy Report (@GeopoliticaEcon) March 13, 2023

This April, Brazil’s current president, Lula da Silva, a fellow member of Dilma’s leftist Workers’ Party, took a historic trip to China, where he called to challenge US dollar dominance.

While in Shanghai, Lula was the first head of state to visit the NDB headquarters, where he attended the swearing in ceremony for Dilma.

Lula said the NDB’s goal is “creating a world with less poverty, less inequality, and more sustainability”.

He added that the bank should play a “leading role in achieving a better world, without poverty or hunger”.

This was the first time that a Head of State visited the Bank's Headquarters in Shanghai and addressed the NDB staff in person. President Lula had the opportunity to witness the NDB's commitment to promoting sustainable development and delivering on its mandate.#NDB #BRICS pic.twitter.com/MlC9tfySPY

— New Development Bank (@NDB_int) April 13, 2023

Dilma also commented, “As a former president of Brazil, I know the importance of the work of multilateral banks to support developing countries, particularly NDB, in addressing their economic, social, and environmental needs”.

“Becoming the president of the NDB is undoubtedly a great opportunity to do more for the BRICS, the emerging markets, and developing countries”, she said.

In her speech, H.E. Mrs. Dilma Rousseff emphasized the Bank's commitment to supporting Brazil's sustainable development goals and highlighted the importance of the presidential visit for strengthening the cooperation between the NDB and Brazil.#NDB #BRICS pic.twitter.com/0aut3dLM1H

— New Development Bank (@NDB_int) April 13, 2023

In her interview with CGTN, Rousseff explained her goals with the BRICS Bank:

It is very important to me that New Development Bank, the bank of the BRICS, acts as the tool to support the development priorities of the BRICS and other developing countries.

We need to invest in projects that contribute to three fundamental areas:

First, we need to support the countries with regards to climate change and sustainable development goals.

Second, we should promote social inclusion at every opportunity we have.

And I believe we should finance their most critical and strategic infrastructure projects.

That said, we want to promote quality development.

Developing countries still don’t have the necessary infrastructure. They don’t have enough ports, airports, and highways to meet their needs. And many times, the ones they have are not adequate.

They still have to build alternatives and more modern models of transportation, for instance.

I see China, a country that has developed capability for alternative transportation at the scale and quality it needs.

NDB has to support the other countries to also build their quality infrastructure as well, like high-speed trains.

It is very important to invest in technology and innovation, invest in universities for example.

Our countries will not overcome extreme poverty if we don’t invest in education, science, and technology.

When asked what challenges the BRICS and NDB face, Rousseff replied:

The world now is under the threat of high inflation and restrictive monetary policy, particularly in developed countries.

Such monetary policy means a higher interest rate, and therefore a higher probability of reduction in growth and a higher probability of recession.

This presents an important question for the BRICS. We need a mechanism, a so-called anti-crisis mechanism, which must be counter-cyclical and support stabilization.

It is necessary to find ways to avoid foreign exchange risk and other issues, such as being dependent on a single currency, such as the US dollar.

The good news is that we are seeing many countries choosing to trade using their own currencies.

China and Brazil, for instance, are agreeing to exchange with RMB (renminbi) and the Brazilian real.

At the NDB, we have committed to it in our strategy. For the period from 2022 to 2026, the NDB has to lend 30% in local currencies, so 30% of our loan book will be financed in the currencies of our member countries.

That will be extremely important to help our countries avoid exchange rate risks and shortages in finance that hinder long-term investments.

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*** 

Future historians may say that the most significant event of 2023 had nothing to do with Donald Trump, other 2024 presidential candidates, or even the war in Ukraine. Instead, the event with the most long-term significance may be one that received little attention in the mainstream media — Saudi Arabia’s movement toward accepting currencies other than the US dollar for oil payments.

After President Nixon severed the last link between the dollar and gold, his administration negotiated a deal with the Saudi government. The US would support the Saudi regime, including by providing weapons. In exchange, the Saudis would conduct all oil transactions in dollars. The Saudis also agreed to use surplus dollars they accumulated to purchase US Treasury bonds. The resulting “petrodollar” is a major reason why the dollar has maintained its world reserve currency status.

Also this year, China and Brazil made an agreement to conduct future trade between the countries using the countries’ own currencies rather than dollars. Brazilian President Lula da Silva has called on more nations to abandon the dollar.

This de-dollarization movement is driven in part by resentment of America’s foreign policy, including, in particular, the US government’s increasing use of economic sanctions. Dethroning the dollar from its world reserve currency status makes it easier for countries to ignore these sanctions.

De-dollarization will negatively impact the US government’s ability to manage its over 30 trillion dollars debt. With a few exceptions, there is still no real support in Congress for spending cuts. Republican leadership members may say they will not support a debt ceiling increase unless it is tied to spending cuts. However, after the Biden administration accused the Republicans of wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy declared a reduction in spending on Social Security and Medicare — big drivers of the federal deficit — “off the table.” Similarly, despite the growing skepticism of foreign interventionism among Republicans, the military-industrial complex maintains a viselike grip on congressional leadership and the White House. Therefore, do not expect any reduction in military spending. Instead, the Pentagon’s budget will likely increase.

The Federal Reserve will face continuing pressure to monetize ever-increasing federal debt and keep interest rates (and thus the federal government’s borrowing costs) low. The resulting inflation will lead to more support for ending the dollar’s world reserve currency status. As more countries abandon the dollar, the Fed will become less able to monetize the federal government’s debt without creating hyperinflation. This will result in a dollar crisis and an economic meltdown worse than the Great Depression.

This crisis will lead to the end of the welfare-warfare-fiat currency system. While history suggests this will lead to the rise of even more authoritarian political movements, the growing popularity of libertarian ideas suggests the collapse will also fuel the further growth of the liberty movement. This could mean that the crisis leads to a restoration of limited government and an advancement of liberty. The key to taking full advantage of the opportunity presented by the crisis is to keep spreading our ideas. Fortunately, we do not need a majority; we just need a tireless, irate minority committed to the cause to regain our liberty.

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Ramsey Clark passed away in April 2021 

His legacy will live forever.

He has been a source of inspiration to anti-war activists for more than half a century.

Our thoughts are with Ramsey Clark, whom I first met in New York in 1999 at the height of the US-NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.

Ramsey was fully aware of the dangers of all out war in Ukraine. Below is Ramsey Clark’s November 2014 open letter to President Obama et al, condemning US-NATO troop deployments on Russia’s borders.

With foresight, Ramsey Clark had predicted what is now happening.

“This massive U.S. intervention in the Ukraine and ever-increasing campaign to surround and isolate Russia must end, I therefore demand:

1. That the U.S. government and all its public, secret, official and unofficial agencies immediately cease all forms of intervention in Ukraine, including ceasing all material and political aid to fascist and right-wing organizations within the country;

2. That all sanctions and threats of sanctions against the Russian Federation be dropped — sanctions are an act of war;

3. That U.S. military forces immediately be withdrawn from the Eastern European region and that NATO’s expansion and provocative actions against Russia be ended.”

 

“Peaceful Coexistence” between Russia and America is the Answer

Michel Chossudovsky,

Global Research, April 11, 2021,  April 18, 2023

***

TO:

President Obama, Senator McCain, Secretary Kerry, Secretary-General Ban, Members of Congress, and Members of the Media:

The overwhelming majority of the population of the U.S. is against being dragged into another disastrous war. Nothing is more dangerous than the aggressive U.S./NATO troop movements right on the borders of Russia.

Sending U.S. destroyers into the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea; scheduling threatening U.S./NATO war games and troop movements in East Europe; and imposing sanctions on the Russian Federation is a threat to peace on a world scale. We have seen the cost of past and continuing U.S. wars, which enrich the military corporations while impoverishing the targeted countries as well as poor and working people here in the U.S.

The years of U.S. funding of fascist forces in Ukraine and the recognition of a government in Kiev that overthrew the elected government, seized power and appointed extreme right-wing groups to head the police, army and national guard in order to pull Ukraine into NATO membership makes the U.S. complicit in the complete denial of the rights of the Ukrainian people. It is also a provocation against the entire region.

People in East and South Ukraine, outraged by this coup government, have attempted to resist the illegal junta, have declared an independent People’s Republic of Donetsk, and have called for referendums. In response, the right-wing coup government has allowed its military forces and other fascists to terrorize the Ukrainian people. In the most recent incident, some 40 people were massacred in the city of Odessa on May 2 by fascist militants, loyal to the Kiev government, who set the Trades Union Building on fire. In addition, 23 people were killed at Slavyansk and in Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region in attacks by Ukrainian military forces from May 2-3.

Despite mass desertions by Ukrainian police and military personnel, so-called “anti-terrorist” campaigns against activists in southeastern Ukraine were launched immediately after visits to Kiev by U.S. officials. Washington has spent $5 billion to effect “regime change” in Ukraine, helping to bring into power a junta dominated by fascist, racist, anti-Semitic organizations like Svoboda, Fatherland and Right Sector. Meanwhile, the U.S. has pledged up to $10 billion in loans to the illegal coup regime, and Washington has been instrumental in securing a $17 billion aid and austerity package from the International Monetary Fund.

This massive U.S. intervention in the Ukraine and ever-increasing campaign to surround and isolate Russia must end. I therefore demand:

1. That the U.S. government and all its public, secret, official and unofficial agencies immediately cease all forms of intervention in Ukraine, including ceasing all material and political aid to fascist and right-wing organizations within the country;

2. That all sanctions and threats of sanctions against the Russian Federation be dropped — sanctions are an act of war;

3. That U.S. military forces immediately be withdrawn from the Eastern European region and that NATO’s expansion and provocative actions against Russia be ended.

Tragically, neither the US nor the EU honored the February 21 compromise accord between the Maidan coalition and the Yanukovich govenment that was brokered by Foreign Ministers of France, Germany and Poland. It is upon the US government to save the honor of Western democracies as promoters of peace, legality and moderation. Return to the February 21 Accords before the hell of war breaks loose!

Sincerely,

Ramsey Clark

Former US Attorney General
Founder of International Action Center
New York

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***

First published in January 2018

Ukraine. Across its eastern border is Russia and to its west-Europe. For centuries, it has been at the center of a tug-of-war between powers seeking to control its rich lands and access to the Black Sea.

The 2014 Maidan Massacre triggered a bloody uprising that ousted president Viktor Yanukovych and painted Russia as the perpetrator by Western media. But was it?

“Ukraine on Fire” by Igor Lopatonok provides a historical perspective for the deep divisions in the region which lead to the 2004 Orange Revolution, 2014 uprisings, and the violent overthrow of democratically elected Yanukovych. Covered by Western media as a people’s revolution, it was in fact a coup d’état scripted and staged by nationalist groups and the U.S. State Department.

Investigative journalist Robert Parry reveals how U.S.-funded political NGOs and media companies have emerged since the 80s replacing the CIA in promoting America’s geopolitical agenda abroad.

 

Watch the full documentary below.

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*** 

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*** 

Food processing plants blowing up, vaccine mandates crippling the US military, and people pushing and hustling for the next pandemic… what is really going on?

In the video below, Atty. Thomas Renz appears on Bannon’s War Room to talk about the bigger agenda behind all this.

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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*** 

The word is getting out that almost nothing is true about what governments and legacy media have been telling us concerning the COVID-19 disaster. Moreover, all the imposed remedies, but especially the global lockdowns and the gene-modifying injection procedures, are resulting in absolutely catastrophic effects whose full scale is basically still unfathomable in these increasingly apocalyptic times.

So far the world’s eight billion habitants have received about 14 billion shots collectively. Many will recognize that this worldwide jab fest is not good news at all. It is very bad news with enormous consequences for all of humanity and our posterity as well.

The governments of almost every one of the world’s 192 countries came up with similar sets of bad policies that have been doing the lion’s share of the damage constituting the manufactured COVID crisis. The simultaneous similarity of these consistently destructive policies indicate that some supranational initiative above the level of nation states has been mobilized to orchestrate our ongoing descent into tyranny. This descent kicked into high gear in the winter of 2020, but especially after the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic without sufficient credible evidence.

Hence the imperative of thinking globally while acting locally is absolutely apt right now when it comes to developing the collective muscle we need to stop the horrific continuing predations.

Here and there citizens are organizing to initiate our own public inquiries into the genesis of the disaster we are living through. In Canada there is a “citizen-led inquiry” presently underway. The mission of the National Citizens Inquiry (NCI) is to investigate “Canada’s COVID-19 responses.” To advance this mission, a cross-country tour of citizen-appointed NCI Commissioners is underway.

It is my intention to participate in this process, including by giving expert testimony if and when I am called upon to do so. My intention is to send out regular dispatches on GlobalResearch.ca. I am checking my tires and updating my laptop to prepare myself to join the tour as it approaches Saskatchewan and then my home province of Alberta.

The principle that this inquiry is citizen-led, not government-led, is crucial to understanding the larger significance of what is taking place here in Canada. Government-led investigations are rarely credible when it comes to investigating suspected crimes committed by governments. Such investigations usually turn out to be whitewashes of the powerful and well connected. Very often the investigations turn into witch hunts directed at smearing the most effective critics of government policies and actions.

This pattern is almost perfectly illustrated by Trudeau’s outrageous effort to criminalize the Canadian Freedom Convoy movement and thereby distinguishing himself as a vigilant champion of law and order. In mid-February of 2022 Trudeau invoked Canada’s version of martial law. Trudeau’s purpose was to vanquish the Freedom Convoy by tactics like unleashing police violence on peaceful demonstrators on Parliament Hill and by seizing the bank accounts of some Truckers and their supporters.

Justin appointed a very politicized Liberal Party judge and Trudeau family friend, Paul Rouleau, to lead in early 2023 a Commission charged to investigate whether the Canadian government had acted properly or not by imposing the highest level of emergency measures provisions on top of layer upon layer of prior COVID emergency measures. Variations of this same process have happened all over the world as the executive branches of government have seized vast new powers by suspending civil liberties in the name of fighting the celebrity virus.

Not surprisingly the Liberal Party judge gave his friend Justin and his cronies a clean bill of health. Trudeau’s friend found the Trudeau government, Not Guilty. Nothing to see here folks, just keep moving along.

So in Canada the precedent is being set that we cannot count on governments to investigate their own crimes in instigating and worsening the manufactured COVID crisis and the subsequent manufactured crises flowing from the Mother of All Medical False Flags. We need local initiatives, national initiatives, regional initiatives and ultimately worldwide initiatives to get to the bottom of what has happened and to initiate the kind of juridical procedures necessary to stop this spree of serial Crimes Against Humanity.

Only trials, criminal verdicts when justified, and appropriate punishments will serve the cause of the kind of justice we desperately need right now as the rule of law continues to vanish day-by-day.

In late 2022 Preston Manning, founder of Canada’s Reform Party and the son of former Alberta Premier Ernest Manning, initiated the NCI in a press conference in Parliament’s press gallery in Ottawa. He explains very clearly the importance in these circumstances of not waiting for governments to investigate themselves.

Click here to view the video

The following link contains some examples of the testimony gathered so far by the NCI: click here.

I recommend particularly the testimony of Vincent Gircys, a retired senior police official in Ontario who has been working diligently with colleagues to clarify what the rule of law demands of police officers in these times. Constable Gircys had his bank account seized by the Trudeau government zealots in one of the most characteristic demonstrations of the fascistic tactics being developed to stifle legitimate dissent.

The testimony of Embalmer Laura Jeffey is gripping. Ms. Jeffrey is an exemplary model of a resolute whistle blower coming forward when all the public officials around and above her, refuse to honour their professional responsibilities and do the right thing.

Journalist Rodney Palmer has presented a well documented assessment of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s appalling refusal to investigate the COVID-19 scandal. He names names and chronicles explicitly the depth to which the CBC has fallen by renouncing its role as a public broadcaster. Palmer provides the evidentiary goods to prove that the CBC has become a purveyor of gross propaganda to serve the agenda of its thoroughly corrupt paymasters. Clearly we need a new public broadcaster to replace the now-thoroughly discredited CBC.

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Dr. Anthony Hall is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.

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

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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*** 

Sudan’s capital Khartoum has turned into a war zone with a split in the military forces.  The Sudanese army is battling the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) which is a paramilitary force, and the 10 million residents are taking cover to avoid the artillery exchanges, and air force operations against the RSF. Hospitals are reporting 80 injured, and three civilian deaths.

Al Sharek TV, based in the UAE, reporting from Sudan, claimed that an Eqyptian soldier was killed in Murwey military airbase in Khartoum today, with raging battles continuing from yesterday. 

A large contingent from the army swooped into the RSF camps and took control on Saturday after the RSF had attacked army bases previously, according to Brigadier-General Nabil Abdallah, who characterized the army as performing their duty to safeguard the country.

The RSF claimed to have taken control of the capital airport, two other regional airports, and the presidential palace, while Sudan’s General Intelligence Service refuted the RSF claims as untrue.

General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the ruling Sovereign Council, was reportedly safe.  Sudan has struggled to return to civilian rule following a military takeover when the army and the RSF ousted the former president in 2019.  A transition period, with elections to follow was planned, but never initiated.

General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, the commander of the RSF, called Burhan a ‘criminal’ and accused the army of carrying out a coup. Hemedti has been deputy leader of the ruling Sovereign Council headed by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan since 2019, and his RSF are 100,000 strong.

The tension between the army and the RSF began on Thursday when the army accused the RSF of movements which were independent of the army and were illegal. Under the still unsigned transition agreement, the RSF is to be integrated into the ranks of the army. The process of the merger and under which authority it should be conducted has opened the door to conflict.

The RSF grew out of the government of the autocratic President Omar al-Bashir, who was removed from office in 2019. During Bashir’s time in power, Hemedti carried out a brutal crackdown in Sudan’s Darfur region during the decades of conflict there. The struggle for power and control between the army and the RSF today dates back to the previous administration.

The RSF have been accused of war crimes in the Dafur conflict, and in June 2019 they raided a Khartoum pro-democracy camp and nearly 130 people died.

Foreign intervention

Like so many countries in the Middle East, Sudan has been split by sections of the society who follow the Muslim Brotherhood, and their political ideology of Radical Islam, and those who are against extremism.  Qatar, Turkey and the US have been allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, and especially the US has used them as foot soldiers in Syria.  However, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Russia have rejected the Muslim Brotherhood.

US and Israel

Yesterday, the U.S. Ambassador to Sudan, John Godfrey, said the escalation of tensions to direct fighting was “extremely dangerous” and called urgently on the senior leadership to stop the clashes. Godfrey said he and embassy staff were sheltering in place. 

In January 2021, Sudan agreed to normalize relations with Israel in order to have Sudan removed for the US list of state sponsors of terrorism. On February 2, 2023 Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen met with Burhan in Khartoum, and the two countries were planning to sign a peace treaty in Washington, DC. before the end of 2023, but first depending on the Sudan democratic elections result.

Burhan accepted the US demands that Sudan stop its support of the Palestinian cause of freedom, and to cut off its relations with Iran.

However, Sudan was not the beneficiary of improvements in its infrastructure, and Sudan remains a broken, failed state with a population on the brink of starvation.

The current confrontation between the army and the RSF could acerbate the economic breakdown, and tribal violence across the vast country.

The Syrian opposition

Syrian opposition leader Fahad Almasri, founder of the National Salvation Front in Syria (NSF), has publically called for normalization between Syria and Israel.  Almasri says Syrians have wasted their time on the Palestinian cause, and should look after their own interests instead.

During the armed conflict in Syria, injured Jibhat al-Nusra terrorists were taken to Israeli hospitals for treatment.  Jibhat al-Nusra is designated as a terrorist group by the US and the UN.  

Members of the extinct Free Syrian Army sang songs and carried banners in Homs praising Israel and asking for their help in their participation in the attack on Syria.

The conflict in Syria began in 2011 and was a US-NATO attack on Syria for regime change.  The US policy goal to change the government in Syria was formulated in Tel Aviv with the policy paper “A Clean Break” written in 1996.

The situation today in Sudan should be a wake-up call to the Syrian opposition calling for normalization with Israel.  Looking at the case of Sudan, we can see that following the US and Israel down the path of normalization has not benefitted Sudan, or its people.

The US and Israel make promises, but fail to follow through with actions.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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*** 

Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to China did not quite go according to plan, though much depends on what was planned to begin with.  In one sense, the French President was consistent, riding the hobbyhorse of Europe’s strategic autonomy, one hived off from the US imperium and free of Chinese influence.

Europe’s third-way autonomy would be a mighty thing for the Elysée Palace, especially given French pretensions in steering it.  After all, Frau “Mutti” Merkel is no longer de facto European chief, presiding over the bloc with matronly care.  Her successor, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, is finding himself caught in undergrowth, a difficult thing at times for the continent’s largest economy, and the globe’s fourth.

What, then, of the fuss?  In the first place, Macron had company on his Beijing visit: on his first day of the trip, the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had decided to come along. This was never going to go well, given their respective views over the Middle Kingdom.  Von der Leyen, for one, uses a larded management approach to Beijing, ringing the relationship with restrictions and signals of constipation.  On Taiwan’s status, she sticks to the warring line embraced by policy makers stretching from Canberra to Washington.  Macron, at least in one sense, understands the power of China to be not only inextinguishable but a logical weight against the US.

The fuss then began in earnest with Macron’s remarks, made on his plane, the Cotam Unité, after the three-day visit.  To reporters from Politico and Les Echos, he began conventionally, reiterating the view that Europe should be a third power, a counterweight to Washington and Beijing.  But it was his remarks on Taiwan that caused some bristling across a number of quarters.  “Do we [Europeans],” he posed to Les Echos, “have an interest in speeding up on the subject of Taiwan?  No. The worst of things would be to think that we Europeans must be followers on this subject and adapt ourselves to an American rhythm and a Chinese overreaction.”

The mania over Taiwan’s fate constituted a potential “trap for Europe”, landing it in crises “that are not ours”.  The heating up of the US-Sino conflict would frustrate European ambitions, be it in terms of time or finance, to develop “our own strategic autonomy and we will become vassals, whereas we could become the third pole [in the world order] if we have a few years to develop this”.

Those familiar with the Macron recipe have seen it before.  An interview of frankness acts as kindling.  The fire rages.  Then come the explainers, clarifications, points of qualification.  The fire abates.  In 2019, he warned of NATO’s “brain death”. (Since then, that brain-dead patient has become ever more emboldened and enlarged, engaged in a proxy war with Russia.)  He has also been unabashed about offering a fig leaf or two to Moscow, despite its Ukrainian adventurism.

Representatives of the US empire-set, nervously clinging to orb, sceptre, and some misguided sense of civilisation, sneered and scoffed.  Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.), rolling around in the rhetoric of anti-Sino thrill, called the Chinese Communist Party “the most significant challenge to Western society, our economic security, and our way of life”.  The remarks from Macron had been “embarrassing”, “disgraceful”, and “very geopolitically naïve.”

Republican Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, offered his few cents worth.  “If Macron is speaking for all of Europe, and their position now is they’re not going to pick sides between the US and China over Taiwan, maybe then we should not be taking sides either.”  His point: the US was essentially funding a European war, and to what end?

The Washington Post viewed the visit as one that “angered politicians and analysts on both sides of the Atlantic, highlighting gaps between the US and French approaches to China, showcasing division within the European Union – and probably delighting Beijing.”

The Wall Street Journal was even more bullish in its criticism, suggesting that Macron had refused to get with the anti-China deterrence program. (Good of the paper to openly admit that such a policy is actively being pursued in Washington.)  “If President Biden is awake, he ought to call Mr Macron and ask if he’s trying to re-elect Donald Trump.”  At the WSJ, warmongering is ascendant.

For some commentators, notably in Macron’s camp, the anti-China pugilists had misunderstood the whole message.  This was the reading from French lawmaker Benjamin Haddad: “Macron is much closer to the European centre of gravity on China than the numerous scandalized comments on his comments would suggest.”

Chances are that Macron knew exactly what he was saying, cognisant of the preening egos he would affront.  The same cannot be said about the number of US lawmakers who, ignorant of their own republic and its warring ambitions, are keen to interpret the views and ambitions of another as disturbingly independent of their own.

Were these figures to go back to school, directed by the spirit of Lafayette, and the French purse that was broken in supporting the American War of Independence, such lawmakers might show a greater appreciation about the view from Paris.  But those days are long gone, and Washington, in its increasingly trembling way, is keen to stay the pretensions of any power that will challenge it, and make others toe the line.

*

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

Featured image is from http://english.www.gov.cn

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When reflecting on the significance of the defeat of the coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018, it is easy to forget the regional context at that fateful moment and focus only on the terrible events in the national context. But it is also important to remember always that the ruling elites in the United States and their local allies in the region were at that time and are still constantly striving to sabotage and if possible reverse the emancipation processes of the peoples of the region that had gained strength since 2006. In 2018, corrupt right-wing governments allied with the United States dominated most of Latin America and collaborated closely, especially to help the government of President Donald Trump intensify its criminal hybrid war against Venezuela and the blockade against Cuba.

Only Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela kept alive in that period the vision of a sovereign regional integration promoting the interests of their countries’ majorities. The right-wing Sebastian Piñera had won the presidency in Chile. In Argentina, Mauricio Macri and his cronies were deepening the country’s economic crisis, seeking a corrupt arrangement with the International Monetary Fund to favor the financial interests of the national oligarchy. Despite their extremely low levels of popular support, Michel Temer in Brazil and Lenin Moreno in Ecuador oversaw the implementation of neoliberal policies against their peoples while their allies in the judiciary abused the criminal justice system to attack their progressive political rivals.

In Colombia, Ivan Duque acted to systematically prevent the implementation of the Peace Agreements while dozens of community leaders and former FARC combatants who had welcomed the peace were killed every month. In Peru, due to their own bitter internal political disputes, the national oligarchy exploited the judicial and legislative system to keep the country in a permanent crisis of governance. In Paraguay, the corrupt government of Horacio Cartes was coming to the end of its term. In Uruguay, the Frente Amplio government of Tabaré Vasquez was also coming to the end of its period severely damaged by lack of popular support and the forced resignation of its Vice President Raul Sendic.

All this throws into relief the events of 2018 in Nicaragua and reveals their dual aspect. In one sense, it was another attack by the empire seeking to maintain the Monroe Doctrine and its usual regional dominance and control. At the domestic level, it was one more episode in the endless class war waged by the national oligarchy insisting on wanting to maintain their privileged dominant status in relation to the dispossessed majority. In a broader sense, the 2018 coup attempt in Nicaragua represents another moment of the Western elites’ ruthless assault on the idea of the nation state, which is the main defense of the world’s peoples against the depredations of giant multinational corporations, which are the essence of globalization.

Image: Augusto César Sandino (Licensed under the Public Domain)

So the failed coup attempt of 2018 in Nicaragua can be seen from different perspectives. In part, it was a popular battle against a political, social, economic and cultural retreat into the past. At the local level, a reactionary minority made an alliance with foreign powers because they lacked the political strength and popular support to win elections. Externally, the United States insisted on its imperative of regional control to intervene and force a change of government favoring its interests. What happened in 2018 repeated historical patterns in Nicaragua that have persisted from the time of William Walker, from the Knox Memo and the Chamorro-Bryan Treaty to the Espino Negro Pact, the assassination of General Sandino and the Contra war against the Sandinista Popular Revolution of the 1980s.

If 2018 was a battle against returning to the sinister past of submission to empire and to the political and economic repression of US puppet governments, it was also a battle to defend the prosperity and advances in force at that time, the result of good government by Daniel Ortega, Rosario Murillo and their sandinista ministerial team. More profoundly, it was an absolutely fundamental defense of a future of true political and economic democracy, of security, prosperity and tranquility for the population, of development and peace. Above all, it was a defense of the future national sovereignty which has been not only the basis of all the recent economic, social, cultural and spiritual victories of Nicaragua’s people, but which is also an essential element of the new multipolar or pluricentric world now under construction.

In 2018, the Nicaraguan people faced choosing between passively submitting to the lies, violence, anarchy and arrogance of the coup plotters or acting decisively to defend the sovereignty that the coup leaders and their foreign owners wanted to take away from them. On the one hand, we could see the reactionary bishops, the failed traitorous politicians, the greedy opportunistic business leaders, the corrupt management class of the bought NGO sector and the criminal thugs abusing the population in the roadblocks. On the other hand, Nicaragua’s People could see their own reflection as protagonists of the revolutionary model of the government’s National Plan for Human Development and Poverty Reduction, a plan for peace, development and justice based on the historical program of the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

Over the weeks and months from April to July 2018, mixed in with the coup attempt’s horrific abuses, odious crimes and widespread terrorism, popular feeling steadily grew rejecting the coup leaders self-evident cynicism, hypocrisy and lack of seriousness during the sessions of the national dialogue. In the end the clear choice lay between between defending the achievements of the People and their revolutionary process or submitting to a new repressive government of odious, mediocre leaders directed by their Yankee patrons. Over the last few days Comandante Daniel has summarized what happened in 2018 as follows:

“There was an attempted coup d’état here, and as usual, the historical imperialists, the Europeans, the European empires, vassals of the North American Empire, immediately joined in. But, thanks to the People’s decision, the coup was aborted and we have managed to resume the conditions that we had up until 2018, of stability, Peace, security, economic growth, progress in the fight against poverty and this has strengthened the People’s Consciousness and also strengthens the defense capacity of the Nicaraguan people.”

It is no accident that Comandante Daniel made that comment during a meeting with a delegation from the Cooperation Agency of the People’s Republic of China. The defeat of the coup attempt in Nicaragua was a key event in a regional and global context characterized by the desperate efforts of the United States and its allies to destroy any initiative that structurally favors the region’s dispossessed majorities. The US suffered another defeat with the landslide electoral victory of the Bolivian people in 2020, reversing the coup d’etat in that country following the elections in 2019.

Similarly, the Venezuelan people have repeatedly defeated the tremendous, constant US economic aggression and sabotage, just as the Cuban people have done for over 60 years. All these victories are increasingly shaping a Latin America and Caribbean based on respect and equality between sovereign nations instead of privileging the interests of the region’s national oligarchies allied to North American and European elites. That is why the victory of the Nicaraguan people over the failed coup attempt in 2018 was such a great triumph for the region’s sovereign future, so essential to consolidate Nicaragua’s development in a new world of international relations genuinely based on international relations of justice and Peace.

*

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This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal, translated from Spanish.

Stephen Sefton, renowned author and political analyst based in northern Nicaragua, is actively involved in community development work focussing on education and health care. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image: Protest in Managua, Nicaragua in 2018 (Licensed under the Public Domain)

The 21-year Old Leaker — Something Is Not Right

By Larry Johnson, April 17, 2023

The media obsession in vilifying Jack Texeira for “leaking” TOP SECRET and SECRET documents and judging him guilty without any benefit of doubt, is just another symptom of the authoritarian fever that grips many inhabitants of the United States. Forget the first amendment.

