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In November 2018, The New York Times ran a front-page article titled “In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception.”

Co-authored by Pulitzer-winning correspondent David E. Sanger, the article cited satellite imagery and a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to argue that North Korea was continuing to secretly develop missiles in violation of the June 2018 Singapore agreement between Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump.

However, the prominently embedded satellite photo was actually dated March 2018—three months before Kim and Trump met in Singapore—and the missile bases presented as damning evidence of Kim’s duplicity had been known to South Korea for at least two years.

Source: nytimes.com

The Times’s deception is part of a larger media propaganda campaign against North Korea that has helped condition the U.S. public to accept draconian U.S. sanctions policies, the spending of billions of dollars per year beefing up the South Korean military, and the $7.1 billion Pacific Deterrence Initiative that includes a major naval build-up in the South China Sea.

Felix Abt was one of the first foreign entrepreneurs to work in North Korea, and the founding president of the first foreign chamber of commerce in North Korea, set up by a dozen resident foreign business people in 2005, and co-founder and director of the Pyongyang Business School.

He has just published a book entitled A Land of Prison Camps, Starving Slaves and Nuclear Bombs? An Alternative Account to the Western Media’s Blinkered North Korea Portrayal, which debunks the media’s narrative of North Korea as a “monolithic gulag network filled with slaves” and a “hellhole…rife with suffering and starvation.”

Abt’s first memoir, A Capitalist in North Korea: My Seven Years in the Hermit Kingdom (Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2014), was blacklisted in Western media.

Photo courtesy of Felix Abt

In this latest book, he writes that,

“for decades, the United States has been waging a vitriolic public-opinion war against North Korea,” which functions as a “necessary bogeyman to persuade the American taxpayers that the mammoth defense budgets for the benefit of one of its largest and most profitable industries, is justified.”

Forgotten is the litany of crimes committed by the United States against North Korea during the Korean War (1950-1953), including the systematic incineration of North Korean cities and villages with napalm, bombing dams to cause flooding on the rice fields and thus mass starvation, and dropping plague-infected flies in order to spread disease.

For all the hysteria in U.S. media about North Korea’s nuclear threat, Abt was told by almost everyone he met that North Korea needed nuclear weapons for defensive purposes to prevent a first strike from America—which threatened to destroy their country as it had done in the Korean War. Kim Jong-un would never be crazy enough to risk the catastrophic results of firing the weapons first.

Not Even Up to the Level of the National Enquirer

The multitude of outrageous stories about North Korea and its leader Kim Jong-un do not generally match basic journalistic standards—or even those of the National Inquirer.

Often, they rely on defectors who are paid by the South Korean government and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to spread disinformation.

In August 2013, the London Telegraph reported that Kim Jong-un had his ex-lover executed by firing squad because she allegedly made a pornographic film, though later the same publication reported that she had reappeared on North Korean television.

Source: slideshare.net

ABC ridiculously also reported that all male university students in Pyongyang were required to get haircuts exactly like Kim Jong-Un, though later there were reports that Kim had banned leather coats to stop people from copying his style.

“Critical thinking just goes out the window on North Korea,” observed Chad O’Carroll, founder of the NK News website.

A More Positive Picture Than in U.S. Demonology

Abt found that, while propaganda does abound in North Korea, the claim about a total news blackout is false. Kids recited to him old Korean folktales, not regime propaganda, and many people read foreign literature.

Example of misleading propaganda in Western media that presents North Korea in the worst possible light. [Source: japantimes.co]

Despite the crippling U.S. sanctions, North Korea has a growing economy, replete with an emerging entrepreneurial middle class and has made important technological advances.

Kim Chaek University of Technology, for example, developed a cranial CT scanner, which it sells to domestic hospitals.

DPRK-produced CT scanner, Kim Chaek University. [Photo courtesy Felix Abt]

Kim Chaek University [Source: alchetron.com]

Dr. Kee B. Park, a neurosurgeon on the faculty at Harvard University who has traveled to North Korea 18 times to advise its health programs, told Abt that the images from the CT scan he had seen in North Korea were “of satisfactory quality,” and could “help doctors detect a variety of diseases and conditions.”

Despite sanctions that banned fertilizer, spare parts for agricultural machines and fuel for farm vehicles, Kim Chaek University had also developed methods that increased the yields of rice crops while decreasing plant disease.

Lies About Famine

During the 1990s, when North Korea experienced a famine precipitated by natural disasters and exacerbated by a drastic reduction in oil imports from the crumbling Soviet Union, Western think tanks, activists, and media from the Wall Street Journal to Reuters amplified the death toll by five times, thereby vilifying “evil” North Korea.

They claimed more than 3 million deaths out of a population of 22 million when the actual number was below 500,000, according to the French coordinator of the United Nations food distribution efforts. (The U.S. Census Bureau gave an estimate of between 500,000 and 600,000).

Despite a much-improved situation in the 2000s, the U.S. and world media continued to run stories every autumn quoting international aid agencies saying that North Korea was once again on the brink of mass starvation.

Source: quora.com

Abt reports that, with no indigenous sources of oil and natural gas, North Korea depends on imported energy inputs to produce fertilizers and pesticides, to fuel irrigation equipment and agricultural machinery and to transport seeds and crops.

The UN prohibition on essential energy imports thus helped provoke the collapse of North Korea’s agricultural production in 2018 to levels similar to those of the famine years—though the source of the crisis was ignored, and human rights groups in the West shamefully did not call for the lifting of the sanctions.

Despite all of its problems, North Korea still ranks above India on the Global Hunger Index. The country has improved its agricultural productivity through land reclamation projects and imported potato varieties from Europe that were cheap, easy to grow and nutritious.

Photo courtesy of Felix Abt

An Orwellian Dystopia—or Something Else?

Los Angeles Times journalist Barbara Demick, in her 2010 best-selling book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, compared North Korea to George Orwell’s Oceania, a futuristic dystopia where the “only color to be found was in propaganda posters.”

Source: amazon.com

Melanie Kirkpatrick reported in the Wall Street Journal that North Korea kept its “citizens in the dark ages,” with ”foreign goods being kept out.”

In reality, it was not the North Korean government but U.S. sanctions that kept foreign goods out—including household items like lipstick, salami sausages, knives and watches, whose importation was all banned.

And while there are certainly oppressive features of society, including a harsh criminal justice system, life in North Korea in Abt’s observations is far from dystopic or out of the dark ages.

Rather, it is not very different from other countries: Buildings are painted in all kinds of colors (color is not only found in propaganda posters), the people enjoy pizza, sweets, and other delicacies along with trips to the beach, and kids ride bikes, roller-skate and play other games in the street.

Photos courtesy of Felix Abt

Women particularly thrive as North Korea’s constitution accords them equal social status and rights with men, and a range of benefits including maternity leave.^[1]

Felix Abt with North Korean businesswomen. [Photo courtesy of Felix Abt]

Rather than being starved or downtrodden, most of the workers that Abt met were reasonably well compensated and diligent. The pharmaceutical company that he ran was obsessed with quality and achieved good manufacturing practices as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), winning bidding competitions against foreign competitors.

North Korea’s airline, Air Koryo, meanwhile, meets high safety standards despite being called in the West the “world’s worst airline.”

Stewardess with North Korea’s national airline, Air Koryo, which the media called the world’s worst airline, but which actually meets high safety standards. [Photo courtesy of Felix Abt]

Tantamount to Another Act of War

A cruel feature of the sanctions policy was its denying North Koreans the opportunity to work abroad, shattering the aspirations of many working people.

North Korean painters are now prohibited from selling their paintings abroad. Other sanctions have prevented North Korea from rebuilding water supplies and drainage systems, causing an upsurge of health problems, and blocked it from importing mechanical parts and fuel to operate agricultural machinery, causing food shortages.

Because U.S. and UK credit and financial institutions were prohibited from dealing with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK-North Korea), North Korean importers and exporters had to travel to their foreign suppliers with suitcases stashed with cash or empty money bags to collect payments.

The sanctions furthermore a) helped prevent the signing of a 9-digit dollar contract with a Swiss company that would have greatly improved North Korea’s power network; b) led to reduction in quality and availability of medicines; c) destroyed the possibility of safe mines because of the banning of the import of mine-safety equipment; and d) forced numerous garment factories to close, resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.

North Korean miners are deprived of property safety because of the inability to import mine safety equipment due to U.S. sanctions. [Photo courtesy of Felix Abt]

A businessman adversely impacted by sanctions told Abt that he considered the sanctions “tantamount to another act of war by hostile Western powers,” adding that “we in our company have never done anything wrong or illegal.”

As America Wishes It to Be Viewed

Abt concludes his book by noting that,

“given the dominant U.S.-centric North Korea narrative, with no other voice to offer balance or express the true reality, it is hard to blame the general global populace for accepting the situation as America and its supporters wish it to be viewed.”

Perhaps if more Americans learned about the history of the Korean War and its barbarism, they might show some empathy for North Koreans and try and better understand the country’s policies; or perhaps, if more foreign exchanges are established, they might press their government to end the brutal sanctions and to pursue a formal end to the Korean War.

Until that time, we can expect that North Korea will be continuously invoked as a reference point for tyranny and its leader ridiculed, in quasi-racist fashion, as a clownish dictator.

Source: Madison.com

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

1. Abt points out that North Korea has more female bank managers than does South Korea. 

Featured image: A family eats ice cream in North Korea [taken by Eva Bartlett]

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All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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First published on May 2, 2022

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“Children have had no voice or vote, regarding their potential Covid vaccination. Children depend entirely on their parents to make a well-informed and wise decision. Ethically, experimental pharmaceutical products, particularly experimental vaccines that have been rushed into use before adequate testing for safety could be completed, must not be administered to anyone, particularly children, without adequate informed consent.” – Dr. Robert Rennebohm

In March Dr. Robert Rennebohm, an American paediatrician with nearly 50 years of experience, penned an extensive open letter to parents and paediatricians regarding Covid “vaccinations” for children.  At the end of his 119-page letter, he lists over 1,000 references – almost all of which have either been published in peer-reviewed medical journals or submitted as pre-prints for publication. Just before the list of references, he has included links to several helpful educational video interviews and video presentations.

“Parents, I apologise for the length of this Letter … Much is at stake. So, for the sake of your child and all children, please consider taking the time to read this Letter. If you don’t have time, consider reading just the ‘Summary – shorter version of this open letter’,” Dr. Rennebohm wrote.

Paediatricians are legally and morally required to honour the principle of “Informed Consent” and make certain that parents are sufficiently informed before they (the parents) agree to have their children vaccinated.

The information and concerns explained in this Open Letter represent the kind of information needed for a parent to make a well-informed decision before granting consent for vaccination of their child.

An Open Letter to Parents and Pediatricians Regarding Covid Vaccination, Dr. Robert Rennebohm, March 2022

The following are excerpts taken from the summary section, pages 7 to 18, of Dr. Rennebohm’s Open Letter.

Introduction

Two contradictory views on Covid vaccination have been expressed: a prevailing narrative – get vaccinated, immediately! Vaccination is our way out of the pandemic, and an alternative narrative – stop the Covid vaccination campaign immediately! Covid vaccination is dangerous and makes the pandemic worse. Unfortunately, there has been little or no healthy scientific dialogue between proponents of the two narratives, despite repeated pleas for such from leaders of the alternative narrative.

This Open Letter is intended to help parents and paediatricians to better understand the science behind the conflicting narratives and decide on the best course of action regarding Covid vaccination of children. This Letter seeks to:

• clarify the science behind Covid vaccination issues;
• facilitate healthy, inclusive dialogue; and,
• bring people together to jointly determine what would be best for children and humanity as a whole.

Overview of the Human Immune System

The immune system can be divided into two major compartments—the mucosal immune system and the systemic immune system. Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi has helpfully referred to these two compartments as the “Air Force” (mucosal compartment) and the “Navy” (systemic compartment).

An Open Letter to Parents and Pediatricians Regarding Covid Vaccination, Dr. Robert Rennebohm, March 2022

The Air Force is “based” in the mucosa and submucosa (the space underneath the mucosal lining) of the respiratory tract, the GI tract, and the mucosa/submucosa of other mucous membrane-lined organs (e.g., bladder, uterus, etc.).

The Navy is based (has “bases”) throughout the rest of the body—in lymph nodes, spleen, bone marrow, blood circulation, within solid organs, etc.

Both the Air Force and the Navy have an innate immunity division and an acquired (adaptive) immunity division.

When the SARS-CoV-2 virus invades a person, the human immune system potentially uses all of its multiple dimensions—both its mucosal immune system (the Air Force) and its systemic immune system (the Navy), both of which have an innate immunity division and an acquired immunity division—to quickly subdue the virus (initially by innate immunity troops of the Air Force) and create robust, durable, multi-dimensional acquired immunity to protect the person from future invasion by that virus.

In comparison, the Covid vaccines provide uni-dimensional training of the systemic immune system and little, if any, training of the mucosal immune system.

There is a legitimate concern that the current Covid vaccines could be interfering with innate immunity and detrimentally disrupting the flow and optimal function of the natural human immune ecosystem.

Effects of a Respiratory Pandemic Without a Vaccine

When a respiratory viral pandemic like the Covid pandemic is not treated with a vaccine (which was the case during the first year of the Covid pandemic, when no Covid vaccine was available), a considerable percentage of the population (primarily people under age 60, who are out and about) eventually become infected with the virus (the SARS-CoV-2 virus in this pandemic).

The most vulnerable, including the elderly, must be carefully protected from exposure to the virus. Those who do become infected need to be proactively treated (much more promptly and aggressively than has been the case throughout the Covid pandemic).  Those who become infected (and recover) develop robust naturally acquired sterilising immunity that contributes to increasing development of herd immunity.