“New York City Spring 2020: Investigating the COVID Epicenter”

By Michael Bryant, April 17, 2023

A recent retrospective piece by the NY Times titled, “Covid Was Bad in New York City. See How Bad on a 200-Year Timeline”, took a look back to Spring 2020 in New York City and the “wave of illness” that hit the city causing a “seismic” death event not seen in nearly 200 years.

World Economic Forum: The Global Shadow Elite

By Ernst Wolff, April 17, 2023

The world, especially with the support of the WEF, has reached a point where it is no longer just about political, economic or social change, but about the transformation of people themselves, about their fusion with the digital sphere, also called “biodigital convergence” or “transhumanism”.

Beef Producers Panic Over mRNA Vaccine News

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, April 17, 2023

Last week, I reported that pork producers have been using customizable mRNA-based “vaccines” on their herds since 2018 — without telling the public. This issue really only rose to the surface after attorney Tom Renz started promoting new legislation in Missouri (House Bill 1169, which he helped write) that would require labeling of mRNA products.

Novel Vaccine Technologies in Veterinary Medicine: A Herald to Human Medicine Vaccines

By Dr. Peter McCullough, April 17, 2023

The mRNA and adenoviral DNA COVID-19 vaccine debacle in humans has set populations on edge, distrustful of poorly conceived genetic technology. Meanwhile the field has advanced considerably in veterinary medicine.

COVID and Free Speech in the High Court

By Thomas Hayes, April 17, 2023

On 5 April 2023 the [U.K.] High Court handed down judgment in Adil v General Medical Council [2023] EWHC 797 (Admin). The case examined the extent to which a professional regulator can interfere with the right to freedom of expression of an individual subject to its regulation, as well as the circumstances in which the Court should accept challenges to decisions made by regulators in the performance of their duties.

Russia’s Investigations About US Biolabs in Ukraine

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, April 17, 2023

Finally, the Russian investigation about American biological activities on Ukrainian soil was completed. A special parliamentary committee had been formed to carefully analyze evidence of crimes such as the production of biological weapons in military biolabs found and neutralized by Russian armed forces. 

Capitol January 6, 2021: At Least 50 Undercover Officers and Informants Monitored Proud Boys and Crowds, New Court Filing Says

By Joseph M. Hanneman, April 17, 2023

Up to a dozen previously undisclosed undercover Metropolitan Police Department officers were embedded in the crowds on Jan. 6—including one who admitted joining in protester chants to “stop the steal”—according to an April 10 court filing in the Proud Boys seditious-conspiracy trial.

How NATO States Sponsored ICC Prosecutor’s Putin Arrest Warrant

By Max Blumenthal, April 17, 2023

ICC prosecutor general Karim Khan raised millions from NATO states by crafting an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin while freezing investigations into well-documented US and Israeli war crimes. Along the way, he won powerful friends in Washington, London, Kiev — and Hollywood.

History: The Origins of the Polish-Ukrainian Conflict: West Ukraine and Greater Poland

By Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović, April 17, 2023

At the very beginning, it must be noticed that before the outbreak of WWI in the summer of 1914 it was not both either Poland or Ukraine as the state on the political map of Europe. Poland was considered a historical region while Ukraine was a geographical one.

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“April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.” –T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland (Part I, The Burial of the Dead)

A recent retrospective piece by the NY Times titled, “Covid Was Bad in New York City. See How Bad on a 200-Year Timeline”, took a look back to Spring 2020 in New York City and the “wave of illness” that hit the city causing a “seismic” death event not seen in nearly 200 years.

Noting that the the spike in the city’s death rate was “like something from a different era” and that life expectancy dropped city-wide an astonishing 4.6 years from 2019 to 2020, the article unquestioningly and exclusively attributes this shocking mortality event to the impacts of Covid.

Nowhere in the piece, as is the case with the official narrative, can one find a more extensive examination of events as they unfolded in NYC in Spring 2020 though there are hints even within the article that oddities which defy the accepted narrative abound. 

Towards the end of the article it is noted, “In Brownsville, Brooklyn — an impoverished and predominantly Black neighborhood with a high concentration of public housing developments — the premature death rate was nine times as high as in Greenwich Village and SoHo, predominantly white and wealthy Manhattan neighborhoods.”

While it could be justifiably argued that the poor are beset by an array of pre-existing health problems, thus impacted disproportionately by disease due to these lower health indices, would this not make the case that the inferior health of these communities is the issue, not some deadly disease?

This also brings up a range of questions as to how such a fast moving, super contagious and deadly virus selectively opted to hit poor, minority communities while percipiently avoiding upscale principally white neighborhoods.

Further in the article it is acknowledged that, “Many people went without seeing doctors or receiving medical care when Covid-19 arrived. Deaths from heart disease, for instance, were nearly 20 percent higher in 2020 than the year before.” 

Even as this anomaly is recognized,  logical follow-up questions posited are omitted, questions which could present a more complete picture of this cataclysmic event. 

How many of these individuals who died due to avoidance of medical treatments would still be alive had they not been dissuaded from seeking medical care by the constant fear-based narrative?

How many of these deaths from heart disease were falsely attributed to Covid? 

While certain incongruities can be discerned in this one article, this hardly scratches the surface. 

The spectrum of unanswered questions is substantial. 

A necessary full scale investigation into the events of Spring 2020 would undoubtedly unleash a multitude of inconvenient questions:

What was the location of the reported waves of death in NYC?

Were NYC emergency rooms truly overwhelmed? 

What does the data say about NYC ICU rates?

Was Elmhurst hospital, tabbed as “coronavirus ground zero”, truly overflowing in Spring 2020? 

What does the data say about Elmhurst hospital Spring 2020 emergency visits compared to previous years?

What was the 2020 emergency like for NY- Presbyterian Columbia hospital inpatient volume?

What does the data indicate for Maimonides Medical Center, understood to be the NYC hospital with the highest number of Covid deaths between March and May 2020?

What medical procedures and protocols were being used inside hospitals to treat Covid patients? To what effect?

What drugs were used in NYC hospitals?

What impact did newly introduced Covid-19 Do-Not-Resuscitate Orders have on patient outcomes?

How did financial incentives dictate hospital policies?

Who were the people that died during this time? 

The colossal dimensions of the media reports coming out of New York City in Spring 2020 cannot be overstated as the alleged onslaught of Covid-related illnesses and ‘wave of deaths’ in NYC hospitals became the circuit breaker for the entire mass hysteria that subsequently beset the United States and the primary ‘code red’ rationale for national lockdowns and suspension of civil liberties across the country.

The mainstream news outlets reportage and blind acceptance of overwhelmed hospitals, dead bodies piled into trucks, lines of people anxiously waiting outside hospitals and various sci-fi scenarios struck terror into the hearts of those who witnessed these images as they sat glued to their television.

Three years on, an unquestioning media gives the impression that mass deaths caused by a novel pathogen is an unassailable truth. 

However, the Spring 2020 apocalyptic scenario of a deadly pathogen besieging New York City increasingly looks to be a disputable chronicle of events rather than an ironclad narrative. 

Who can forget Andrew Cuomo crying about an urgent need to get more ventilators?

Who can forget the scarcely used 70,000-ton ‘message of hope’ Navy hospital ship sent to NYC? 

As further evidence and hospital data comes to light a picture emerges which stands in stark contrast with the story portrayed by the mainstream media.

The world deserves a full scale investigation into what happened throughout New York City in Spring 2020 and specifically what happened within the NYC hospitals.

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This article is inspired by and links to Dr. Jessica Hockett’s independent research on New York City’s 2020 mortality event. Hockett holds a PhD in educational psychology from University of Virginia and shares the results of her personal inquiries on Twitter @ewoodhouse7 and Substack https://woodhouse.substack.com.

Featured image: Marchers on International Working Women’s Day in New York City on March 8 demand an end to sanctions and comprehensive support for workers during the COVID-19 epidemic. (Source: Sara Flounders)

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Below are excerpts from Ernst Wolff’s book.

***

Foreword

We live in turbulent and unsettling times. The world around us is changing at an unprecedented speed. Financialization and the digitalization of the world economy have fundamentally changed the global balance of power on our planet within the past 50 years.

After Wall Street’s big banks dominated global #nance for almost a century, the big asset managers took their place at the start of the millennium. The ten leading companies in this industry, which has only emerged in the last 50 years, managed well over 40 trillion US dollars in mid-2022, roughly as much as the combined gross domestic product of the USA, China and Japan, the world’s three largest economies.

In addition, there is a historically unique concentration process: the largest asset managers BlackRock and Vanguard finance each other as major shareholders and are also among the major shareholders of six of the next largest eight asset managers. In addition, BlackRock has Aladdin[1], a unique global financial data analytics system used by numerous large corporations and major central banks. Their leaders, such as the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB), have made BlackRock an influential advisor in return for access to its software.

 The second process that has led us to the current situation alongside financialization is the digitization of the global economy. Although it is less than 50 years since the first IT giants Microsoft and Apple were founded, this industry has now conquered the entire planet. With the platform economy[2], it has spawned an entirely new branch of business that has spread like wildfire across the globe and usurped unprecedented market power.

What’s more, digitization has given IT giants a competitive advantage that has never existed before: By capturing the data and financial flows of other companies, they have insights into their innermost workings that no company before them has had. This information has not only given them an invaluable knowledge advantage over the rest of the economy, but has also historically changed the balance of power in the world. Whereas “money makes the world go round” used to apply, this change means that “money and data make the world go round” nowadays.

With BlackRock and Vanguard also still among the major shareholders of Apple, Alphabet, and Microsoft, and themselves digitally merged with some of them (Aladdin was uploaded to Microsoft’s Azure Cloud in 2021), the digital-financial complex has created a corporate cartel that surpasses anything the world has ever seen in cartels and monopolies.

The impact of this development became apparent in the wake of the Corona Crisis starting in 2020. Nearly 200 governments, regardless of all other differences and controversies, enacted almost identical measures that brought historic gains to the digital-financial complex. Whether lockdowns, quarantines, homeschooling, home offices, the introduction of QR codes, or the rollback of cash — the beneficiaries of all restrictions were always the digital corporations and the asset managers behind them.

Not only did the power of the world-dominating cartel become clear during the Corona crisis, but also the way in which it  exercises this power. It has outsourced a large part of its power so that it can remain largely unrecognized in the background and pull the strings undisturbed. This has created a network of organizations with which it can exert pressure through a wide variety of channels, disseminate targeted information or even misinformation, and manipulate and direct the economy and society in its interests.

But who are these organizations that serve as tools for the cartel? Besides the transnational conglomerates, which are dominated by the digital-financial complex, it is first and foremost the central banks, who have been dependent on Aladdin’s data and thus on BlackRock since the world financial crisis. The top asset managers are now so powerful that they can move any market on earth in any direction they wish and therefore have the central banks completely in their hands. Should they make any decisions that the asset managers do not like, a short, deliberately induced crash of the financial markets would be enough to bring them back on track.

Governments can also be made compliant in this way. Greece provided a vivid example of this in 2015. When the austerity-critical Syriza party threatened to win the elections, the ECB unceremoniously cut the country o! from all financial flows — with the effect that, after the election, Syriza politicians did exactly the opposite of what they had promised the Greek people in the election campaign.

In addition to central banks and governments, the digital-financial complex has also subjugated academia, especially the world’s leading universities. A good example of this is provided by the US Johns Hopkins University, which produced the statistics during  the Corona crisis on the basis of which lockdowns and restrictions were decided. The most important institute of its medical faculty is the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, founded in 1916 with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation. Since 2001, it has been named after the IT billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who donated more than $3.5 billion to the school by 2022. 

Even international organizations such as the United Nations and several of its sub-organizations such as the children’s relief organization UNICEF or the World Health Organization WHO are by no means independent. They are largely dependent on private donors such as the international pharmaceutical industry, for example, which in turn is backed by the digital corporations and asset managers. Even global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cannot get around their power. This was also evident in the Corona crisis, when the granting of loans to various governments was linked to compliance with health rules that benefited the platform economy.

It is no different with the media. If you look at the shareholder structure of the major media groups, the same names always appear there, too. Even where they don’t appear, the digital-financial complex has its fingers in the pie. For example, the powerful Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, by far the financially strongest in the world with assets of around 50 billion U.S. dollars in 2022, awards millions year after year worldwide for “good journalism”. In December 2018, for example, the German news magazine DER SPIEGEL received a donation of more than $2.5 million.[3]

The development of Gates’ foundation also reflects a trend that has played an increasingly important role in the global power structure over the past 20 years — the concealment of influence by the ultra-wealthy elite through the increasing use of foundations.

The general public still sees foundations as organizations through which particularly successful people want to give something of their wealth back to society out of gratitude. However, this view has little to do with their actual function. After all, modern foundation law came into being primarily to make it easier for wealthy people to avoid paying taxes.

In recent decades, this goal has been joined by another: direct influence on politics, the economy and society, bypassing parliamentary or other social structures, almost always dressed up as the benefaction of one or more philanthropists. The Open Society Foundations conglomerate of U.S. billionaire and major investor George Soros, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) have been particularly prominent in this regard.

The WEF plays a special role here, because its example is an excellent illustration of how parliamentarism has been increasingly eroded and condemned to ineffectiveness in recent decades. Moreover, this story shows that the course of the world is increasingly determined by forces that are not elected by anyone and are often hardly known to the public. This example also illustrates in a frightening way the immense dangers of abusing power in times of rapid technological upheaval.

The world, especially with the support of the WEF, has reached a point where it is no longer just about political, economic or social change, but about the transformation of people themselves, about their fusion with the digital sphere, also called “biodigital convergence” or “transhumanism”.

This development is by no means in its infancy any more, but is already far advanced and is being pushed ahead at high speed behind the public’s back. Should it reach its goal, it would be no more and no less than the end of evolution and the dawn of an epoch in which the process of creation would be interfered with and the self-determination of man would be replaced by external control in the interest of a tiny elite.

This book is intended to help prevent such a development.

Chapter I: A Small Town on the Shores of Lake Geneva

If you drive north from Geneva along the shores of Lake Geneva, after a few kilometers you reach Cologny, one of the most beautiful communities in western Switzerland, home to about 5,000 people. The townscape is characterized above all by the historic facades of stylish country houses that the Geneva upper classes have built there since the end of the 17th century.

If you turn onto the Route de la Capite, which runs parallel to the waterfront promenade, after a few hundred meters you will see the stately Villa Diodati on your left, which is considered a kind of place of pilgrimage among fans of the horror genre. In its rooms, the then 18-year-old Mary Shelley wrote the manuscript for her literary worldwide success Frankenstein in the cold summer of 1816.[4]

If you drive a little further straight ahead, you will come to a building opposite a golf course that doesn’t #t into the picture at all: a spacious cubist fat-roofed building with huge window fronts and terraced floors, whose contemporary architecture seems like a provocation compared to the old architectural style of the place.

The break in style has a symbolic character, because since 1998 it has been home to the headquarters of an organization that has undergone a historically unique development over the past 50 years and set new standards worldwide. The World Economic Forum (WEF), founded in 1971 by the German professor Klaus Schwab as the “European Management Forum”, has succeeded within a few decades in becoming one of the most important political and economic hubs of world affairs and thus one of the most significant power centers of our time.

Whether multinational corporations, governments, trade unions or NGOs — there is hardly an organization of significance in the leading industrialized nations and also in many emerging and developing countries whose leading personnel are not linked to the WEF in some way. Top politicians and corporate leaders from all continents have passed through the WEF’s two cadre workshops, the “Global Leaders for Tomorrow” and the “Young Global Leaders”, some 1,000 major corporations with billions in sales are among its international partners, and more than 10,000 ambitious young people under 30 are currently being networked and prepared for careers in the WEF’s spirit as part of the “Global Shapers”.

The annual highlight of the WEF’s activities is the yearly meeting held in Davos in the Swiss canton of Graubünden. Usually about 2,500 business leaders travel to meet presidents, heads of government and representatives of the ultra-rich elite to discuss current issues and to agree and coordinate future strategies.

To this day the foundation is led by its founder Klaus Schwab, who still holds the reins firmly in his hands and who must also be considered one of the most important personalities in contemporary history, at least since the 1980s. But how did an unknown German professor manage to catapult himself to such unimaginable heights leading a Swiss foundation and becoming one of the key figures in world affairs? Does Klaus Schwab possess extraordinary abilities that others do not have? Or were there special historical circumstances that favored his rise? And if so — which ones?

These are precisely the questions that this book seeks to explore. On the one hand, it will shed light on Schwab’s background and personal activities, and on the other hand, it will try to uncover the social, economic and financial driving forces that made the historically unique rise of the WEF possible.

Chapter II: Klaus Schwab’s Background

Klaus Schwab was born in Ravensburg on March 30, 1938, the son of the German Eugen Wilhelm Schwab and his second wife, the Swiss Erika Schwab,[5] née Epprecht. Eugen Schwab, a trained mechanical engineer, had been appointed commercial director of the Ravensburg branch of the Swiss engineering and turbine company Escher Wyss, which he had previously managed in Zurich.

Escher Wyss, one of Switzerland’s largest exporters of industrial products after the First World War, ran into difficulties in the wake of the world economic crisis in the 1930s and struggled to survive. During this struggle, the Ravensburg plant headed by Eugen Schwab developed into an important pillar of the company as a whole, albeit under questionable auspices. As a military contractor, the company bene#ted from Hitler’s war preparations and, as the largest employer in Ravensburg, was awarded the title of “National Socialist Model Company” by the NSDAP. 

During the war, Escher Wyss helped the German Wehrmacht to produce war weapons and armaments, including manufacturing parts for German fighter planes and employing prisoners of war.[6]

Because of their German-Swiss origins, the Schwab family enjoyed the privilege of traveling back and forth between the two countries at any time during the war. After the end of the war, Eugen and Erika Schwab moved back to Switzerland with Klaus and his younger brother Urs Reiner. The family returned to Ravensburg a few years later, where Eugen Schwab was appointed president of the Ravensburg Chamber of Commerce.

Klaus Schwab attended The Spohn High School in Ravensburg from 1949. After graduating from high school, he studied mechanical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich from 1958 to 1962 at the request of his father. In 1962, he graduated with an engineering degree. He then studied business administration at the University of Fribourg in western Switzerland, working part-time from 1963 to 1966 as assistant to the general director of the German Engineering Federation (VDMA) in Frankfurt. In 1965, he received his doctorate from the ETH Zurich with a dissertation on “Der längerfristige Exportkredit als betriebswirtschaftliches Problem des Maschinenbaus” (Long-term export credit as a business problem in mechanical engineering) and in 1967 from the University of Fribourg with a dissertation on “Ö!entliche Investitionen und wirtschaftliches Wachstum” (Public Investment and Economic Growth).

In 1966 and 1967, Schwab completed an academic year at Harvard Business School, from which he graduated with a Master of Public Administration (MPA). Here he met a number of personalities who were to have a major influence on the rest of his life. According to Schwab’s own statements, his professor Henry Kissinger, one of the key figures in world politics in the 1970s as U.S. National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, is one of the personalities who most influenced his thinking over the course of his life.

Hardly less important may have been two other Harvard professors: Kenneth Galbraith, world-famous economist, textbook author and advisor to several U.S. presidents; and Herman Kahn, cyberneticist, futurologist and, as a nuclear strategist, one of the  architects of the concept of “nuclear deterrence” developed during the Cold War. All three were to play a decisive role in the establishment of Schwab’s foundation in 1971.

In 1967, Schwab returned to Zurich and worked until 1970 as assistant to the chairman of the board of directors of Escher Wyss, the company his father had previously headed. Escher Wyss had again run into difficulties in the years before and, after unsuccessful cooperations with Brown Boveri and Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon, was taken over by Winterthur-based Sulzer AG in 1966.

In the following three years, Schwab helped in a leading position to organize the complete merger with Sulzer. Here, some of his strengths became apparent, namely the early recognition of technological and market trends and their implementation in business practice. When he took up his post in 1967, he already predicted the importance of the use of computers in modern mechanical engineering. In the three years that followed, he put this insight to good use and ensured that the mechanical engineering company, renamed Sulzer Ltd, was developed into a modern technology group.

In 1969, he accepted a part-time professorship at the Centre d’Études Industrielles (CEI), an international management institute affiliated with the University of Geneva, which later became IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Chapter III: Three Decisions with Big Consequences

In 1970, Schwab made three decisions that would change his life from the ground up: He quit his job, completed a book, and prepared for a first major international conference. 

After quitting his permanent job, he set up a three-person office in Geneva. The first employee he hired was Hilde Stoll, whom he married the following year and who remains by his side to this day. In the same year, he completed a book entitled Moderne Unternehmensführung im Maschinenbau (Modern Management in Mechanical Engineering), which he had written at the request of his former employer, the German Engineering Federation (VDMA), and which was published in Frankfurt in 1971.

This book contains an important key to understanding Schwab’s great success. In it, he outlined the foundations of his political and economic philosophy and was one of the first to use the term stakeholder capitalism. Schwab thus deliberately set himself apart from the neoliberal concept of shareholder capitalism. For its most popular proponent at the time, Milton Friedman, the main goal of corporate managers should be to maximize earnings in order to increase returns for shareholders (Friedman Doctrine).

Schwab countered this provocatively cynical definition with his vision of a capitalism that should also be concerned with the interests and welfare of employees, customers, suppliers, the government, society as a whole and, beyond that, with protecting the environment. In doing so, however, it merely adopted the common critique of capitalism voiced mostly by the political left, without questioning the laws of the market, challenging the political order, or providing concrete instructions for action to achieve its goals. Basically, the ideology of stakeholder capitalism was and is nothing more than a wholehearted commitment to the market economy and to the existing political and social structures, combined with a (mostly ineffective) appeal to the conscience of entrepreneurs and politicians.

For the latter, however, Schwab’s ideology has a certain appeal: On the one hand, those who subscribe to it indicate that they are familiar with criticism and strive to act in a more socially acceptable way than the neoliberal competition. On the other hand, whenever they deviate from its principles, they can point to external constraints of an economic or political nature, and thus redeem themselves morally. In other words, the concept of stakeholder capitalism is a fig leaf behind which one can hide without having to fundamentally change one’s strategy.

Schwab’s main activity as an independent contractor in 1970 was to prepare and organize a conference to introduce top European managers to American management methods, and to do so on a large scale. His goal was to bring together several hundred CEOs with the leading faculty of European and U.S. business schools the following year.

Since Schwab was only 32 years old at the time, had just five years of professional experience, and could not boast an extraordinary success story, one wonders: Were these the fever dreams of a young man suffering from overconfidence?, or were there possibly influential forces supporting him in the background?

At least one such force is even confirmed by Klaus Schwab himself. According to his statements, there was a German industrialist  who lent him 50,000 francs for his project.[7] The fact that he made this loan to Schwab conditional on either repaying the money or joining his company suggests that the two were close. It is quite possible that the sponsor was Gottlieb Stoll, the founder of the Swabian company Festo and father of Schwab’s later wife Hilde.

But even 50,000 francs would certainly not have been enough to put Schwab’s plans into practice. So who were the other supporters? A look at the personnel and circumstances of the first conferences should provide the answer to this question.

*

Table of Contents

Foreword 

Chapter I: A Small Town on the Shores of Lake Geneva 

Chapter II: Klaus Schwab’s Background 

Chapter III: Three Decisions with Big Consequences 

Chapter IV: Davos, 1971: The First Meeting 

Chapter V: 1972: The Second Meeting — under the Sign of Europe 

Chapter VI: 1973: Undeterred Ahead 

Chapter VII: The Economic and Political Background of the Early Years

Chapter VIII: 1974 — 1976: The Forum Gains Influence and Power 

Chapter IX: 1977 — 1980: The Breakthrough 

Chapter X: In the Background: Digitalization and Financialization Take their Course

Chapter XI: The First Half of the 1980s: Brick upon Brick 

Chapter XII: 1985 — 1988: Rise to the Political Olympus 

Chapter XIII: 1989 — 1990: The Final Disintegration of the Eastern Bloc

Chapter XIV: The 1990s — Digitalization and Financialization Pick up Speed 

Chapter XV: 1991 — 1992: The WEF Becomes a Cadre School for the Elite 

Chapter XVI: 1993 — 1995: Elected by No One, but more Influential Than Ever 

Chapter XVII: 1996 — 1998: The WEF Gradually Takes Over Global Leadership

Chapter XVIII: 1999 — 2000: Protests, Turn of the Millennium and a Foundation with Consequences 

Chapter XIX: 2001 — 2003: Terror and War as Economic Drivers

Chapter XX: 2004 — 2006: The Calm before the Storm

Chapter XXI: 2007 — 2008: The World Financial Crisis Changes Everything 

Chapter XXII: 2009 — 2011: Austerity at any Price 

Chapter XXIII: 2012 — 2014: Focus on Health, Climate and Ukraine 

Chapter XXIV: 2015 — 2017: Fourth Industrial Revolution and Transhumanism 

Chapter XXV: 2018 — 2019: The Financial System is Finished, What Now? 

Chapter XXVI: 2020: COVID-19 and the Great Reset 

Chapter XXVII: 2021 — 2022: “Creative Destruction” — up to War 

Chapter XXVIII: The WEF’s Vision of the Future: Authoritarian Regimes and Digital Central Bank Currencies … 131

Chapter XXIX: From EMF to WEF: From Lobbyism to Transhumanism 

Chapter XXX: 2023: Climate Change and Artificial Intelligence 

Bonus Chapter A: Strategic Partners

Bonus Chapter B: Young Global Leaders 

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World Economic Forum: The Global Shadow Elite

by Ernst Wolff

Publisher: ‎ Clearsight Media (April 14, 2023)

Language: ‎ English

Paperback: ‎ 258 pages

ISBN-10: ‎ 1739777913

ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1739777913

Click here to order.

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Ernst Wolff was born in China in 1950 and spent his childhood in Korea. After studying in Germany and the USA, he worked as an interpreter, language teacher and screenwriter. Since the 1990s, he has been working as a journalist on the relationship between politics and “nance. He has published numerous articles on this subject and written several non-fiction books (World Power IMF, Financial Tsunami and Wolf of Wall Street). With the highly acclaimed book World Power IMF he became an acknowledged bestselling author. With World Economic Forum he continues this success. His investigative research and detailed knowledge of the global monetary system make him one of the top authors in the fields of economics, “nance and political economy. Ernst Wolff runs his own info channels on YouTube, Telegram and Odysee and regularly reaches an audience of millions.

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A man has died following a shooting at a farm in Kenya that supplies flowers to British supermarkets.

A second man is understood to have been seriously injured.

The shooting happened at 2.30am today near Mount Kenya at Ibis Farm in Timau, which is operated by Flamingo Group.

It is the world’s largest rose grower and top supplier of premium flowers to UK supermarkets. 

Customers include Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, M&S, Waitrose and the Co-op.

A Flamingo spokesperson told Declassified: “A gang of around 20 people broke into Flamingo’s farm site in Kenya. Flamingo’s guards, who are all unarmed, were on duty at the time and alerted the police.

“Following the arrival of the police there were gunshots and the gang dispersed. Some time later, it became clear that a person beyond the boundary of the site had tragically passed away.

“We extend our sincere condolences to the family of the deceased. Our current priority is ensuring the safety of all personnel.”

Flamingo guards patrol with dogs but claim not to carry weapons and could have been overpowered by the intruders, who sometimes steal drip lines or plastic.

The deceased, who did not work for Flamingo, has been named as Kalulu Mutwiri, a married father of two young children.

Kalulu Mutwiri’s body was found 200m away from the farm at 9am. (Photo: Supplied)

Local people are furious that Mutwiri was shot dead, apparently at close range, rather than arrested.

Kelvin Kubai, a lawyer who lives in the area, accused those involved of “taking the law into their own hands”.

He told Declassified Mutwiri’s body bore signs of torture and had been dragged by a rope to a nearby river valley.

Kubai believes those responsible hoped heavy rainfall would wash away the body and cover up the death.

Instead police were called back after the body was discovered by community members 200m from the site at 9am, triggering a protest at the farm this morning by around a thousand local villagers.

The protesters demanded an explanation from farm management and some destroyed property inside the site, including setting fire to a tractor.

The situation remains volatile with the farm in shut down and all employees being evacuated.

Kenya’s police were asked to comment. At least one person has been arrested.

Conservative Party chairman Greg Hands (left) on a tour of Flamingo farms in Kenya as a trade minister in 2018. (Photo: UK Foreign Office)

Lorry crash

The dramatic scenes follow another incident there in December, when dozens of workers were injured after a lorry fell over.

Workers are bussed around the farm in the back of lorries that have no seats.

Between 68 and 136 workers were involved in the accident. Many suffered crush injuries and required hospital treatment.

One man, 28-year-old Samuel Sikuku, received a head injury and died from a blood clot between his skull and brain six weeks later, according to a post-mortem report filed with Kenya’s police.

It stated that Sikuku was “an employee at Flamingo” who was “injured in a motor vehicle accident”.

A pathologist found the cause of death were “complications of chronic subdural haematoma following head injury due to blunt force trauma” and high blood pressure.

The NHS website says “Head injuries that cause subdural haematomas are often severe, such as those from a car crash”.

A lorry carrying Flamingo workers fell over at a farm in Timau, Kenya, on 8 December 2022. (Photos: Supplied)

Pay gap

Flamingo, headquartered in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, posted annual post-tax profits of £50m and paid one of its directors annual remuneration worth £1m, according to the company’s most recent accounts.

Its workers in Kenya are expected to pick 1,500 roses a day. At peak times, like Valentine’s and Mother’s Day, the daily target rises to 4,500 stems. 

Workers at Timau can be paid as little as £2 a day (365 Kenyan shillings). They receive a death in service payment of just £179 (27,000 shillings). 

Many of the workers injured in the accident were employed under one month contracts which were not renewed after the accident.

Kubai commented: “They take the thorns as Flamingo takes the roses.” 

In response to the lorry accident, a company spokesperson said: “Flamingo Horticulture takes the safety and wellbeing of all its employees extremely seriously. We strongly refute a number of the issues raised and would highlight our contribution to our employees and communities over 40 years of working in Kenya. 

“These include making material contributions, totalling more than £5,000,000 in Kenya, in areas such as education and healthcare. We also run a school feeding programme for local schools in the surrounding community in Nanyuki. We operate to high ethical standards and are subject to regular 3rd party audits from independent bodies.”

‘Ethical business’

Sikuku, who died in the latest incident, had worked at the Flamingo farm in Timau, near Mount Kenya, since 2014. 

When Declassified visited the area last year, we saw horticulture workers living in squalid conditions a 40 minute drive from the luxurious Lewa Wildlife Conservancy where Prince William spent his gap year.

Flamingo has previously faced criticism over its flower farms at Kenya’s Lake Naivasha, where nomadic Maasai herders were concerned over high water usage.

Flamingo’s farm at Timau was previously run by Scottish firm Finlays, which acquired much of their land in Kenya during colonial rule when indigenous communities were violently evicted by British settlers.

In February an undercover investigation by the BBC accused Finlays managers of sexually abusing women who work at its Kenyan tea plantations.

Flower pickers at Timau live in shanty towns. (Photo: Phil Miller / Declassified UK)

Large swathes of Kenya’s most fertile farmland are foreign owned, with some still controlled by the descendents of European settlers. 

After independence from Britain in 1963, some land was allocated to local communities. However, the area around Timau was pocketed by a corrupt Kenyan land minister, Jackson Angaine, who sold part of it to Finlays subsidiary Home Grown Kenya.

Last year Kenya’s National Land Commission ruled that some of the land grabbed by Angaine should be returned.

Conservative party chairman Greg Hands toured Flamingo farms in Kenya in 2018 when he was a trade minister, with the British high commission calling the company an “ethical business”.

This week Kenyan MP Francis Kuria Kimani said he suspected some multinational companies were using “large parcels of land across the country…without having to compensate the people of Kenya” and accused foreigners of receiving “preferential treatment”.

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Phil Miller is Declassified UK’s chief reporter. He is the author of Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes. Follow him on Twitter at @pmillerinfo

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*** 

 

 

The mRNA and adenoviral DNA COVID-19 vaccine debacle in humans has set populations on edge, distrustful of poorly conceived genetic technology. Meanwhile the field has advanced considerably in veterinary medicine. While these shots may protect animals from pathogens over the short term, what are the implications for our food supply? Any of the genetic material transmissible to humans through consumption? Raw or cooked? These and other questions are coming up as more information is being brought forward.

Aida and colleagues have graphically summarized the genetic technologies in use as of 2021 in veterinary medicine. In the consumer meat category at present, only swine are of concern given the use of plasmid DNA, replication incompetent viral vector, and RNA replicon products. Do these technologies cause noninfectious diseases in the animals?

Can any of the genetic material survive denaturing during curing and cooking? How about pork intestines harvested for the production of heparin widely used in human medicine? It is conceivable that genetic incorporation of foreign RNA or DNA into humans and production of antigens for example, porcine endemic diarrhea or influenza A, could have untoward effects including autoimmunity similar to that with the COVID-19 vaccines?

Aida V, Pliasas VC, Neasham PJ, North JF, McWhorter KL, Glover SR, Kyriakis CS. Novel Vaccine Technologies in Veterinary Medicine: A Herald to Human Medicine Vaccines. Front Vet Sci. 2021 Apr 15;8:654289. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2021.654289. PMID: 33937377; PMCID: PMC8083957.

Now is a good time for veterinary and human medicine including the FDA and USDA, to come together and review the published studies of these new products on genetic transmissibility to humans and its potential implications. The Aida paper does not even mention the possibility of collateral impact to humans. One can see that developers, sponsors, and authors are blinded with infatuation for molecular biology and have lost sight of biological product safety in the food supply.

If you find “Courageous Discourse” enjoyable and useful to your endeavors, please subscribe as a paying or founder member to support our efforts in helping you engage in these discussions with family, friends, and your extended circles.

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Source

Aida V, Pliasas VC, Neasham PJ, North JF, McWhorter KL, Glover SR, Kyriakis CS. Novel Vaccine Technologies in Veterinary Medicine: A Herald to Human Medicine Vaccines. Front Vet Sci. 2021 Apr 15;8:654289. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2021.654289. PMID: 33937377; PMCID: PMC8083957.

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*** 

On 5 April 2023 the [U.K.] High Court handed down judgment in Adil v General Medical Council [2023] EWHC 797 (Admin). The case examined the extent to which a professional regulator can interfere with the right to freedom of expression of an individual subject to its regulation, as well as the circumstances in which the Court should accept challenges to decisions made by regulators in the performance of their duties. It is the first case decided by the [UK] High Court concerning anti-vaccination statements made by a doctor in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the actions of the General Medical Council (“GMC”) in response. 

Factual Background

Mr Adil is a consultant colorectal surgeon. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, he posted multiple videos on social media in which he, amongst other things, made statements to the effect that:

1. COVID-19 did not exist;
2. the pandemic was a conspiracy brought about by the United Kingdom, Israel and America; 
3. the pandemic was a scam which was being manipulated for the benefit of Bill Gates and pharmaceutical companies;
4. Bill Gates infected the entire world with COVID-19 in order to sell vaccines; and 
5. COVID-19 vaccines would be given to everyone, by force if necessary, and could potentially contain microchips that affect the human body.

In these videos Mr Adil made it known that he was a doctor working in the UK.

The GMC brought regulatory proceedings against Mr Adil on the basis that these statements:

1. undermined public health;
2. were contrary to widely accepted medical opinion; and/or 
3. undermined public confidence in the medical profession.

His case was heard by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal (“the Tribunal”) in June 2022. It found that the statements were made as alleged, that in doing so Mr Adil was guilty of misconduct which in turn gave rise to an impairment of his ability to practise medicine, and that a six-month immediate suspension of his registration was appropriate. 

Grounds of Appeal

Mr Adil appealed to the High Court. He advanced five grounds of appeal, which focussed primarily on whether the Tribunal’s decision was consistent with his right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The grounds can be summarised as follows:

Ground 1 was that the conclusions on misconduct and impairment were contrary to Article 10(1), ECHR because they represented an interference with his Article 10 rights that was not “prescribed by law”;

Ground 2 was that the conclusions on misconduct and impairment were a disproportionate interference with his Article 10 rights;

Grounds 3 and 4 were in effect further extensions of ground 2. Ground 3 was that the Tribunal was wrong to conclude that expressing views “outside widely accepted medical opinion” amounted to misconduct or provided a justification for interference with Mr Adil’s right to freedom of expression. Ground 4 was that there was no evidence to support the conclusion that his comments had damaged the reputation of the medical profession. This too, it was submitted, went to whether the conclusions of misconduct, impairment, and the penalty imposed were proportionate interferences with his ECHR rights.

Ground 5 was that the sanction of six months suspension from the medical register was wrong.

Applicable Law

Article 10(1) of the ECHR states:

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers

The right is qualified by Article 10(2), which makes express provision for interference with freedom of expression for the purpose of the protection of health:

The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health…

Judgment

The Court dismissed all 5 grounds of appeal and upheld both the Tribunal’s determinations and its sanction.

In respect of the first ground, the Court held that the provisions of “Good Medical Practice” (the GMC’s principal guidance document for doctors) were sufficient to satisfy the requirement that any interference with Mr Adil’s Article 10 rights be “prescribed by law”. Although the requirement for doctors to maintain public trust in the profession is framed by “Good Medical Practice” in quite general terms, it was nevertheless sufficient to reflect the body of obligations which attached to the profession and was capable of being readily understood by doctors so as to enable them to regulate their conduct. The Court held that it should have been reasonably foreseeable to Mr Adil that his actions would conflict with the professional standards set by the GMC.

In respect of the second, third and fourth grounds, the Court held that whilst the GMC’s sanction undeniably engaged Article 10, it was a proportionate interference with his freedom of expression. Mr Adil had identified himself as a doctor and then made comments which the Judge considered to be “outlandish”. In the circumstances, it was clearly open to the Tribunal to conclude that his comments undermined the protection of public health and would impair public trust in the profession. Having done so, it was a proportionate interference with Mr Adil’s Article 10 rights for the Tribunal to conclude that: (a) his broadcast amounted to misconduct; (b) that by reason of that misconduct his fitness to practise was impaired; and (c) that his registration should be suspended for six months.

As to the fifth ground of appeal, the question for the Court was whether the Tribunal’s sanction was “wrong”. In light of its conclusions in respect of grounds 1 to 4, the decision to impose an immediate suspension was clearly one which was open to the Tribunal. Accordingly, the final ground of appeal also failed. 

Comment

The Court recognised that in matters of professional regulation, the regulator has a particular expertise which the Court lacks as to how the reputation of the profession and the public interest is best protected. It follows that the Court should be slow to interfere with a regulator’s decision. In this case, given the nature of Mr Adil’s comments, the determinations and conclusions of the Tribunal were held to be clearly reasonable.

Nevertheless, the Court properly remarked upon the necessity of freedom of expression for medical professionals, and that this should not be constrained by any need for a doctor’s comments to fall within mainstream medical opinion. The Court recognised the interest in preserving the right of doctors to challenge medical orthodoxy, and the undesirable consequences if doing so placed a doctor at risk of professional sanction. 

Interestingly, the Court held that the enabling law for the purpose of satisfying the requirement that any interference with freedom of expression be “prescribed by law” was not statute passed by Parliament (in the form of the Medical Act 1983), but “Good Medical Practice”. It follows that where a regulator issues guidance or advice to a professional as to expected professional standards, the regulator should be cognizant that the Court may treat such guidance as “law” by which those professional standards are to be judged. Should this guidance later be shown to be insufficiently precise, a regulator’s actions may be held to be unlawful where they engage qualified rights conferred by the ECHR. Documents such as “Good Medical Practice” cannot therefore be treated merely as helpful guidance provided by a regulator to assist professionals in shaping their conduct, but have the potential to be treated by the Court as codes of conduct against which a professional’s standards should be judged. 

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Martin Forde KC acted for the General Medical Council, assisted by Thomas Hayes, the author of this piece.

Featured image is from The Conservative Woman

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Up to a dozen previously undisclosed undercover Metropolitan Police Department officers were embedded in the crowds on Jan. 6—including one who admitted joining in protester chants to “stop the steal”—according to an April 10 court filing in the Proud Boys seditious-conspiracy trial.

A motion for mistrial filed by defense attorney Roger Roots said the additional undercover officers bring the number of police, agents, and informants embedded in Jan. 6 crowds to at least 50.

He had filed an April 5 motion in the case that estimated the number to be 40.

Roots, who represents Proud Boys defendant Dominic Pezzola, asked U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly to declare a mistrial based on “numerous, repeated and yet-unfolding” instances where exculpatory evidence was withheld by federal prosecutors.

At an April 7 meeting with prosecutors, “the defense learned that there were at least 10 to 12 additional, previously unknown plainclothes MPD officers among the Proud Boys on Jan. 6,” Roots wrote.

“This brings the total number of informants among defendants on or around Jan. 6 to 50 or more,” he said. “And there are reasons to suspect the true number is higher.”

In his April 5 court filing, Roots said there were 19 confidential informants from an agency called HSI (Homeland Security Investigations) in the crowds on Jan. 6. That was in addition to eight FBI informants within the group.

Five members of the Proud Boys—Pezzola, Zachary Rehl, Enrique Tarrio, Joe Biggs, and Ethan Nordean—have been on trial since December.

They are charged with seditious conspiracy, conspiracy to obstruct official proceedings, obstruction of official proceedings, conspiracy to prevent certain federal officers from performing their duties, and other Jan. 6 counts.

Prosecutors contend they conspired to attack the Capitol and disrupt the counting of Electoral College votes by Congress.

Tarrio, Rehl, Nordean, and Biggs face nine criminal counts related to the Capitol breach, and Pezzola is charged with 10.

Officer Joins in Protest Chants

Roots said the newly disclosed 10–12 MPD undercover officers were from the Narcotics and Special Investigation Division. They were in addition to previously reported undercover officers from the MPD Electronic Surveillance Unit (ESU).

Prosecutors presented three of the undercover MPD officers for defense attorneys to interview, Roots said.

On April 7, investigator Nicholas Tomasula told defense attorneys his role on Jan. 6 was to record the crowds with his bodycam. He did not know if the other narcotics division undercover officers were also capturing video, the motion stated.

Roots said the defense has not been provided with Tomasula’s video.

“And he admitted he himself had been heard on video chanting, “Whose house? Our house!” and “Stop the steal!” Roots said.

“We still do not know the extent to which the crowd’s First Amendment demonstrations were transformed into violence by undercover law enforcement officers,” Roots said.

“The Tomasula bodycam videos may be the tip of a much larger iceberg.”

Tomasula told defense attorneys he had destroyed his iPhone, and all of his text messages—including some related to the Proud Boys—had been auto-deleted, the motion said.

“Tomasula indicated he would have immediately written reports of any violence, violent talk, or violent or insurrectionist plans among the Proud Boys or patriots but reported none,” he said.

“Such information would have been nice to have weeks ago when defendants were cross-examining government witnesses and developing their defense,” Roots said.

Prosecutors previously disclosed that a dozen ESU undercover officers were in the crowds taking videos and photographs, the motion said.

Those officers recorded protesters on the scaffolding on the west front of the Capitol, live-streamed video to MPD’s Joint Operations Command Center (JOCC), documented MPD’s attempts to hold police lines while being assaulted by the crowd, and filmed a Jan. 5 crowd that had taken an “aggressive stance” with MPD officers, according to a supplement filed with Roots’ motion.

DOJ Is Unaware

In its reply to Roots’ April 5 court filing, the U.S. Department of Justice said it is unaware of any Homeland Security Investigations unit that worked at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

“Defendant Pezzola does not identify the agency that runs the ‘Homeland Security Investigations’ unit, nor does he contend that this unit is closely aligned with the prosecution team,” read the response, signed by Jocelyn Ballantine, chief of the Complex Conspiracy Unit in the DOJ Capitol Siege Section.

“And, indeed, the government is aware of no involvement in Dominic Pezzola’s case by any unit so identified,” the response read.

A leaked video posted on Rumble on March 24 shows three undercover MPD officers engaging in provocateur behavior on Jan. 6, helping protesters climb over barriers, shouting pro-Trump slogans, and directing the crowd to proceed up the northwest stairs to the Capitol.

The actions of those officers were disclosed in court filings in another case by Jan. 6 defendant William Pope of Topeka, Kansas.

Pope has asked U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras to lift the court seal on a video shot by one of the officers so the public can view it.

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Featured image: Outside during the US Capitol during the January 6, 2021 attack on the building (Licensed under Creative Commons)

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ICC prosecutor general Karim Khan raised millions from NATO states by crafting an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin while freezing investigations into well-documented US and Israeli war crimes. Along the way, he won powerful friends in Washington, London, Kiev — and Hollywood.

Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, stood before a podium on March 3, 2023, and issued an unusual qualifier:

“Of course the prosecutor of the ICC does not, whatever affection and regard I may have for my dear friends in Ukraine – has no special affinity to any particular country. We’re not a party to any hostilities.”

“We have an affinity to legality,” Khan insisted in British-accented English. “We have an affinity and commitment to the rule of law.”

Khan made his declaration of legal independence while headlining the “United for Justice” conference, an event personally organized in Lviv, Ukraine, by President Volodymyr Zelensky. There, he pressed the flesh with Ukraine’s president and conferred with US Attorney General Merrick Garland, who had stopped in to advance the Biden administration’s effort to haul Russian President Vladimir Putin before an international war crimes tribunal.

It was Khan’s fourth visit to Ukraine since the Russian military invaded the country in February 2022.

On March 17, 2023, Khan introduced a formal ICC warrant for Putin’s arrest, accusing the Russian president of the “unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children to a “network of camps” throughout Russia. The warrant arrived days before the 20th anniversary of the NATO invasion of Iraq, a crime directed by US and UK officials whom the ICC has refused to prosecute to this day.

As The Grayzone has reported, the ICC’s warrant was inspired by a State Department-funded report that contained no field reporting, no concrete evidence of war crimes, and no proof that Russia was actually targeting Ukrainian youth with a massive deportation campaign.

In fact, the investigators acknowledged finding “no documentation of child mistreatment, including sexual or physical violence, among the camps referenced in this report.” What’s more, the inquiry’s lead author told The Grayzone’s Jeremy Loffredo that “a large amount” of the Russian youth camps his team researched were “primarily cultural education – like, I would say, teddy bear.”

Though Khan pledged his absolute independence in his hunt for Putin, he is closely aligned with the same Western governments that are currently engaged in a proxy battle with Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield. Meanwhile, he has stalled the ICC’s case against Israel, frustrating human rights lawyers who represent the victims of grisly violence in the besieged Gaza Strip. Additionally, Khan formally dropped the international court’s case against the US military for its actions in Afghanistan.

Through his focus on Ukraine, Khan has presided over a massive surge in Western financial support for his office, with much of the money earmarked for his investigation into Russian officials. The ICC’s issuance of Putin’s arrest warrant happened to coincide with a major donor’s conference for the court in London, England.

The ICC prosecutor’s political entanglements do not stop there. Celebrity lawyer Amal Clooney has worked as a special advisor to Khan’s office while simultaneously counseling the Ukrainian government on its initiative to target Russian officials with prosecution, either by the ICC or another international body. Clooney has also served as a special liaison to the British Foreign Secretary.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that after two decades of unremitting hostile relations with the ICC, official Washington is suddenly warming up to the court, and is endeared by its top prosecutor.

Karim Khan (left) with US Attorney General Merrick Garland in Lviv, Ukraine on February 28, 2023

ICC’s Khan inspires “sighs of relief in Jerusalem,” support from the US

US President Joe Biden helped set the tone in Washington with a full-throated endorsement of the ICC prosecutor Khan’s warrant against Putin, declaring it “justified.” On the Republican side of the aisle, the US Senate’s most enthusiastic cheerleader of the Ukraine proxy war, Lindsey Graham, was even more fulsome in his support for the court’s campaign, celebrating the ICC’s prosecutor as a modern-day Nazi hunter.

Washington’s sudden embrace of the ICC represented a sudden and clearly opportunistic break from two decades of antagonism.

Almost as soon as US President George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001, his administration introduced the Servicemembers Protection Act, a measure that authorized a future US military invasion of the Hague in the event the ICC indicted any US personnel for war crimes. When the bill passed the Senate the following year, not one member of the Republican Party opposed it.

The US intensified its campaign against the ICC in 2019, after then-Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced an investigation into war crimes committed by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. While Secretary of State Mike Pompeo personally denounced Bensouda, the Senate introduced a bipartisan resolution calling on him to escalate its attacks on the “politicized” ICC. Graham was among the signatories to the resolution. (The Biden administration also opposes the ICC investigation into Israeli war crimes).

When Bensouda declared her intention to investigate both the US and Taliban for crimes against humanity in Afghanistan the following year, Washington placed the prosecutor under sanctions and revoked her US visa.

Since replacing Bensouda in 2021, Khan has worked to soothe the nerves of the US and its most violence-prone allies. The Jerusalem Post reported in June 2022 that “there have been some sighs of relief in Jerusalem,” as Khan had “not issued a single public statement nor taken any single public action regarding Israel-Palestine” in his first year as prosecutor.

“There has been no significant progress or measures taken, the investigation [into Israeli atrocities] is not a priority for the office of the prosecutor, and no cases have been brought yet,” a member of the legal team representing victims of Israeli violence in the occupied Gaza Strip told The Grayzone. “Every time the issue is raised before Khan, he never takes a position, and there’s never been a statement.”

The lawyer noted the irony of Khan’s obsession with the transfer of civilians from Ukraine to Russia, considering he has ignored the forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the territory now known as “Israel” to occupied territories and refugee camps across the Middle East. “In Palestine civilians have been transferred for decades, it’s the most over documented situation of war crimes in history,” they said. “Palestine should be the final benchmark for the credibility of the court.”

Khan also narrowed the scope of the ICC’s Afghanistan investigation, protecting US forces from prosecution by focusing solely crimes committed by the Taliban. “This decision reinforces the perception that these institutions set up in the West and by the West are just instruments for the West’s political agenda,” Shaharzad Akbar, the former chair of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission, complained to The Intercept

“This was clearly a political decision – there’s really no other way it can be interpreted,” Jennifer Gibson, a US lawyer who heads an investigation into US abuses in Afghanistan, said of Khan’s action. “It gave the US and their allies a get out of jail free card.”

With its two most contentious investigations out of the way, a clearly pliant figure in the prosecutor’s office, and Russian troops inside Ukraine, the previously battered ICC suddenly experienced a deluge of Western financial support.

“In the weeks after 24 February [2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine], the [International Criminal] court has been flooded with cash and secondments,” reported JusticeInfo.net.

Much of the money flowed directly to Khan’s office, with special earmarks for efforts targeting Russian officials. As Maria Elena Vignoli of Human Rights Watch told JusticeInfo.net, “In the messaging around the various pledges that were made, states were not always that careful, and they often made the link between their contribution and Ukraine, thus creating this perception of politicization or selectivity in the court’s work.”

Washington, London pave the path for the ICC’s Khan

It was February 28, 2022 when Khan announced his intention to “proceed with opening an investigation into the Situation in Ukraine, as rapidly as possible.” Russia’s military operation inside Ukraine was only four days old at that point.

Days later, on March 2, 2022, the British Embassy in the Hague delivered Khan a referral co-signed by over 40 US and UK diplomats that urged him to investigate Russia for violations of the Rome Statute of the ICC.

That same day, Sen. Graham introduced a resolution in the US Senate calling for “Vladimir Putin and members of the Russian regime to be held accountable for the numerous acts of war, aggression, and human rights abuses that have been conducted under his watch.” Even as hawks like John Bolton warned that support for the ICC’s warrant could validate future legal actions against the US citizens, the resolution passed unanimously.

Just hours after issuing his resolution condemning alleged violations of international law, Graham took to Twitter to call for Putin’s assassination. “Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?” the senator pleaded on March 3, 2022. “The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out.”

Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?

The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out.

You would be doing your country – and the world – a great service.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) March 4, 2022

On April 3, 2022, Biden injected further momentum into the ICC’s campaign against Russia, branding Putin a “war criminal” and demanding he be hauled before “a war crimes trial.”

To further Biden’s objective, and by extension, that of the ICC, the US Department of State announced in May 2022 the establishment of a Conflict Observatory to gather open source evidence of alleged Russian war crimes and disseminate the findings “so that prosecutors can potentially even build criminal cases based on the material that is published.”

With American political winds at his back, Khan embarked on his first officially-curated tour of Ukraine.

ICC prosecutor Karim Khan on a government-guided tour of Kharkiv, Ukraine

Four government-guided junkets to Ukraine

Khan made his inaugural visit to Ukraine on March 16, 2022, arriving first in Poland, where he met with Ukrainian migrants at a refugee reception center. He then crossed the Ukrainian border to confer in Lviv with Irina Venediktova, the Ukrainian Prosecutor-General, before holding a virtual meeting with Zelensky.

“We conduct our work with independence, impartiality and integrity. I have underlined that I wish to engage with all parties to the conflict,” Khan insisted.

📢 During today's visit to #Ukraine, Prosecutor #KarimAAKhanQC met virtually w/ President @ZelenskyyUa:“I was pleased to hold important exchanges w/ the President while in country; we agreed all efforts are needed to ensure #IHL is respected & to protect the civilian population.” pic.twitter.com/SqAJsdF5oI

— Int'l Criminal Court (@IntlCrimCourt) March 16, 2022

His second visit came just weeks later, in April, when Venediktova shepherded him to the town of Bucha, which Russian troops had occupied for weeks before retreating at the start of that month. Ukrainian officials simultaneously led packs of Western journalists to local gravesites, presenting the burial grounds as evidence that Russia had carried out mass-scale executions in the town.

Images of corpses strewn across Bucha prompted Zelensky to accuse the Russian government of “genocide”, while US President Biden demanded that Putin appear before a war crimes tribunal. Biden’s request came despite his own Defense Department concession that it could not “independently and singlehandedly confirm accounts” of execution-style massacres committed by Russian forces in the town.

When Khan made his third visit to Ukraine in July 2022, he went to Kharkiv. Accompanied once again by Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Venediktova, he announced that the ICC planned to establish a field office in Kiev.

By that point, Zelensky’s government had outlawed 13 opposition parties, jailed his main presidential rival, shut down all critical media, banned the Russian patriarchate of the Orthodox Church and was on its way to arresting its top priest. Kiev was also disappearing and torturing political opponents and human rights advocates as part of an assassination campaign targeting Ukrainian officials accused of collaborating with Russia. Neo-Nazi militants had even videotaped themselves executing suspected Russian sympathizers.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military was escalating its attacks on civilian targets throughout the independent Republicans of Donetsk and Lugansk, bombing markets and in one instance, massacring a bus load of commuters with a Tochka-U missile. Ukrainian soldiers were also recorded executing unarmed Russian prisoners or war and shooting them in the knees.

But as Khan was junketed around Ukraine, he remained studiously disinterested in the documented abuses his official hosts were carrying out right under his nose. He had his eyes firmly fixed on Putin – and on the generous Western donations that propelled his mission.

Karim Khan meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during his fourth trip to Ukraine this March

Bring Back Our Girls 2.0

This March, Khan made his fourth trip to Ukraine to, in his words, “deepen our engagement with national authorities.” In Lviv, he headlined a conference called “United for Justice.” Personally hosted by Zelensky, the stated purpose of the event was to “hold Russia’s top leadership accountable for the crime of aggression against Ukraine.”

In promotional material, the United For Justice conference focused on a seemingly new and emotionally potent issue: the supposed deportation of Ukrainian children by Russia, and the urgent need to bring them home.

The theme contained clear echoes of the Kony 2012 campaign launched against Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, who “kidnapped over 30,000 children to strengthen his army,” according to the now-disgraced online hucksters that initiated it. It also recalled the humanitarian interventionist “Bring Back Our Girls” hashtag campaign launched by former First Lady Michelle Obama and other celebrities to highlight the abduction of several hundred schoolgirls by the Islamist militia Boko Haram in northern Nigeria.

At United for Justice, it seemed NATO officials had landed on a theme guaranteed to pique the outrage of suggestible Western liberals.

Throughout the United for Justice conference, participants repeatedly leveled the allegation of mass youth deportations against Russia. “Small children are being kidnapped, brainwashed, and forced to become Russian citizens,” Dutch Foreign Minister Woepke Hoekstra claimed from the podium, denouncing “the systemic abduction of Ukrainian children.”

Merrick Garland, the US Attorney General, said after his visit to Lviv that he was “trying to find the people” to identify and “build evidence against” in Russia’s alleged “effort to forcibly deport children.”

During his own address, Khan linked a visit he made to an orphanage inside Ukraine to “allegations that we received that children have been deported outside Ukraine, into the territory of the Russian Federation.” He did not indicate that any children were taken from the orphanage he toured, however.

The ICC website currently features a photograph of Khan posing beside empty cribs in the Ukrainian orphanage he referenced in his speech – an apparent public relations ploy designed to suggest that Putin’s minions had snatched the young children from their beds. Though this orphanage was far from the front line, Khan sported a kevlar protective helmet for added effect.

Yet just months before Khan posed as the fatherly protector of Ukrainian children from the Kremlin’s predatory clutches, a child abuse scandal hit close to his own home.

In May 2022, Khan’s brother, Imran Ahmad Khan, resigned from his seat in the British House of Commons after he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy. Ahmad Khan served 18 months in prison after a judge found him guilty of climbing into the boy’s bunk bed and groping his groin while attempting to ply him with gin and pornography. Following the conviction, a second man accused Ahmad Khan of abusing him as a minor.

While there is no indication Karim Khan provided any legal assistance to his convict brother, The Guardian noted that Ahmad Khan remains “close to his family, particularly his brothers Karim and Khaled, both lawyers, the former a prosecutor at the international criminal court in The Hague.”

Khan relies on State Department-sponsored research for “home run pitch”

During public speeches about Ukraine, Karim Khan often emphasizes his trips to battlegrounds like Bucha and Kharkiv, where the Kiev government accused Russia of  committing grisly war crimes. However, when he introduced the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin, his indictment did not mention any alleged Russian atrocities in either location. Instead, it focused entirely on the supposed deportation of Ukrainian children.

The ICC prosecutor’s warrant was clearly inspired by a Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) report that was funded and supported by the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations – an entity the Biden administration established in May 2022 to advance the prosecution of Russian officials.

The ICC accuses Russia's leadership of running a network of "re-education camps" for captive Ukrainian youth.@loffredojeremy did what the ICC refused to do and visited one such camp outside Moscow.

Is this a war crime? Watch Jeremy's exclusive video and judge for yourself. pic.twitter.com/lVTYjxpkJZ

— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) April 2, 2023

That State Department-sponsored paper, as The Grayzone revealed, contained long passages contradicting the ICC’s prosecutor’s claims, as well as those its author made in media appearances. In a conversation with journalist Jeremy Loffredo, Yale HRL director Nathaniel Raymond stated that “a large amount” of the Russian youth camps his team researched were “primarily cultural education – like, I would say, teddy bear.”

When asked why his research team did not attempt to visit any programs inside Russia, Raymond said, “We’re persona non grata. We’re considered extensions of US intelligence by the Russians.”

At the same time, the Yale HRL director acknowledged his report was driven by State Department objectives, conducted under “a lot of pressure” from the US National Intelligence Council. He also conceded his team relied on the Pentagon’s US Indo-Pacific Command to “expand our satellite access in the Pacific Command to get the Siberian and eastern camps.”

When asked why Khan did not seek arrest warrants over allegations of Russian war crimes in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, which dominated Western media coverage for days, Raymond recalled a phone conversation he held with several foreign correspondents from the New York Times in March 2023:

“I was on the phone with the New York Times on Friday – the folks who did the big Bucha investigation, and they were like, basically, ‘Hey, we want to win a Pulitzer Prize on Bucha. We think it’s weird that Khan charged [the transfer of youth] and didn’t charge Bucha.’ And I said, ‘It would have been the worst thing imaginable.’”

Raymond explained the prosecutor’s logic: “If Khan had charged Bucha, it would have been catastrophic, because he would have been telegraphing weakness to the Russians. Because Bucha is a massacre. But it doesn’t mean that it is Rome Statute-level in terms of intentional systematic and command-and-control orders. To do that, you need the forensics… ballistics, you need the communications. And there’s no evidence the ICC has that.”

So, according to the Yale HRL director, Khan “started with a home run pitch, and basically said, we’re charging Putin on his own statements in a prima facie evidence-proof [case] on a conservative set of indictments. The transfer and deportation was lowball, he didn’t charge first degree murder.”

“For the New York Times,” Raymond continued, “they’re not going to be happy until Bucha gets charged with all the glitz of an ICC indictment. But [Khan would] be basically saying to Putin: ‘go throw a lieutenant colonel from the paratroopers out the window and you’re cool.’”

Besides providing Khan with the easiest route to an arrest warrant for Putin, the indictment also happened to pack the biggest propaganda punch, enabling the prosecutor to cast himself as the savior of Ukraine’s children.