The natural course of a respiratory virus pandemic is one of gradual resolution, usually over a period of months, and this resolution is largely due to increasing development of robust sterilising herd immunity.

It is important to understand that herd immunity via natural infection is far superior to herd immunity attempted via mass vaccination with a sub-optimal (non-sterilising) vaccine in the midst of an active pandemic. Herd immunity cannot be achieved through mass vaccination with a sub-optimal (non-sterilising) vaccine. And, in fact, such vaccination interferes with the development of herd immunity.

Effects of a Respiratory Pandemic Treated Primarily with a Vaccine

The current Covid pandemic has been primarily managed with the roll-out of a rapid, mass vaccination campaign (across all age groups), using sub-optimal (non-sterilising) uni-dimensional vaccines (directed at only the spike protein), in the midst of the active pandemic and in the midst of considerable lockdown measures.

According to many experienced virologists/vaccinologists, a mass vaccination campaign using a sub-optimal (non-sterilising) vaccine in the midst of a pandemic is a recipe for disaster.  Because:

• When a person who has been vaccinated with a sub-optimal vaccine is subsequently exposed to the virus, the vaccine does not prevent the virus from entering cells, replicating in those cells, and spreading to other people.
• When the virus replicates in the vaccinated person’s cells, new mutations develop, and under the pressure of the mass vaccination campaign and the added pressure of lockdown measures, the mutated variants that will be successful. Covid mass vaccination will inevitably result in predominant variants with increased vaccine resistance and increased transmissibility.
• The mass vaccination campaign might eventually generate a predominant variant that is intrinsically more virulent (deadly) than any of its predecessors—an intrinsically more virulent variant that could be harmful to everyone, including children, regardless of vaccination status. Covid illness may become more life-threatening because of vaccine-induced ADE (antibody-dependent enhancement).

Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, a leading proponent of the alternative narrative, disagrees that this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” On the contrary, he views it as a pandemic that has become prolonged and more dangerous because of the mass vaccination campaign. Furthermore, he worries that it is the vaccinated people who are becoming the most likely “spreaders” of the virus—because the vaccine allows the vaccine-resistant variant to enter their cells and replicate, while the vaccine might indirectly make them less symptomatic, even asymptomatic, which results in their possibly being unwitting asymptomatic spreaders.

Dr. Vanden Bossche thinks it is a huge mistake to continue the current Covid mass vaccination campaign. He strongly urges that we stop vaccinating before it is too late.

According to the alternative narrative, the total cumulative numbers of Covid hospitalisations, Covid ICU admissions, and Covid deaths during the Covid pandemic (from the beginning of the pandemic through January 2022) would have been lower if the pandemic had not been treated with the mass vaccination campaign and, instead, had been managed.

Other Concerns About the Covid Vaccines, Adverse Events

In addition to concerns that current mass vaccination is driving the development of more transmissible and potentially more lethal strains, may be harming natural innate immune function (particularly in children), and is interfering with the development of sterilising herd immunity, many scientists and physicians are deeply concerned that the Covid vaccines are unsafe in other important ways – causing unacceptable short- and long-term side effects for individuals.  For example myocarditis and pericarditis in adolescents and young adults; lethal clotting and devastating neurologic side effects in adults.

References at the end of Dr. Rennebohm’s Open Letter include 757 articles in the medical literature that report serious side effects of Covid vaccinations (reference nos. 271-1028). This represents an alarming and unprecedented number of reports of adverse effects of a new pharmaceutical product. The VAERS data also reveal an alarming number of severe adverse reactions and deaths associated with the Covid vaccines.

Problems With the Covid PCR Test and Covid Data

The prevailing narrative (its data, its conclusions, and its policies) has been fundamentally based on the use of the Covid PCR test.

A positive Covid PCR test at a Ct (cycle threshold) greater than 30 is likely to represent either a false positive (commonly) or detection of a tiny amount of dead virus. Many of such people have not, in fact, had Covid, and if they have had Covid, they are no longer infectious.

Even when a Covid PCR test is positive at a low Ct value, this does not assure that the patient definitely has Covid. The most accurate test for confirmation of Covid is genomic sequencing. Since the beginning of the pandemic, confirmed diagnoses of Covid should have been based on genomic sequencing, not on PCR testing.

By basing data collection on the Covid PCR test CDC and State Health Departments have generated scientifically unsound data. Data collection has been based on scientifically unsound criteria for the designation of “Covid cases,” “Covid hospitalisations,” and “Covid deaths.”

The prevailing narrative has not been based on proper conduct of science. This has been a huge and fundamental problem throughout the pandemic.

Efficacy of the Vaccines

Proponents of the alternative narrative are concerned that the Covid vaccines are not nearly as effective as initially and subsequently claimed by their manufacturers.

Covid vaccines are sub-optimal (non-sterilising) and uni-dimensional; only partially train the systemic immune system; have little or no effect on the mucosal immune system; may be interfering with normal immune function, and drive the appearance and predominance of viral variants that “escape” the vaccinal antibodies and become increasingly transmissible and potentially more lethal.

Several studies suggest that the Covid vaccines actually increase the risk of Covid infection and Covid death during the 5 weeks after the first dose; then there is temporary and modest protection (at best) for a matter of only weeks or a few months; then there appears to be a negative effect (increased susceptibility to Covid infection); and it is likely that Boosters will prove to provide only transient benefit, which is likely due to brief non-specific stimulation of natural immunity.

Furthermore, there is legitimate concern that vaccine-induced ADE phenomena might be increasing disease severity and death in vaccinated people when they subsequently become infected; and there is some evidence that vaccinated people may be more likely to spread the virus than are the unvaccinated (because the vaccines may actually facilitate viral entry into cells).

Conclusions

In section 10 of his Open Letter summary, pages 16 to 18, Dr. Rennebohm lists his conclusions.  If you are very short of time this may be a good place to start.  His final two concluding points state:

“For the sake of our children, grandchildren, and all of humanity, we have an individual and collective social responsibility to call for an immediate and complete halt to the current Covid vaccination campaign, on a scientific basis alone, until an appropriate Covid Commission is convened to thoroughly and accurately evaluate the Covid situation. In the meantime, current scientific evidence strongly suggests that to participate in the continuation of the Covid vaccination campaign – to promote it, to remain silent about it, or to personally receive further Covid vaccination – is to contribute to the harm of children and humanity, as well as harm to oneself.

“Morally, ethically, and scientifically, we have a social responsibility to call for at least temporary cessation of the Covid vaccination campaign. Such a call is an unselfish, science-based act of courage and social responsibility, behind which all of humanity (whether currently unvaccinated or already vaccinated) can confidently unite, to the mutual support and the emotional, social, and health benefit of all.”

You can read and download the full ‘Open Letter to Parents and Paediatricians Regarding Covid Vaccination’ for sharing with medical professionals and others HERE.

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Dr. Rennebohm has written 21 articles covering most aspects of Covid including one titled ‘A Call for an Independent International Covid Commission’.  You can find all his articles HERE.

Featured image is from Vaccines.news

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All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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The European Union is debating on imposing sanctions on Patriarch Kirill, the head of The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), also known as the Moscow Patriarchate, who leads about 100 million believers. The EU has accused him of supporting the war in Ukraine, and President Vladimir Putin. The sanctions would entail an asset freeze and a travel ban, with EU diplomats set to meet this week to discuss the sanctions, which is part of a wider package proposed by the EU on Wednesday.

About 75% of Russians and 60% of Ukrainians profess to be Orthodox Christians, which can be both a religious as well as cultural affiliation.

In a sermon in March, Kirill preached against western values such as greed and gay pride parades.  Kirill and many Russians who hold his views, see the war in Ukraine in terms of religious values, defending conservative moral values against a corrupt West. Kirill has referred to “so-called homosexual marriages” as a threat to family values. “When laws are detached from morality they cease being laws people can accept.”

The Ukraine had been closely united with Russia.  The prevailing faith in Ukraine was the Russian Orthodox Church. A large percentage of those living in Ukraine speak Russian and identify themselves as ethnically Russians.  However, in the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the independent status of Ukraine, the government there has been leaning toward the West.  They want to join the EU, NATO and accept western views on gay issues.

“By separating from Moscow we are adhering to the Christian vision of the world,” said Father Vladymir Melnichuk of the Russian Orthodox Church in Udine, Italy.  Melnichuk recently split his church from Moscow, and instead allied with a church based in Istanbul.

In 2018, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP), were considered “schismatics” (illegally segregated groups) by the Patriarchate of Moscow (ROC), as well as by the other Eastern Orthodox churches. The schism forms part of a wider political conflict involving Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimea and its military intervention in Ukraine, as well as Ukraine’s desire to join the EU and NATO.

Russian values are not the same as Western values.  The Russian Orthodox Church does not approve of gay marriages, or educating children about their options to declare themselves gay, or choose a different gender to identify with.  What has become common place in USA is not accepted everywhere, but the US government seeks to impose their own values on other countries, in their role as the global superpower.

The US has a long list of regime-change projects: Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Syria.  Imposing a US style of freedom and democracy on foreign countries has become a decades old mantra at the State Department.  Similarly imposing US style secular values on foreign countries has become a point of derision.

The American society, government, schools and churches have made gay rights and transgender issues an accepted fact of life.  If there are conservative Americans with different views, they have been encouraged to remain silent, and accept the prevailing notion that everyone has a right to choose.

The Russians not the same as Americans.  There are different opinions and viewpoints based on history, religion and culture.

Putin, in responding to prevailing Russian opinion on issues involving homosexuality, passed laws preventing indoctrinating minors about homosexuality and preventing gay pride rallies which would have been seen by children.

In July 2020, Putin mocked the US embassy in Moscow for flying a rainbow flag to celebrate LGBT rights.  Russia had conducted a nationwide vote on constitutional reforms that included an amendment enshrining the definition of marriage specifically as a union between a man and a woman.

“It’s no big deal though. We have spoken about this many times, and our position is clear,” said Putin, who has sought to distance Russia from liberal Western values and aligned himself with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Putin added,

“Yes, we passed a law banning the propaganda of homosexuality among minors. So what? Let people grow up, become adults and then decide their own destinies.”

Russia had decriminalized homosexuality after the fall of communism in 1993, but anti-gay sentiments have been on the rise in the country in the past decade.

Under the Obama administration, the issue of gay rights became extremely import.  Obama sent gay Ambassadors to five countries in order to send a message on where the US government stood on the issue.  Promoting gay pride, and same-sex marriages in foreign countries became an important foreign policy in Obama’s State Department.

During Obama’s terms in office, the push to make lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights became an international issue. The high point came in December 2011, when then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton went to the United Nations in Geneva and proclaimed LGBT rights “one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time”.

In 2014, US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, said he was proud of the message the United States gave Russia on gay rights leading up to the Olympics, and said the Obama administration had been tough on Russia on human rights throughout his tenure in Moscow.

“We as an administration, starting with the president, virtually every day are very open in criticizing the Russian government when we see human rights abuses,” McFaul said.

US advice and encouragement is sometimes condemned as unacceptable meddling with foreign cultures and religious values. Some conservative American groups are outraged by the policy. Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, calls it “a slap in the face to the majority of Americans”, given that American voters have rejected same-sex marriage in a number of state referendums.

“This is taking a flawed view of what it means to be a human being male and female and trying to impose that on countries throughout the world,” Brown said. “The administration would like people to believe that this is simply ‘live and let live.’ No, this is coercion in its worst possible form.”

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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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***

In what appears to be yet another escalation in Silicon Valley’s redoubled efforts to quash dissident voices since the beginning of the Ukraine war, PayPal has just blocked the accounts of multiple alternative media voices who’ve been speaking critically against official US empire narratives. These include journalist and speaker Caleb Maupin, and Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod of MintPress News.

Just the other day MintPress published an excellent article by MacLeod titled “An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming the New Norm” documenting the many ways skepticism of the US government’s version of events in this war is being suppressed by Silicon Valley megacorporations, including financial censorship via the demonetization of YouTube videos that don’t regurgitate the imperial line on Ukraine.

Today, both MintPress and MacLeod have been banned from using the payment service that many online content creators have come to rely on to help crowdfund their work.

BREAKING: MintPress News & @AlanRMacLeod has been banned from PayPal for unspecified reasons.

Help us fight back against this onslaught of censorship: https://t.co/dzLbAlo48o https://t.co/7CkUbXPFQy

— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) April 28, 2022

MintPress News happens to have published critical journalism about PayPal itself in the past, like the articles it published in 2018 by Whitney Webb documenting the way shady PayPal-linked billionaires Peter Thiel and Pierre Omidyar have advanced the interests of the US empire and facilitated imperial narrative control, or this one from 2016 on how the company blocks Palestinians from opening accounts while showing no such bias against illegal Israeli settlers.

I asked MintPress News Executive Director Mnar Adley for comment on PayPal’s move. Here is her response in full:

“Paypal banning myself and MintPress is blatant censorship of dissenting journalists & outlets. For the past decade MintPress has been unapologetically working as a watchdog journalism outlet to expose the profiteers of the permanent war state from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Sudan to Apartheid Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen to regime change operations in Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela where US weapons have flooded these nations to plunge them into devastating civil wars.

“In the era of a declining US empire, censorship has become the last resort of an unpopular regime and its forever wars to make the truth disappear and critical thinking all but dead. With the war in Ukraine raging on, we’ve entered war time and Big Tech giants, including Paypal, are working hand in hand with the New Cold War architects themselves to sanction dissenting journalists. If you read the board of any of these tech giants from Google, Twitter, Facebook and Paypal, they read like a rogues’ gallery of war mongers and their agenda is clear: To control the free flow of information and target the bank accounts of anyone who dares question the official narrative of the Pentagon or State Department.

“It is outrageous to be told that tech giants, which are run by those who directly profit from the New Cold war including the crisis in Ukraine, could limit any journalist’s ability to fund their work. Can you imagine if this was the norm in Russia, China or Iran? Our media would be screaming about free speech and first amendment rights. Yet, when we do it’s ok because it’s under the guise of fighting ‘Russian propaganda’.

“We’re living in an intellectual No-Fly Zone where online censorship of dissenting journalism has become the new norm. The US sanctions regime that is trying to starve Russia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Cuba and Iran and over 25% of the world’s population is now targeting its own citizens with its maximum pressure campaign so we are forced to toe the official government line in order to survive as a journalist in alternative media today.

“No matter the war waged against us, we refuse to be backed into a corner and bullied by tech giants who have a deep relationship with weapons manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and who work hand in hand with NATO that profit off the blood of millions of people around the world. The only way forward is for people to unite on a broader front of non-partisanship and fund our own media because there are more of us than there are of them.”

I am banned from PayPal. pic.twitter.com/GB6IrT80wq

— Caleb T. Maupin (@calebmaupin) April 28, 2022

PayPal has also banned Caleb Maupin, an American speaker and journalist whose work has already seen his personal Twitter account branded “Russia state-affiliated media” by the US state-affiliated platform.

“Why should something as basic as cash transactions be subject to political censorship?” said Maupin when asked for comment. “The economic war on independent countries is turning into a war on free speech. Writers and journalists must be able to eat.”

Indeed, a very effective way to silence unauthorized media voices is to make it difficult for them to earn a living making their voices heard. Speaking from experience I know for a fact I couldn’t put out a fraction of the content I put out if I was forced to work a 9-5 job in some office rather than having the freedom to put all my time and mental energy into this work thanks to the generous support of my readers. Cutting me off from that funding would be the same as censoring me directly, because there’s no way I could continue the kind of work I do.

We are at a profoundly dangerous and frightening point in human history. The US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is escalating by the day and the drums of war are beating ever louder against China over the Solomon Islands and Taiwan. If you think censorship is bad now, wait until this global power grab really gets going.

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***

Iran and Venezuela are poised to enter a new era to fight US sanctions. Their cooperation in Hydrocarbons production as well as trade may help them gradually detach from western sanctions.

An idea brought forward in this interview is their joint exit from the dollar-dominated trade economy, by selling their petrol and gas in one or more other currencies than the US dollar or even the Euro. Ideally, they may want to join the Russian move of selling gas for rubles instead of US dollars.

This Russian initiative, of course, has been a major “explosion” in Europe and elsewhere in the world, but most countries eventually accept this new payment mode – one that is totally delinked from the US dollar and its little brother, the Euro.

It is a move away from the SWIFT transfer system which makes countries vulnerable to sanctions, because using SWIFT – the western payment mode — all transfers have to transit via US banks, thus increasing vulnerability to western, mostly US, interferences or sanctions.

After all, still today 84% of all energy used in the world stems from hydrocarbons, as compared to some 87% in the year 2000. And this despite much talk of shunning petrol and gas, the Paris Climate Agenda, and especially propagating a Green Agenda – empty words, manipulating people’s minds towards a new form of capitalism.

Another strategy which both countries are actively considering, is increasingly delinking their trading from the west and orienting their economies towards the east, i.e., the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), the Association of South Asian Nations (ASEAN), uniting 11 Asian countries, plus Russia and China. Earlier this year, Iran has been admitted as a member of the SCO.

These Eastern block economies, together make up for about 50% of Mother Earth’s population and at least a third of the world’s GDP. Becoming part of this union is definitely a decisive step away from western domination and US sanctions.

See Peter Koenig’s Interview (PressTV-PK – video 12 min – 3 May 2022) below.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

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***

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard. The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more-general CDC purposes.

Location data is information on a device’s location sourced from the phone, which can then show where a person lives, works, and where they went. The sort of data the CDC bought was aggregated—meaning it was designed to follow trends that emerge from the movements of groups of people—but researchers have repeatedly raised concerns with how location data can be deanonymized and used to track specific people.

The documents reveal the expansive plan the CDC had last year to use location data from a highly controversial data broker. SafeGraph, the company the CDC paid $420,000 for access to one year of data, includes Peter Thiel and the former head of Saudi intelligence among its investors. Google banned the company from the Play Store in June.

The CDC used the data for monitoring curfews, with the documents saying that SafeGraph’s data “has been critical for ongoing response efforts, such as hourly monitoring of activity in curfew zones or detailed counts of visits to participating pharmacies for vaccine monitoring.” The documents date from 2021.

Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher who closely follows the data marketplace, told Motherboard in an online chat after reviewing the documents:

“The CDC seems to have purposefully created an open-ended list of use cases, which included monitoring curfews, neighbor-to-neighbor visits, visits to churches, schools and pharmacies, and also a variety of analysis with this data specifically focused on ‘violence.’” (The document doesn’t stop at churches; it mentions “places of worship.”)

Motherboard obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the CDC.

The documents contain a long list of what the CDC describes as 21 different “potential CDC use cases for data.” They include:

• “Track patterns of those visiting K-12 schools by the school and compare to 2019; compare with epi metrics [Environmental Performance Index] if possible.”
• “Examination of the correlation of mobility patterns data and rise in COVID-19 cases […] Movement restrictions (Border closures, inter-regional and nigh curfews) to show compliance.”
• “Examination of the effectiveness of public policy on [the] Navajo Nation.”

At the start of the pandemic, cellphone location data was seen as a potentially useful tool. Multiple media organizations, including the New York Times, used location data provided by companies in the industry to show where people were traveling to once lockdowns started to lift, or highlight that poorer communities were unable to shelter in place as much as richer ones.

The COVID-19 pandemic as a whole has been a flashpoint in a broader culture war, with conservatives and anti-vaccine groups protesting government mask and vaccine mandates. They’ve also expressed a specific paranoia that vaccine passports would be used as a tracking or surveillance tool, framing vaccine refusal as a civil liberties issue. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense, one of the more influential and monied anti-vaccine groups in the U.S., has promoted fears that digital vaccine certificates could be used to surveil citizens. QAnon promoter Dustin Nemos wrote on Telegram in December that vaccine passports are “a Trojan horse being used to create a completely new type of controlled and surveilled society in which the freedom we enjoy today will be a distant memory.”

Against that inflamed backdrop, the use of cellphone location data for such a wide variety of tracking measures, even if effective for becoming better informed on the pandemic’s spread or for informing policy, is likely to be controversial. It’s also likely to give anti-vaccine groups a real-world data point on which to pin their darkest warnings.

A SCREENSHOT OF THE USE CASES PROPOSED BY THE CDC. IMAGE: MOTHERBOARD.

The procurement documents say that “This is an URGENT COVID-19 PR [procurement request],” and asks for the purchase to be expedited.

But some of the use cases are not explicitly linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. One reads “Research points of interest for physical activity and chronic disease prevention such as visits to parks, gyms, or weight management businesses.”

Another section of the document elaborates on the location data’s use for non-COVID-19–related programs.

“CDC also plans to use mobility data and services acquired through this acquisition to support non-COVID-19 programmatic areas and public health priorities across the agency, including but not limited to travel to parks and green spaces, physical activity and mode of travel, and population migration before, during, and after natural disasters,” it reads. “The mobility data obtained under this contract will be available for CDC agency-wide use and will support numerous CDC priorities.”

The CDC did not respond to multiple emails requesting comment on which use cases it deployed SafeGraph data for.

SafeGraph is part of the ballooning location industry, and SafeGraph has previously shared datasets containing 18 million cellphones from the United States. The documents say this acquisition is for data that is geographically representative, “i.e., derived from at least 20 million active cellphone users per day across the United States.”

Generally, companies in this industry ask, or pay, app developers to include location data gathering code in their apps. The location data then funnels up to companies that may resell the raw location data outright or package it into products.

SafeGraph sells both. On the developed product side, SafeGraph has several different products. “Places” concerns points of interest (POIs) such as where particular stores or buildings are located. “Patterns” is based on mobile phone location data that can show for how long people visit a location, and “Where they came from” and “Where else they go,” according to SafeGraph’s website. More recently SafeGraph has started offering aggregated transaction data, showing how much consumers typically spend at specific locations, under the “Spend” product. SafeGraph sells its products to a wide range of industries, such as real estate, insurance, and advertising. These products include aggregated data on movements and spends, rather than the location of specific devices. Motherboard previously bought a set of SafeGraph location data for $200. The data was aggregated, meaning it was not supposed to pinpoint the movements of specific devices and hence people, but at the time, Edwards said, “In my opinion the SafeGraph data is way beyond any safe thresholds [around anonymity].” Edwards pointed to a search result in SafeGraph’s data portal that displayed data related to a specific doctor’s office, showing how finely tuned the company’s data can be. Theoretically, an attacker could use that data to then attempt to unmask the specific users, something which researchers have repeatedly demonstrated is possible.

In January 2019, the Illinois Department of Transportation bought such data from SafeGraph that related to over 5 million phones, activist organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) previously found.

The CDC documents show that the agency bought access to SafeGraph’s “U.S. Core Place Data,” “Weekly Patterns Data,” and “Neighborhood Patterns Data. That last product includes information such as home dwelling time, and is aggregated by state and census block.

“SafeGraph offers visitor data at the Census Block Group level that allows for extremely accurate insights related to age, gender, race, citizenship status, income, and more,” one of the CDC documents reads.

Both SafeGraph and the CDC have previously touched on their partnership, but not in the detail that is revealed in the documents. The CDC published a study in September 2020 which looked at whether people around the country were following stay-at-home orders, which appeared to use SafeGraph data.

SafeGraph wrote in a blog post in April 2020 that “To play our part in the fight against the COVID-19 health crisis—and its devastating impact on the global economy—we decided to expand our program further, making our foot traffic data free for nonprofit organizations and government agencies at the local, state, and federal level.” Multiple location data companies touted their data as a potential mitigation to the pandemic during its peak in the United States, and provided data to government and media organizations.

A year later, the CDC purchased access to the data because SafeGraph no longer wanted to provide it for free, according to the documents. The Data Use Agreement for the in-kind provided data was set to expire on March 31, 2021, the documents add. The data was still important to access as the U.S. opened up, the CDC argued in the documents.

“CDC has interest in continued access to this mobility data as the country opens back up. This data is used by several teams/groups in the response and have been resulting in deeper insights into the pandemic as it pertains to human behavior,” one section reads.

Researchers at the EFF separately obtained documents concerning the CDC’s purchase of similar location data products from a company called Cubeiq as well as the SafeGraph documents. The EFF shared those documents with Motherboard. They showed that the CDC also asked to speed up the purchase of Cubeiq’s data because of COVID-19, and intended to use it for non-COVID-19 purposes. The documents also listed the same potential use-cases for Cubeiq’s data as in the SafeGraph documents.

Google banned SafeGraph from its Google Play Store in June. This meant that any app developers using SafeGraph’s code had to remove it from their apps, or face having their app removed from the store. It is not entirely clear how effective this ban has been: SafeGraph has previously said it obtains location data via Veraset, a spin-off company which interfaces with the app developers.

SafeGraph did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

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***

The US has no business joining the war in Ukraine, and Congress should refuse to approve any measure that endorses direct intervention in the conflict. Rep. Adam Kinzinger is sponsoring a new resolution authorizing the use of American military force in the war, and it is vital that Congress rejects it. Kinzinger has been one of the loudest agitators for military action in Ukraine, and he wants this authorization in order to give the president a free hand to take the US into a potentially catastrophic war.

Kinzinger’s resolution would give the president authorization to use force to “assist” in “defending and restoring the territorial integrity of Ukraine” in the event of a Russian biological, chemical, or nuclear attack. Lumping these types of attacks together serves to blur the differences between them, and if the resolution passed it would draw an unnecessary red line that the US would then be under pressure to enforce. The president should make clear that he doesn’t want the authority Kinzinger is proposing, and Kinzinger’s colleagues in Congress should firmly repudiate his warmongering by voting down his resolution.

If the US did what Kinzinger wanted, it would lead at best to a dangerous and unnecessary war for the United States and at worst it would lead to a nuclear exchange that would devastate our country and much of the world. It makes no sense to respond to Russian unconventional attacks with an armed intervention that makes it more likely that Russia launches many nuclear strikes. The Russian government has made it abundantly clear that direct intervention by outside powers in Ukraine would trigger a severe response, and that is widely assumed to include the use of nuclear weapons. It would be reckless in the extreme to assume that the Russian leadership is bluffing about that.

Because the resolution refers to “restoring” Ukraine’s territorial integrity, that implies that the US would be expected to participate in retaking every piece of territory that has been under Russian control since 2014. That would presumably include using US forces to take Crimea, which Moscow now considers to be part of its territory. If direct US intervention in the war didn’t provoke further escalation from Russia right away, trying to seize control of Crimea surely would.

The resolution obscures the reality of what would be involved in providing this “assistance,” since it would necessarily mean open war with Russia and it would presumably require US attacks on Russian soil. Once US forces start attacking the Russian military, retaliation against the US and its European allies would be inevitable. That would mean turning a local war into a general war between the two states with the largest nuclear arsenals on the planet. There is no scenario in which a general war between the US and Russia results in anything but massive death and destruction for all parties. Actively courting that outcome as Kinzinger does is pure madness. For all of Kinzinger’s talk of “standing with our allies,” his preferred course of action would very likely lead to huge losses of life in dozens of allied countries.