To that end, he has received critical PR assistance from Amal Clooney, the international lawyer who gained fame as the wife of a Hollywood humanitarian interventionist who is one of the US Democratic Party’s most prolific fundraisers.

The ICC’s Karim Khan confers with Amal Clooney in April 2022 after appearing at the UN to drum up support for prosecuting Russian officials

The Clooney connection: Khan collaborates with Hollywood humanitarian interventionists

In September 2021, weeks after assuming the role of ICC prosecutor, Khan appointed Amal Clooney as a special advisor to his investigation into atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan. When Russian forces entered Ukraine five months later, Clooney immediately shifted her focus, accepting a Ukrainian government invitation to join their “legal task force on accountability.”

Her collaborative relationship with Khan, which spanned at least a decade, has raised further questions about the ICC cheif’s pledge of “independence, impartiality and integrity.”

The Lebanese-born Amal Clooney first emerged as a global celebrity through her marriage to Hollywood heartthrob George Clooney, himself a prominent humanitarian interventionist who led the campaign to target Sudan’s government and its former president, Omar Bashir, with economic sanctions and genocide charges over its actions in Darfur. The US Israel lobby and then-US president George W. Bush heavily supported the crusade against Khartoum, with the latter threatening to send US troops to the oil-rich region to confront Bashir. For his part, Clooney invoked the memory of Auschwitz to advocate for UN military intervention in the region. Though the subsequent ICC warrant for Bashir’s arrest ultimately proved futile, Clooney’s campaign established his bonafides within the international human rights industry.

In 2016, George Clooney turned his focus to domestic politics, raising what he described as “an obscene amount of money” for the presidential campaign of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Entry costs ran up to $353,400 per couple at the pro-Hillary fundraisers hosted by George and Amal Clooney.

George and Amal Clooney (right) at a 2016 fundraiser they hosted for Hillary Clinton

That same year, George and Amal leveraged their fame to establish the Clooney Foundation for Justice. Like the foundations established by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama after their presidencies, the Clooneys’ initiative relied on funding from liberal billionaires including Bill Gates and George Soros and forged partnerships with Microsoft and the UN. The Clooney Foundation for Justice also lists the US and UK government-sponsored intelligence proxy Bellingcat as an official partner.

The agenda of the Clooneys’ human rights outfit tracks closely with Washington’s foreign policy objectives. The group pushes human rights campaigns in countries where the US seeks regime change, while overlooking well-documented atrocities committed by the US and its allies, including Israel. In Venezuela, for example, which the US has targeted with sanctions and violent military coups in pursuit of regime change, the Clooney Foundation says it is assisting an ICC investigation into President Nicholas Maduro.

While overseeing her foundation, Amal Clooney won several British government appointments, including a two years stint as UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s Special Envoy for Media Freedom, and a role as a formal international legal advisor to the UK Attorney General.

Though Clooney once served on the legal team of jailed Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange, she said nothing when Hunt denounced her former client, defended his arrest, and endorsed the journalist’s extradition to the US.

Amal Clooney (left) and UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who appointed her as his Special Envoy on Media Freedom in 2019

In April 2022, the Clooney Foundation announced it would dispatch a team to Kiev to assist the Ukrainian government’s ICC investigation. That month, Amal Clooney appeared on a UN Human Rights Council panel alongside Khan, where she introduced the public to the allegations that Russia’s government was engaged in the mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children for the first time.

“Could it be that thousands of children are being forcibly deported to Russia? Could it be that teenage girls are being raped in the street in front of their family and their neighbors? …Unfortunately, the answer is yes,” Clooney proclaimed, providing no evidence to back her claim.

"Ukraine is, today, a slaughterhouse."

Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney urged countries at the UN to focus on international justice for war crimes in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/Wthabo06W7

— DW News (@dwnews) April 28, 2022

Two months later, Khan and Amal Clooney reunited for a meeting with Ukraine’s General Prosecutor, Irina Venediktova, at the European Union’s Eurojust side-event on prosecuting Russian officials.

Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova met with ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan and Amal Clooney, a British lawyer who is part of the Legal Task Force. This working group supports #Ukraine in providing justice for victims of international crimes committed by Russia.⤵ pic.twitter.com/T7pJMPWTFy

— Now in Ukraine (@Now_in_Ukraine) June 2, 2022

Next, in September, Khan participated in another Eurojust “cooperation for accountability in Ukraine” side-event co-sponsored by the governments of Ukraine, Germany, Denmark and Netherlands. The ICC prosecutor moderated the panel alongside Amal Clooney and the Ukraine’s new prosecutor, Dmitri Kostrin. (President Zelensky dismissed Venediktova in July over “concerns of treason”).

Khan’s relationship with Amal Clooney began long before either gained international notoriety. Back in 2010, when she was still Amal Alamuddin, the lawyer contributed to a volume of essays which Khan co-edited. Khan has also blurbed a 2022 book Clooney co-authored with British lawyer Philippa Webb, calling it a “a tour de force.” (Like Clooney, Webb is a member of the Kiev-supported “legal task force on accountability for crimes committed in Ukraine”).

The website of the Clooney Foundation for Justice features Khan showering even more praise on Clooney, hailing her as a “a giant [who has] been willing to speak up even though many would rather [she] quietened down…[her] refusal to be muzzled must inspire us not to be muzzled [and her] refusal to lose hope must inspire us to march forward.”

The ICC prosecutor’s adoration for Clooney apparently inspired his decision to keep her as a special advisor to his office, even as she worked for the British and Ukrainian governments – both belligerents in a war with Russia.

The Grayzone queried the ICC prosecutor’s press officer about Khan’s close collaboration with Clooney, inquiring whether her work on behalf of the Ukrainian and British governments compromised Khan’s stated pledge to “independence, impartiality and integrity.” It received no reply.

ICC undercuts negotiations with indictment timed for London donor conference

This March 20, exactly one week after issuing an arrest warrant for Putin, Khan appeared in London at an event sponsored by the British and Dutch governments to appeal to the Western states sponsoring the Ukraine proxy war for more money. There, he was seen yukking it up with British Justice Minister Dominic Raab and his counterparts from several NATO states and Ukraine.

The Guardian linked the timing of the Putin arrest warrant to the donor conference, noting, “Khan made his dramatic move against the Russian president last week ahead of a conference in London co-hosted by the UK and the Dutch government aimed at raising cash to fund the ICC’s war crimes investigatory work inside Ukraine.”

With justice ministers 40 UK and UK allies on hand, the confab raised $5 million for the ICC’s mission to prosecute Russian officials.

The donor conference just happened to take place three days after the 20th anniversary of the US and UK-led invasion of Iraq, an event that is estimated to have left over 1 million Iraqis dead. In 2020, the ICC dropped its investigation into British atrocities in Iraq.

Meanwhile, it has been over three months since Khan pledged to visit the Occupied Palestinian Territories to further the ICC’s dormant investigation into Israeli abuses. “Nobody knows if Khan has any plans to go to Palestine,” a lawyer representing Palestinian victims of Israeli violence lamented to The Grayzone. “It’s clear that it won’t be a priority.”

It is also clear that the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin has planted another obstacle in the way of a negotiated end to the conflict in Ukraine. As a top Zelensky aide, Mykhailo Podalyak, stated on Twitter immediately after the court’s indictment of Putin, “There can be no negotiations with the current Russian elite.”

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The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions. 

Featured image: ICC prosecutor Karim Khan meets with Ukrainian President Zelensky, March 2023 (Source: The Grayzone)

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The media obsession in vilifying Jack Texeira for “leaking” TOP SECRET and SECRET documents and judging him guilty without any benefit of doubt, is just another symptom of the authoritarian fever that grips many inhabitants of the United States. Forget the first amendment. Stay in the dark and trust the Government to tell you what you need to know. Before you join the mob eager to lynch the poor kid, let me share what some of my friends who are veterans of the CIA and the Air Force have said about this affair in the past few days.

Both men say that the story and alleged facts smell to high heaven. One longtime buddy, a veteran of the CIA, still provides consulting services to the U.S. Government and holds the same high clearances that he had prior to his retirement. He is an experienced operations officer. He has recruited foreigners to spy on behalf of the United States, managed highly classified programs and planned and executed many covert actions. In other words, he is no desk jockey.

We started working together 18 years ago in providing training support to a variety of military commands by writing and executing military exercises. All of our work was conducted in a SCIF and we had the clearances that gave us access to TOP SECRET, COMPARTMENTED INTELLIGENCE. I stopped doing that work five years ago but he has continued on.

During our 18 years of working on these highly classified exercises we have never seen a E3 (i.e., an Airman First Class) anywhere in the SCIF. The enlisted personnel who worked on these TOP SECRET exercises were at least a Staff Sergeant (E5). So what is a lowly E3 doing in a SCIF with TOP SECRET material and no supervision? That is the first red flag.

Another red flag, as I noted in my previous piece, is the partial copy of the CIA Operations Center Intelligence Report. Both of us have had access to CIA systems available on the military servers and we have never seen the CIA Ops Center report on any of those systems. Never! How did this 21 year old kid get his hands on that?

I was chatting today with another friend. He’s of more recent vintage. I discovered he is a retired U.S. Air Force Colonel and that his last job with the Air Force was the inspection, certification and monitoring of Air Force SCIFs. Wow! Talk about serendipity. I asked him what he thought of the story the media is hard selling about the 21 year old with a trove of TS leaked documents? He told me, “It does not make sense.”.

He made the same points as my CIA buddy — how does a 21 year old E3 have this kind of access? My retired Colonel never saw it during his career. He told me, “At most, kids this age, might have a SECRET clearance.”

He also made the same observation that I raised in my previous piece on this incident — where the hell was this airman’s chain of command? A lowly E3 is not going to have unfettered access to a SCIF and will always have at least one senior commander (NCO or Officer) present to tell him what to do and to monitor his work.

Something is askew with the media story being presented to the World about the boy who posted the leak on the gamer chat board. The documents are not randomly selected. If the intent was to post classified information in order to impress a bunch of teenage gamers then why is the bulk of the material only about the war in Ukraine?

Finally, we are told, according to the Washington Post, that there are 300 documents. Really? Where are they? I have only been able to find roughly 18 documents. Have any of your seen the 100 pages that the media insists were posted to the web? That discrepancy alone raises another big red flag for me. Why was the Washington Post allowed to read/see 300 highly classified documents? The Post reporters do not hold security clearances. But it is okay for them to review those documents.

One of the major revelations from this leaking incident is that most of the press in the United States have rejected the fundamental mission of the media — expose truths the Government wants to hide from the public. What a volte face!! Fifty years ago the New York Times and the Washington Post led the way in defying the Nixon Adminstration’s effort to quash the publication of the highly classified Pentagon Papers. Those documents revealed that the U.S. Government, under both Republican and Democrat Presidents, lied to the American public about the war in Vietnam. And today? Those two media outlets enthusiastically helping the U.S. Government identify the leaker and smear him in the process. So much for the viability of the First Amendment.

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Featured image: Jack Teixeira, alleged orchestrator of the 2023 Pentagon document leaks. (Licensed under the Public Domain)

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*** 

I suppose I have been contemplating the contours of an ideal form of “Medicine” forever, certainly ever since beginning my formal institutional studies that led to my M.D.

Three years of the Corona Wars have exposed institutional corruption at virtually every level: governments, their ministries, the medical councils that purport to protect their citizens by regulating those who practice medicine, the global entities inextricably entwined, for example, the United Nations and the World Health Organization.

We’ve seen over these past three years how vaccines have come to be redefined, how informed consent has been minimized, how the Hippocratic Oath has lost its charm for the globalist agenda seeking to instill fear into the population of the world and to inject this population with a gene-altering thrombogenic concoction using the arts of seduction and force.

So, the dust having been settled, from within this rubble of institutional malfeasance, we have an opportunity to start afresh – we people who have recognized the perverse role of the pharmaceutical industrial complex with its the so-called New World Order aspirations.

Let’s start with doctors and the authority with which they have been imbued, and the power with which scientific research facilities and hospitals have been cloaked by those who, suffering, are at their mercy.

Every encounter between a patient and a doctor is itself permeated by aspects of this force: even kings of an earthly realm have been humbled, when weak and stricken, by their physicians.

It is time to level the playing field, and to support a form of patient-guided self-healing in which the individual becomes the master of his or her own treatment. After all, the typical first step for any afflicted individual is a self-healing one; only when this fails does he or she reach out to a professional authority, an authority whose regulation is monopolized by the State.

This authority may now take on a new shape and may be redefined.

Let us leave aside for the moment Big Medicine, by which I mean the medicine of highly technical procedures and expensive equipment and operating rooms and surgeries, the Medicine of acute trauma care and complex imaging, which by my estimation accounts for a small percentage of health.

Let us focus instead on areas of nutrition, prevention, early detection of ailments, and natural treatments for conditions that comprise the bulk of GP consultations. Diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular health – it seems to me that these can be addressed readily and successfully by integrative and ‘alternative’ medical approaches that rely far less on proprietary pharmaceuticals and far more on homeopathic approaches.  But whatever the type of intervention, at the core of what I am proposing is a clear and purposeful demystification of the doctor or healer – a demystification that does not detract from an acknowledgment of expertise, but that establishes the patient on a level playing field, as it were.

In psychoanalysis the discovery by Freud of what we call ‘transference’ led to an immense research into the meaning and uses of the emotional constellations projected or transferred onto the analyst. It involved a recognition of the creation of authoritative power – a power created by the patient himself which, at the end of a successful analysis, would be dissipated or analyzed away sufficiently until the patient could proceed independently. In summary, the goal of analysis is self-analysis: autonomy.

By these lights a new system would be one of egalitarian cooperation. A patient would be free to educate himself and to choose interventions, approaches, medicines, and treatments in accordance with his or her needs.

How this may be practically implemented I will have to leave to others whose powers of creative organization are far greater than mine.  I can imagine flourishing wellness centers, widespread communicative consultation enabled by the internet, programs emphasizing health rather than focused on and organized principally around disease … In fact, I am aware of initiatives here in New Zealand and around the world that have begun to implement such ideas.

But it is the fulcrum of autonomy that is essential, whatever lever may be used, and the end of the millennial tradition in Western medicine that deified physicians.  It will mean also the end of the reign of the monstrous public and private entities and corporations that have so thoroughly betrayed us these past three years.

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Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He has authored articles ranging from explorations of psychoanalytic technique, the psychology of creativity in music (Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Delius), and politics. He is also a poet, novelist and theatrical director. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021 after working in the public sector in New Zealand. Visit his substack at https://newzealanddoc.substack.com/

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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*** 

 

 

 

At the very beginning, it must be noticed that before the outbreak of WWI in the summer of 1914 it was not both either Poland or Ukraine as the state on the political map of Europe. Poland was considered a historical region while Ukraine was a geographical one.

Poland was divided at the end of the 18^th century between three powerful neighbors – the Kingdom of Prussia, the Habsburg Empire, and the Russian Empire while the present-day territory of Ukraine between the Habsburg Monarchy (Austria, Austria-Hungary) which took its western part including Lvov (Lemberg/Lwów) and the Russian Empire possessing its eastern and central portions including Kiev. However, the biggest portions of historical Poland and geographic Ukraine were governed by Russia from 1795 up to 1917.

For the reason to change a such geopolitical situation, it was created before WWI an idea of political cooperation between the Poles and the Ukrainians for the sake to fight for independence. Nevertheless, behind this idea was the project of reborn Great Poland within its historical boundaries (before the three partitions of Poland-Lithuania in 1772, 1793, and 1795). The Polish state was re-established on November 11^th, 1918 but at that time the Poles and the Ukrainians were already fighting with each other over the land and the borders. On the same day, Józef Piłsudski (born near Vilnius in Lithuania/Litwa in 1867) became appointed by the Governing Council of Poland (in fact, the government) to the position of the head of state with dictatorial authority (“Naczelnik”).[i] His first duty was to create the government of the just re-established independent state of Poland. He was the leader of Poland till 1922 and from 1926 to 1935 when he died. During his governing of Poland, the Polish foreign policy, especially toward Soviet Russia/USSR, Lithuania, and Ukraine depended on his designs and political decisions.

He wanted to realize the idea of re-born independent Poland during WWI as saw wartime as a great opportunity to re-establish the borders of historical Poland (those borders were established on the east at the very expense of Eastern Slavs, primarily Russians, and Russia). However, to do that, the precondition was the dismissal of the three empires: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. Only on the ruins of all three of them, the borders of historical Poland could be re-created. Nevertheless, at the very end of the war, it became obvious that Lithuanians and Ukrainians would not support this idea and his designs concerning historical Poland as in this case both of them had to be included in Poland but not be independent. The greatest part of this idea could be realized by the collapse of Russia during the war (as the biggest portion of historical Poland was included in Russia) and, therefore, J. Piłsudski supported the Russian defeat by Germany and Austria-Hungary. For that reason, since 1908 he was forming Polish legions which had to fight on the side of the Central Powers against the Russian Empire on the Eastern Front.

The Bolshevik anti-Russian revolution in October/November 1917 followed by the 1917−1922 Russian Civil War offered new political possibilities to several nations to get either formal independence or autonomy within post-revolutionary Russia (in fact, the USSR). That was exactly an idea that was promulgated by Józef Piłsudski for the last two decades.

Nevertheless, from the very beginning of WWI, the Polish question was put within the geopolitical designs of the German Second Reich (1871−1918) which meant in the practice that the Polish patriots and nationalists have been only observers without a real political and military power to change the political map of Central and East Europe to their national favor. Up to the very end of WWI, in other words, they could just silently observe the changes that occurred in this part of Europe including the Bolshevik red revolution, the Russian civil war between the Reds and the Whites, and finally, the military occupation of present-day West Ukraine by the Central Powers.

Józef Piłsudski himself became arrested by the Germans in the summer of 1917 (being in the German prison in Magdeburg till November 1918) for the very reason he did not want to put his military detachments (legions) under the German supreme command. He became free when the Russian Empire already collapsed due to the pro-German Bolshevik revolution. In the meantime, on November 11^th, 1918 Poland proclaimed its national-political independence but without clear and internationally agreed state borderlands especially in the east (conflict with the Bolshevik Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine). From the time of the beginning of the Russian civil war in November 1917 up to the end of WWI, there were a number of nations who proclaimed their national-political independence including Poland as well (From Finland to Azerbaijan).

The Polish head of state, saw East Ukraine with Kiev to be the key subject to the question of the Russian future and, therefore, to Poland too. He took into consideration several important facts regarding Ukraine as its geopolitical position, economic potential including the production of grain, coal, salt, iron ore, or steel, and finally its huge population number which was at that time around 30 million people. All of these factors have been taken into consideration as Ukraine was a natural ally of Poland against the Russian Empire or any form of Russia including a Bolshevik one as a successor of the Russian Empire.

That was a time (November 1918) when self-proclaimed the so-called Ukrainian People’s Republic (the UPR), in fact, present-day East Ukraine, was fighting to survive against the Bolshevik Red Army as V. I. Lenin did not want to recognize any kind of Ukrainian independence but rather autonomy within Bolshevik Russia (later the USSR). The same policy intentions he had regarding all other ex-Russian territories that had proclaimed independence from the Russian Empire in 1917 and 1918, including Poland as well. For that purpose, Lenin’s Bolsheviks organized a political attempt in November 1918 to take power in Poland which ultimately collapsed. Nevertheless, it was a clear signal for the new Polish authorities in Warsaw that Lenin’s Bolsheviks are the enemies of Polish independence and Polish geopolitical projections in East Europe including parts of present-day Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania (or in other words, former historic Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania according to the 1569 Union of Lublin). Nevertheless, a new Bolshevik government in St. Petersburg started to militarily occupy land claimed by Warsaw and to bolshevizied it which became the casus belli for the 1918−1920 Polish-Bolshevik War.

To have a better position in the fight against the Bolsheviks, J. Piłsudski sent to Kiev at the end of November 1918 a special diplomatic mission which had the prime task to discuss with the new Ukrainian authorities all possibilities concerning Polish-Ukrainian military cooperation.

For the same purpose, in January 1919 it was sent to Warsaw the Ukrainian delegation from Kiev in order to discuss all practical problems regarding the making of the Polish-Ukrainian anti-Bolshevik military coalition. But in the practice, at that time, at least for the Polish side, such military alliance became, in fact, not so relevant as Poland did not have armed forces which could substantially help the UPR against the Red Army.

For instance, when WWI was over, the Polish army numbered only some 6.000 soldiers, although their number was growing progressively. For example, in two months, the Polish army had around 110.000 volunteer soldiers and officers but they have not been able to successfully participate in any serious military action at least until the spring of 1919. Nonetheless, it became the truth that the Polish army had to be engaged in the first serious military campaigns exactly against Ukrainian forces over the territory of East Galicia, and, therefore, Polish negotiations with the Ukrainian side became broken off already in January 1919.

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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a former university professor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Note

[i] Joseph Klemens Piłsudski was born on December 5^th in 1867 and died on May 12the in 1935. He was born near Vilnius (Litwa) at that time part of the Russian Empire (the so-called “Russian Poland”). He was studying at the Kharkov University and became one of the chief agitators for the Polish Socialist Party (the PSP) since 1893. However, his focal political orientation and aim was to gain an independence for Poland primarily from Russia, but if possible, within the historical borders of Poland as they existed before 1795 (the Third Partition of Poland-Lithuania). For his anti-Russian activities, J. Piłsudski was in 1887 exiled to Siberia. In 1892 he returned to Poland and founded underground propaganda newspaper to agitate for the independence of Poland. In 1914 after the start of WWI he organized Polish volunteer detachments to join the army of Austria-Hungary on the Eastern Front to fight Russia. After the Russian February Revolution in 1917, he required from Germany to guarantee the ultimate independence of Poland but when the German authority rejected the requirement J. Piłsudski stopped to support Berlin. As a consequence, he was interned in 1917−1918. In newly independent Poland he became head of state in 1918−1922 and Chief of Staff of the Polish Army in 1918−1923. During the Polish-Russian War after WWI, J. Piłsudski succeeded to expend the eastern borders of Poland at the expense of Bolshevik Russia. In 1926, he organized and lead an army putsch and dissolved Parliament. Until his death he was Minister of War and general inspector of the armed forces but failed to modernize both the army and economy.    

All images in this article are from the author

Beware the Agents of Chaos

By Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null, April 15, 2023

Not a day passes without Americans witnessing another debacle in the nation’s domestic and foreign policies that further grind down the last remaining threads of a sustainable, coherent and functioning nation. Instead of actual progress, we hear competing incantations of nonsense to “make America great again” and to “build back better.” 

Black Radical News in 2023: Mumia’s Fate, African Colonialism, and the Zone of Peace in the Americas.

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Throughout history, many of the exciting developments in exploration, discovery and the joy of establishing a new colony is accompanied, like a counterpoint with the tremendous misery of the people on the ground who made it work or who had to be eliminated in order for the project at hand to proceed.

Gateway to Nowhere. The One World Order Privatization of Amazonia. Greed for Power and Money

By Peter Koenig, April 15, 2023

We may call the whole vast enormous area of Amazonia PARADISE. It is the fountain of life, with endless biodiversity, forests, intermeshed jungle, wilderness, an uncountable richness of fauna, flora, medicinal plants – and not to forget, an almost limitless abundance of water, together with oxygen, also generated by Amazonia, thanks to the natural carbon – CO2 – the world emits, mostly the Oceans — the essence of life. 

“Humanity Must Adopt the Results of Psychological Research in Order to Create a Life Worthy of Human Beings.”

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, April 15, 2023

The citizens in our countries are not satisfied with the present world situation: The West’s never-ending war against Russia, which could develop into a nuclear war between the two superpowers on European soil, and the many other wars: murder and manslaughter again and again. Add to this the increasing impoverishment of low-income groups and concerns about the future. See Paul C. Roberts, “Does America Have a Future?

Canadian Hero, Former Ontario MPP and Whistleblower Randy Hillier

By Dr. Mark Trozzi, April 17, 2023

Like rare honest scientist, nurses, and doctors; Randy Hillier is a rare and special leader among us. He was serving as a member of our provincial parliament in Ontario when covid was launched. While many meat puppets in governments lined their pockets with fiat currency, and served global predators and their covid agenda against the people; Randy asked important questions, spoke truth to power, and stood with us and our truckers in Ottawa.

The Pentagon Leaks Charade

By Pepe Escobar, April 17, 2023

Tweaked or not, the “secret” Pentagon comparative war dead ratio between Russians and Ukrainians still does not make sense. The numbers appear to reflect Bakhmut/Artemovsk casualties, where Russian casualty ratios were highest. Yet reliable on the ground Russian military correspondents assure the ratio is really 10 to 1, with the Russians employing the snail technique combined with a formidable artillery mincing machine.

Substack: Dead Man Walking

By Kurt Nimmo, April 17, 2023

Substack’s days are numbered. The email newsletter platform is increasingly under attack, most recently by the ADL. The organization wrote on April 3 that Substack “continues to attract extremists and conspiracy theorists who routinely use the site to profit from spreading antisemitism, misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.”

The Israeli Attack on South Lebanon and Al Aqsa Crisis

By Steven Sahiounie, April 17, 2023

The Palestinian resistance group Hamas attacked Israel with rockets coming from South Lebanon on April 6. The resistance was responding to the repeated attacks on Palestinians praying inside the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem during the holy month of Ramadan.

From Europe to the Indo-Pacific, Italy at Arms. Manlio Dinucci

By Manlio Dinucci, April 17, 2023

The multinational military exercise Defender 23, directed by the US Army Europe, begins on April 22nd. The exercise will take place for two months in 10 European countries. 9,000 US soldiers and 17,000 others from 26 US allied countries, with Italy in the foreground, will participate.

The IMF Has Just Unveiled a New Global Currency Known as the “Universal Monetary Unit” That Is Supposed to Revolutionize the World Economy

By Michael Snyder, April 17, 2023

A new global currency just launched, but 99 percent of the global population has no idea what just happened.  The “Universal Monetary Unit”, also known as “Unicoin”, is an “international central bank digital currency” that has been designed to work in conjunction with all existing national currencies. 

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*** 

Like rare honest scientist, nurses, and doctors; Randy Hillier is a rare and special leader among us. He was serving as a member of our provincial parliament in Ontario when covid was launched. While many meat puppets in governments lined their pockets with fiat currency, and served global predators and their covid agenda against the people; Randy asked important questions, spoke truth to power, and stood with us and our truckers in Ottawa. He’s been unjustifiably arrested, removed from parliament, and faces more than one million dollars in fines for standing up for human rights in Canada. Here in conversation with Glen Jung of Bright Light News, Randy is frank and clear in exposing the nature of corruption that permeates all political parties in Canada. He explains the disingenuous practices that win elections, and line pockets, as our country spirals down the toilet.

“Political parties should be seen as legalized crime families”

Glen Jung of Bright Light News wrote:

“Now retired from a colourful political career, former Ontario MPP Randy Hillier comes firing explosive insider allegations that would only fuel the cynicism of a public already weary of political scandals, “There is no political party that has a tinker’s damn interest in the public interest.”

In this no-holds barred interview, Hillier asserts that political parties are essentially “crime families” engaged in “a lawful, legalized and authorized protection racket” in which “political parties exist for their betterment, their enrichment.”

Join us as Hillier, a longstanding champion of freedom and activist-turned-politician, takes us through the ins and outs of the corrupt political game where billions of dollars are at stake and the seemingly intentional abject failure of the Ontario govt’s response to Covid-19 in which Hillier was the first elected official in the world to speak out against.”

One Bright Light News reader Strelawney wrote:

“It doesn’t matter who is in power. They are all enacting UN Agenda 21. It was Conservative PM Brian Mulroney who signed Canada up to this atrocity in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit. Then, in 2015, Conservative PM Stephen Harper signed Canada up to UN Agenda 2030, the 10 year phase as part of the overall plan for depopulation and totalitarian control aka UN Agenda 21. When Poilievre, as the new leader of the Conservative Party, stated he didn’t know what UN Agenda 2030 was, when it’s plastered all over the government’s websites, revealed himself as an enemy of the people. Also, when I did not give him money to join his party, he removed me from his mailing list after I told him I had lost my job and been disallowed to attend a family gathering even though I had proof I did not have COVID-19.

Trust is gone. All of the agencies and corporations have broken the social contract with the citizens of the world.”

*

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 Get yours for FREE! Click here to download.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page. 

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*** 

The script reads like a spoof straight out of legendary Mad magazine 1960’s cartoon “Spy vs. Spy”: Secret Pentagon Documents Fall in the Hands of Malign Russia. Well, actually in the hands of millions accessing Twitter and Telegram.

So here, at face value, we have a major leak essentially detailing Pentagon planning for the next stage of the NATO vs. Russia proxy war in Ukraine: the interminably debated Spring “counter-offensive” that may, or may not, start in mid-April, as well as war plans shared with FVEY – the Five Eyes.

The leaked intel might – and the operative word is “might” – be advantageous to Russia were this not to be misdirection: and the possibility is quite real.

The inestimable Ray McGovern, who knows one or two things about the CIA, noted whether the Pentagon is “falsifying kill-ratio to gild Easter lilies in Kyiv? Recent leak of an apparently official NATO document shows 71,500 Ukrainians KIA and only 16,000 to 17,500 Russians, a far cry from earlier Pentagon ‘estimates’. All sounds so Vietnam-déjà vu!”

So this may be Vietnam all over again – never count on the Pentagon learning from their mistakes – but could be something way more alarming, according to a top Beltway intel source, retired: “Our interpretation of this breach is that intel sources in the United States have released critical intel data in order to avoid a nuclear war with Russia.”

As it stands, the only certainty is that the spin war has gone berserk. So the leaker may have been a – disgruntled – U.S. insider. No, wait: the whole thing may be fake, as the Pentagon insists. In spin speak, that would be an attempt to “spread false information that could harm the U.S.”.

Tweaked or not, the “secret” Pentagon comparative war dead ratio between Russians and Ukrainians still does not make sense. The numbers appear to reflect Bakhmut/Artemovsk casualties, where Russian casualty ratios were highest. Yet reliable on the ground Russian military correspondents assure the ratio is really 10 to 1, with the Russians employing the snail technique combined with a formidable artillery mincing machine.

“Stupefying” incompetence

The undisputable conclusion out of the – real or fake – Pentagon leaks is that the U.S. is in a state of war against Russia. And that is serious enough.

Washington has been feeding information non-stop on command posts, ammunition depots and key nodes in the Russian military lines. It’s such real-time intel that has allowed Kiev to target Russian forces, kill senior generals and force ammunition depots to be moved farther from the Russian front lines.