Even if the consequences of using force were not so grave, it would be foolish to authorize the use of force in advance. We have seen before with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the 2002 AUMF what happens when Congress hands over blanket, open-ended authority to the president, and we also know how these authorizations can be stretched and applied in ways that they were not intended to be used. Congress should never volunteer to give the president authority to wage a war, especially one as potentially costly and disastrous as a war with Russia over Ukraine. Pre-authorizations like the one Kinzinger proposes are the foreign policy equivalent of loaded guns, and they prematurely cede authority to the president to decide on the question of war. Nothing good can come from them, and they are designed for the sole purpose of getting the US into wars that have nothing to do with defending this country.

Among its other defects, the resolution also uses dishonest language. The text of the resolution refers to defending the “territorial integrity of United States allies,” but Ukraine is the only country whose territory is mentioned in the resolution. Crucially, Ukraine is not and never has been an ally of the United States. Not only is the US not obliged to go to war for Ukraine, but the US also has no vital interests in Ukraine that could possibly justify doing so. Kinzinger’s description of Ukraine as an ally is a bit of sleight-of-hand that many hawks in both parties have used before, but it doesn’t withstand scrutiny. He is calling on the US to defend the territory of allies, but that is exactly what going to war to defend Ukraine wouldn’t be.

Going to war with Russia is not in the interests of the United States or its treaty allies, and there is no plausible scenario in which it is.

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

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***

A German study has found that the number of serious side effects after Corona vaccines was 40 times higher than previously reported. The Charité, a well-known hospital in Berlin, interviewed 40 000 vaccinated people after they had received their mandated jabs.

The interviews showed that the number of serious side effects was 40 times higher than previously reported by medical supervisors the Paul Ehrlich Institute, according to MDR, the public broadcaster of the states of Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony. The number of side effects resulting from normal vaccines, such as those against polio or measles, is considerably lower, researchers pointed out.

NEW – "The number of severe complications after vaccination against Sars-CoV-2 is 40 times higher than previously recorded by the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI)," a study with around 40,000 participants by the Berlin Charité concludes.https://t.co/GSys7hSTzY

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) May 3, 2022

Sweden, Israel and Canada

Lead researcher Harald Matthes said the figures corresponded to the picture in countries such as Sweden, Israel and Canada. Even the makers of the vaccines come up with similar numbers in their own studies.

Last year, Dutch data analyst Wouter Aukema analysed data from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for all EU member states and saw a similar picture emerge.

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Defying threats from the European Union, Hungary has announced they will not stop purchasing oil and gas from Russia and join a blockade of energy products by the 27 member EU alliance.

Hungary will not support sanctions that would make Russian oil and gas shipments to Hungary impossible, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in a statement on Tuesday.

Speaking in Kazakhstan, Szijjarto said Russian oil shipments via the Druzhba pipeline accounted for about 65% of the oil Hungary needed and there were no alternative supply routes that could replace that. (link)

Slovakia has also announced they will not participate, which makes any collective EU action problematic.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is reported to be using his connection to the U.S. and Joe Biden in an effort to force the EU to deliver additional sanctions.   Essentially, if an EU country does not fall in line, Zelenskyy will instruct Biden not to support that EU country with the money congress is preparing to use as blackmail.

Source: The Last Refuge

The polish government has collapsed under the pressure of Joe Biden and the NATO alliance. However, if you look closely at the $33 billion spending demand from the White House, it’s clear to see the U.S. State Dept, specifically those who are currently operating the proxy war along with the CIA, are positioning the funds for use as bribes to EU allies.

Any deal on Russian oil would require the consent of all 27 EU members, meaning it could not pass without Hungary and Slovakia’s approval. The bloc agreed on an embargo on Russian coal in the fifth package last month, while it has not yet ventured into gas.

[…] Ministers from other EU states have spoken of sympathising with oil-reliant neighbours but urged unity during the crisis. Hungary and its Russia-friendly leader Viktor Orban have irked Ukraine with an equivocal stance on the war. (more)

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The United States and its Western partners have embarked on two simultaneous rounds of war games in Eastern Europe as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its third month. 

Swift Response 2022, an annual drill hosted by the US Army’s Europe and Africa component command, kicked off on Monday and is set to run until May 20. It will be carried out across locations in the Arctic High North, the Baltics, the Balkans and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Army said in a statement.

Around 9,000 soldiers – among them 2,700 Americans and 6,300 troops from 16 allied nations – will take part in the exercise. In addition to training for “arctic defense operations,” the servicemen will simulate airborne “Joint Forcible Entries” in Latvia, Lithuania and North Macedonia.

Poland, meanwhile, announced the start of the Defender Europe 2022 military drills on Sunday, noting they would take place May 1–27 in nine countries and will involve 18,000 soldiers from more than 20 nations.

“The troops’ ability to cooperate in a joint combat operation will be put to test using various training episodes including long-distance tactical marches, bridging rivers and live-fire training,” a statement from Warsaw said.

This year’s Defender Europe will be scaled back compared to prior iterations, as more than 30,000 soldiers from 27 nations participated in the drills in 2021. The previous year involved even more troops, and was reportedly one of the largest military exercises held on the continent since the Cold War.

Though Russia has repeatedly denounced such war games as aggressive posturing which “[simulate] offensive military action,” Poland claimed the Defender Europe exercise “demonstrates the United States’ unshakable commitment to NATO,” touting it as “a prime example of our collective capabilities.”

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Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Antiwar.com and news editor of the Libertarian Institute.

Will Porter is the assistant news editor of the Libertarian Insitute and a staff writer at RT. Kyle Anzalone and Will Porter host Conflicts of Interest along with Connor Freeman.

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According to a report from The New York Times citing unnamed senior US officials, intelligence provided by the US on Russian military units has helped Ukraine target and kill Russian generals.

Ukraine has claimed to have killed 12 Russian generals, but the number is not confirmed, and Kyiv has an interest in exaggerating its success on the battlefield, and the officials wouldn’t specify how many Russian officers were killed as a result of the assistance. But either way, the claim by US officials that they are helping kill Russian generals is a major provocation toward Moscow.

Like other US assistance to Ukraine, the claim raises questions about at what point Russia will consider the US to be a co-belligerent in the war. The officials said that the targeting of Russian generals is part of a Biden administration effort to share real-time targeting intelligence with Ukraine.

The officials said that the US is focusing on sharing intelligence on the location of Russia’s mobile military headquarters. They said the US assistance combined with Ukraine’s own intelligence allows Ukrainian forces to target Russian officers.

The US has expanded intelligence sharing with Ukraine since Russia invaded, but there are still limitations. The officials said that the US is prohibited from sharing intelligence on the most senior Russian leaders.

Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, reportedly visited the frontlines of Russia’s war in Ukraine this week. The officials said that the US didn’t share information with Ukraine to aid in a strike that hit the area of eastern Ukraine Gerasimov reportedly visited.

Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the US was still refraining from providing Ukraine from launching strikes inside Russian territory, although Western officials have been publicly encouraging Kyiv to launch such attacks. Britain’s armed forces minister said it was “completely legitimate” for Ukraine to attack Russian territory, adding that it was “not necessarily a problem” if the attacks were carried out using weapons London provided to Kyiv.

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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave

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Last week, the Director of National Intelligence, the data-gathering and data-concealing arm of the American intelligence community masquerading as the head of it, revealed that in 2021, the FBI engaged in 3.4 million warrantless electronic searches of Americans. This is a direct and profound violation of the right to privacy in “persons, houses, papers, and effects” guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

For the past 60 years, the Supreme Court has characterized electronic surveillance as a search that can only be conducted pursuant to a warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of crime, which itself must be presented under oath to the judge. The warrant must specifically describe the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.

By failing to comply with these constitutional requirements, the FBI violated the natural and constitutionally protected right to be left alone of millions of Americans.

Yet, all of this was perfectly lawful. How can government behavior be both lawful and unconstitutional at the same time and in the same respect?

Here is the backstory.

The Fourth Amendment was written in 1791 while memories of British soldiers searching colonial homes were still prevalent. The British used general warrants to justify their violation of colonists’ privacy. A general warrant was not based on probable cause of crime. It was generated whenever the British government persuaded a secret court in London that it needed something from foreign persons, the colonists. The British government did not even need to identify what it needed.

General warrants authorized the bearer to search wherever he pleased and to seize whatever he found. The Fourth Amendment was written expressly to outlaw general warrants and warrantless searches.

After President Richard Nixon used the FBI and the CIA to spy on his political opponents, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which prohibited warrantless domestic surveillance. Since the Fourth Amendment did so already, the prohibition was superfluous.

It was also toothless, as the new law set up a secret court — the FISA court — which issued surveillance warrants based not on probable cause of crime as the Fourth Amendment requires, but on probable cause of communicating with a foreign person. And the court, over time, kept modifying its own rules to make it easier for the National Security Agency —America’s 60,000 domestic spies — to spy on Americans.

Today, if you call your cousin in London, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can authorize the NSA to spy on you. And if you then call your sister-in-law in Kansas, FISC can allow the NSA to spy on her and on the folks she calls and the folks they call.

This massive invasion of privacy produced huge amounts of data, which FISA required the NSA to keep to itself and use only to anticipate breaches of national security. The data acquired from spying on all fiber optic transmitted communications could not be shared with law enforcement since it had been obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment. That prohibition was known as the “wall” between the intelligence and law enforcement communities.

In 2008, after the Bush administration was caught in massive warrantless spying on Americans, Congress enacted amendments to FISA that removed the wall. Stated differently, the new law, Section 702 of FISA, which expires in 20 months, required all telecom and computer service providers to give the NSA unfettered access to their computers whenever the feds came calling — with or without FISA warrants — and also allowed the FBI access to the body of raw intelligence data that the NSA acquired.

The wall between the intelligence community and law enforcement is gone.

Every member of Congress has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, yet by repeated majority votes and the signatures of all pre-Biden presidents since 2008 continually reenacting Section 702, Congress has permitted the FBI to bypass the Constitution. Thus, FBI spying is lawful because a statute authorizes it, but unconstitutional because the statute violates the Fourth Amendment.

Last week, the Director of National Intelligence, who is required by Section 702 to report all FBI access to the raw intelligence data, did so. But her record keeping is as sloppy as her fidelity to the Constitution. Thus, she reported 3.4 million FBI searches of raw intelligence data on Americans in 2021.

You’d think that meant that 3.4 million Americans had their emails, text messages, phone calls, medical and legal and personal records surveilled by the FBI. You’d be incorrect. To the feds, the word “search” refers to the input of a search term, like “Jan. 6” or “local militia” or “small government.” One FBI search thus can lead to the records of thousands of Americans.

It is hard to believe that senior management of the CIA, NSA and FBI can perpetuate these egregious constitutional violations with straight faces. But they do. And Congress permits it. Why? Because the CIA, NSA, FBI and their collaborators have dirt on members of Congress. Dirt.

The federal government is rotten to the core. Its officers and employees don’t believe that the Constitution means what it says. They will lie, cheat, threaten, bribe and steal to cut constitutional corners and remain in power.

The Fourth Amendment was written to protect the quintessentially American right to privacy. It is a critical part of the structure of the Bill of Rights.

Rather, it was.

Today, in America, we have no rights. A right is an indefeasible claim against the whole world — to think as you wish, to say and publish what you think, to worship or not, to defend yourself, to experience your life and exercise your liberty and use your property without a government permission slip, and to be left alone.

The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, yet the rights it facially protects are now subject to government approval. The Bill of Rights is really a Bill of Temporary Privileges.

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***

Dismantle NATO Now!

Rescind the $16B US Allocations to the Ukraine War!

US Imperialism is the Main Danger to Peace, Sovereignty, and Justice for Peoples all Over The World!

The ongoing crisis and war in Ukraine threatens to pull the world into a disastrous nuclear confrontation. Disinformation, lies, and propaganda from the US and other western media are aimed at confusing millions of people inside the US and around the world to view Russia as the aggressor, while hiding the US role in the evolution of this conflict. One major example of this manipulation is that western media has not been honest about the massive role that the US played in facilitating a 2014 coup in Ukraine that overthrew the country’s democratically elected president, and funneled support to neo-Nazi forces who were favorable to US/EU interests, helping them rise to power in Ukraine.

We, the undersigned organizations and individuals of the Black Liberation Movement and the various mass organizations and movements fighting for justice inside the US, call on all peace loving, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities to condemn and oppose US involvement in the Ukraine and across Europe through its various corporate and political interests and its military arm, The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

We, Black people living in the United States, are a people of African descent oppressed inside the United States. We have been barred from the right to housing, to food, to medicine, to clean air, healthy environments, education and livable wages. Our grandmothers make difficult decisions monthly between keeping on the lights or being able to afford insulin. As 13% of the US population, we face disproportionate levels of violent police repression and make up 40% of US prisoners. Those corporate and elite ruling class forces in the US who are making the policies to expand NATO across the 12,500 miles of Russia’s borders from Central Asia to Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, are the same ruling elites that maintain the oppressive policies inside the US that leave our communities in the racist economic and political peril we have suffered here for hundreds of years.

We further condemn the blatant hypocrisy of the US government as a capitalist, imperialist, patriarchal predator power that has invaded and undermined numerous countries for regime change and other schemes, in order to control the politics, wealth, and natural resources of those nations. The United States is the strongest and largest imperialist power in the world and has repeatedly invaded other nations such as Grenada (1983); Afghanistan (2001); Iraq (2003); Libya (2011); and at least 21 others since 1945. The US military arm on the African continent is known as AFRICOM, a force that breeds violence and instability in maintaining US corporate interests across Africa.