Anything Pentagon/NATO stenographers say about Kiev playing the proverbial “decisive role” in planning and executing these strikes is a lie. The U.S. exercizes total, absolute control of the Ukraine war on a central command basis. Including from that “secret” underground bunker near Lviv which recently received a business card from Mr. Khinzal and has gone to meet its maker – along with over 200 NATO high-level operatives.

Fake or not fake, we also have confirmation that the Pentagon has direct access to communications of the Russian Ministry of Defense. And that the Americans listen to everyone and his neighbor: the sweaty T-shirt actor in Kiev, all the Five Eyes allies, and the Mossad.

As for the notion that Kiev has changed its counter-offensive “military plans” because of the Pentagon leaks, everyone should feel free to control the pitch of their roaring laughter.

The Russian non-response response to all this hoopla could be seen as a classic of misdirection. Responding to the U.S. de facto engaged in an undeclared war against Russia, much hotter than Hybrid, President Putin said that Russia is interested in “peaceful coexistence with the U.S. and establishing a balance of interests” given their status as the world’s two biggest nuclear powers.

Well, no one can possibly imagine Stalin saying that Russia was interested in peaceful coexistence with Nazi Germany in July, 1941 as the Wehrmacht was rushing towards Moscow, Leningrad and the Caucusus oil.

From the point of view of valuable military information, the indispensable Andrei Martyanov summed it all up: these “documents” contain none, apart from confirming that the Pentagon is absolutely clueless on the SMO: why is it happening, what is the modus operandi and what it plans to achieve.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov did cut to the chase: “We don’t have the slightest doubt about direct or indirect involvement of the U.S. and NATO (…) it cannot influence the final outcome of the special operation.”

As Martyanov stresses, Russia maneuvers an extremely advanced ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) complex, including human intel on the ground, electronic warfare and satellite constellations: “In terms of war correlates and combat statistics – I wouldn’t touch anything coming from Pentagon with a long stick.”

There are indeed several serious issues with the Pentagon “top secret” intel. It oozes the impression it was redacted based on open data, and not actual intel. And all that packaged by some quite shoddy work.

For instance, the insistence to “re-equip” Ukrainian air defense with missiles is not supported by data on where such missiles will be coming from. The name of the NASAMS – the middle range, ground based air defense system co-developed by Raytheon – is misspelled.

In official NATO documents, weapons from the USSR and from Russia are indicated in NATO codification. There is no style uniformity: it’s a messy mix of official code designations and transliterations from Russian into English.

So no wonder the impression is solidified that the U.S. Army Command in Europe (EUCOM) got their “intel” from open sources, and is absolutely clueless on how many weapons, how much equipment and how many people the Ukrainians actually have.

And that explains what’s going on in Artemovsk – with the Russians taking all the time in the world to calibrate their strategic defense, and after the orderly abandon of Kherson, lure the Ukrainians into a non-stop slaughterhouse. Martyanov qualifies U.S./NATO incompetence to see it coming as “stupefying.”

A do-or-die war to control Eurasia

Once again: the most important consequence of the Pentagon leaks is to establish that the U.S., de facto and de jure, is at war against Russia – whatever may be the spin by that Norwegian piece of dead wood in Brussels. Russia will establish a war crimes tribunal for Ukraine, so sooner rather than later, selected collective West luminaries better take refuge in their New Zealand bunkers.

It’s also crucial to always keep in mind Ukraine is a mere pawn in their game for not losing world power, against China, Russia and potentially Germany.

The initial psycho Straussian neocon goal was to cut off Germany from Russia using “Liver Sausage” Chancellor Scholz, who was briefed in advance on the terror attack on the Nord Streams.

Scholz was also involved in the CIA misdirection scam, channeling the blame for the terror attack on some obscure Ukrainian “dissident” and a bumbling yacht – as brilliantly covered by Seymour Hersh.

The next step is to cut off Ukraine from Russia – “reconquering” Crimea, the focus of the current P.R. blitzkrieg, and Donbass, thus originating a cataclysmic psychological upheaval in Russia leading to a Putin regime change.

Then the Straussians would finally command Russia’s massive natural resources – and block them from China by land and by sea via the U.S. Fleet.

That’s not exactly clever – but Straussian neocons do revel in their own intellectually shallow pond. Cue to that insufferable idiot Admiral John Kirby saying there can be no negotiations with Russia until they leave Ukraine, abandoning Donbass and Crimea.

So the (show) war in Ukraine must go on, to the last Ukrainian, or all these elaborate plans will irretrievably bite the dust. This is a do-or-die war against Russia-China for the control of Eurasia. Will that imply more Pentagon leaks? Bring them on.

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Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok. 

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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It seems that European countries are going to pay for their attempts to profit on cheap Ukrainian grain, which, instead of feeding the starving African countries, is being transferred to quite well-fed Europe. Ukrainian grain has already brought farmers in Eastern Europe to the brink of bankruptcy, it also turned out that it is dangerous for its consumers.

On April 13, the Slovak authorities banned the processing and sale of Ukrainian grain and flour made from it on the territory of the country. The Ministry of Agriculture and Regional Development of Slovakia stated that it found multiple excess of the maximum permissible concentration of pesticides.

In a 1.5 thousand tons batch of wheat from Ukraine, which was sent for threshing, “the presence of a pesticide that is not allowed in the EU and has a negative impact on human health was confirmed.” The Minister of Agriculture of Slovakia explained that three independent accredited laboratories confirmed the increased content of pesticide residues.

In the near future, the authorities intend to collect samples of all Ukrainian grain and flour stored in Slovakia.

The study in Slovakia confirmed the statements of the Polish Minister of Agriculture, who has already warned that Ukraine supplies grain of dubious quality to Europe.

On April 7, according to the head of the Ministry of Agriculture of Poland, Kiev agreed to stop importing grain into the country and now only its transit to other countries continues.

However, it did not help to avoid another scandal in the country.

The largest Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita reported that the largest Polish flour mills received, under the guise of high-quality Polish grain, what was technical Ukrainian grain that had not passed food control and was intended for burning as fuel. Only grain that cannot be used for any other purposes is sent for burning. It is either infected with a fungus, or has become a poison due to improper storage. As a result of the dangerous deals, Polish flour mills lost more than 1.5 million zlotys.

In March, Romanian Agriculture Minister, citing an assessment by the European Commission, said that farmers from Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Slovakia had lost a total of €417 million due to the influx of cheap Ukrainian grain to the markets of those countries.

Poland and Romania reportedly asked the EU to create a mechanism to control cheap grain from Ukraine. In early April, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia called on the European Commission to buy the accumulated Ukrainian food from them for “humanitarian reasons.” They complained that the prices of their own products is falling, and the prices of fertilizers and energy are rising.

The local authorities have agreed to “protect their farmers”. It is possible that the ongoing scandals may be a part of their struggle but the threat posed by the contaminated Ukrainian grain should not be belittled.

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Substack’s days are numbered. The email newsletter platform is increasingly under attack, most recently by the ADL. The organization wrote on April 3 that Substack “continues to attract extremists and conspiracy theorists who routinely use the site to profit from spreading antisemitism, misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.”

The latest salvo by ADL against the First Amendment dovetails with a congressional push to further erode liberty with its draconian RESTRICT Act. There are a number of tweets that encapsulate the latest threat to liberty, but Substack no longer allows tweet embeds, thanks to an absurd ego-colliding tiff between Substack CEO Chris Best and Twitter boss, Elon Musk.

The RESTRICT Act is dressed up as a response to Tik Tok and China. Contrary to this propaganda, it will be used primarily to sanitize the internet and squash (and criminalize) all speech diverting from USG narratives.

“The Restrict Act Completes the Overthrow of the US Constitution,” writes Paul Craig Roberts. “The purpose is to silence all dissent from official explanations. Truth is criminalized. Propaganda and lies will reign supreme and unchallenged. The Matrix will be complete.”

Connor O’Keeffe writes for the Mises Institute,

With its vague language, the bill gives the government much leeway in defining what qualifies as illegal information. We’ve already seen government officials and their friends in media conflate antiestablishment arguments with foreign disinformation. They’ve even falsely labelled accurate news stories as foreign disinformation. It’s not hard to see these same people using the powers granted to them by the RESTRICT Act to criminalize certain dissenting views under the guise of counterintelligence.

The crowning propaganda achievement of the next phase of authoritarian control over free speech is the theatrical SWAT takedown of 21-year-old patsy Jack Teixeira, a low-level National Guard airman that, according to The Washington Post, somehow managed to get his hands on highly classified CIA and DOD documents. This is highly improbable, but then a blindsided American public is routinely fed improbable lies, exaggerations, and omissions by the USG and its corporate propaganda media.

CNN describes the event as a “carefully choreographed arrest,” and I’d agree with that assessment, although not as a result of the “Biden administration’s scramble” to contain sensitive leaks. The theatrical takedown of Mr. Teixeira is a propaganda event designed to bolster further eradication of dissent and grease the skids for the passage of RESTRICT.

The Washington Post has a documented history of working with the CIA to disseminate propaganda, so when we learn that the newspaper “wrote about the presence of problematic content on Substack, noting its use by spreaders of false information,” according to the ADL, we know for certain Substack will be brought to heel. (For more on the CIA’s takeover of the media, see The CIA and the Press: When the Washington Post Ran the CIA’s Propaganda Network, by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn).

Add to this the Digital Services Act. It is “the EU’s latest incoming tech rulebook requiring them to stamp out illegal content on their platforms… including social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. These include quickly taking down flagged illegal content, including hate speech,” Politico reported last October. The corporate propaganda conduit conflated “hate speech” (that is, speech contrary to the narratives of the state) with “child pornography and terrorist videos.”

According to Slate, the Digital Services Act (DSA),

while written to protect EU residents, will almost certainly lead social media firms to change their moderation policies worldwide. Thus, with the DSA, the EU will effectively be doing what the First Amendment ostensibly prohibits our own government from doing: regulating the editorial judgments made by social media platforms on which Americans communicate with each other.

The jaws of the authoritarian vice are tightening. In the near future, the ability to express your opinion will be terminated if it runs counter to official government narratives. All avenues of expression are to be tightly monitored, moderated and censored at the behest of the state.

“The Biden administration is looking at expanding how it monitors social media sites and chatrooms after U.S. intelligence agencies failed to spot classified Pentagon documents circulating online for weeks,” NBC News reported on April 12. “The administration is now looking at expanding the universe of online sites that intelligence agencies and law enforcement authorities track.”

Undoubtedly, this will include Substack, one of the last remaining platforms where free speech is permissible without the heavy-handed interference of the state, and the narrowly focused and highly politicized censorship agenda of the ADL and other anti-First Amendment organizations.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.

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The Palestinian resistance group Hamas attacked Israel with rockets coming from South Lebanon on April 6. The resistance was responding to the repeated attacks on Palestinians praying inside the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem during the holy month of Ramadan.

Extremist Jewish settlers had insisted on going to the Mosque, against long standing traditions, which provoked tensions and the Israeli police used brutal tactics on the Palestinians praying, including beating women and arresting 400.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s extremist government opposes the creation of a Palestinian state and supports the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, which emboldened the fanatical settlers who went to the Mosque.

On April 7, Israeli air strikes hit southern Lebanon in retaliation, marking the biggest escalation between Israel and Lebanon in almost 20 years. There were no casualties reported from either side after the tit-for-tat strikes. Hamas is supported by Hezbollah, the Lebanese resistance group.

The US State Department condemned the attack on Israel, and said Israel had the right to defend itself against all attacks. No mention of the right for Palestinians to pray inside their own Mosque during a religious period. The US supports only the rights of Jews, and the Christian and Muslim Palestinians are left defenseless.

Samir Geagea, whose Christian Lebanese Forces (LF) often battled Palestinian fighters in the civil war, denounced the attack and Fouad Abu Nader, another former LF commander, called for the arrest of the Hamas leader.

Israel and the US have used Lebanon as a stage to fight proxy wars in. The creation of Israel in 1948 caused a huge influx of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, and after so many years without any Palestinian rights being restored; those old problems persist for the entire Middle East, which is held hostage by the Apartheid state of Israel.

Past Israeli attacks and occupation of Lebanon

On April 10, 1973, two years before the civil war erupted, an Israeli commando team led Ehud Barack, invaded Beirut and killed three top officials from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in their homes. Several Lebanese policemen and guards were also killed in the crime.

The raid enflamed divisions between the Lebanese supporters, and the opponents of the PLO, which had been in Lebanon since 1970.

The Lebanese army clashed with Palestinian freedom fighters less than a month later, which developed into the 1975-1990 civil war, during which the Israeli army invaded the south of Lebanon, and the brutal military occupation lasted until 2000.

It was the rise of Hezbollah that was responsible for the Israeli withdrawal. In the summer of 2006, US President Bush and Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice, supported the Israeli attack on Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah. Much of the most vital civilian infrastructure in Lebanon was destroyed by the air raids, and more than 1,000 Lebanese were killed, while hundreds of thousands were made homeless. In the end, Israel was unable to enter Lebanon, and Hezbollah was proven to be the only force able to protect the Lebanese border from invasion and occupation.

Saudi-Iran full diplomatic relationship restored

The surprise agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia signed on March 10 may hold the key political reconciliation in Lebanon.

Saudi Arabia has traditionally supported the Lebanese Sunni politicians, such as the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and his son PM Saad Hariri. However, Saad Hariri resigned himself from political life.

With Saudi Arabia supporting Sunni politicians and Iran backing the Shiite group Hezbollah, the long-standing rivalry between the two has shaped the political scene in Lebanon. The newly found reconciliation between Riyadh and Tehran may set the stage in Lebanon for compromise.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has a Vision 2030, which depends on peace and prosperity in Saudi Arabia and the region. 

Prior to the March 10 agreement, Hezbollah supported Maronite Christian Suleiman Frangieh for president. 

Riyadh has not come out publically in support of any one name in the contest, and has taken the position that Lebanon should decide alone.

The office of president in Lebanon has been left vacant since October 2022, and the process of the election depends on a candidate garnering the required votes from parliament members, which on repeated rounds of voting never concluded with a majority.

Saudi Arabia was once a major investor in the country mainly in the luxury tourism industry, but fundamental issues must be resolved before large-scale investments return.

The US is opposed to the Saudi-Iran détente. The chaos and conflict between the two regional powerhouses served the US interests and was in line with the Israeli foreign policy for its neighbors: namely to keep them at war with each other.

Presidential office is vacant 

Politicians are deadlocked over the election of a new president, in a multiparty republic with a parliament. The Prime Minister must be Sunni, the President must be Maronite, and the Speaker of the Parliament must be Shiite.

The current population is almost 5.5 million, with 31.9 % Sunni, 31% Shiite, and 32.4 % Christian.

Lebanon was founded in 1920 from a small portion of Syria, under French administration, and finally independence in 1943.

Central Bank Chief accused of Money Laundering

Marwan Kheireddine, CEO of Lebanese bank Al Mawarid, was indicted in France last month as part of the French investigation into embezzlement of more than $330 million by Lebanon’s central bank governor, Riad Salameh, and his brother Raja.

“I confirm that Marwan Kheireddine has been indicted for aggravated money laundering charges and participation in a criminal conspiracy, and placed under judicial supervision as part of the judicial investigation opened in France, targeting notably embezzlement at the Central Bank of Lebanon,” prosecutor Antoine Jocteur-Monrozier said.

Riad Salameh has been accused by many countries in Europe of money laundering involving his girlfriend Anna Kosakova as well as his brother Raja.

In January, Kheireddine was questioned by European investigators in relation to some accounts, which reportedly began with an initial investment of $15 million, and grew to $150 million.

Lebanese judge Jean Tannous wrote, “Riad Salameh entrusted his brother Raja Salameh in 1993 with an amount of $15 million” in violation of the Code of Money and Credit, “which prohibits the governor from retaining any stake in a private company”.

Financial crisis and starvation

The economic crisis in Lebanon has been described by the World Bank as one of the worst in history and was caused by years of mismanagement by political leaders and their corruption. The local currency has lost over 99 % of its value against the US dollar with banks still locking people out of their deposits.

Four in 10 Lebanese and Syrian refugee children currently face high acute food insecurity, with Lebanon the sixth worst food crisis globally.

Families are forced to skip meals or reduce the number of nutritious meals for their children.

IMF mission Chief Ernesto Rigo said in Beirut that the authorities should accelerate the implementation of conditions set for a $3 billion bailout.

Lebanon inflation hit 190% in February as IMF calls for urgent reforms, which has seen three-quarters of the population into poverty and almost no electricity.

Rigo said, “This inaction disproportionately harms the low-to-middle-income population and undermines Lebanon’s long-term economic potential. The government, parliament, and the Central Bank must act together, rapidly and decisively to tackle long-standing institutional and structural weaknesses to stabilize the economy and pave the way for a strong and sustainable recovery.”

Lebanon signed an agreement with the IMF nearly one year ago, but has not taken the necessary steps to secure the funding for recovery.

Salameh is still the central bank manager, and many of the same warlords and political elites who caused the financial collapse of the country through their corruption are charged with fixing a system they destroyed. 

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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*** 

The multinational military exercise Defender 23, directed by the US Army Europe, begins on April 22nd. The exercise will take place for two months in 10 European countries. 9,000 US soldiers and 17,000 others from 26 US allied countries, with Italy in the foreground, will participate. They will use 7,000 pieces of equipment (armaments and military equipment) shipped from the United States to Europe, plus another 13,000 pieces of military equipment from US Army depots in Europe. Finally, in June, a major air warfare exercise will take place in Europe with US and allied fighter-bombers with dual conventional and nuclear capabilities. While Europe is being transformed by the USA into a training ground for the war against Russia, the Russian strategic missile forces are enhancing their combat capability with the test launch of a new intercontinental ballistic missile that can be armed with multiple nuclear warheads.

At the same time, the USA is increasing its military forces deployed in the Indo-Pacific, the region which, in the geography of the Pentagon, extends from the west coast of the United States to the coast of India. The central objective of this escalation is China, which Washington increasingly fears for its political and economic initiatives, especially today in the Middle East. The headline of the Washington Post is emblematic: “China’s new world order is taking shape”. Despite the US attempt to isolate China, French and German entrepreneurs are closing big contracts in China.

Italy, on the other hand, is preparing to send the Cavour carrier with US F-35B fighters on board to the Indo-Pacific, de facto under US command in an anti-Chinese function. Italy also enters the Indo-Pacific with an important agreement concluded with Japan and the United Kingdom: Global Combat Air Programme, the Global Combat Air Programme, for the construction of a sixth-generation fighter. Since it will be a nuclear attack aircraft, the Program will allow Japan to become a de facto nuclear country, as is Italy equipped with nuclear weapons by the USA. The Global Combat Air Programme will cost tens of billions of dollars before the new fighter enters service.

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This article was originally published on byoblu in Italian.

Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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The U.S. government approved its first three payments to people injured by COVID-19 vaccines — amounting to a total of $4,634.89.

The Health and Resources Service Administration (HRSA) vaccine injury claims report, updated monthly, shows one $2,019.55 payment for anaphylaxis and two payments — $1,582.65 and $1,032.69 — for myocarditis.

The payments were made through HRSA’s Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP).

The CICP was established under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, which protects pharmaceutical companies from liability for injuries sustained from “countermeasures,” such as vaccines and medications, administered during a public health emergency.

Since 2010, when it approved its first claim, the program has compensated a total of 33 claims for vaccine injuries — but these are the first awards for COVID-19 vaccines.

“These long-awaited awards were overdue, highly anticipated and speculated upon,” said Kim Mack Rosenberg, acting general counsel for Children’s Health Defense (CHD). “What is remarkable is that less than $5,000 was paid — total. This is a tragedy that highlights the severe limitations of the program.”

CHD Acting President Laura Bono called the payouts for myocarditis “insulting,” given that mortality rates increase to 50% within five years of diagnosis.

Bono said:

“The CICP is a pathetic, government-run program that gives complete liability protection to the very industries profiting from the COVID vaccine or product. While victims linger with their injuries, paying out-of-pocket for expenses, or at worst die, the industries run to the bank.”

Since the start of the pandemic, people claiming injuries related to COVID-19 vaccines and other countermeasures submitted 11,425 requests for compensation.

Of those, only 19 have been declared eligible for compensation and are undergoing a “medical benefits review” to determine payment.

The anaphylaxis case had been pending medical benefits review since the fall of 2021, and the two myocarditis cases had been pending review since January.

During the medical benefits review, HRSA determines any costs remaining after insurance, workers’ comp, disability or other reimbursements or payments.

Wayne Rohde, an expert in vaccine injury compensation, wrote on his Substack that given the “18+ months to review previous medical benefits that may have been awarded to the injured party [the anaphylaxis case], this process tells me it was a major injury that resulted in very large medical bills.”

Myocarditis is a serious condition that also requires a lot of medical attention, Rohde said.

To date, there have been 1,541,275 reports of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

How does vaccine injury compensation work? the VICP and CICP

HRSA, which operates under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), administers two vaccine injury compensation programs: the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) and the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP).

The VICP is a special, no-fault tribunal housed within the U.S. Court of Federal Claims that handles injury claims for 16 common vaccines on the childhood vaccination schedule. To date, it has awarded more than $4 billion for medical bills, lost wages, lawyer fees, and pain and suffering to thousands of people for vaccine injuries.

The program does not currently cover COVID-19 vaccine injuries. Should COVID-19 vaccines be moved into the program, any injuries would be handled by the already overwhelmed VICP.

The CICP, the only program that covers COVID-19 vaccine injuries at this time, is even less equipped to deal with them, Rohde told The Defender.

“For COVID-19 vaccine-injured people, the CICP is the worst place, it’s the worst option,” Rohde said, “because it is not really a compensation program, it’s a reimbursement program for medical costs.”

The CICP allows individuals to claim compensation only for unreimbursed medical expenses — meaning those not fully reimbursed by insurance or government programs, such as Medicaid — for death and for lost wages up to $50,000.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, under the CICP:

“Eligible individuals may be compensated for certain reasonable and necessary medical expenses and for lost employment income at the time of the injury. Death benefits may be paid to certain survivors of covered countermeasures recipients who have died as a direct result of the covered countermeasure injury.

“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is the payer of last resort. Therefore, payments are reduced by those of other third-party payers.”

“There’s no pain and suffering here, there’s nothing,” Rohde said.

Because the CICP reviews and resolves claims through an administrative rather than a judicial process, no details other than the amount of the payments have to be shared with the public.

“It’s designed to be very convoluted, very non-transparent,” Rohde said.

The CICP was known for its cumbersome claims process and low likelihood of success for claimants even before the pandemic. Since then, it has seen unsustainable growth.

According to HRSA’s numbers, of the 11,941 claims filed with the CICP since 2010, nearly 11,000 of them are still under review.

The HRSA budget for COVID-19 vaccine injury compensation will increase in fiscal year 2023 — from approximately $1 million to $5 million — and its budget for staffing and contractors will jump from $5 million to $9.5 million.

How would COVID vaccine injury compensation change under the VICP?

For vaccine injury claims to be covered under the VICP rather than the CICP, three requirements must be met:

1. The vaccine needs to be recommended for routine administration for children and/or pregnant women.
2. It needs to have an excise tax imposed upon it through the legislature.
3. There needs to be a notice of coverage published in the federal record.

The COVID-19 vaccine was added to the childhood immunization schedule earlier this year — but the next two steps in the process have yet to be completed and public health officials have not indicated when this might happen.

The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine met for three days last month — behind closed doors, except for a two-hour public comment period — to review the epidemiological, clinical and biological evidence on adverse events associated with COVID-19 vaccines.

The committee will generate a report that will be used to add injuries to the federal Vaccine Injury Table, which lists known adverse events associated with existing vaccines.

This list helps the VICP and the CICP decide whether to compensate vaccine injury claims.

At the National Academies meeting, Professor Renee Gentry, director of the Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic at The George Washington University Law School, told the committee the stakeholders that created the VICP — vaccine manufacturers, lawyers and parents — set it up to be petitioner-friendly, informal, generous and non-adversarial.

But instead, she said, HHS has been “unrelenting” in its opposition to recognizing vaccine injuries.

“I believe the VICP as it exists today would be unrecognizable to those original stakeholders,” she said.

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Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

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Seeing as how Egypt, Ethiopia, Russia, the UAE, and the US all have important interests in Sudan, it’s clear that this latest African conflict could indeed have far-reaching consequences if it continues and especially if its “deep state” war descends into a civil war. In that event, this geostrategic country could suddenly become an object of intense competition in the New Cold War, which could catalyze uncontrollable processes that culminate in destabilizing all of Africa. All responsible stakeholders must therefore do their utmost to prevent that from happening.

Fierce fighting broke out all across Sudan this weekend between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), with each blaming the other for starting this. Seeing as how this conflict remains limited for the time being to two military factions, it can therefore be described as a “deep state” war and not a civil one like the conflict that ultimately resulted in South Sudan’s independence. This doesn’t mean that it won’t turn into a civil war, but just that it hadn’t yet by Sunday evening.

Sudan’s “deep state” war was inevitable though since these factions have been competing with each other over who’ll remain the country’s most powerful force amidst its continually delayed transition to democracy that began after 2019’s military coup. The SAF is led by Chief General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan while the RSF is run by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who’s also known as Hemedti. Both men are part of the Transitional Sovereign Council, the first as president and the second as deputy chairman.

A new prime minister and institutions of the transitional authority were supposed to have been announced by last Tuesday, but that obviously didn’t happen. “Deep state” tensions started becoming uncontrollable around that time, perhaps due to one or both parties calculating that they can make their long-planned power play against the other on the pretext of presenting it as a “defense of democracy” against their allegedly “anti-democratic” opponent.

It’s difficult to discern exactly what’s happening right now and who controls what due to the “fog of war” so the present piece will avoid touching upon unconfirmed information in analyzing Sudan’s “deep state” war, instead focusing on the consequences of this entirely predictable development. For starters, this conflict reflects very poorly on the military since it shows how deeply divided it’s become over the years that two clearly distinct competing centers of power were able to emerge within it.

Depending on how long they war with each other, this institution might become depleted enough to the point where separatist forces reemerge along its periphery as a potent threat to Sudan’s territorial integrity, which could turn it into the next Yugoslavia. Former President Omar Al-Bashir even warned his Russian counterpart about this during their meeting in 2017 when he requested assistance in averting what he said was “the US desire to divide Sudan into five states”.

That scenario hasn’t yet unfolded due to the military remaining a formidable force despite its growing divisions since then, which culminated in Sudan’s inevitable “deep state” war this weekend, but everything could quickly change if their conflict continues raging on. The longer that these factions fight, the more likely it is that some level of foreign intervention could occur as well, particularly the possibility of Egypt supporting Burhan and the UAE backing Hemedti, who they’re each considered close with.

Even though Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ) just met his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in Cairo last week, those two could quickly turn to propping up their respective partners if the conflict continues dragging on in order to give them an edge over the other. Regarding Egypt’s role, the RSF captured some of its troops in the country, which Cairo claims were there to conduct joint training. They’ll be returned, but few even knew they were there in the first place until this happened.

Neighboring Ethiopia, with whom Egypt and Sudan are embroiled in a bitter dispute over a dam on the Nile that runs through each of their territories, will certainly take note of this as well as footage on social media claiming to show Egyptian fighter jets in Sudan too. There have been concerns for a couple years already that Egypt is plotting a so-called “preemptive strike” against Ethiopia in order to stop Addis from filling that aforesaid dam, the speculation of which was now extended credence by this revelation.

Ethiopia and Sudan are also in a dispute over a region known as Alfashaga, which led to clashes last summer, so it’s possible that Addis could make a military move there in support of its claims should it sense that Khartoum is too divided and weak to retain control over it. To be absolutely clear, there aren’t any signs that this is being considered, but it’s still worth mentioning in the larger context of the consequences that could unfold if Sudan’s “deep state” war continues.

This latest conflict is also of interest to Ethiopia because its optics very closely resemble the recent dispute between the federal government and some elements in the Amhara Region over the country’s military reorganization. Chief of General Staff Birhanu Jula announced on Saturday that “Starting from today, the regional special forces structure is no longer there. Our work has been finished”, so federal supporters might claim that this successful operation prevented a Sudanese-like “deep state” war.

It’s not just the US, Egypt, the UAE, and Ethiopia whose interests are affected by this conflict, but Russia too, who’s grown extremely close to both warring military factions after building upon the ties that former President Bashir established during his previously mentioned trip to Moscow in 2017. It plans to open a naval base in Port Sudan sometime soon, the two sides reportedly cooperate on mining and security, and Sudan facilitates Russian access to the neighboring Central African Republic (CAR).

The Kremlin doesn’t care which side wins as long as the victor retains their strategic ties, the last dimension of which is immensely important since any potential impediment to Russia’s trans-Sudanese access to the CAR could have disastrous consequences for that country’s security. Moscow helped Bangui restore its sovereign writ over large swathes of the country with Wagner’s help, but the capital could once again be threatened by rebels if the Kremlin can’t adequately resupply those two’s forces.

The possible collapse of Russia’s “Democratic Security” project there would have massive implications for its newfound appeal to African countries, which is due to the combination of it effectively bolstering its partners’ sovereignty via the means pioneered in the CAR and its attractive multipolar worldview. The possible reversal of its first “Democratic Security” success on the continent as a result of the Sudanese “deep state” war would represent a significant symbolic setback that the West would certainly exploit.

With these five states’ interests in mind, it’s clear that this latest African conflict could indeed have far-reaching consequences if it continues and especially if Sudan’s “deep state” war descends into a civil war. In that event, this geostrategic country could suddenly become an object of intense competition in the New Cold War, which could catalyze uncontrollable processes that culminate in destabilizing all of Africa. All responsible stakeholders must therefore do their utmost to prevent that from happening.

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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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*** 

For years, US intelligence officials could hold their allies, notably the British, in contempt for leaking like sinking vessels and harbouring such espionage luminaries as the Cambridge Five.  The whirligig of time has returned the favour with the latest leak from the US Department of Defense.  They pose a question pregnant with relevance: Do Washington’s allies have any reason to trust their own secure channels of sharing defence information?  The answer: probably not.

The spray of Pentagon documents began appearing on such platforms as Twitter, 4chan, Telegram and a Discord server that hosts video games.  (How odd, go the folks at Bellingcat.)  The very nature of this distribution has tickled pundits into assuming a sense of play at work here.  A few have even asserted that the alleged perpetrator, Jack Texeira of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was making a playful effort to make friends.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was informed of the leak during his April 6 morning briefing after five images surfaced on the platforms.  The following day, Austin commenced daily crisis meetings to discuss the matter. 

These briefings seem to have come some weeks late.  Certain documents began circulating on the Discord messaging platform in March, featuring photographs of folded up printouts, only to then be smoothed out again.

The lion’s share of the documents came in the form of slides developed by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, largely acting as briefing notes for senior leaders regarding Ukraine.  A pessimistic picture emerges about the prospects of success for any Ukrainian spring counteroffensive.  Shortages in ammunition were also becoming critical, and the capacity of Western states to replenish them had yet to be developed.  The delivery of existing equipment to the frontline had also been slow, as was training Ukrainian forces.  Soviet-era munitions and artillery continued to be the mainstay of Kyiv’s military effort.

But then the picture became more cluttered – and clotted.  Messily, there were suggestions that the United States had observed that old adage that friends need to be spied upon to be good.  South Korea proved a case in point. 

One leaked document revealed the state of mind of South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s senior advisors on whether to yield to US pressure to send ammunition to Ukraine, or resist arming the state altogether.  In 2022, Seoul had agreed to replenish US artillery stocks on the proviso that they keep the shells for themselves.  But Foreign Affairs Secretary Yi Mun-hui, on March 1, told then National Security Advisor Kim Sung-han that the government was “mired in concerns that the US would not be the end user” of the ammunition.  A mooted option was sending shells to Poland instead.

The revelation immediately drew a stout defence, notably in the Financial Times.  “Washington needs to know if Seoul is considering a move that could spark a nuclear arms race in north-east Asia, or fatally undermine international pressure on Pyongyang, or – in the most extreme circumstances – drag the US into a nuclear conflict.”

There was also disgruntlement in Washington regarding the UN Secretary General’s supposedly favourable stance towards Russia.  This was revealed in several documents describing private conversations between António Guterres and a number of African figures. 

The Black Sea grain deal between Ukraine and Russia, which the secretary aided, along with Turkey, to broker last July, received a special, scathing mention.  “Guterres emphasised his efforts to improve Russia’s ability to export even if that involves sanctioned Russian entities or individuals,” states one document.  His conduct in February, according to the assessment, had undermined “broader efforts to hold Moscow accountable for its actions in Ukraine”.  

These documents have raised a few questions.  Was such leaked information inaccurate, thereby revealing the state of confusion within the Pentagon itself?  We already know how an entire swathe of US agencies and departments recently cocked-up their assessments of Afghanistan and the capabilities of the Taliban.  Or had the information itself been tampered with on its release, thereby skewing the material favouring, to use the defence vernacular, the interests of a hostile adversary?  Ultimately, all intelligence assessments must be subject to the withering eyes of History’s muse, Clio, who may well, in time, reveal something quite different.

The overarching issue remains: Is it possible that a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard could have access to such information?  Again, in this information saturated age, where reports on security and defence stack shelves and surf as attachments on emails, smooth and ready access is easy to envisage.

Inevitable comparisons with Edward Snowden’s disclosures from 2013 have been made.  His disclosures threw the lid off the vast surveillance imperium created in freedom’s name in the wake of the September 10, 2001 attacks, and executed in the service of paranoia and callousness.  But in the land of intel-chat, these latest leaks are deemed more serious given their immediate relevance.  The US-Ukraine show must be seen to be going according to plan, the aid from Washington noble, the fighting from Kyiv even nobler.    

The old problems Snowden exposed, however, have not gone away.  In redux format, officials are now demanding a review of systems of access within the Pentagon.  “We need to rethink how we store and hold classified information and who has access to that information,” insists Mick Mulroy, retired CIA officer and former Pentagon official.  A tad late for that, isn’t it?

The picture emerging from this, edited or otherwise, is ugly for the bureaucrats.  For one, it shows that the conflict in Ukraine is very much a NATO affair, a brutal stoush with the Russian bear packed with old grievances and concerns.  A bloody, lengthy conflict is on the cards. 

As the DoD attempts to root out the sources and patch up the leaky vessel, Washington’s allies will be pensive.  The Empire, as was demonstrated in the Snowden spill, is prone to misbehaviour. 

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

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*** 

The top-secret Pentagon documents leaked last week highlight concerns about the failure of US-made bomb kits being used by the Ukrainian forces to carry out precision strikes against high-value Russian military targets.

The failure of these bomb kits is partly attributed to GPS signal issues, potentially caused by Russian jamming efforts.

The United States has provided Ukrainian Air Force with its Joint Direct Attack Munition Extended Range (JDAM-ER) bombs which could be used to hit large-sized Russian targets, such as bridges and hardened fortifications, from long distances.

Reports of the Ukrainian military using these US-supplied JDAM-ER bombs began emerging in early March. According to Russian media reports, the Ukrainian military seems to have started using the JDAM-ER bombs on Russian-held positions in the Bakhmut region.

Standard JDAMs rely on a combination of the inertial navigation system (INS) and GPS guidance, coupled with an autopilot, to direct the bomb’s course via steerable tail fins.

The complete JDAM kit comprises a new tail containing a GPS-assisted inertial navigation system (INS) guidance system and strakes fitted elsewhere along the body of the bomb, which offers a limited ability to glide toward its intended target.

Depending on the altitude at which it is released, a JDAM can hit targets at a range of up to 24 kilometers, and the JDAM-ER’s wing kit extends this range up to around 72 kilometers.

A single JDAM kit costs over US$24,000 and is used for converting unguided bombs weighing between 220 and 907 kilograms, as per the fact sheet of the US Navy.

When it came to light that the US had provided Ukrainian JDAM-ER bombs, Western military experts suggested that these bombs would pose unprecedented challenges for Russian forces. 

The JDAM bombs can provide Ukraine with precision-guided fire-and-forget capability, which should allow the Ukrainian fighter pilots to turn away immediately after firing it, thereby putting a distance between themselves and hostile air defense systems.

However, a cache of classified US intelligence documents that were leaked recently tell a very different story, according to which the JDAM bomb kits being used by the Ukrainian Air Force may have been rendered useless by Russian electronic warfare.

Russian Jamming Of GPS Signals Causing JDAM-ER Failure?

A document marked ‘secret’ and titled “Why are JDAM-ERs Failing? BDA From Recent Strike?” examines why JDAM-ER bombs have failed on the Ukraine battlefield. Two factors potentially explain why there have been “duds and/or misses.”

One of the factors is that the bomb fuses are not being armed correctly, which the Ukrainian Air Force is said to have fixed, and the second factor is the GPS signal issues, potentially caused by Russian jamming efforts, which have caused some misses.

The document also notes that similar GPS signal issues have hindered the operations of Ukraine’s guided multiple-launch rocket systems (GMLRS).

“However, the Director of the Joint Navigation Warfare Center (JNWC) stated that based on their analysis, GPS jamming should not have affected the JDAM-ER strikes based on target location compared to active Russian jammers, but other factors may have prevented the JDAM-ER from acquiring GPS signal,” the intelligence document reportedly said.

The document is said to have been published sometime between late February and early March. As stated earlier, reports of the Ukrainian military using JDAM bombs against Russian positions began emerging in early March.

Huge Explosion!!!

Video of Ukraine allegedly using U.S. donated JDAM High-precision Smart Bombs. #UkraineRussiaWar #Ukraine #Russia #US pic.twitter.com/07VvxxzB59

— EurAsian Times (@THEEURASIATIMES) March 11, 2023

As per reports, by the time the document was published, the Ukrainian Air Force had dropped at least nine JDAM-ER bombs on Russian targets. However, four of them seem to have been missed due to Russian jamming efforts.

The confidence in this intelligence assessment was reportedly ‘medium to high,’ and the document recommends neutralizing the Russian jammers before using the JDAM-ERs to realize the best results in precision strikes.

Image: JDAM Smart Bomb (Source: The Eurasian Times)

It is also important to note here that the JDAM kit relies on a GPS-assisted inertial navigation system (INS), which means the INS portion of the bomb must ensure that accuracy is retained up to a significant extent, even if the GPS signal is jammed or otherwise lost.

Russia has some of the most advanced electronic warfare equipment in the world and some very experienced personnel to operate such equipment. As per media reports, the Russian forces have been regularly jamming signals from the US Global Positioning System (GPS) as part of their military campaign in Ukraine.

In June, a Ukrainian Intelligence official revealed that the Russian jamming of GPS receivers on drones that the Ukrainian forces use to locate the enemy and direct artillery fire is particularly intense in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine.

There have also been reported instances of Russian troops having managed to jam the radar communications of Ukrainian drones, keeping them from successfully identifying Russian artillery batteries.

Western experts have touted Russian ability to jam GPS signals noting that there have been instances where Russia has precisely jammed the GPS signals in northern Norway from locations far across the border without affecting the nearby frequency band from Russia’s GLONASS satellite navigation system.

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Featured image: The graphic depicts various JDAM variants and an example of one of the bolt-on tail kit guidance units. (Source: The Eurasian Times)

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*** 

While nearly three-quarters of researchers believe artificial intelligence “could soon lead to revolutionary social change,” 36% worry that AI decisions “could cause nuclear-level catastrophe.”

Those survey findings are included in the 2023 AI Index Report, an annual assessment of the fast-growing industry assembled by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and published earlier this month.

“These systems demonstrate capabilities in question answering, and the generation of text, image, and code unimagined a decade ago, and they outperform the state of the art on many benchmarks, old and new,” says the report. “However, they are prone to hallucination, routinely biased, and can be tricked into serving nefarious aims, highlighting the complicated ethical challenges associated with their deployment.”

As Al Jazeera reported Friday, the analysis “comes amid growing calls for regulation of AI following controversies ranging from a chatbot-linked suicide to deepfake videos of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appearing to surrender to invading Russian forces.”

Notably, the survey measured the opinions of 327 experts in natural language processing—a branch of computer science essential to the development of chatbots—last May and June, months before the November release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT “took the tech world by storm,” the news outlet reported.

Just three weeks ago, Geoffrey Hinton, considered the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” told CBS News‘ Brook Silva-Braga that the rapidly advancing technology’s potential impacts are comparable to “the Industrial Revolution, or electricity, or maybe the wheel.”

Asked about the chances of the technology “wiping out humanity,” Hinton warned that “it’s not inconceivable.”

That alarming potential doesn’t necessarily lie with currently existing AI tools such as ChatGPT, but rather with what is called “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), which would encompass computers developing and acting on their own ideas.

“Until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general-purpose AI,” Hinton told CBS News. “Now I think it may be 20 years or less.”

Pressed by Silva-Braga if it could happen sooner, Hinton conceded that he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of AGI arriving within five years, a significant change from a few years ago when he “would have said, ‘No way.'”

“We have to think hard about how to control that,” said Hinton. Asked if that’s possible, Hinton said, “We don’t know, we haven’t been there yet, but we can try.”

The AI pioneer is far from alone. According to the survey of computer scientists conducted last year, 57% said that “recent progress is moving us toward AGI,” and 58% agreed that “AGI is an important concern.”

In February, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a company blog post: “The risks could be extraordinary. A misaligned superintelligent AGI could cause grievous harm to the world.”

More than 25,000 people have signed an open letter published two weeks ago that calls for a six-month moratorium on training AI systems beyond the level of OpenAI’s latest chatbot, GPT-4, although Altman is not among them.

“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” says the letter.

The Financial Times reported Friday that Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who signed the letter calling for a pause, is “developing plans to launch a new artificial intelligence start-up to compete with” OpenAI.

Regarding AGI, Hinton said: “It’s very reasonable for people to be worrying about those issues now, even though it’s not going to happen in the next year or two. People should be thinking about those issues.”

While AGI may still be a few years away, fears are already mounting that existing AI tools—including chatbots spouting lies, face-swapping apps generating fake videos, and cloned voices committing fraud—are poised to turbocharge the spread of misinformation.

According to a 2022 IPSOS poll of the general public included in the new Stanford report, people in the U.S. are particularly wary of AI, with just 35% agreeing that “products and services using AI had more benefits than drawbacks,” compared with 78% of people in China, 76% in Saudi Arabia, and 71% in India.

Amid “growing regulatory interest” in an AI “accountability mechanism,” the Biden administration announced this week that it is seeking public input on measures that could be implemented to ensure that “AI systems are legal, effective, ethical, safe, and otherwise trustworthy.”

Axiosr eported Thursday that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is “taking early steps toward legislation to regulate artificial intelligence technology.”

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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Kenny Stancil is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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*** 

A new global currency just launched, but 99 percent of the global population has no idea what just happened.  The “Universal Monetary Unit”, also known as “Unicoin”, is an “international central bank digital currency” that has been designed to work in conjunction with all existing national currencies.  This should set off alarm bells for all of us, because the widespread adoption of a new “global currency” would be a giant step forward for the globalist agenda.  The IMF did not create this new currency, but it was unveiled at a major IMF gathering earlier this week…

Today, at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Spring Meetings 2023, the Digital Currency Monetary Authority (DCMA) announced their official launch of an international central bank digital currency (CBDC) that strengthens the monetary sovereignty of participating central banks and complies with the recent crypto assets policy recommendations proposed by the IMF.

Universal Monetary Unit (UMU), symbolized as ANSI Character, Ü, is legally a money commodity, can transact in any legal tender settlement currency, and functions like a CBDC to enforce banking regulations and to protect the financial integrity of the international banking system.

As the press release quoted above indicates, this new “Universal Monetary Unit” was created by the Digital Currency Monetary Authority.

So who in the world is the Digital Currency Monetary Authority?

Honestly, I had no idea until I started doing research for this article.

The press release says that the organization consists of “sovereign states, central banks, commercial and retail banks, and other financial institutions”…

The DCMA is a world leader in the advocacy of digital currency and monetary policy innovations for governments and central banks.  Membership within the DCMA consists of sovereign states, central banks, commercial and retail banks, and other financial institutions.

Basically, it sounds like a secretive cabal of international banks and national governments is conspiring to push this new currency down our throats.

We are being told that the “Universal Monetary Unit” is “‘Crypto 2.0”, and those that created it are hoping that it will be widely adopted by “all constituencies in a global economy”…

The DCMA introduces Universal Monetary Unit as Crypto 2.0 because it innovates a new wave of cryptographic technologies for realizing a digital currency public monetary system with a widespread adoption framework encompassing use cases for all constituencies in a global economy.

I don’t know about you, but this sounds super shady to me.

Of course the Digital Currency Monetary Authority is not the only one that has been working on a new digital currency.

The UK has also been working on one.

The same is true for the European Union.

And would it surprise anyone that the Biden administration is touting the potential benefits of a “digital form of the U.S. dollar”?  The following comes from the official White House website…

A United States central bank digital currency (CBDC) would be a digital form of the U.S. dollar. While the U.S. has not yet decided whether it will pursue a CBDC, the U.S. has been closely examining the implications of, and options for, issuing a CBDC. If the U.S. pursued a CBDC, there could be many possible benefits, such as facilitating efficient and low-cost transactions, fostering greater access to the financial system, boosting economic growth, and supporting the continued centrality of the U.S. within the international financial system.

I don’t think that it is a coincidence that governments all over the western world are simultaneously developing CBDCs.

And the IMF has actually already put together an extensive handbook “to assist central banks and governments throughout the world in their CBDC rollouts”…

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is putting together a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) handbook to assist central banks and governments throughout the world in their CBDC rollouts.

Published publicly on April 10, the “IMF Approach to Central Bank Digital Currency Capacity Development” report outlines the IMF’s multi-year strategy for aiding CBDC rollouts, including the development of a living “CBDC Handbook” for monetary authorities to follow.

A lot of people out there will cheer when these digital currencies are introduced.

But it is imperative to understand that once everyone is using them, your financial privacy will be almost totally gone.

Authorities will be able to track virtually everything that you buy and sell, and I am sure that they won’t hesitate to use that information against you.

Needless to say, the potential for tyranny in such a system is off the charts.

Can you imagine a world in which you are restricted from buying meat for a while because you have already used your “carbon credits” for the month?

Your “financial privileges” could potentially be restricted at any time at the whim of a government bureaucrat, and if you are a big enough troublemaker you could be “deplatformed” from the system permanently.

Of course in order for such a system to have real teeth, cash and other forms of payment will need to be phased out, and that is precisely what is happening right now in Europe.  The following comes from the official website of the European Parliament…

To restrict transactions in cash and crypto assets, MEPs want to cap payments that can be accepted by persons providing goods or services. They set limits up to €7000 for cash payments and €1000 for crypto-asset transfers, where the customer cannot be identified.

Ultimately, they will just keep lowering the limits until the use of cash is almost completely eliminated.

Everyone will be slowly but surely forced on to the new digital system, and it will be a system that they control with an iron fist.

And most people will willingly go along with it.  These days, most people are just scraping by from month to month and one recent survey found that 70 percent of all Americans are “financially stressed” at this point…

Inflation, economic instability and a lack of savings have an increasing number of Americans feeling financially stressed.

Some 70% of Americans admit to being stressed about their personal finances these days and a majority — 52% — of U.S. adults said their financial stress has increased since before the Covid-19 pandemic began in March 2020, according to a new CNBC Your Money Financial Confidence Survey conducted in partnership with Momentive.

Most Americans simply do not care that these new digital currencies could open a door for great tyranny.

They just want to be able to pay the bills and take care of their families, and if our politicians tell them that this new system is good for the economy they will be all for it.

But those of us that are awake know that more globalism doesn’t lead anywhere good.

Concentrating even more power in the hands of the international elite is always a bad idea, and hopefully we can start to get more people to understand this.

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Michael Snyder has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News which are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. 

It is finally here! Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

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*** 

The shock oil production cuts from May outlined by the OPEC+ on Sunday essentially means that eight key OPEC countries decided to join hands with Russia to reduce oil production, messaging that OPEC and OPEC+ are now back in control of the oil market.

No single oil producing country is acting as the Pied Piper here. The great beauty about it is that Saudi Arabia and seven other major OPEC countries have unexpectedly decided to support Russia’s efforts and unilaterally reduce production. 

While the 8 OPEC countries are talking about a reduction of one million b/d from May to the end of the year, Russia will extend for the same period its voluntary adjustment that already started in March,  by 500,000 barrels.

Now, add to this the production adjustments already decided by the OPEC+ previously, and the total additional voluntary production adjustments touch a whopping 1.6 million b/d. 

What has led to this? Fundamentally, as many analysts had forewarned, the Western sanctions against Russian oil created distortions and anomalies in the oil market and upset the delicate ecosystem of supply and demand, which were compounded by the incredibly risky decision by the G7, at the behest of the US Treasury,  to impose a price cap on Russia’s oil sales abroad. 

On top of it, the Biden administration’s provocative moves to release oil regularly from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve in attempts to micromanage the oil prices and keep them abnormally low in the interests of the American consumer as well as to keep the inflationary pressures under check turned out to be an affront to the oil-producing countries whose economies critically depend on income from oil exports.   

The OPEC+ calls the production cuts “a precautionary measure aimed at supporting the stability of the oil market.” In the downstream of the OPEC+ decision, analysts expect the oil prices to rise in the short term and pressure on Western central banks to increase due to the possible spike in inflation. 

What stands out in the OPEC+ decision is that Russia’s decision to reduce oil production by the end of the year has been unanimously supported by the main Arab producers. Independent but time-coordinated statements were made by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Iraq, Algeria, Oman and Kazakhstan, while Russia confirmed its intention to extend until the end of the year its own production reduction by 500,000 barrels per day, which began in March. 

Significantly, these statements have been made precisely by those largest oil producers in OPEC, who have a record of fully utilising their existing quota. Put differently, the reduction in production is going to be real, not just on paper.

Partly at least, the banking crisis in the US and Europe prompted the OPEC+ to intervene. Although Washington will downplay it, in March, Brent oil prices fell to $70 per barrel for the first time since 2021 amid the bankruptcy of several banks in the US and the near-death experience of Credit Suisse, one of the largest banks in Switzerland. The events sparked concern about the stability of the Western banking system and fear of a recession that would affect oil demand.

There is every likelihood that tensions may increase between the US and Saudi Arabia as higher oil prices will push inflation and make it even more difficult for the US Federal Reserve to find a balance between raising the key rate and maintaining financial and economic stability. Equally, the Biden administration must be furious that practical cooperation is still continuing between Russia and the OPEC countries, especially Saudi Arabia, notwithstanding the West’s price cap on Russian oil and Moscow’s decision to unilaterally cut production in March. 

However, the Biden administration has only a limited range of options to respond to the OPEC+’s surprise move: one, go for another release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; two, pressure US producers to increase domestic oil output; three, back legislation that would allow the US to take the dramatic step of suing OPEC nations; or, four, curb the US’ export of gasoline and diesel. 

To be sure, the OPEC+ production cut goes against the Western demand to increase oil output even as sanctions were imposed against Russian oil and gas exports. On the other hand, the disruption in oil supplies from Russia contributed to the rising inflation in the EU countries.

The US wanted the Gulf Arab states to step in and step up oil production. But the latter did not oblige because they felt that there wasn’t enough economic activity in the West and there were clear signs of recession contrary to expectation. 

Thus, as a result of the sanctions against Russia, Europe is facing the complex situation of inflation and near-recession known as stagflation.  In reality, the adaptive and agile OPEC + read the situation correctly and has shown that it is willing to act ahead of the curve. At a time when the world economy is struggling to grow at a healthy rate, the demand for oil would be relatively less, and it makes sense to cut oil production to maintain the price balance. 

All that the Western leaders can complain about is that the OPEC+ cut in oil output has come at an inappropriate time. But the woes of Western economies cannot be laid at the door of OPEC+ as there are inherent problems which are now coming to the surface. For instance, the large scale protests in France against pension reform or the widespread strikes in Britain for higher wages show that there are deep structural problems in these economies, and the governments seem helpless in tackling them.

In geopolitical terms, the OPEC+ move came after a meeting between Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman in Riyadh on March 16 that focused on oil market cooperation. Therefore, it is widely seen as the tightening of the bond between Russia and Saudi Arabia. In fact, in May, as the largest members of OPEC join Russia in its unilateral reduction, the balance of quotas and the ratio of market shares between and amongst the participants in the OPEC + deal will return to the level set when it was concluded in April 2020. 

The big question is, how Moscow might profit from the OPEC+ decision. The rise in crude oil prices particularly benefits Russia. Simply put, the production cuts will tighten up the oil market and thus help Russia to secure better prices for the crude oil it sells. Second, the new cuts also confirm that Russia is still an integral and important part of the group of oil producing countries, despite the western attempts to isolate it. 

Third, the consequences of Sunday’s decision are all the greater because, unlike the previous cuts by the OPEC+ group at the height of the pandemic or last October, today, the momentum for global oil demand is up, not down — what with a strong recovery by China expected. 

That is to say, the surprise OPEC+ reduction further consolidates the Saudi-Russian energy alliance, by aligning their production levels, thus placing them on equal footing. It is a slap in the face for Washington. 

Make no mistake, this is another signal regarding a new era where the Saudis are not afraid of the US anymore, as the OPEC “leverage” is on Riyadh’s side. The Saudis are only doing what they need to do, and the White House has no say in the matter. Clearly, a recasting of the regional and global dynamics that has been set in motion lately is gathering momentum. The future of petrodollar seems increasingly uncertain. 

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The precedent established by former President Rousseff upon her ordering Brazilian diplomats to abstain from voting in support of an anti-Russian UNGA Resolution in March 2014 was indisputably changed by Lula. Precisely because his recalibrated multipolar vision makes him amenable to the US’ grand strategic interests, he decided to do away with Rousseff’s pragmatic stance towards the Ukrainian Conflict in favor of showing the world that he now supports the US’ position.

Brazilian President Lula’s condemnation of Russia in his joint statement with Biden and his country’s vote in support of an anti-Russian UNGA Resolution shortly thereafter, both of which were analyzed in the context of his grand strategy here, prompted some of his supporters to make excuses for this policy. Instead of acknowledging the reality that he’s politically aligned with the US against Russia in the most geostrategically significant conflict since World War II, they prefer to mislead others about this fact.

To that end, one of the most common narratives that they invented is that Lula is supposedly bound by Article 4 of the Brazilian Constitution to condemn anything that Russia does in those territories that Kiev claims as its own. Foreign Minister Vieira also justified his boss’ political hostility towards Russia on that exact same pretext in an interview with leading Brazilian media late last month, which can be read in full here.

Google Translate shows that he made the following point: “Brazil condemned the invasion of Russia and it could not be otherwise. This is even one of the constitutional precepts that guide foreign policy. This is in the initial articles of the Constitution which establishes, among other things, international law, human rights, territorial integrity and the peaceful settlement of disputes. Brazil could not fail to condemn the invasion of Ukrainian territory.”

This is a blatant lie that’s debunked by the policy that the Workers’ Party (PT) previously practiced towards this issue during Rousseff’s government, which succeeded Lula’s second term and was fully endorsed by him. Back then, Brazil pragmatically abstained from an anti-Russian UNGA Resolution condemning Crimea’s democratic reunification with its historic homeland, which post-“Maidan” Kiev and its Western patrons described as a “Russian invasion” just like they describe its special operation.

The official UN Digital Library website shared proof of Brazil’s previous position here by placing an “A” next to its name to indicate that it abstained, unlike those countries that have a “Y” and “N” to correspondingly show that they voted yes or no. Brazil’s former Permanent Representative at the United Nations explained his country’s stance on the Meetings Coverage and Press Release part of the official UN website here, which is being shared below for the reader’s convenience:

“ANTONIO DE AGUIAR PATRIOTA ( Brazil) said the international community must reaffirm its strong resolve to urgently find a peaceful solution, emphasizing that his country’s concerns reflected its close bilateral ties and strategic partnership with Ukraine. 

Noting that Brazil hosted one of the largest Ukrainian-descendant communities outside Europe, he expressed deep regret over the deaths in Kyiv. 

The United Nations Charter must be respected under all circumstances, as should international law, he stressed, urging all parties to engage in constructive talks, while commending the Secretary-General’s initiatives to de-escalate tensions, restore calm and promote dialogue.”

These are the same points as those that Lula himself, other Brazilian diplomats like Vieira, and their supporters on social media have all made, with the exception being that Brazil abstained from March 2014’s anti-Russian UNGA Resolution under Rousseff but voted in support of February 2023’s under Lula. Neither he nor the opposition at the time demanded that she be prosecuted on the pretext of supposedly violating Article 4’s provisions related to the formulation of her country’s foreign policy.

Brazil’s previous policy and the factual observation that nobody accused it of being anti-constitutional at the time combine to debunk the lie that Vieira recently relied upon for justifying his country’s decision to vote in support of late February’s anti-Russian UNGA Resolution. Lula could have ordered his country’s diplomats to abstain just like his then-successor Rousseff pragmatically did but instead deliberately decided to have them politically align Brazil with the US against Russia on the Ukrainian Conflict.

This proves that the PT did indeed change its position towards Russia since the last time that it led Brazil, which also naturally prompts the question of why Vieira lied about this instead of doing his job as his country’s top diplomat by articulating the ruling party’s new stance on this issue. As was explained at length in this analysis from early March here, the falsehood that he spewed to justify Lula breaking with his BRICS partners by refusing to abstain from that vote is part of the Hybrid War on Brazil.

The latest manifestation thereof is actually being waged by the PT’s elite and their supporters in order to mislead the party’s multipolar base about the “politically inconvenient” reality of Lula politically aligning with the US against Russia in the most geostrategically significant conflict since World War II. The precedent established by former President Rousseff, who remains such a key figure in the PT that she was recently appointed as the head of the BRICS Bank, was indisputably changed by Lula.

Precisely because his recalibrated multipolar vision makes him amenable to the US’ grand strategic interests as was explained in late January here, he decided to do away with Rousseff’s pragmatic stance towards the Ukrainian Conflict in favor of showing the world that he now supports the US’ position. Further insight into his thinking can be obtained by reviewing the analysis that was cited in the introduction, but the point is that nobody can deny that Lula changed Rousseff’s policy on this issue.

Instead of resorting to toxic ad hominem attacks against those who draw attention to this undeniable fact and even sometimes concocting the kookiest conspiracy theories about their intentions out of desperation to distract from this issue, Lula’s supporters should directly address it. Continuing to wage their Hybrid War by denying this “politically inconvenient” reality is dishonest and makes observers wonder why they’re so obsessed with misleading everyone about this policy.

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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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First published on April 7, 2023

***

The brutal war of the parasite class against the American people has entered a new and deadly phase. At the moment that we should be organizing to stop the spread of poisoned food, the release of dangerous chemicals in the atmosphere as part of classified geoengineering projects, and the destruction of money and of the local economy through the radical empowerment of Wall Street and multinational investment banks, at this critical moment we are being fed the sensationalist arraignment of former president Donald Trump on the charges of paying off a porn star to keep secret about their relationship.

This myopic focus on a lascivious affair at the moment that war has been declared on the American people is no accident.

The corporate media screams out about a profound ideological struggle between the left and the right, one that could lead to a civil war between conservative militias in rural areas and so-called “progressive forces”, backed by the Biden administration, on the coasts, and in the cities.

Although such a scenario is most certainly possible, perhaps already well under way, it is but the tip of the iceberg.

Deep beneath the screaming headlines, behind the frantic bloggers of various ideological shapes and colors, and below the insipid news reports that are only invigorated by references to sexual relations between Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels, is the steel fist hidden in the velvet glove.

This made-for-television confrontation is between puppets whose strings are pulled by the strategy teams of billionaires and the consultants for private equity firms, investment banks and other financial players around the world.

The parasite class has decided that the United States is worth more to them as scrap, as fragments to be sold off at a secret auction, than as a functioning republic.

The are most certainly those who have strong feelings about Donald Trump, in that he has been set up as a symbol of what is wrong, or what is right, about America through a multi-billion, multi-year, propaganda campaign.

The point of this operation run by private intelligence firms, consulting groups, and public relations agencies (whose activities are now illegally rendered as classified), is to confuse and divide the population so that it will not be capable of responding to the current attack until it is too late.

The obvious next step for the citizens of the United States, is NOT to gawk at Trump, but to come together, to take strong action against the globalists who have seized control of the entire executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, and to stop the use of vaccines, and now GMO food, to poison and kill, to stop the creation of fake money to destroy the economy of the people, and to end the use of private intelligence and police forces to take destroy our infrastructure, poison our farmland and water, groups that will transform the entire country into a horrific Disneyland, a playground in which everybody hunkers down in secret fear as they knowingly (or unknowingly) participate in a grotesque “genocide with a smile.”

Do not waste a second trying to understand the Manhattan prosecutor’s office allegations of 34 felony counts aimed at Donald Trump and his former attorney Michael Cohen.

Brace for the worst. Come together with your neighbors, your comrades across the country, and across the world, to create a republic for the people, of the people, and by the people, one based on the Constitution and the scientific method.

Do not be afraid, or shy, to denounce this travesty. Refuse to buy into this false “progressive” “conservative” dialectic that has been set up for you by the billionaires and their consultants.