In these imperialist wars, it is the Black, Brown, Indigenous, working and poor families who suffer the losses of dislocation, the deaths of loved ones, and other forms of agony. Black people in this country have fought in every US war while our families and communities continue to suffer the ravages of hatred, discrimination, poverty, disease, and death. In the Ukraine conflict, racism is showing its ugly face in the denial of immigration rights to African and other non-white people’s seeking to escape the degradation and violence of this conflict, like all others living in Ukraine.

We join with Black and Brown people in other countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America who uphold the right of all nations to sovereignty and security, including Russia, who has historically been invaded by the forces of imperialism and fascism across its borders several times in the 20th century. The Russian people lost millions of lives to defeat fascism during WWII, fighting Hitler’s Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941. This history of invasions of Russia also lies at the root of the Russian concerns about its security and the Ukraine/NATO expansion scheme that has provoked this war.

We call upon every community and organization fighting for justice and peace to adopt and sign this statement calling for the Dismantling of NATO, an end to US Support of the War in Ukraine, and to Rescind the Billions of Dollars in military aid to Ukraine. Those military funds sent to Ukraine should be reallocated to the needs of people inside the US for universal healthcare, universal childcare, affordable housing, education, liquidation of all student loan debt, minimum incomes and other human needs.

Signed by:

• NBLM National Unity Initiative
• New African People’s Organization
• Black Workers for Justice
• Mapinduzi
• Black Alliance for Peace
• All African People’s Revolutionary Party
• New African Independence Party
• Lowcountry Action Committee
• Spirit of Mandela
• Cooperation Jackson
• Pan-African Community Action
• Hood Communist
• Imam Jamil Action Network
• Parable of the Sower Intentional Community

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***

On April 30, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, arrived unannounced in Ukraine with a small congressional delegation. Pelosi met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and received the Order of Princess Olga (or Olha) award. It is an ideal award for a woman who celebrated the gruesome murder of Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi by Obama and his NATO assassins.

The Speaker said the illegal presence of the US in Syria is justified and it would be “dangerous” to withdraw troops. Pelosi and fellow Democrat powerbroker Chuck Schumer, however, flip-flopped on the use of troops abroad after Donald Trump became president. Pelosi pushed the widely debunked chemical attack in Syria supposedly “resulting in the deaths of more than 1,400 people, including hundreds of children,” she wrote in a letter to fellow Democrats.

In 2019, WikiLeaks published a report indicating there was vigorous dissent surrounding a bogus claim at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The OPCW files “show that serious concerns have been raised by members of the OPCW Fact Finding Mission (FFM) to Douma about evidence that was excluded from the final report in order to implicate Assad.”

“The international community must respond to this atrocity with strength and unity, and a thorough investigation.  Putin must be held accountable for his cynical support of Assad, and for enabling these war crimes,” Pelosi added on her official government web page.

So, of course, it is all about the “New Hitler,” Vladimir Putin. Not mentioned by Pelosi are two indisputable facts: first, Russia was invited by Syria to help defeat US-spawned Islamic terrorists, and second, the US received no such invitation and is in the country illegally, stealing oil and establishing military bases.

Pelosi, wearing one her trademark pantsuits, said her visit is intended to “send an unmistakable and resounding message to the entire world: America stands firmly with Ukraine.”

In other words, Pelosi, Biden, the Democrats, and no shortage of Republicans, stand firmly behind a government run in large part by avowed racist nationalists responsible for overthrowing an elected government in 2014 (a feat engineered by Obama’s State Department) and turning a blind eye to the organized mass murder of ethnic Russians in the Donbas and elsewhere in Ukraine.

The fight for freedom in Ukraine is a fight for Ukraine and for freedom everywhere. #SlavaUkraini pic.twitter.com/Ueomwj4Urk

— Nancy Pelosi (@TeamPelosi) May 1, 2022

Actually, awarding the Order of Princess Olga medal to Pelosi is appropriate. The myth states that Grand Prince Ihor of the Kyivan Rus was killed during a war with the Drevlians, a tribe of Early East Slavs who refused to pay tribute to the prince, and as a result his wife, Olha, avenged his murder “in an extremely harsh manner, killing Drevlian ambassadors and nobility, burning their capital of Iskorosten to the ground and leveling other towns,” the Euromaidan Press explains.

In short, Pelosi received a  medal celebrating ethnic cleansing, the sort of behavior the nationalist right in Ukraine is attempting to inflict on ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers in the Donbas and southern Ukraine, including Crimea.

It is an irony lost on the American people. If recent polls can be believed, an overwhelming number of Americans believe the US should continue sending billions of dollars worth of military hardware to the Zelenskyy government and his neo-Nazi goons, although, now that Russia has invaded, all mention of the extremist nature of the Azov Battalion, Right Sector, Svoboda, the National Corps, Carpathian Sich, Democratic Ax, White Hammer, Trizub, and other far-right political groups and paramilitaries are assiduously avoided by the narrative-following corporate media.

On April 30, headlines should have read, “Zelenskyy Makes Deal with Nazis,” but instead there was primarily silence.

Zelenskyy is pushing to have Serhiy Sternenko head up Ukraine’s security service, SBU. Sternenko, a rightwing activist in his late 20s, commanded the Odesa regional branch of the Right Sector (Pravy Sektor), an organization at the forefront of the US State Department orchestrated color revolution in 2014.

Right Sector was formed a year prior to the coup and its original confederation consisted of street fighting soccer hooligans and skinheads, a modern version of a loosely organized Freikorps paramilitaries and brownshirts during the Weimer Republic in Germany following WWI.

Sternenko was convicted of “illegal deprivation of liberty” in the kidnapping of Serhiy Shcherbych, a member of the Kominternivske District Council of the Odesa region. “Serhii Sternenko was sentenced to 7 years and 3 months of imprisonment with confiscation of half of his property. Another subject of the case Ruslan Demchuk received the same sentence,” Zmina reported in February 2021.

Despite this conviction—ruled to be political intimidation, not robbery—Sternenko may soon be calling the shots at the highest state security service in a notoriously corrupt Ukraine. In 2015, Dmytro Yarosh, the former leader of Right Sector, was appointed an advisor to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, thus signaling a further integration of neo-nazism and racist ideology at the highest levels of the government.

Far-right or ultra-nationalist “shock troops” played an instrumental role in the 2014 coup.

It was “openly supported by the imperial powers in the United States and Europe, relied on far-right shock troops such as the fascist organization Right Sector and the ultranationalist Svoboda Party to overthrow the elected government of Viktor Yanukovych,” reports MRonline. “Three members of Svoboda were installed as members of the first post-coup government, and the co-founder of Svoboda, Andriy Paruby, was parliamentary speaker for five years.”

Considering the sort of lickspittles the state hires to report the “news” (manufactured “big lie” narratives), it is not surprising we hear so little about the real face of the government in Ukraine. The propaganda wranglers understand very well the average American cannot recall history past the last 72 hours or so. They know John and Jane Q. Public will respond appropriately if the “news” shows relentless images of dead civilians, bombed out cities, and scads of refugees, especially the children, and attributes all the misery, destruction, and death, minus any credible evidence, on Russia. Minus Big Lies and fabrications, and presented with objective facts on both sides of a story, the average person would undoubtedly arrive at a far different conclusion than the one they have now accepted. More than a quarter of Americans actually believe war against Russia is feasible and winnable. Delusions have turned pathological.

Sorry to say, I am not hopeful. Nancy Pelosi’s photo op in Ukraine and the muster of Democrats and Republicans to do something more than merely ship expensive arms (that are now being targeted by Russia) to Ukraine. Of course, Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin don’t have a problem with this.

The stock market casino rollercoaster is teetering, inflation is moving into double digits, the supply line snafus are multiplying in number and consequence as the price of the diesel fuel that essentially runs modern civilization is now well over five dollars a gallon. It won’t be long before people begin complaining, even reticent Americans. It won’t be long before political violence flares up in earnest.

The ruling financial elite believe they can divert our attention away from the above problems with a good old-fashion war—and slip in a worldwide tyrannical new Bretton Woods “Great Reset” in the aftermath.

Such cavalier recklessness with thermonuclear weapons and other WMDs—including biowarfare labs in Ukraine—have put humanity in supreme danger. It’s not an exaggeration to say we are a minute or less before midnight on the Doomsday Clock.

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***

Syria has for the vast majority of the post-World War II period been considered by United States governments as a staunch enemy. In more recent decades, Washington has attempted without ultimate success to isolate and overthrow the Assad dynasty in Syria’s capital Damascus.

Image on the right: Hafez al-Assad (Licensed under public domain)

In March 1971 the Syrian Air Force general, Hafez al-Assad, took power in the country. That same year General Assad consented to the USSR establishing a naval facility at the strategically important Syrian city of Tartus, which rests on the Mediterranean Sea. Developments like these caused significant concern in Washington.

During the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 Israel, with strong US support, scored a military victory against the Soviet Union-backed Syria and Egypt in a conflict which lasted for less than 3 weeks. Following this setback General Assad crushed a number of revolts in Syria, engineered primarily by the Sunni-Salafi Muslim Brotherhood, a pan-Islamic organisation vehemently opposed to Assad’s secularist government.

The best known of these Muslim Brotherhood rebellions was the February 1982 Hama revolt, in western Syria, which rumbled on for almost a month. It resulted in many hundreds if not thousands of deaths, including extensive civilian casualties. President Assad’s military secured a decisive triumph against the Muslim Brotherhood, by ruthlessly suppressing the insurgency. The Hama revolt may well have been encouraged by “the intelligence services of the United States and Turkey” according to Moniz Bandeira, the Brazilian political scientist.

After the 1982 rebellion Bandeira wrote that the Syrian president “stabilized the country” while “The continuing efforts by the United States to erode the regime in Syria pushed president Hafez al-Assad more and more toward an alliance with the Soviet Union”.

The process of the USSR’s disintegration, starting in the late 1980s, was not at all a welcome scenario for General Assad. During the remainder of his life, he had little choice but to readjust his foreign policy in the 1990s to accommodate the Americans. Assad provided support to the Western powers during the 1990-91 Gulf War versus Saddam Hussein, after the Iraqi dictator had invaded neighbouring Kuwait on 2 August 1990.

The Chicago Tribune reported on 12 March 1991,

“The Bush administration [George H. W. Bush] credits Syria with helping to restrain terrorist groups, that might have targeted U.S. and other Western interests during the war with Iraq. The newly forged relationship with the U.S. provides a balance in Syrian foreign policy that had been lacking”.

A “balance” meaning that the Russians had disappeared, for now. The majority of Syrians were displeased with the warmer US-Syrian relations in the 1990s. They had not forgotten the US-led coup d’etat that deposed president Shukri al-Quwatli in Damascus in 1949; nor the failed attempts at further CIA coups in 1956 and 1957, once more against Quwatli, who is considered a founding father of modern Syria.

Ordinary Syrians were unhappy with Washington’s ongoing support for Israel, and with the attempts to exclude Syria from the Middle East peace process. Much of the Syrian populace was doubtful whether Washington actually wanted to improve relations – taking into account that General Assad continued, into the 1990s, his refusal to capitulate to American strategic and economic interests.

By the late 1990s General Assad’s health was rapidly deteriorating. He succumbed to a heart attack at age 69 on 10 June 2000, after 29 years in power. On 17 July 2000 his son Bashar al-Assad, at age 34, took over the presidency in Damascus, as he had been preparing to do for some time in agreement with his father. At the start of this century, Bashar al-Assad was a colonel in the elite Syrian Republican Guard, having undertaken years of military training.

The maintenance of the Assad dynasty was not greeted with fanfare in Washington. When George W. Bush became president in January 2001, his administration that same year started planning a military attack against Syria, in order to remove Assad and replace him with a pro-Western and pro-Israeli leader.

American general Wesley Clark, a former NATO supreme commander, recalled how he had visited the Pentagon in late 2001, and was shown a classified memorandum by an unnamed US general. As Clark later remembered, the Pentagon memo stated that the US Armed Forces were “going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran”.

The invasion of Syria was to almost immediately follow a successful American intervention in Iraq. With the US military in October 2001 having already assailed Afghanistan – an invasion planned well before the 9/11 atrocities against America – less than 18 months later the Bush administration launched a military offensive in Iraq on 20 March 2003; so as to reassert US hegemony over the Middle East and to ensure control over Iraq’s oil reserves.

The go-ahead for the US invasion of Iraq, bolstered by Tony Blair’s hawkish regime in London, had in part been made possible with the support of the Western mainstream press, which as usual was generally pro-war. American plans to attack Iraq also predated 9/11 by months, to March 2001, just a few weeks into Bush’s presidency.

Bandeira revealed,

“Documents from March 2001, which the US Department of Commerce was forced to declassify in mid-2003, as a result of a suit filed by the Sierra Club (an environmentalist organization) and Judicial Watch, confirmed that the Task Force headed by vice-president Dick Cheney had developed two maps plotting the oil fields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, and two maps detailing the projects and the companies that wanted to manage these resources in Iraq”.

In early April 2003 Saddam Hussein was ousted from power, with the capital Baghdad falling to US-led soldiers on 9 April. Iraq itself had been devastated by years of Western sanctions prior to the invasion, and was not far from being a defenceless and broken country. Shortly after Baghdad’s capture the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, initiated contingency plans to extend the military assault to Syria, which shares a near 400 mile eastern border with Iraq.