Allow me to introduce to you here article “The slow-motion civil war: America’s three-way fight” from 2018. I describe in this article the complex political battle taking place between three factions, a “three-way fight,” that is presented, in an intentionally misleading manner, as a binary struggle between left and right.

“The slow-motion civil war: America’s three-way fight”

We are so accustomed to a functional political system in the United States that sets standards for the world that in this transitional period it is quite difficult for many to conceive that massive institutional decay is taking place in Washington, D.C., that will only accelerate and, if not handled well, risks both global war and domestic conflict far beyond what we have seen so far.

That means we had better get serious about an accurate interpretation of current events in the U.S. or risk having events overwhelm us.

First we must move beyond the simplistic opposition between conservatives and liberals in American politics. We have to stop trying to shoehorn the contradictory information that we observe into this meaningless dichotomy. The Trump administration is a radical, not a conservative, political movement and its opposition, in that it exists in Washington, is not liberal.

We are witnessing a “three-way fight” in the U.S. that defies assumptions about politics over the past 70 years. A complex battle has reached a peak and it is what has allowed Trump to become president, and to remain in power thus far.

The term “three-way fight” in contemporary politics finds its origin in a fascinating article by Matthew Lyons titled “Defending My Enemy’s Enemy” that was published on the blog “Three Way Fight” on August 3, 2006. Although Lyons’ analysis has a certain leftist bias, his analysis is pretty much on target.

Here is what Lyons says,

“Instead of an essentially binary struggle between right and left, between the forces of oppression and the forces of liberation, three-way fight politics posits a more complex struggle centered on the global capitalist ruling class, the revolutionary left, and the revolutionary right. The latter encompasses various kinds of fascists and other far rightists who want to replace the dominance of global capital with a different kind of oppressive social order.”

I use the term “globalists” to refer to the “global capitalist ruling class,” “anti-globalization left” to refer to “the revolutionary left,” and “anti-globalization right” to refer to “the revolutionary right.” I feel that both “capitalist” and “revolutionary” are ambiguous and ideologically loaded terms that mislead as much as they inform.

You might say that we witnessing a “civil war in slow motion” right now in the United States, but there is a serious risk that the domestic conflict will speed up and that it may bring with it more substantial military conflicts, even if the Trump administration did not have such intentions originally.

Americans are struggling to make sense of the conflicting narratives they have been fed by the mainstream media. Most have no other sources of information even while they know it is flawed. This problem is made worse by the contempt shown toward working-class people by educated upper-middle-class liberals. Working-class people, especially whites, are dismissed as “ignorant” or “racist” by liberals, without any effort to communicate with them or to understand the world they live in.

As a result, working-class whites often feel that the anti-globalization right cares about them more than the globalists who may be African American, but who have no connection with working-poor people.

The Globalists

The globalists are ideologically neither progressive (in that they do not embrace restrictions on capital or regulations aimed at supporting local control) nor are they conservative (in that they have little interest in Christian values and may very well be extremely open-minded in terms of who they invite to their mansions in terms of race, ethnicity or sexuality).

The globalists are most concerned with global finance and the stock exchange. For individuals, whether banker or politician, liberal or conservative perspectives on institutions are a result of family upbringing, or audience, and are not central to their concerns. As long as you embrace a global perspective and you do not want to interfere with certain key features of global finance (such as the free rein of commercial banks and the measurement of success in terms of interest rates, inflation and GDP) you too can be a globalist.

Hillary Clinton was clearly the candidate of the globalists. Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz were also globalists, but they used the iconography of the right wing. The globalists do have certain fracture lines, and there are rivalries between factions — occasionally enough to encourage flirting with political enemies. But for the most part, the globalists want the subject of trade and finance to be off the table, and to focus on identity issues.

The “conservative” flavor of globalists basically speak the same way when they meet behind closed doors with Goldman Sachs or Lockheed Martin, as do the left wing globalists (like Clinton, or for that matter Sanders). But their appeal to ordinary citizens is different. The conservatives stress Christian values, patriotism, a strong defense and law and order. The liberals like Clinton speak to their audience more in terms of “diversity,” “opportunity” and “innovation.”

Conservative culture demands that the Republican candidate appear to be strong and confident. Such iconography is offensive to most Democrats. Democrats have to look like they are participatory, and ethnically diverse, and not just leaders barking orders like a lieutenant, or lecturing like a preacher. Such images do not mean a fundamental difference in organization.

The fundamental interests supporting both sides are basically the same. Neither side would suggest that retirement funds should not be tied to the stock market (although many progressives and conservatives would make that argument). The difference is rather that the Democrats take more money from Hollywood and from the mainstream media, from hospitals and high-tech ventures, and from specialized investment banks. By contrast, the Republicans take more from fossil fuel companies, defense contractors and retailers like Walmart.

The anti-globalization left

The anti-globalization left has a vision of creating a more equitable society and it works under the assumption that the state, if run by the right people, is capable of bringing about such changes. There are several layers to the anti-globalization left and there are bitter rivalries that make cooperation difficult. Moreover, many leftists fighting globalization are new to the field, having only entered politics recently. Although their numbers and their networks are growing rapidly, many espouse socialist ideals that have been outside of mainstream politics since the 1940s. Building networks and support groups is slow, but it is accelerating.

The astonishing number of people willing to support Bernie Sanders in his campaign, and come out for his events, suggests that there is broad support for such a leftist movement, and we will see the next generation after Occupy Wall Street and Sanders soon.

There are many anti-globalization leftists who look at the mild statements of Sanders with distain. Because Sanders cannot even articulate a critique of American imperialism and foreign wars, they suggest, he is nothing more than a stooge.

Although the critique may seem a bit harsh, the truth of the matter is that the more strident news outlets of the anti-globalization left, like WSWS (World Socialist Web Site) and Truthdig have, for all their ideological bias, completely surpassed the New York Times in terms of the quality of their reporting. Many CIA analysts secretly read these publications for real analysis of current issues (and they probably contribute to them as well).

The anti-globalization left is growing stronger, but that shift is nearly invisible because they have been entirely blocked out of the mainstream media. Their critique against the establishment is powerful and their total rejection of the entire system has a broad, if covert, appeal. Their essential doctrine is revolutionary, not progressive. They describe a political culture that is so corrupt that literally nothing can be accomplished. Such radical demands for change are much more common than was the case even five years ago.

There is a substantial part of the left that thinks that Sanders has betrayed them and they are not coming back to the Democratic Party. They watched how the last progressive movement to address real economic and social issues, Occupy Wall Street, was brutally suppressed by illegal police action and they have had enough. They saw how the 2016 prison strike, the largest in U.S. history, was entirely ignored by the so-called progressive media and they are disgusted.

These anti-globalization revolutionary leftists are not well organized precisely because of their anti-institutional bias, but they may well come together again soon in an effective manner.

Sanders picked up many of these people during his campaign, so much that Democrats were deeply worried he might rock the boat. Sanders was most effective in speeches that drew on direct reference to class and concentration of capital, words that recalled politics of the 1930s. His campaign represents a major development in the U.S. and we have not seen the end of that movement. Yet his decision to fold without a fight before the Democratic Convention drove his revolutionary followers out of the Democratic Party. The betrayal was deep.

The anti-globalization right

Donald Trump has become the idol of the anti-globalization right wing and they are increasingly the most motivated ethnic group in the U.S. The dispossessed whites, with their strong ties to law enforcement and to the military, have been able to dominate the discussion on class issues (which Democrats are afraid to touch), on political conspiracies (ditto) and on the question of massive institutional corruption. Whereas liberal politicians speak about corruption as the result of few bad apples, of selfish and thoughtless people, the anti-globalization right assumes from the start that the system is broken beyond repair. They are closer to a universal critique to the far left than they are to the mainstream Democrat or Republican.

Anti-globalization right websites like Prison Planet and others have grown a loyal following beyond the far right because they disclose classified information and they discuss larger corporate conspiracies in detail. The fact that many of those discussions are diluted with fictions that keep the listeners from fully comprehending what exactly is happening does not detract from the broad impact of these broadcasts.

In the 1930s, blaming the Jews was an extremely effective way to diffuse explosive critiques of the contradictions of capitalism. The complete ignorance of most citizens of how they themselves were part of a cannibalistic economic system could be preserved by finding a scapegoat. But because the far right spoke out about real issues the media ignored, it had an appeal to the common man and they felt revolutionary. So also the calls of Trump followers to throw out the blacks and Muslims (a call that will extend eventually to Jews and Asians) feel like real action, as opposed to hot air for many poor whites. They are not repulsed by Trump’s aggressive behavior, but rather inspired. When Trump calls other nations “shitholes,” his popularity only increases.

The anti-globalization right prefers a simple narrative that is easy to follow and it appeals to working-class people who are alienated from elite institutions like Harvard that are uncritically embraced by the left. Trump is able to attack the entire system and still survive politically because of the depth of alienation. Many of these anti-globalizations play major roles in local politics in rural America and must be taken seriously because the structure of elections discriminates against urban dwellers.

Trump’s campaign also attacked free-trade ideology in a manner that no progressive Democrat was capable of doing. Party loyalty forbids any Democrat from suggesting that free trade is by its nature destructive. But Trump had not such limits on his rhetoric. He gained much support among working-class whites who have suffered terribly from free trade when he suggested that automobile imports should be stopped by tariffs.

If you look at Trump’s background, he is clearly more of a globalist, but his main skill is not policy, but rather the ability to respond quickly to the needs of his audience. His policies evolved as a reaction of those who followed him.

Trump learned to appeal to these anti-globalization rightists, and white nationalists, but he is not originally one of them. Trump has very close ties to Israel (which both the anti-globalization left and anti-globalization right dislike). Many of his right-wing supporters are extremely hostile to Israel. Even as Trump moves to embrace Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, attacks on Jews from the far right are increasing.

How do the factions ally with each other?

We find a constantly shifting set of temporary alliances on a case-by-case basis in a three-way fight: the globalists will pair up with the anti-globalization left on occasion, but with the anti-globalization right at other times.

The anti-globalization right also can team up with the anti-globalization left, a phenomenon that has little precedent in our memory, but which is becoming quite prevalent.

The globalists team up with the anti-globalization left

Many important figures at global financial institutions like Goldman Sachs come from cultured families and they, and their families, have bought into a tolerant, multi-cultural world view. They are happy to have anti-globalization leftists giving talks at their events, and will even make donations to outfits like Democracy Now or Green Peace, as long as those players do not present a systematic strategy for taking on Wall Street’s absolute domination of the American economy.

To put it bluntly, globalists support humanitarian projects and welfare policies, as long as they are “progressive” and not “revolutionary.” That is to say, incremental changes are introduced, not fundamental shifts in how the economy and the well-being of the nation are assessed.

Moreover, globalists and the anti-globalization left have an agreement on climate change. Globalists are seriously concerned about climate change (as long as the response does not affect their bottom line). And there is much cooperation in this respect — even to a flaw as the anti-globalizations have bought into the globalist’s carbon trading scheme. Finally, the anti-globalization left is urban and small in number (large in the number who sympathize, but small in the number of heavy hitters). It does not have the churches and other institutional networks of the anti-globalization right and stumbles when it tries to get its message to the larger audience.

Many leftist intellectuals find themselves at a greater distance from working-class people than from millionaires. They would find it easier to collect money from the super-rich than from factory workers. That disconnect is significant and it results in profound distortions. The liberals, and the so-called progressives, are often caught in a bubble and that is why the right wing so easily attacks them as elitists even when they try to do good.

Globalists team up with the anti-globalization right

When the globalists reach out to the anti-globalization right to support their battles, they pose their arguments in terms of “rights” or of “freedom.” They find that the right wing is more flexible, more open to contradictory or even hypocritical deals and willing to speak in terms of money.

The old agreement, until Trump, was that the anti-globalization right would get support from the Republican globalists on their pet issues like federal money for Christian organizations, prohibitions on abortion and draconian crime legislation, in return for the right supporting the globalist Republican Party in its relentless pursuit of free trade and financial deregulation (both issues that the anti-globalization right dislikes). So also the anti-globalization right was willing to put up with the Republican embrace of Israel, even though at the local level it is far more hostile to Israel, and to Jews as a whole, than any part of the left.

The anti-globalization right also has a strong interest in the military and the police. Their members have close ties to the military and they model their organizations on military culture. They may not like the many foreign wars, but they admire the military’s strength and discipline. Moreover, jobs in the police, in the military and in prisons are extremely valued by rural white communities. The privatization of the prison system has resulted in a direct money exchange as a result of the harsh enforcement of laws in urban regions with large minority populations. A young black man may not be able to find a job or make a significant contribution to the local economy because of the decimation of factories. But if he is picked up on a doubtful charge and sent to prison (which are almost always in rural white communities), he can be forced to work producing products for next to nothing and the prison will supply high-paying jobs to many in the community. The prisons have in many cases become the biggest employer in the region.

Unspoken alliance of the anti-globalization left and the anti-globalization right

The most interesting part of this equation is the teaming up of the anti-globalization right and the anti-globalization left, which is increasing as the U.S. government shows signs of advanced decay. The far right and far left often have much in common with regards to international trade and finance, both of which they want to limit dramatically. They are both at war with the deep state, even if they define it in slightly different ways. Both sides suggest that the current government of the United States lacks the legitimacy to govern — both sides are, in essence, revolutionary, and not progressive or conservative.

Trump would never have been able to get elected if there had not been a large number of people on the left who supported the manner in which he weakens the state, which they want to bring down. Trump made appeals to the far left repeatedly. In fact, during the election, many far-left organizations posted material on their websites attacking Hillary Clinton that were originally produced by right-wing groups. Many continued to post them even after complaints were registered, because they felt the content was true. Trump even hinted at support for Wikileaks during the campaign — a position he was forced to back away from once president.

Steve Bannon, who continues to be a force in the Trump administration, even if the militarists have blocked some of his access to the White House, made a declaration that is particularly helpful to us in understanding what is going on here in this anti-globalization hidden coalition of left and right.

He remarked: “We don’t believe there is a functional conservative party in this country and we certainly don’t think the Republican Party is that. It’s going to be an insurgent, center-right populist movement that is virulently anti-establishment, and it’s going to continue to hammer this city, both the progressive left and the institutional Republican Party.”

Bannon was suggesting a “third-way” strategy based on the fascists of the 1930s that has a broad appeal beyond the “conservative/progressive” discourse in that it is anti-elite and revolutionary.

Moreover, Bannon’s news agency, Breitbart News, has borrowed heavily from Lenin’s war chest, employing attacks on “global elites” and even suggesting that Barack Obama was a “parasite.”

This strategy was best expressed by Trump on the campaign trail in this manner: “The Washington establishment and the financial and media corporations that fund it exist for only one reason, to protect and enrich itself. The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election. For those who control the levers of power in Washington and for the global special interests, they partner with these people who don’t have your good in mind.”

This statement, never followed up on in his actions, appealed to many voters. It went far beyond anything that even Sanders was capable of expressing. Trump was backed by the dark money of billionaires, and not dependent on the Republican Party, so he could say just about anything. That was the strategy.

A space emerged for Trump (and his inventors Bannon and Robert Mercer) to address the needs of workers in a manner that Democrats could not because of their dependency on corporations. Trump could give a talk in Detroit saying that he would stop the import of foreign cars as part of his “American first” economic nationalism. The appeal to workers was immense, but no Democrat would be allowed to say something like that because of the party commitment to “free trade.” Democrats talk about ethnic diversity, but they do not touch on class issues and they have no connections with ordinary workers, black or white, preferring to work with the leaders of major workers’ unions.

The anti-globalization left thought that having Trump installed as president (with the help of the anti-globalization right) would mean that the false face covering up American imperialism would be torn off. Leftists thought that at least Trump would not start new wars, or expand wars in the Middle East. They were wrong.

Of course Trump made statements, probably sincere, that he wanted to eat a hamburger with Kim Jong-un and that U.S. policy in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq in 1992 was all mistaken. But Trump was a political amateur and had no network at all in the military-industrial complex. It did not take long for him to be completely captured, reading off a script written up by the war hawks.

How did the left respond to the challenge of Trump? Look at the words of Jill Stein, the presidential candidate of the Green Party, who is certainly quite moderate among anti-globalization leftists,

“Donald Trump, I think, will have a lot of trouble moving things through Congress,” Stein says. “Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, won’t … Hillary has the potential to do a whole lot more damage, get us into more wars, faster to pass her fracking disastrous climate program, much more easily than Donald Trump could do his.”

Stein’s greater distrust of Clinton suggests a fundamental breakdown in American political culture.

Beyond the progressive vs. conservative Grand Guignol, institutional decay continues unabated

The three-way fight described goes far back in American politics and if I were writing a history textbook, I would add a few more chapters. The scale of its impact on American politics today, however, is unprecedented and suggests that there is a more profound decay of institutions, whether it be political parties, or the federal government, or corporations. All these organizations have been carved up for the use of small factions and interest groups and have ceased to serve a public good. Moreover, our privatized media has spent most of its time papering over, and rendering invisible, such institutional transformation, thus leaving citizens open to easy manipulation. We are led to believe that Trump is the source of evil, as opposed to the privatization of government, or the deregulation (legalization of corruption) of industry.

It is no surprise that citizens view political parties, and government itself, as hostile and threatening. Because our media, and our very approach to political analysis (not only on television, but in the classroom as well) hinges on a simplistic, one-size-fits-all progressive/conservative historical narrative, we have trouble comprehending the interference pattern created by the masked tug of war between three distinct groups who in alternation pair up or confront one another.

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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.

Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

Featured image is from Elijah J Magnier

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

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Films featuring animals as screen filled protagonists, often in an imperfect, callous human world, have been made before.  There was Robert Bresson’s 1966 Au Hasard Balthazar, which introduced audiences to a saintly donkey subject to the terrible things human beings are so often prone to inflict.

In recent times, the documentary black-and-white film Gunda, directed by Viktor Kossakovsky (executive producer Joaquin Phoenix), stripped of human dialogue, featured the farm life of an impressively large sow and her piglets.  To their lives were added cows and a chicken with one leg.  In such a film, livestock are seen as breathing, living creatures; they are not mere units of stock, destined for the packet and table.  It is a film stunningly free of didactic hectoring or moral scolding.

EO, a film by Jerzy Skolimowski, that seasoned though less known member of the Polish New Wave, which included such busting, big hitters as Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski, pays tribute to Bresson’s work.  At the very least, the same animal of biblical lore features.  It certainly has gone down well with some of the critics, winning a nomination for Best International Feature Film and netting the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022.

Interestingly enough, this particular animal is very much in cinematic vogue: Jenny, the miniature donkey in The Banshees of Inisherin, has made something of a splash.  Jenny was even featured alongside the Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel at this year’s events.  “Not only is she an actor,” the humourless Kimmel strained, “she’s a certified emotional support donkey – or at least that’s what we told the airline to get her on the plane from Ireland.”

Skolimowski’s inspiration for selecting the donkey arose from an encounter in Sicily, where he and his wife and collaborator Ewa Piaskowska, spend their winters.  At a village Nativity, he noted “an incredible cacophony – chickens, geese, pigs, goats … In the very far corner, I saw those famous ears”.

The donkey, despite moving its startlingly parallel ears, remained silent.  It was, according to the director, “like a witness on the side. I came very close and I looked at his eyes – next time you see a donkey, please notice the enormous eyes.  They had this very specific melancholic look – not being involved, but looking with a distance and maybe some philosophical reflection.”

In The Economist, Skolimowski is reported regarding donkeys as “extremely intelligent animals and very sensitive”.  He condemns industrial farming as “torture”, rightly deserving a ban.  Perhaps inevitably, vegetarianism gains appeal through EO, capturing hearts and moving conscience.  Half of the crew involved in the filming swore off meat by its end.  Both Skolimowski and Piaskowska reduced their own meat consumption.

Where Bresson’s ass is village-bound and passed around its various residents, Skolimowski’s donkey is involuntarily restless, beginning his adventures from a doomed circus in Poland which must let its animals go for reasons of legislation and protest.  There, he is much loved by Magda (Sandra Drzymalska), who performs under the circus name Kasandra, his shield against savagery.

EO becomes a witness, something like a fauna-directed camera, finding himself in the company of animals awaiting industrial slaughter, but also journeying through forests and environs populated by free creatures.  There are even Jewish graves in a reminder of the Holocaust, that most conspicuous example of centralised and orchestrated killing.

The film is stark, pared back, though enriched by splashes of colour sequences that suggest imminent danger.  The mesmerising, head throbbing soundtrack enhances the sense that harm lurks.  EO, like Bresson’s Balthazar, finds himself in manifold situations of neglect, betrayal and brutality.  He is beaten up by football hooligans who believe their team lost a match because of his braying.  A black-market flesh trader attempts to sell him for salami.  A dissolute aristocrat prone to gambling befriends him while speaking of his love of meat, including that of donkey.

While eschewing sentimentality, Skolimowski does not shy away from moments of tenderness.  After leaving the circus, EO finds himself in an animal sanctuary, where he delights children.  At one point, at a mayoral opening, he is garlanded with carrots.

At the hands of humans, animals suffer cruelty; but EO also shows us that humans, in tried-and-true sadistic fashion, are masters of inflicting harm upon themselves.  The flesh-trader offers food to a migrant refugee in clumsy fashion, only to have his life savagely concluded.  All the time this sequence unfolds, the protagonist waits with his equine companions fated for the knackery.

Skolimowski leaves us tantalised about the perspective of EO.  This brings to mind the dilemma put forth by the philosopher, Thomas Nagel, who wondered, famously, what it was like to be a bat.  The film, at points, suggests that EO is not immune to reminiscing, notably about the touch of Magda who loved him so, her voice echoing as emotive balm, encouragement and assurance.  But we are not necessarily any the wiser for it.  One thing we do know: the director misses him.

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

Featured image: This is a poster for EO. The poster art copyright is believed to belong to Skopia Film. (Licensed under Fair Use)

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*** 

How worried should we be as a civilization about artificial intelligence, assuming we aspire to continue to exist?

I recently sat for a podcast with Nicolas Creed and The Daily Bell editor Joe Jarvis to discuss the existential threat, or lack thereof, posed by unchecked AI.

Joe, playing devil’s advocate, was bullish on AI as a net positive for humanity. Nicolas and I were less optimistic. We all agreed that the defining factor will be the manner in which it is developed — by whom, for what purposes, and with what precautions, if any.

We on Team Skeptic are now joined by a bevy of experienced AI professionals. One such figure, for instance, recently literally called for the bombing of AI data centers that provide the inputs for AI “cognition.”

Via Futurism:

“One of the world’s loudest artificial intelligence critics has issued a stark call to not only put a pause on AI but to militantly put an end to it — before it ends us instead…

Machine learning researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has for more than two decades been warning about the dystopian future that will come when we achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), is once again ringing the alarm bells.”

(For reference, “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, is popularly defined as “the representation of generalized human cognitive abilities in software so that, faced with an unfamiliar task, the AGI system could find a solution. The intention of an AGI system is to perform any task that a human being is capable of.”)

Continuing:

“Yudkowsky said that while he lauds the signatories of the Future of Life Institute’s recent open letter — which include SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and onetime presidential candidate Andrew Yang — calling for a six-month pause on AI advancement to take stock, he himself didn’t sign it because it doesn’t go far enough.”

The warning letter signed by Elon Musk and other notable public figures that Yudkowksy alludes to reads, in part:

“Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.“

Other AI heavyweights have echoed similar sentiments, including the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” Geoffrey Hinton, who cited a “minor risk” AI would be humanity’s undoing.

Returning to Yudkowsky’s call to literal arms to stop AI’s ascendance, he raises the essential problem, which I have raised elsewhere, of creating an intelligence that outstrips humanity’s cognitive limits. Without effective guardrails in place to prevent it from becoming either negligent of human welfare or outright hostile to human life, we are at a serious disadvantage:

“It’s not that you can’t, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you,” he mused, “it’s that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers.”

Much like biomedical researchers using gain-of-function research to soup up viruses, the AI engineers currently at work creating ever more intelligent AI know not what they do. They are meddling, recklessly and needlessly, with forces they do not understand when the prudent course of action would require prior study.

As recently reported on elsewhere, AI very recently developed what philosophers and biologists call “theory of mind.” This means that it has the newfound lifelike capacity to frame itself in the state of mind of another person or thing and then to act strategically accordingly.

It may not be prudent to cosign calls for kinetic bombing of information warehouses, but these developments certainly should serve as a cause for pause, to grapple with the wide-ranging implications of this technology.

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This article was originally published on The Daily Bell.

Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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First published on July, 2022

Bill Gates, who already owns close to 270,000 acres of land in the U.S., has been granted the legal authority to buy another 2100 acres in North Dakota despite protests by local residents.

Gates, already the largest farmland owner in the country, has secured the go ahead to buy the land for $13.5 million under his ‘Red River Trust’ company.

Bill Gates' exposed ND land buy has locals livid pic.twitter.com/HTuwqSPRDB

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2023) June 24, 2022

Gates is circumventing a 1932 anti-corporate farm ownership law by pledging to lease the land back to farmers after the purchase is complete.

The Daily Mail reports:

North Dakota’s Agriculture Commissioner, Republican Doug Goehring, previously said that many people feel they are being exploited by the ultra-rich who buy land but do not necessarily share the state’s values.

‘I’ve gotten a big earful on this from clear across the state, it’s not even from that neighborhood,’ Goehring told KFYR-TV. ‘Those people are upset, but there are others that are just livid about this.’

Bill Gates acquired six parcels of land in Pembina County. Tuesday, the office of the Attorney General sent out a letter asking the Red River Trust to confirm how the company plans to use the land and if it meets any of the exceptions to the North Dakota Corporate Farming Laws. pic.twitter.com/MGGFKV16mm

— DOCTOR FROM LONG ISLAND NEW YORK (@Doctorfromliny) June 22, 2022

Gates now owns 268,984 of multi-use land in 19 states:

As we have previously noted, Bill Gates and other billionaires have been buying up huge amounts of farmland while Americans are being told by neo-feudalist ‘Great Reset’ technocrats that the future is one without private property.

Gates is also intent on pushing 100% synthetic meat products while he buys up record amounts of farmland and monopolizes global food production.

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Inizia il 22 aprile l’esercitazione multinazionale Defender 23, diretta dallo US Army Europe, l’Esercito USA in Europa. L’esercitazione si svolgerà per due mesi in 10 Paesi europei. Vi parteciperanno 9.000 soldati USA e 17.000 di 26 Paesi alleati degli USA, con in primo piano l’Italia.  Useranno 7.000 pezzi di equipaggiamento (armamenti e attrezzature militari) spediti dagli Stati Uniti in Europa, più altri 13.000 pezzi di equipaggiamento militare provenienti dai depositi dello US Army in Europa. Al termine, in giugno, si svolgerà in Europa una grande esercitazione di guerra aerea con cacciabombardieri USA e alleati a duplice capacità convenzionale e nucleare. Mentre l’Europa viene trasformata dagli USA in campo di addestramento  alla guerra contro la Russia, le forze missilistiche strategiche russe potenziano la propria capacità di combattimento col test di lancio di un nuovo missile balistico intercontinentale armabile di più testate nucleari.

Contemporaneamente gli USA accrescono il dispiegamento di forze militari nell’Indo-Pacifico, la regione che, nella geografia del Pentagono, si estende dalla costa occidentale degli Stati Uniti a quella dell’India. Obiettivo centrale di questa escalation è la Cina, sempre più temuta da Washington per le sue iniziative politiche ed economiche, oggi soprattutto in Medioriente.  Emblematico il titolo del Washington Post: “Il nuovo ordine mondiale della Cina sta prendendo forma”. Nonostante il tentativo USA di isolare la Cina, imprenditori francesi e tedeschi stanno concludendo grossi contratti in Cina.

L’Italia, invece, si prepara a inviare nell’Indo-Pacifico, di fatto sotto comando USA in funzione anti-cinese, la portaerei Cavour con a bordo i caccia USA F-35B. Nell’Indo-Pacifico l’Italia entra anche con un importante accordo concluso con il Giappone e il Regno Unito:  il Global Combat Air Programma, il Programma Aereo di Combattimento Globale,  per la costruzione di un caccia di sesta generazione. Poiché sarà un aereo da attacco nucleare, il Programma permetterà al Giappone di divenire di fatto un paese militarmente nucleare, come è l’Italia dotata dagli USA di armi nucleari. Il Global Combat Air Programme costerà decine di miliardi di dollari prima che il nuovo caccia entri in servizio.

Manlio Dinucci

VIDEO :

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The cause of this disaster is under investigation

*** 

A “horrific” explosion and fire at a dairy farm in the southern US state of Texas killed about 18,000 head of cattle and injured one agricultural worker, authorities said on Thursday.

“This was the deadliest barn fire for cattle in Texas history and the investigation and cleanup may take some time,” Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said in a statement.

The explosion and fire ripped through the Southfork Dairy Farms near the town of Dimmitt in the Texas Panhandle on Monday night.

Firefighters and police rushed to the scene and “determined that one person was trapped inside,” the Castro County Sheriff’s Office said on Facebook. The person was rescued and flown to a hospital in Lubbock, it said.

The cause of the explosion and fire were not immediately clear, said Miller, who described it as a “horrific event.”

“Once we know the cause and the facts surrounding this tragedy, we will make sure the public is fully informed — so tragedies like this can be avoided in the future,” he said.

Castro County Sheriff Sal Rivera told the CBS affiliate in Amarillo that a system to remove manure from the barns may have gotten “overheated.”

He said methane may have “ignited and then spread out with the explosion and the fire,” adding that a probe would have to determine the precise cause.

“Farms must do more to protect animals by adopting commonsense fire safety measures,” tweeted the Animal Welfare Institute, one of the oldest animal welfare charities in the United States, referring to the Texas tragedy.

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First published on April 10, 2023

***

Why are major governments, corporations, think tanks and the Davos WEF all promoting a Zero Carbon global agenda to eliminate use of oil, gas, coal? They know that the turn to solar and wind-based electricity is impossible. It is impossible because of the demand for raw materials from copper to cobalt to lithium to concrete and steel exceeding global supply. It is impossible because of the staggering trillions in cost of battery backup for a “reliable” 100% renewable electric grid. It is also impossible without causing the collapse of our present standard of living and a breakdown of our food supply that will mean mass death from starvation and disease. All this for a scientific fraud called man-made global warming?

Even paling the brazen corruption surrounding the recent vaccine push by Big Pharma and major government officials globally is the mindless push by especially EU and USA governments to advance a Green Agenda whose costs vs benefits have rarely been openly examined. There is a good reason for this. It has to do with a sinister agenda to destroy industrial economies and reduce the global population by billions of human beings. 