However, president Bush was warned that starting another war so soon could cause problems in the “special relationship” with Britain. The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said in mid-April 2003 that Washington does not intend to attack another country “right now”. The UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, said that should the war be extended to Syria the entire Middle East could be destabilised.

Having secured a military victory in Iraq, the Americans still had to occupy and subdue the country, in order most importantly to copper-fasten US control over Iraq’s oil; this would take time, if it could be achieved at all. Assad was the first Arab leader, other than Saddam Hussein, to condemn the Anglo-American attack on Iraq. Towards the end of March 2003 Assad predicted,

“The United States and Britain will not be able to control all of Iraq. There will be much tougher resistance… and we doubt that they will succeed”.

The Anglo-American aggressors were indeed unable to control all of Iraq. By 2008, now near the end of Bush’s presidency, it was clear that Washington had in fact suffered a major defeat. Facing large-scale Iraqi popular resistance, the Bush administration had to give up its claims to military bases in Iraq and privileges for US investors in the country’s rich energy system.

In 2008 a US invasion of Syria was back on the agenda largely because of Israel; on the pretexts of preventing weapons trafficking from Syria to the Lebanese-based militant group Hezbollah, a sworn enemy of Israel, along with the training of Hezbollah militants in Syria and the construction of a nuclear reactor in Deir ez-Zor, eastern Syria.

The US State Department had since 2005 been furnishing anti-Assad elements in Syria with millions of dollars. This money encouraged the instigation of protests in Syria against Assad. Not only did the US government wish to topple the Syrian president, but they wanted to sever Syria’s tightening naval relations with Russia, and to break the partnerships that Assad had formed with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas in Palestine.

Yet Robert Gates, the US Secretary of Defence since 2006 and former CIA Director, did not think a US offensive against Syria was a good idea. He rightly believed that American credibility was damaged with the debacle of the occupation of Iraq, in which Saddam’s mythical Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) were never found. Moreover, Gates felt an invasion of Syria would meet with the disapproval of the American public and incite unrest in Europe and the Middle East, while undermining continued US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

President Bush therefore abandoned the idea of attacking Syria, despite consistent pressure from his vice-president Dick Cheney. Bandeira described Cheney as “the warmonger who had similarly manipulated the invasion of Iraq to deliver profits to Halliburton, the corporation he had presided and with which he maintained close ties, just as with other military-industrial contractors of the Pentagon and the Big Oil Companies”.

Following Barack Obama’s assumption to power in Washington in January 2009, the threat of an American intervention in Syria continued to hover over Assad. As president Obama was settling into office, Assad refused to sanction through Syrian territory the South Pars/North Dome Pipeline, infrastructure which was planned to pass through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey; and which would have supplied natural gas to the markets of Europe, a continent dominated by NATO, the expansionist US-led military organisation.

In withholding his approval for the pipeline, Assad was undoubtedly defending the interests of his ally, Russia. Such policies of course disturbed both Washington and Brussels. A principal goal of the Obama administration, supported by France and Britain, was to take control of the Mediterranean and to politically isolate Iran, a Syrian ally, in addition to restricting Russian and Chinese influence in the Middle East and North Africa.

By 2012 Russia was planning to reform and expand its naval base in Tartus, Syria, so that it could receive large Russian warships, thereby safeguarding Moscow’s presence in the Mediterranean; along with a Russian-controlled air base at the Syrian city of Latakia, about 60 miles north of Tartus. Russia had further planned to erect naval bases in Libya and Yemen.

Summarising US-NATO imperialist thinking Bandeira wrote,

“The fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime, after the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya by NATO forces, would suppress the presence of Russia and its naval bases in Syria (Tartus and Latakia); cut off supply routes for weapons to Hezbollah, the Shia stronghold against Israeli ventures into southern Lebanon; contain the Chinese advance on oil resources; and completely isolate and strangle Iran, with the consequent elimination of the (Shia) Islamic government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad”.

The triumvirate of America, France and Britain attacked oil rich Libya on 19 March 2011, paving the way for the toppling of the country’s long-time leader, Muammar Gaddafi, who was killed on 20 October 2011. The NATO states were assisted in eliminating Gaddafi by Al Qaeda and Libyan terrorists, along with the special forces of Qatar, the UAE and other countries. Within the space of a few years Libya, which in 2010 had by some distance the best living standards in Africa, was splintered into warring parties as conditions for its population dropped sharply. Libya is yet to recover.

Obama’s government, with the support of NATO members France, Britain, Germany and Portugal, then attempted to repeat the subterfuge at the United Nations (UN) regarding Syria, which they had used to proceed with military actions against Libya. On 4 October 2011, the Western powers presented at the UN a proposal for a resolution based on the “Responsibility to Protect”.

Russia and China, aware that NATO wanted to bomb Syria and remove Assad, vetoed the resolution. Bandeira outlined,

“The pretext of the Responsibility to Protect resolution, as it was used in the bombing of Libya, had become the template to justify NATO interventions as the military instrument of the ultra-imperialist cartel led by the United States, Great Britain and France”.

Obama set out to stealthily incite war against Assad. On 17 August 2011 the US president said, “For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside”. It was not the last occasion that Obama would call for Assad to go. The war in Syria was no ordinary conflict between two opposing sides, but it involved an array of factions, many of them outright extremists and jihadists.

In the fight against Assad’s government, Al Qaeda, America, France and Britain were effectively on the same side. The Franco-American-British powers participated in the war, directly and indirectly, more than any other states, with the assistance of Western allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. By late 2012, the Obama administration knew “from classified assessments” that most Western weaponry sent through Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and then on to Syria, ended up in the possession of Islamic fundamentalists who were trying to destroy Assad’s government.

The jihadists wanted to restore the Great Caliphate in Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham) between the Euphrates River and the Mediterranean Sea. With CIA assistance, the Persian Gulf states and Turkey continued increasing military aid to the extremists in Syria, sending them weaponry dropped from the air.

*

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Sources

David W. Lesch, When the Relationship Went Sour: Syria and the Eisenhower Administration, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Winter 1998, Published by: Wiley, Jstor

Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, The World Disorder: US Hegemony, Proxy Wars, Terrorism and Humanitarian Catastrophes (Springer; 1st ed., 4 Feb. 2019)

Ray Moseley, “Syria’s support of U.S. in Gulf War Paying Dividends”, Chicago Tribune, 12 March 1991

George Arney, “US ‘planned attack on Taleban’”, BBC, 18 September 2001

Meredith Reid Sarkees and Stephen Zunes, Disenchantment with the ‘New World Order’: Syria’s Relations with the United States, International Journal, Spring 1994, Published by: Sage Publications Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian International Council, Jstor

Democracy Now!, “Gen. Wesley Clark Weighs Presidential Bid: ‘I Think About It Every Day’”, 2 March 2007

Robert Stevens, “BBC was most pro-war of British networks”, World Socialist Web Site, 10 July 2003

Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, The Second Cold War: Geopolitics and the Strategic Dimensions of the USA (Springer 1st ed., 23 June 2017)

CNN, “No war plans for Syria: U.S.”, 16 April 2003

Alissa J. Rubin, “Syria Sees Threat of Force Behind Rumsfeld Remark”, Los Angeles Times, 30 March 2003

Scott Wilson and Joby Warrick, “Assad must go, Obama says”, The Washington Post, 18 August 2011

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***

 

 

 

The US Supreme Court Chief Justice was furious.   For the first time in history, the raw judicial process of one of the most powerful, and opaque arms of government, had been exposed via media – at least in preliminary form.  It resembled, in no negligible way, the publication by WikiLeaks of various drafts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the forerunner to the current Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The subject matter was positively incendiary: the potential overturning and judicial eradication of Roe v Wade, a 1973 decision which has generated a literature both for and against its merits of herculean proportions.  In its draft form, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health entertains a full-throated attack on the decision that had legalised abortion via constitutional fiat, even if the original grounds centred on privacy.

Such an inner illumination of processes was never the intention of the US Supreme Court.  For over two centuries, it had not seen the like of this.  For the most part, whatever their persuasion, the justices have kept religiously mum on the issue of a case till final publication.  In an address to the American Constitution Society, given on June 15, 2012, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not giving anything away to the audience about what fate awaited the Affordable Care Act.  The justices had originally voted on the matter on March 30.  By mid-June, opinions had already been drafted and circulated in the judicial conclave.  “Those who know don’t talk,” teased Ginsburg. “And those who talk don’t know.”

The same, remarked Jack Goldsmith in The New Republic, could not be said about the national intelligence community, where the loquacious roam.  Those knowledgeable and in the know on such matters were often the same ones willing to spill, babble and discuss.

The draft, published in unadulterated or abridged form, comprises 98 pages and 118 footnotes, with an accompanying 31-page length appendix covering the historical state abortion laws.  Delivered by Justice Samuel Alito, it states with punchy certainty that, “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”  The reasoning adopted in the decision was “exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.”  It is a paean for state power over federal dictation.  Laws on abortion should finally be returned to the fold of State legislatures.

Judgments do go through various iterations.  This version stems from February.  The fact that it is now circulating in public like a demon of agitation, stirring up the various party bases and groups, is an experiment of itself, bringing down the rickety façade of the Supreme Court as a non-partisan body.  “Unquestionably, it drags the court into the political scrum and rubs some of the polish of it,” opines George F. Will.

A statement from the Supreme Court, in an effort to keep up appearances, claims that its operations has only suffered a minor hiccup.  “Although the document described in yesterday’s reports is authentic, it does not represent a decision by the Court or the final position of any member on the issues in the case.”

2021 Women’s March, many speakers bemoaned a looming threat to Roe (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Whether the justices congeal or adjust their current view on Roe in light of the Politico leak is, at this point, unanswerable.  But a distinct sense of bloodlust has taken over in the effort to find the culprit.  Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in a statement, described the leak as “a singular and egregious breach of trust that is an affront to the Court and the community of public servants who work here.”

The message captivating the establishment is whether the leaker violated any laws and, if so, what penalty might fellow.  While pro-choice supporters are well infuriated by the draft, but the conservatives seem intent on crucifying the perpetrator.  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) fumed that this “lawless action” be “investigated and punished as fully as possible.”  The editors of the National Review insist that this incident “is intolerable and cannot go unpunished.”

The Chief Justice, for his part, has directed the Marshal of the Court, Col. Gail A. Curley, to begin an investigation into the source.  Doing so potentially rings off the process from the prying eyes of the FBI and the Justice Department.  No judicial officer wants them to get involved.

The prosecution effort is unlikely to amount to much. In the first place, a Supreme Court draft decision fails to have the gravity, standing or properties of a legal document to warrant such action.

“As far as I can tell,” submitted the seasoned UC Berkeley legal authority Orin Kerr, “there is no federal criminal law that directly prohibits disclosure of a draft legal opinion.”

The only real legislative foothold to use against the opportunistic leaker, if that even counts, is the statute known as 18 U.S.C.§ 641 which covers public money, property or records, namely prohibiting the theft or misuse of government-owned “things of value”.   The lingering question here is whether the statute covers information and whether the concept of information could be said to be a “thing of value”.

The guidelines of the Justice Department also suggest that it would be “inappropriate to bring a prosecution” where an individual had legitimate access to the information or document and used such material “for the purpose of disseminating it to the public.”

As the Colonel gets busy with her investigation, the debate over how to cope with a world after Roe has begun in desperate fury.  The Biden administration has reiterated its support for the principle of the case and notes, in the event of its overturning, that the onus will fall to the elected and the electors “at all levels of government.”  At the federal level, it will pursue a process that codifies Roe.  Either way, the politicians of the US imperium are going to get busier over matters of the foetus.

*

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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: Norma McCorvey/Jane Roe (Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)

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***

In a recent report titled Global Energy Perspective 2022, consultancy McKinsey said it expected wind and solar to become a sort of baseload generation capacity as soon as 2030.The report also had a lot of praise for the technological advances that had allowed the cost of wind, solar, EVs, and battery storage to fall substantially over the past few years 

What that report didn’t say was that the “baseload scenario” will only materialize in the presence of a sufficient supply of raw materials. As a front-runner in the transition race, Europe is particularly vulnerable to any shortages of these raw materials. Because of these shortages, the transition might end before it begins in earnest.

For now, everything looks like it’s going pretty well. The prices of electric cars are on the rise but sales are still going strong, at least in part because of government incentives and in another part because of soaring fuel prices.

Yet there are clouds on the horizon.

China’s CATL, one of the majors in the battery space, recently reported a drop in its first-quarter profit because of higher production costs. What this suggests is that the company has so far absorbed the cost increases caused by tightening raw material supply but how long it would continue to do this is an open question.

Meanwhile, the CEO of Rivian, the Amazon-backed EV startup, warned of a battery shortage in the EV space. And it was a grave warning:

“Put very simply, all the world’s cell production combined represents well under 10% of what we will need in 10 years,” RJ Scaringe said, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal. “Meaning, 90% to 95% of the supply chain does not exist.”

One would think that at least with wind and solar, the supply chains are there and well developed. That may be the case; however, the metals needed to feed into these supply chains are in problematic supply, especially in Europe.

Like fossil fuels, Europe has little local mining production, so it is heavily dependent on imports. To make matters a lot more complicated for it, its main supplier of aluminum, nickel, and zinc is Russia. Almost all of the lithium and rare earths used in Europe are also sourced from abroad.

“The global energy transition is progressing faster than the mining project pipeline, with copper, cobalt, lithium, nickel, and rare earths all at risk of a disruptive demand pull between now and 2035,” said the authors of a study from Belgian KU Leuven University that warned Europe was facing a shortage of all the main ingredients of the energy transition.

Local production is desirable but quite unlikely, at least on a scale that would make sense. A Reuters analysis of the situation by Andy Home notes that the regulatory regime in the union is such that any new mine would take 15 years from planning to the start of production.

In other words, Europe has made it impossible for its own miners to produce the metals the continent needs to transition away from fossil fuels locally. At the same time, with its stance toward Russia and China, it is risking a lot of the current supplies of these metals and other critical materials. And this time, the U.S. can’t come to the rescue because it is struggling with reducing its own dependency on foreign sources of critical metals and minerals.

The solution? Recycling, according to the authors of the KU Leuven study. Between 2040 and 2050, the EU could come to source between 50% and 75% of the critical minerals it needs from recycling. That is, if the EU acts now to develop a recycling supply chain. And if it finds how to bridge the gap between supply and demand for these minerals in the years until 2040.

*

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Irina is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry.

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***

As part of the new ‘imminent’ sanctions on Russia – to include a phased ban on all Russian oil by the end of the year – it seems the European Union is ready to escalate even further, taking action to and beyond all-encompassing Iran-style sanctions. 

Now it’s mulling going after Russia’s ability to even ship oil on the high seas with a proposed ban on European vessels and companies’ ability to provide services to Russian shipping entities. As Bloomberg is reporting Wednesday, the action would constitute “a move that could dramatically impair Moscow’s ability to ship its oil anywhere in the world.”

If such a ban on Russia’s access to European insurers were enacted, this would leave Russian companies exposed to the tune of multiple billions of dollars every time a single tanker leaves port, given risks like accidents and oil spills can bring with it such a price tag in terms of claims and legal action.

Russian energy companies would then be left with few or no alternatives, writes Bloomberg:

“While member states are still wrangling over the terms, it’s a potentially powerful tool because 95% of the world’s tanker liability cover is arranged through a London-based insurance organization called the International Group of P&I Clubs that has to heed European law.”

The report makes direct comparison of such a course of action to a key way that Washington has for years been able to severely limit Iran’s ability to transport of crude, forcing the Islamic Republic to cover its risks directly.

But huge hurdles still remain in terms of inter-EU unity on a Russian oil embargo, given the rise in countries demanding exemptions – led most notably by Hungary and Slovakia. And further erecting major hurdles for European companies is expected to be even more controversial given the ripple effect at home.

1) Sovcomflot fire-sales 1/3 of its 68 tankers to repay $2bn debt before 15 May sanction deadline;

2) its highly regarded mgmt will have noticed the reduced need for Russian oil;

3) as well as the difficulty to ship without Western insurance…
https://t.co/9E2KPSBPaz

— Alexander Stahel 🇺🇦 (@BurggrabenH) May 4, 2022

The ban would prevent any European entity or individuals from transporting Russian oil anywhere in the world, which will be particularly painful to the economies of smaller Mediterranean countries like Greece, Cyprus and Malta  – which play an outsized role in the European shipping and transport industry.

These countries have reportedly already registered their opposition to such a drastic punitive plan, which they say will only blowback on European companies and their ability to do business.

*

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***

A California bill is now threatening to strip doctors of their medical licenses if they express medical views that the state does not agree with. California Assembly Bill 2098 designates “the dissemination or promotion of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or ‘COVID-19,’ as unprofessional conduct” warranting “disciplinary action” that could result in the loss of their medical license

Misinformation related to SARS-CoV-2 includes “false or misleading information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the development, safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.” But as far as what might constitute “misinformation” or “disinformation” is unclear and basically left open for interpretation by the state

Doctors have an ethical obligation to treat each patient as an individual, and to ensure each patient receives the safest and best care. Bill 2098 will turn doctors into government agents, leaving no one to advocate for patients’ health

California has also introduced six other bills seeking to enshrine tyranny into law, including bills to criminalize “amplification of harmful content,” create a centralized vaccination registry, strip funding from law enforcement that refuses to follow public health orders, mandate COVID jabs for school children, authorize minors to consent to vaccination, and require school districts to conduct routine COVID testing

If you live in California, please review these bills and VOTE NO

*

One of the most stunning parts of this pandemic has been the denial of basic science, and one of the most shocking developments from that has been the attack on medical doctors who try to set the record straight.

As reported by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — professor of health policy at Stanford, research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for focused protection of the most vulnerable¹ — a California bill is now threatening to strip doctors of their medical licenses if they express medical views that the state does not agree with.²

Bhattacharya’s Personal Battle

Bhattacharya has first-hand experience with this kind of witch hunt. He was one of the first to investigate the prevalence of COVID-19 in 2020, and found that by April, the infection was already too prevalent for lockdowns to have any possibility of stopping the spread.

Bhattacharya has called the COVID-19 lockdowns the “biggest public health mistake ever made,”³stressing that the harms caused have been “absolutely catastrophically devastating,” especially for children and the working class, worldwide.⁴

After Bhattacharya co-sponsored the Great Barrington Declaration, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and his former boss, now retired National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, colluded behind the scenes to quash the declaration from day 1.⁵

To that end, they set out to smear and destroy the reputations of Bhattacharya and the other coauthors of the declaration. In one email, Collins referred to the three highly credentialed and respected scientists as “fringe epidemiologists” and called for a press “takedown” of the trio.^6,7,8,9 I detailed this treachery in “Authors of Barrington Declaration Speak Out.”

“Big tech outlets like Facebook and Google followed suit, suppressing our ideas, falsely deeming them ‘misinformation,’” Bhattacharya writes.¹⁰ “I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to ‘let the virus rip,’ when I had proposed nothing of the sort. I was the target of racist attacks and death threats.

Despite the false, defamatory and sometimes frightening attacks, we stood firm. And today many of our positions have been amply vindicated. Yet the soul searching this episode should have caused among public health officials has largely failed to occur. Instead, the lesson seems to be: Dissent at your own risk.

I do not practice medicine — I am a professor specializing in epidemiology and health policy at Stanford Medical School. But many friends who do practice have told me how they have censored their thoughts about COVID lockdowns, vaccines, and recommended treatment to avoid the mob …

This forced scientific groupthink — and the fear and self-censorship they produce — are bad enough. So far, though, the risk has been social and reputational. Now it could become literally career-ending.”

Do You Want Your Doctor To Be Muzzled by the State?

California Assembly Bill 2098¹¹ — introduced by Assemblyman Evan Low, a Silicon Valley Democrat, and coauthored by Assembly members Aguiar-Curry, Akilah Weber and Wicks, and Sens. Pan and Wiener — designates “the dissemination or promotion of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or ‘COVID-19,’ as unprofessional conduct” warranting “disciplinary action” that could result in the loss of their medical license.

Misinformation or disinformation related to SARS-CoV-2 includes “false or misleading information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the development, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.” But as far as what might constitute “misinformation” or “disinformation” is unclear and basically left open for interpretation — by the state. As noted by Bhattacharya:¹²

“Doctors, fearing loss of their livelihoods, will need to hew closely to the government line on COVID science and policy, even if that line does not track the scientific evidence.

After all, until recently, top government science bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci claimed that the idea that COVID came from a Wuhan laboratory was a conspiracy theory, rather than a valid hypothesis that should be open to discussion. The government’s track record on discerning COVID truths is poor.

The bill claims that the spread of misinformation by physicians about the COVID vaccines ‘has weakened public confidence and placed lives at serious risk.’ But how significant is this problem in reality? Over 83% of Californians over the age of 50 are fully vaccinated (including the booster) …

What is abundantly clear is that this bill represents a chilling interference with the practice of medicine. The bill itself is full of misinformation and a demonstration of what a disaster it would be to have the legislature dictate the practice of medicine.”

The Shanghai Model

We don’t have to guess at what life might look like if this and other bills like it are implemented, Bhattacharya warns. The drama currently playing out in Shanghai offers a clear look into what can happen when public health is dictated by the state rather than by qualified medical professionals rooted in sound science.

“Shanghai is the model for the terrifying dangers of giving dictatorial powers to public health officials,” Bhattacharya writes.¹³ “The harrowing situation unfolding there is a testament to the folly of a virus containment strategy that relies on lockdown.

For two weeks, the Chinese government has locked nearly 25 million people in their homes, forcibly separated children from their parents, killed family pets, and limited access to food and life-saving medical care — all to no avail. COVID cases are still rising, yet the delusion of suppressing COVID persists.

In America, many of our officials still have not abandoned their delusions about COVID and the exercise of power this crisis has allowed. As the Shanghai debacle demonstrates, of all the many terrible consequences of our public health response to COVID, the stifling of dissenting scientific viewpoints by the state might be the most dangerous.”

The Science Deniers Are in Power

As stressed by Bhattacharya, the California bill includes a number falsehoods and fails to acknowledge basic science, starting with natural immunity. High-quality studies have repeatedly shown that natural immunity is equivalent or superior to the COVID shots. Were this bill to pass, a California doctor could lose his license for taking a patient’s COVID history into account when recommending the shot.

It also negates doctors’ ability to prescribe off-label drugs for the treatment of COVID, even though this has been a common and uncontroversial medical practice for many decades. It’s not uncommon for a drug intended for one condition to be used off-label for another. But for some reason, when it comes to COVID, this practice is now deemed hazardous and unprofessional.

The bill also falsely asserts that the “safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines have been confirmed through evaluation by the federal Food and Drug Administration.” Anyone who has followed this circus over the past year realizes that the FDA has completely ignored loud and clear warning bells showing the shots are far from safe and nowhere near as effective as initially claimed.

The bill also ignores the fact that the safety depends on the individual patient’s medical history and current state of health. “For example, there is an elevated risk of myocarditis in young men taking the vaccine, especially with the booster,” Bhattacharya notes.¹⁴

Doctors have an ethical obligation to treat each patient as an individual, and to ensure each patient receives the safest and best care. Bill 2098 will turn doctors into government agents, leaving no one to advocate for patients’ health.

“The false medical consensus enforced by AB 2098 will lead doctors to censor themselves to avoid government sanction. And it will be their patients, above all, who will be harmed by their silence,” Bhattacharya warns.

Californians, Vote NO on COVID Tyranny Bills

California Bill 2098 isn’t the only bill seeking to enshrine tyranny into law. Other pending California bills include:¹⁵

If you live in California, please review these bills and VOTE NO. In a Substack article, Margaret Anna Alice, offers the following guidance to Californians:²²

“If you are a resident of California, please consider taking the additional step of contacting your respective senators and assembly members in addition to filling out the online portal. See Californians for Medical Freedom for step-by-step instructions on how to contact your local legislators as well as what to say if you decide to call (which is recommended).

The PERK website is also a very helpful way to track the hearing dates and status of these bills. In the comments, Donald Tipon has provided additional links for opposing AB2098 and AB1797 from A Voice for Choice Advocacy.”

Front Groups Marshal the Ignorant

Regulating the medical views a doctor can and cannot have is dangerous in the extreme, and hopefully the Californians who are left to vote in that state will quash such efforts. On the national level, we must also stay vigilant against similar legislative proposals, and push back against phony front groups that promote this kind of medical tyranny.

This includes the No License for Disinformation²³ (NLFD) group, which promotes the false information disseminated by the dark-money group known as the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

As most now know, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a medical doctor in his own right, has been the primary challenger of Fauci’s lies, and the NLFD has been instructing individuals to report him to the Kentucky Medical Board, with the aim of getting his medical license revoked.²⁴

Just who are the NLFD?²⁵ In November 2021, I wrote about the NLFD, pointing out that the bottom of their website declared, “Created & Developed by EverydayAmericanJoe.”²⁶ At the time, I took a screenshot of it, in case they’d wise up and change it. Good thing, because that notice has since been deleted.

And, no wonder, because it leads right back to the Biden White House. EverydayAmericanJoe, created by a marketing strategist named Chris Gilroy, was a website dedicated to supporting Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. (That website has since been disabled.²⁷)

According to his LinkedIn profile,²⁸ Gilroy created EverydayAmericanJoe.com — “the largest Biden-Harris grassroots website online” — as a freelance senior marketing consultant and designer for the Biden campaign. Since 2007, he’s been the president of The Microtechs LLC, an online marketing, web development and digital advertising firm that produces custom websites and apps “that our clients can manage themselves.”

Aside from the EverydayAmericanJoe clue, there’s no indication of who is actually running the NLFD. It simply claims to be a “nonpartisan grassroots coalition of Americans” whose goal it is to get state medical boards to “protect the public” from medical professionals “who spread medical disinformation.” In all likelihood, the NLFD is run by a coalition of one — Gilroy himself — who is far from nonpartisan.

Not surprisingly, the NLFD has promoted and relied on the CCDH’s fabricated “Disinformation Dozen” report, which has even been denounced as biased and flawed in the extreme by Facebook.²⁹

It’s quite clear that the CCDH exists to fabricate “evidence” that is then used to destroy the opposition in order to control the information, and the NLFD uses the CCDH’s fabrications as justification to suppress First Amendment rights.³⁰ Indeed, Biden himself has publicly promoted and relied on this dark money CCDH report.³¹

The point of all this is that the censorship is being authorized and directed from the very highest level of our government, and there’s only one reason for that. Democracy flourishes under free speech and dies under censorship, and anyone who claims differently has an ulterior motive for trying to confuse these simple truths.

In my view, the war against “misinformation” and “disinformation” is nothing less than a covert war against the citizens of planet Earth. It’s an attempt to seize power by controlling what people can know, and a number of high-profile world leaders, past and present, have shown their true colors.