We can examine the stated goal of Zero Carbon globally by 2050, the UN Agenda 2030, allegedly to prevent what Al Gore and others claim will be a tipping into irreversible sea level rise, “boiling oceans,” iceberg meltdowns, global catastrophe and worse. In one of his first acts in office, in 2021 Joe Biden issued a proclamation that the USA economy shall become Zero Net Carbon by 2050 in transportation, electricity and manufacturing. The European Union, under the notoriously corrupt Ursula von der Leyen, has announced similar targets in its Fit for 55 and countless other Green Agenda programs.

Farming and all aspects of modern agriculture are being targeted with fake allegations of greenhouse gas damage to the climate. Oil, natural gas, coal and even CO2-free nuclear energy are being phased out. We are being pushed for the first time in modern history from a more energy-efficient economy into a dramatically less energy-efficient one. No one in Washington or Berlin or Brussels talks about  the true required natural resources for this fraud, let alone the cost.

Clean Green Energy?

One of the most remarkable aspects of the fraudulent global hype for so-called “clean, renewable” Green Energy—solar and wind—is how non-renewable and environmentally dirty it actually is. Almost no attention goes to the staggering environmental costs that go into making the mammoth wind towers or solar panels or EV lithium-ion batteries. That grave omission is deliberate.

Solar panels and giant wind power arrays require huge amounts of raw materials. A standard engineering evaluation between “renewable” solar and wind versus present nuclear, gas or coal electricity production would  begin by comparing  bulk materials used such as concrete, steel, aluminum, copper consumed per production of  TeraWatt hour (TWh) of electricity. Wind consumes 5,931 tons of bulk material per TWh, and solar 2,441 tons, both many times higher than coal, gas or nuclear. Building a single wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of non-recyclable plastic. Solar power farms require even more cement, steel and glass—not to mention other metals. [1] Keep in mind  the energy efficiency of wind and solar is dramatically lower than for conventional electricity.

A recent study by the Institute for Sustainable Futures details the impossible demands of mining for not only EV vehicles, but, in addition, for 100% renewable electric power, mainly solar and wind farms. The report notes that the raw materials to make solar PV panels or windmills are concentrated in a small number of countries—China, Australia, DR Congo, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina.

They point out that, “China is the largest producer of metals used in solar PV and wind technologies, with the largest share of production for aluminum, cadmium, gallium, indium, rare earths, selenium and tellurium. In addition, China also has a large influence over the market for cobalt and lithium for batteries.” It continues, “While Australia is the largest producer of lithium …the largest lithium mine, Greenbushes in Western Australia, is majority owned by a Chinese company.” [2] Not so good when the West is escalating confrontation with China.

They note that regarding the huge concentration of cobalt, that the DR Congo mines more than half of the world’s cobalt. The mining there has led to “heavy metal contamination of air, water and soil… to severe health impacts for miners and surrounding communities in DR Congo, and the cobalt mining area is one of the top ten most polluted places in the world. Around 20% of cobalt from DR Congo is from artisanal and small-scale miners who work in dangerous conditions in hand-dug mines and there is extensive child labor. ‘’ [3]

Rare earth metals mining and refining is essential for the Zero Carbon transition in batteries, windmills and solar panels. According to one report by energy specialist Paul Driessen, “Most of the world’s rare earth ores are extracted near Baotou, Inner Mongolia by pumping acid into the ground, then processed using more acids and chemicals. Producing one ton of rare earth metals releases up to 420,000 cubic feet of toxic gases, 2,600 cubic feet of acidic waste-water, and a ton of radioactive waste. The resulting black sludge is piped into a foul, lifeless lake. Numerous local people suffer from severe skin and respiratory diseases, children are born with soft bones, and cancer rates have soared.” [4] The USA also sends most all its rare earth ores to China for processing since it shut down domestic processing during the Clinton presidency.

Because they are vastly less energy efficient per area, the land used to produce the mandated Zero Carbon global electric output is staggering. Wind and solar require up to 300 times the land required to produce the same electricity as a typical nuclear plant. In China 25 square kilometers of a solar farm are required to generate 850 MW of electric power, the size of a typical nuclear plant. [5]

Ground Up Total Cost

Almost no studies by the Green Lobby look at the total production chain from mining to smelting to production for solar panels and wind assemblies. Instead they make fraudulent assertions of the alleged lower cost per KWh of produced solar or wind at the highly subsidized costs.  In 2021 Professor Simon P. Michaux of the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK) published an unusual study of the materials costs in terms of raw materials to produce a global Zero Carbon economy. The costs are staggering.

Michaux points first to the present reality of the Net Zero Carbon challenge. The global energy system in 2018 was 85% dependent on carbon fuels—coal, gas, oil. Another 10% came from nuclear for a total of 95% energy from conventional energy. Only 4% came from renewables, mainly solar and wind. So our politicians are talking of replacing 95% of our current global energy production by latest 2050, and a major part of this by 2030. [6]

In terms of electric vehicles—cars or trucks or buses—of the total of the global fleet of vehicles of some 1.4 billion vehicles, less than 1% is now electric. He estimates that, “the total additional non-fossil fuel electrical power annual capacity to be added to the global grid will need to be around 37 670.6 TWh. If the same non-fossil fuel energy mix as that reported in 2018 is assumed, then this translates into an extra 221 594 new power plants that will be needed to be constructed… To put this in context, the total power plant fleet in 2018 (all types including fossil fuel plants) was only 46 423 stations. This large number reflects the lower Energy Returned on Energy Invested (ERoEI) ratio of renewable power compared to current fossil fuels.”  [7]

Michaux estimates further if we were to go total EV, “To make just one battery for each vehicle in the global transport fleet (excluding Class 8 HCV trucks), it would require 48.2% of 2018 global nickel reserves, and 43.8% of global lithium reserves. There is also not enough cobalt in current reserves to meet this demand… Each of the 1.39 billion lithium ion batteries could only have a useful working life of 8 to 10 years. So, 8-10 years after manufacture, new replacement batteries will be required, from either a mined mineral source, or a recycled metal source. This is unlikely to be practical…” [8] He is stating the problem very mildly.

Michaux  also points to the staggering demand for copper, noting that, “for copper alone 4.5 billion tons (1,000 kilograms per ton) of copper are needed. That’s about six times the total amount that humans have so far extracted from the Earth. The rock-to-metal ratio for copper is more than 500, so it would be necessary to dig up and refine more than 2.25 trillion tons of ore.” And the mining equipment would have to be diesel-powered to work. [9]

Michaux concludes that simply, “To phase out petroleum products and substitute the use of oil in the transport sector with a completely Electric Vehicle fleet, an extra capacity of 1.09 x 1013 kWh (10 895.7 TWh) of electricity generation is required from the global power grid to charge the batteries of the 1.416 billion vehicles in the global fleet. As total global electricity generation in 2018 was 2.66 x 1013 kWh (Appendix B), this means that to make viable the EV revolution, an extra capacity of 66.7% the existing entire global capacity to generate electricity is required to be added…The task of making the EV battery revolution is much larger in scope than previously thought.” [10]

That is only to replace vehicle internal combustion engines globally.

Wind and Solar?

Then if we look to the proposed substitution of solar arrays and onshore and offshore wind power for current 95% conventional electric power sources to get to the absurd and arbitrary Zero Carbon goal in the next few years, all to avert Al Gore’s fake “tipping point” of 1.5 C rise in average global temperature (which itself is an absurd notion), the calculus gets even more absurd.

The main problem with wind and solar farms is the fact that they are not reliable, something essential for our modern economy, even in developing countries. Unpredictable power blackouts that affect the grid stability were almost nonexistent in the US or Europe until introduction of major solar and wind. If we insist as do the Zero Carbon ideologues, that no backup oil, gas or coal plants be allowed to stabilize the grid in low solar times such as night or cloudy days or winter, or times when wind does not blow at the optimal velocity, the only serious answer being discussed  is to build EV battery storage, lots of it.

The cost estimates of such E-battery storage backup vary. Van Snyder, a retired mathematician and systems engineer calculates the cost for such huge battery backup to the USA power grid to ensure reliable steady electricity at today’s level: “So, how much would batteries cost? Using the most optimistic 400 watt hours requirement — something a real engineer would never do — and assuming installation is free — another thing a real engineer would never do — one might look in Tesla’s catalogue and discover the price is $0.543 per watt hour — before installation — and the warranty period, roughly equal to the lifetime, is ten years. Activists insist that an all-electric American energy economy would have average demand of 1,700 gigawatts. If one evaluates the formula 1,700,000,000,000 * 400 * 0.543 / 10, the answer is $37 trillion, or about twice total USA 2020 GDP, every year, for batteries alone.” [11]

Another estimate by Ken Gregory, also an engineer, is similarly impossibly high. He calculates, “If fossil fuel fired electrical power is not available to back up the highly variable S+W energy and only batteries can be used as back up, the battery backup becomes extremely expensive…The total cost to electrify the USA is US$258 trillion with the 2019 profile and US$290 trillion with the 2020 profile.” [12]

The Hidden Agenda

Clearly, the powers behind this mad Zero Carbon agenda know such reality. They don’t care, as their goal has nothing to do with the environment. It is about the eugenics and culling of the human herd as the late Prince Philip famously remarked.

Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Program, in his opening speech to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, declared, “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” At the Rio summit Strong oversaw drafting of the UN “Sustainable Environment” goals, the Agenda 21 for Sustainable Development that forms the basis of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset, as well as creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the UN. [13]

Strong, a protégé of David Rockefeller was far the most influential figure behind what is today the  UN Agenda 2030. He was co-chairman of Klaus Schwab’s Davos World Economic Forum. In 2015 on Strong’s death, Davos founder Klaus Schwab wrote, “He was my mentor since the creation of the Forum: a great friend; an indispensable advisor; and, for many years, a member of our Foundation Board.”

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Notes

[1] Bill Stinson, The Dark Side of Renewable Energy, 20 January 2021,

https://www.flickerpower.com/images/Environment-Destruction-The-Dark-Side-of-Renewable-Energy-1.pdf 

[2] Institute for Sustainable Futures, Responsible Materials Sourcing for Renewable Energy Report, April 2019, https://www.uts.edu.au/sites/default/files/2019-04/ISFEarthworks_Responsible%20minerals%20sourcing%20for%20renewable%20energy_Report.pdf

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bill Stinson, Op Cit.

[5] David Turver, Renewables are not Sustainable, https://davidturver.substack.com/p/wind-solar-renewables-not-sustainable-not-green

[6] Simon P. Michaux, Assessment of the Extra Capacity Required of Alternative Energy Electrical Power Systems to Completely Replace Fossil Fuels, Geological Survey of Finland, 20 August, 2021,  https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Van Snyder, The Great Green Energy Transition Is Impossible, January 9, 2023, https://vsnyder.substack.com/p/report-about-energy-that-i-requested

[12] Ken Gregory, P. Eng.,  The Cost of Net Zero Electrification of the USA, Version 21 August 23, 2022, https://friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/Cost-of-Net-Zero-Electrification-of-the-USAv2.pdf

[13]  Maurice Strong Interview (BBC, 1972), June 29, 2009, http://www.infowars.com/maurice-strong-in-1972-isnt-it-our-responsibility-to-collapse-industrial-societies/ 

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So many military staffers and guards passed through Guantanamo during my 14-year detention that I remember only the kindest, and the cruellest – the ones who seemed to take joy in our misery.

In 2021, just as my memoir – Don’t Forget Us Here, Lost and Found at Guantanamo – was about to be published, I was on Twitter and saw a photo of a handsome man in a white navy uniform. It was Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. I do not remember what the post was about – probably something about him clashing with President Joe Biden over COVID policies. But I remembered his face. It was a face I could never forget. I had seen that face for the first time in Guantanamo, in 2006 – one of the camp’s darkest years when the authorities started violently breaking hunger strikes and three of my brothers were found dead in their cages.

After finding a Miami Herald article in which DeSantis bragged about his service at Guantanamo and confirming that my memory is correct, I sent his photo to a group chat of former detainees. Several replied that they too remembered his face from Guantanamo. Some said seeing his face again triggered painful memories of the trauma they suffered during their imprisonment. I understood. Even after spending the previous few years working on my memoir, which meant reliving everything I had been through at Guantanamo, seeing his face again triggered a lot of pain in me too.

When I first saw DeSantis, I was on a hunger strike.

In 2005, almost all prisoners in the camp started participating in a hunger strike to protest against torture, inhumane treatment, and being held indefinitely without even being charged with a crime. By 2006, news about our hunger strike was finally getting out. We were feeling hopeful.

One day, as we continued our strike with the hope that change is just around the corner, a naval judge advocate general (JAG), whom I later learned to be DeSantis, walked the blocks with other new arrivals. He stopped and talked to us, explaining that his job was to ensure that the camp was abiding by the Geneva Conventions and that we were being treated humanely.

I remember him asking why we were still on hunger strike. We told him to look around. Camp Delta was constructed from metal shipping containers, divided into cages with wire mesh. In the summer, the cages were like ovens. In the winter, they were cold and wet. They were loud with huge fans and the echoes of all the men’s voices. Then there was the persistent harassment by guards, desecration of Qurans, non-existent medical care, systematic torture, and being completely cut off from the outside world.

We told DeSantis we were on hunger strike because we wanted to know why we were being imprisoned. Because we wanted a fair judicial process to prove our innocence. He took notes. He promised to register our complaints.

A few days later, guards retrieved me from the cage I was in and took me to the recreation yard of the November Block. There, we were greeted by a group of nurses and corpsmen standing next to a metal restraint chair and several cases of liquid nutrient “Ensure”. A group of JAG officers and other observers, including Zak, the camp’s cultural adviser, were watching the scene through the yard’s chain link fence.

I was informed that the US government was determined to break the hunger strike. The doctor in charge, a colonel, told me he did not care if I said I was innocent or protesting mistreatment. He was there for one thing: to make me eat. I refused and was immediately and violently strapped into the chair so tightly that I could not move. A nurse forced a thick tube into my nose and down my throat. My nose bled and the pain was so great that I thought my head would explode. The nurse would not stop. Instead, he began pouring Ensure into a feeder bag attached to the tube.

“Eat!” the nurse yelled. “Eat!”

They poured can after can in the feeder bag until my stomach and throat were so full that Ensure poured back out of my mouth and nose. I thought I was going to drown.

“If you throw up,” a corpsman said, “we’ll start from the beginning with a new case and fill you up again.”

As I tried to break free, I noticed DeSantis’s handsome face among the crowd at the other side of the chain link. He was watching me struggle. He was smiling and laughing with other officers as I screamed in pain.

I threw up in their direction. They jumped back, disgusted. I did not care. I was the only one there who had the right to be disgusted.

That force-feeding was inhumane. It was meant to break me and teach me a lesson. It was meant to show me that I was just an animal with no human rights. There is no other way to call it, it was torture.

Because I had thrown up, they fed me another case. This time, they mixed laxatives into the bag. The mixture of Ensure and laxatives completely wrecked my intestines after having no solid foods for more than nine months. They left me restrained in that chair all night, soiled with my own waste and vomit.

The next day they started again. The message was clear: they were not going to stop force-feeding me like that, torturing me, until I ended my hunger strike.

So, I ended my hunger strike. All but a few of us did. A brother who saw me brought back to my cage said I was as swollen as a dead body found in the water.

Still, we kept protesting, especially against guards desecrating the Quran. We started planning for another hunger strike. In June, three men on my block, Yassir, Mana’a, and Ali, were found hanging in their cages, their hands and feet tied, pieces of cloth shoved down their throats. The camp administration called the deaths “suicides” and “asymmetrical warfare”. No one believed it.

I was eventually sent to solitary confinement, permitted to wear only shorts or a suicide smock – a heavy, disgusting-smelling tube of cloth too thick to roll into a noose. Along with the others in the solitary block, I was regularly pepper-sprayed, beaten during cell searches, and subjected to cavity searches worse than rape.

I wrote about all this in my memoir. I did not mention DeSantis was there, witnessing the torture, because I did not know who he was when I was writing.

As far as I know, DeSantis did not order my hunger strike to be violently broken or wrote the policies that allowed it to happen. He was just a guy who claimed he was there to help us and then just watched while we were being tortured. He did not torture me, but he sure seemed to take joy from it.

Today, the violence my brothers and I endured in 2006, and its connection to DeSantis, are in the news again, not because the Florida governor belatedly decided to do the right thing and talk against it, but because he might run for president in 2024.

In fact, DeSantis still calls Guantanamo a “terrorist detention facility”, even though back in 2006, the year he was there, an analysis of official documents found that the great majority of the Guantanamo prisoners were innocent men, imprisoned only because of mistaken identity or because they had been sold to the US for bounty money. Regardless of these facts, DeSantis advocated keeping Guantanamo open in his 2016 testimony before the Subcommittee on National Security, in which he claimed that all detainees were “hardened and unrepentant terrorist[s]”, whose release “risks harming America’s national security”.

At the time of DeSantis’s speech, 80 prisoners remained at Guantanamo. I was one of them. Of the 779 men held at Guantanamo since it opened in 2002, only 12 have been charged with crimes. Only two have been convicted. I wonder who DeSantis was talking about. He was there. He saw who we were.

I was born in Yemen. In my culture, a man is only as good as his word. DeSantis is clearly bending the truth to fit his preferred narrative. Maybe he is not a man worthy of leading Florida, let alone the United States.

My advice to Americans: watch out. Do you want as president someone who tries to consolidate his power by creating an environment of fear? Someone who profits from the misery and pain of others? Someone who does not hesitate to bend to truth to further his political goals?

Americans beware of DeSantis, and what belies his handsome smile.

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Einführung in Thematik

Die Bürger in unseren Ländern sind mit der gegenwärtigen Weltsituation nicht zufrieden: Der nicht endende Krieg des Westens gegen Russland, der sich zu einem Atomkrieg der beiden Supermächte auf europäischem Boden entwickeln könnte, und die vielen anderen Kriege: immer wieder Mord und Totschlag. Hinzu kommt die zunehmende Verarmung einkommensschwacher Bevölkerungsgruppen und die Sorge um die Zukunft. Siehe Paul C. Roberts: „Does America Have a Future? (1).

Was tun? „Auf die Barrikaden gehen“ oder den Wahnsinn stillschweigend hinnehmen? Doch dazu sagte Friedens-Nobelpreisträger Martin Luther King in seiner historischen Rede vom 4. April 1967: „Es kommt eine Zeit, in der Schweigen Verrat ist“ (2).

Laut Dr. Gerda Fellay, Schweizer Psychotherapeutin, sollen Max Horkheimer und Theodor Adorno, zwei berühmte Philosophen der „Frankfurter Schule“ nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg wegen des Einknickens von Goethes und Schillers Vaterland vor dem Führer resigniert haben. Daraufhin ließ Friedrich Liebling (1893-1982), der Begründer der Psychologischen Lehr- und Beratungsstelle Zürich („Züricher Schule“), den beiden Intellektuellen gemäß den Aufzeichnungen Fellay‘s folgende psychologische Antwort zukommen: „Die Menschheit muss sich die Ergebnisse der psychologischen Forschung zu eigen machen, um ein menschenwürdiges Leben zu schaffen.“ (3).

Gegenstand der psychologischen Forschung ist das geistig-seelische Leben des Menschen, seine Natur, seine seelische Verfassung und sein Verhalten. Wenn der Mensch sich und seine Mitmenschen erkennt, ändert er seine Sichtweise auf die staatlichen Gegebenheiten und die gesamte Gesellschaftsordnung. Die Ergebnisse der psychologischen Forschung weisen den Weg.

Deshalb werde ich als Psychologe weiterhin über die Wissenschaft der Psychologie in Wort und Schrift aufklären und dazu einladen, den Weg gemeinsam zu beschreiten. Als Schüler des Schweizer Psychotherapeuten Friedrich Liebling konnte ich persönlich erleben, was es heißt, sich die Ergebnisse der psychologischen Forschung zu eigen zu machen. Als Pionier auf dem Gebiet der wissenschaftlichen Psychologie war es Lieblings Hauptanliegen, den Menschen Hoffnung auf ein in jeder Hinsicht menschenwürdiges Leben zu machen.

Eine Änderung der Welt erfordert eine Änderung des Menschen

Da die Geschichte ein Werk der Menschen ist, muss die Veränderung der Welt aus ihnen selbst kommen. Die Menschen müssen ihre eigene Natur, ihre seelische Verfassung, ihre bewussten oder halbbewussten Vorurteile sowie die eigenen Reaktionsweisen und auch die ihrer Mitmenschen kennenlernen.

So sollten sie einschätzen können, wie sie selbst und wie ihre Mitmenschen auf konfliktträchtige Krisen und kommende Kriege reagieren werden. Was tun die „wehrfähigen“ Männer voraussichtlich, wenn der Einberufungsbefehl ins Haus flattert? Werden sie sofort losmarschieren oder gibt es Persönlichkeiten, die in der Lage sind, sich einem Befehl „von oben“ zu widersetzen und NEIN zu sagen, sodass man sich an ihnen orientieren kann?

In der Regel sind wir uns alle einig: das Kriegsministerium, die Politiker, die Kirche, die Theologen – und auch wir Bürgerinnen und Bürger.

So folgen die Mütter ihrem Gehorsamsreflex und lassen ihre bereitstehenden Söhne ohne Murren auf das „Feld der Ehre“ ziehen. Trifft dann die Todes-Nachricht ein, trägt die Mutter in „stolzer Trauer“ die schwarze Armbinde. Mutter und Sohn fehlt der Mut, nicht in den Krieg zu ziehen. Bereits der Vater oder ein anderes Mitglied der Familie ist in irgendeinem Krieg auf dem sogenannten „Feld der Ehre“ geblieben.

Und der Pfarrer segnet die Waffen des Krieges, die die Anderen jenseits der Grenze, die auch Christen sind, erschlagen. Er folgt damit stillschweigend der Weisung seiner Kirche und ist mit dieser Handlung der Jugend ein miserables Vorbild. Auch die Arbeitslosen melden sich fleißig zum Kriegsdienst, weil sie meinen, sie hätten keinen anderen Ausweg.

Dabei ist jeder Krieg, in dem andere Völker bezwungen und beherrscht werden, ein gutes Geschäft. Die Waffenindustrie verdient sich eine „goldene Nase“, während die Bürger zusehends verarmen. Aber es wird weiter gerüstet; das wird gepflegt und nicht verneint.

Alles ist Profit, wo auch immer wir hinsehen. Es gibt nichts, wo das nicht spielt in unserer Gesellschaftsordnung. Wieso haben unsere Kinder zum Beispiel mit Drogen zu tun? Wie kommen sie dazu? Wenn das kein gutes Geschäft wäre, hätten wir keine Drogen und keine Sorgen; der Markt wäre leer. Aber darauf wird keine Rücksicht genommen. Viele Jugendliche gehen an den Drogen zugrunde, sie gehen buchstäblich in den Tod.

Wenn wir uns umsehen in der Welt, stellen wir fest, dass die Menschen ohne Ausnahme durch die traditionelle Erziehung nicht gesund, sondern psychisch irritiert sind. Sie sind nicht krank, sie sind nur nicht richtig aufgeklärt. Man muss sie nicht heilen, sondern ihnen helfen, sich zu erkennen.

Gelingt es uns, das Problem Mensch in seiner ganzen Tiefe zu erfassen, werden wir lernen, richtig zu sehen, was mit uns Menschen los ist: Ob zum Beispiel nur die Herrscher der Welt und ihre Politiker Kriege anzetteln und führen – oder ob auch wir Bürgerinnen und Bürger für den Krieg sind.

Um das zu erforschen, ist viel Zeit und Geduld nötig. Alle Fragen müssen „bis zum Ende“ durchdacht werden. Dies ist jedoch für das Leben und die seelische Gesundheit von jedem von uns von ungeheurer Bedeutung. Wir haben dann einen Kompass.

Ergebnisse der psychologischen Forschung weisen den Weg

Die Medizin ist erst vorangekommen, als sie die Funktion der einzelnen Organe des Körpers untersuchen und kennenlernen durfte. Die Kirche war zunächst dagegen, dass man den Menschen erforscht. Erst als die Notwendigkeit erkannt worden ist, dass man den Menschen nur dann helfen kann, wenn man die Funktionen der verschiedenen Organe kennt, haben Mediziner Leichen gestohlen, um dies zu erfahren.

Während die Wissenschaft der Medizin den menschlichen Körper erforscht, erforscht die Wissenschaft der Psychologie das geistig-seelisches Leben des Menschen.

Die Wissenschaft der Psychologie ist eine Wissenschaft über den Menschen, über die menschliche Natur: wie er wird, wie er heranwächst und wie er sich dann im Leben zurechtfindet. Seine Erfahrungen werden ihm vor allem von den Eltern und den Lehrern vermittelt. Der Mensch ist dann das Produkt seiner Erlebnisse und Eindrücke in der Kindheit.

Bereits in den ersten Lebensjahren – mit fünf bis sechs Jahren –, wenn das Kind in den Kindergarten kommt, hat es einen Kompass. Es weiß dann, wie es sich zu verhalten hat. Auch über das andere Kind, den Vater, die Mutter und die Geschwister hat es eine Meinung. Es hat bereits seine Charaktereigenschaften und kennt seine Stellung in der Welt.

Wird dem Menschen aber vermittelt, wie er seine Probleme lösen soll und kann, wird er eine andere, eine realistischere Sichtweise bekommen. Die wichtigsten Probleme sind sein Lebensgefühl, seine Meinung über sich selbst, seinen Partner, seine Haltung gegenüber den Kindern, seine Meinung über den Nachbarn, die Gemeinde und den Staat. Das wäre Bildung im psychologischen Sinne.

Hat man die Gefühle und Reaktionsweisen des Menschen einmal erkannt und verstanden, wie er heranwächst, dann versteht man auch sich selbst, den anderen, die Gesellschaft und die ganze Welt. Und wenn wir den Menschen verstehen lernen, dann verstehen wir auch das Problem des Krieges, weil wir unsere eigenen Handlungsweisen und die der Mitmenschen einschätzen können und verstehen, was in uns und in ihnen vorgeht. Wir finden dann eine Antwort auf die Frage: Sind es Menschen wie wir, die für den Krieg sind oder sind es ganz andere Menschen? Wir haben dann eine andere Art des Denkens und Fühlens.

Da die Menschen von allen Institutionen – angefangen von der Erziehung zuhause und in der Schule bis hinauf zur Rekrutenschule und das „Feld der Ehre“ – in deren Vorstellung programmiert werden, hat man es schwer, sie auf unrealistische oder „irrige“ Ansichten aufmerksam zu machen und ihnen zu helfen.

Sie werden so programmiert, dass sie dann alles machen, was die Machthaber von ihnen verlangen. So hat das deutsche Volk von ungefähr 100 Millionen Menschen – das Volk der Dichter und Denker – Adolf Hitler voll zugestimmt und zugejubelt. Alle sind mit ihm mitgegangen – angefangen vom Papst, von der katholischen Kirche und den anderen Kirchen bis hin zu den Gelehrten, den Philosophen und Psychologen, den Arbeitern und Sozialisten. Sie wurden so „gut“ programmiert, dass sie sich in den Tod führen ließen.

Deshalb sollte allen Menschen das psychologische Wissen über sich selbst und die Mitmenschen vermittelt werden. Aber noch leben wir in einer Welt, in der sich der Mensch nicht erkannt hat. Alles hat er erforscht, aber sich selbst, seine Natur, seine seelische Verfassung und seine Reaktionsweisen hat er nicht erkannt.

Aufklärung und Erziehung als Prophylaxe (Vorbeugung)

Da ein menschenwürdiges Leben in den Köpfen und Herzen der Menschen vorbereitet wird, handeln die Menschen morgen so, wie sie heute denken. Deshalb ist Aufklärung von großer Bedeutung. Sinn der aufklärerischen Bemühungen ist die Reinigung des menschlichen Bewusstseins von individuellen und kollektiven Vorurteilen, dem ideologischen Hintergrund vieler Menschheitskatastrophen.

Die Zukunft unserer Kultur wird wesentlich davon abhängen, ob es genügend „Aufklärer“ gibt, die imstande sind, der Bevölkerung die entsprechenden Vorurteile zu nehmen. Intellektuelle haben dabei eine große Verantwortung. In einer Zeit, in der die Bedrohung durch die Atombombe die Selbstvernichtung der Menschheit als möglich erscheinen lässt, bedürfen wir mehr denn je der „freien Geister“, die uns lehren, was Wahrheit und was Lüge ist.

Wichtiger noch als Aufklärung ist das Problem der Erziehung. Die tiefenpsychologische Forschung hat die ungeheure Tragweite der Erziehung deutlich gemacht. Wir wissen heute, dass der Mensch in einem derartigen Maße das Produkt seiner Erziehung ist, dass man hoffen darf, durch psychologische Erziehungsmethoden, die auf das autoritäre Prinzip verzichten, Menschen heranbilden zu können, die gegen die Verstrickungen des Machtwahns gefeit sein werden.

Indem die Erziehung in Elternhaus und Schule auf Angst auslösendes Autoritätsgebaren, Gewaltanwendung sowie unangebrachte Verzärtelung verzichtet und sich mit wahrem Verständnis dem kindlichen Seelenleben zuwendet, wird sie einen Menschentypus hervorbringen, der keine „Untertanen-Mentalität“ mehr besitzt und darum für die Machthaber in unserer Welt kein gefügiges Werkzeug mehr sein wird.

Die Achtung des Erziehers vor der kindlichen Persönlichkeit und seine freundschaftliche Zuwendung zum Erziehenden wird einen wertvollen Beitrag zum Aufbau einer humanen Gesellschaftsordnung und zur Schaffung eines menschwürdigen Lebens leisten.

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel ist Schul-Rektor, Erziehungswissenschaftler und Diplom-Psychologe. Nach seinen Universitätsstudien wurde er wissenschaftlicher Lehrer in der Erwachsenenbildung. Als Pensionär arbeitete er als Psychotherapeut in eigener Praxis. In seinen Büchern und Fachartikeln fordert er eine bewusste ethisch-moralische Werteerziehung sowie eine Erziehung zu Gemeinsinn und Frieden. Für Verdienste um Serbien bekam er 2021 von den Universitäten Belgrad und Novi Sad den Republik-Preis „Kapitän Misa Anastasijevic“ verliehen.

Noten 

1 https://freeassange.rtde.me/international/167034-denkt-nicht-an-die-zukunft-es/

2 https://www.globalresearch.ca/this-madness.must-cease/4460

3 Fellay, Gerda (1997 / 2010). Friedrich Liebling. Leben und Werk – eine Einführung. (Dissertation). New York, Paris, Bern und Sitten (Schweiz), S. 16