Among them, former president Obama, who in April 2022 gave lectures at the University of Chicago and Stanford, arguing for the regulation of information — what people can and cannot view on social media and elsewhere — “to protect democracy.”³²

However, as noted by nonresident senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI), Mark Jamison, “Such controls have done the opposite throughout history and would this time too.”³³

An Open War on the Public

We find ourselves in a situation where asking valid questions about public health measures are equated to acts of domestic terrorism. It’s unbelievable, yet here we are. Over the past two years, the rhetoric used against those who question the sanity of using unscientific pandemic countermeasures, such as face masks and lockdowns, or share data showing that COVID-19 gene therapies are really bad public health policy, has become increasingly violent.

Dr. Peter Hotez, a virologist who for years has been at the forefront of promoting vaccines of all kinds, for example, has publicly called for cyberwarfare assaults on American citizens who disagree with official COVID narratives, and this vile rhetoric was published in the prestigious science journal Nature, of all places.³⁴

Doctors and nurses are now facing the untenable position of having to choose between doing right by their patients and toeing the line of totalitarianism. This simply cannot go on. It’s profoundly unhealthy and dangerous in a multitude of ways.

While frustrating and intimidating, we must all be relentless in our pursuit and sharing of the truth, and we must relentlessly demand our elected representatives stand up for freedom of speech and other Constitutional rights, including, and especially, the rights of medical doctors to express their medical opinions.

*

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Notes

¹ Great Barrington Declaration

^{2, 10, 12, 13, 14} Bariweiss.substack.com April 12, 2022

³ Newsweek March 8, 2021

⁴ Rumble, Ron DeSantis March 7, 2022, 32:00

⁵ Wall Street Journal December 21, 2021

⁶ YouTube Liberty Report, 7:13 minutes

⁷ The Blaze December 18, 2021

⁸ Daily Mail December 18, 2021, Updated December 19, 2021

⁹ ZeroHedge December 20, 2021

¹¹ California Assembly Bill 2098

^15, 22 Margaret Anna Alice Substack April 12, 2022

¹⁶ California SB1390

¹⁷ California AB1797

¹⁸ California SB-1464

¹⁹ California SB-871

²⁰ California SB-866

²¹ California SB-1479

²³ Twitter No License for Disinformation

²⁴ Twitter Chass October 11, 2021

^25, 26 nolicensefordisinformation.org

²⁷ everydayamericanjoe.com

²⁸ LinkedIn Chris Gilroy (Archived)

²⁹ Facebook August 18, 2021

³⁰ Twitter NLFD October 20, 2021

³¹ Daily Wire July 20, 2021

^32, 33 AEI April 25, 2022

³⁴ Nature April 27, 2021

Featured image is from Alliance for Natural Health

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***

In the backdrop of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, ministers of the Czech Republic have been indicating their intention to negotiate with the US on the presence of a base in the country

Progressive sections in the Czech Republic have criticized plans to allow the permanent stationing of US military troops in the country. Various groups including the Czech Peace Movement (CMH), Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM), Young Communists (MK), Communist Youth Union (KSM), and others raised strong objection to statements made by representatives of the incumbent center-right government that favor plans to allow a permanent foreign military base inside the Czech Republic. On April 27, communist leader and CMH chairman Milan Krajca urged the government to reject the deployment of foreign troops, bases and weapons in the country.

With the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, advocates of militarism have been on a roll, especially in Eastern Europe, urging governments to increase military spending, buy and stockpile arms and ammunition, send men and ammunition to Ukraine, and even open new military bases across the region for US-led NATO’s military maneuvers.

Earlier this month, Czech defense minister Jana Černochová hinted at opening talks with her US counterpart regarding the permanent deployment of US military troops in the country. Czech deputy prime minister Marian Jurečka even suggested places like Mosnov and Prerov in as suitable locations for a military base. Even though Czech prime minister Petr Fiala did not fully endorse the defense minister’s plan, he revealed that there may be negotiations for a defense agreement with the US, which most countries in the region already have.

In response to the government’s plans for further militarization of the country, Czech communists and the peace movement have formed a committee, including personalities like Union of Czech Writers chairman Karel Sýs, spokesperson of the No Bases initiative, Eva Novotná, communist leader Josef Skála, and editor of Haló Noviny newspaper, Monika Hoření. The committee has initiated a petition against the presence of foreign troops on the territory of the Czech Republic.

Krajca said in a statement,

“We strongly protest against efforts to build and operate a US military base in the Czech Republic, whether it is in Mosnov, Prerov or anywhere else. Such a step would mean a direct threat to the citizens of the Czech Republic and the danger of an even more intense cloudburst of our country into further rounds of arms.”

KSCM leader Kateřina Konečná told the media earlier,

“I do not want the Czech Republic to be another place with the base of the USA (there are over 800 of them in the world). I do not want our citizens to be a potential target, especially not while the US does what it wants and raises tensions in the world.”

Earlier this year, Czech communists and the peace movement organized a major mobilization against the government’s decision to provide Ukraine with armaments and support NATO’s maneuvers.

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Featured image: Czech defense minister Jana Černochová at a press conference in March. (Source: Peoples Dispatch)

Are the Neocons Setting Up the World for Nuclear War?

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, May 04, 2022

A false flag event is not the only avenue to nuclear war.  The expansion of NATO to Finland and Sweden is another.  Washington is not only pressuring the governments to apply for NATO membership but also is bribing Swedish and Finnish government officials to do so.

Pope Francis Suggests that NATO’s “Barking” Provoked Russia’s Military Op in Ukraine

By Paul Antonopoulos, May 04, 2022

Pope Francis has suggested to Italian daily Corriere Della Sera that the “barking of NATO at the door of Russia” provoked the military operation in Ukraine and alluded that countries should not supply Ukraine with more arms.

When the Government Plays God: The Slippery Slope from Abortions to Executions

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, May 04, 2022

What few seem willing to address is that in the 30 years since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade, the government has come to believe that it not only has the power to determine who is deserving of constitutional rights in the eyes of the law but it also has the authority to deny those rights to an American citizen.

Weaponizing the Current Thing: Biden’s Ministry of Truth & Its Origins

By Jordan Schachtel, May 04, 2022

Prior to the announcement from DHS last week, there was no sign of such a Disinformation Governance Board outfit operating within the federal bureaucracy, but there are clues, and a track record of similar outfits that may have served as predecessors to the current namesake.

“World War III is Closer than Ever”: US War Machine to Increase Lethal Military Aid by Sending “Suicide Drones” to Ukraine

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, May 04, 2022

The majority of the $33 billion, around $20 billion of the US taxpayer-funded war will be used for “artillery, armored vehicles and anti-armor and anti-air capabilities, according to the White House.”

NATO: Sweden Navigates Dangerous Waters

By Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli, May 04, 2022

It was reported that Ankara had asked its NATO allies “to invoke Article 5 to help secure Turkey’s border with threats from Syria.” Still, the final decision was, “NATO stands with Turkey but does not invoke Article 5.” What reliable guarantee from NATO would there be if a similar incident were to occur from the Swedish side, and which would be perceived by Russia as provocative, or worse, as casus belli?

The “Killer Vaccine” Worldwide. 7.9 Billion People

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, May 04, 2022

Fake figures of covid-19 positive cases and covid-19 related deaths. Lies upon lies. There is a complex timeline. The covid crisis is marked by several stages leading up to the implementation of mass vaccination Worldwide in December 2020.

9/11 Truth: The Key to Ending COVID-19 Buried in the 9/11 Narrative and the WTC Wreckage

By Emanuel Pastreich and Dan Hanley, May 04, 2022

The reason that the United States has been overrun with COVID-19 propaganda and that the government acted as a toy of the rich, pushing through policies that have no support, is that the entire system was gutted in the aftermath of 9/11 and a stark tyranny has replaced the flawed republic that once stood behind the halls of government.

“Global NATO” to Have Disastrous Effect on World Security? “Shift in World Order”

By Drago Bosnic, May 04, 2022

In late April, when the UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss called for the creation of a “Global NATO” as part of “a shift in world order”, few seem to have noticed the magnitude of such an announcement. The statement followed calls by US President Joe Biden for a ‘New World Order to be established’ just four weeks prior during his Warsaw speech.

SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination and Myocarditis in a Nordic Cohort Study of 23 Million Residents

By Dr. Oystein Karlstad, Dr. Petteri Hovi, and et al., May 04, 2022

In a cohort study of 23.1 million residents across 4 Nordic countries, risk of myocarditis after the first and second doses of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines was highest in young males aged 16 to 24 years after the second dose.

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***

Just three years ago Tony Blair looked finished. Washed up. Defunct. Politically dead.

The Chilcot report had established the facts surrounding Blair’s deep culpability for the catastrophic Iraq invasion. 

With Blair beside him, Starmer can no longer claim to be a man of honesty and integrity.

Blair had poisoned his own reputation by receiving huge sums for giving lucrative advice to a succession of seedy and sometimes murderous dictators.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party closed its doors to the one-time Labour premier.

Back from the dead

But this week Sir Tony rose sensationally from the dead, courtesy of Sir Keir Starmer.

Starmer exhumed Blair by placing him at the heart of a Labour campaign video in this Thursday’s local elections.

This completes the rehabilitation of Blair that began in January this year when he received the Order of the Garter, the highest honour available in British public life.

It is an open secret that Buckingham Palace, dismayed by Blair’s conduct in office, has long resisted such a move.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is thought to have urged the Queen to change her mind about Blair’s knighthood.

Now Starmer has completed Blair’s public resurrection. To many this will seem an astonishing decision.

Starmer must have known that his new alliance with Blair would estrange many idealistic Labour supporters who despise the former prime minister.

In this article, I will examine the reasoning behind Starmer’s decision to bring Blair back into the heart of Labour politics.

Election winner

First, there is no getting away from the fact that Blair is, quite simply, the most successful leader in the history of the British Labour Party.

Before Blair’s famous 1997 victory, Labour had lost four elections in a row – 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992.

Blair won three handsome victories in a row – 1997, 2001 and 2005 – before being forced out of office in an internal coup masterminded by supporters of Gordon Brown.

Since then Labour has suffered four more straight defeats – 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019.

Politics is ultimately about winning. Starmer may have concluded that he does not want Labour to lose a fifth general election in a row, and that he wants a proven winner like Blair by his side.

A reasonable calculation.

He knows that Blair became a winner by forging an unbeatable electoral alliance between traditional Labour voters and the aspirant middle classes who have historically voted Tory.

He wants to repeat that magic combination. Another reasonable calculation.

I guess Starmer calculates that the Iraq War is now history.

The invasion took place, after all, before some of the young people who will vote in this week’s local elections were even born.

And I am sure he personally recalls how at its best Blair’s New Labour offered hope and a radiant national optimism, and wants to recreate that.

Understandable grounds for assuming that bringing Blair back from his political graveyard will resurrect Labour’s fortunes.

New Labour is history

But there are also powerful arguments for leaving Blair unmolested in the mausoleum of disgraced political leaders.

First, the New Labour era is long gone.

Back in 1997 when Blair stormed to power, Britain enjoyed its strongest economy since World War Two.

Today we face inflation and recession – and with recession comes desperately hard economic choices of the kind that Blair never faced.

Also the demographics have changed beyond recognition. Blair won power by taking working-class voters in traditional Labour areas for granted.

His successors have paid the price for that betrayal – those working-class voters have fled to the Tories.

Most important of all, the political argument has changed beyond recognition.

Boris Johnson has emerged as the sleaziest and most deceitful British prime minister in more than a century – so much so that he fills many voters with disgust.

Starmer’s best hope of fighting an amoral chancer like Johnson is to project himself to voters as a man of honour and decency.

There’s zero chance of doing that with Blair by his side.

The biggest lie

Blair never lied with the fluency, frequency and lack of shame for which Johnson has become notorious.

But there’s no getting away from the fact he is responsible for the biggest and worst political lie in modern history: the claim that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Blair needed to tell that lie in order to justify sending British forces to fight in what was otherwise an illegal war.

There were no weapons of mass destruction, and most good judges accept that the war was illegal as well as a catastrophe for millions.

With Blair beside him, Starmer can no longer claim to be a man of honesty and integrity.

He has therefore thrown away an electoral trump card.

All the more so because Starmer has not just bought into Tony Blair personally. He’s swallowed whole the New Labour concept that Blair brought to Downing Street.

As political journalist Oliver Eagleton makes plain in an outstanding new book, The Starmer Project, Starmer has revived the slavish Atlanticism which was a core feature of the Blair era.

Old guard

Meanwhile, Starmer has become dependent on the Blairite old guard.

Blairite heavyweight David Blunkett sits on Labour’s “council of skills”. Blairite spokesperson Matthew Doyle has been enlisted as communications director. New Labour pollster Deborah Mattinson is back as Starmer’s strategist.

Eagleton states that Peter Mandelson, whose name is synonymous with New Labour manipulation and deceit, has been “recruited as an informal adviser”.

That does alarm and surprise me.

Eagleton reveals that Starmer has even asked Lord Falconer – another core member of the Blairite inner circle – to give him “introductory seminars in economics”.

By modelling himself on “New Labour”, Starmer is fighting a war with an obsolete political technology that’s a quarter of a century old.

He may find – to paraphrase Karl Marx – that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then for a second time as farce.

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Peter Oborne won best commentary/blogging in both 2022 and 2017, and was also named freelancer of the year in 2016 at the Drum Online Media Awards for articles he wrote for Middle East Eye. He was also named as British Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2013. He resigned as chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015. His latest book, The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism, was published in February 2021 and was a Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller. His previous books include The Triumph of the Political Class, The Rise of Political Lying, and Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran.

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***

 

 

Oliver Stone on Facebook writes that rabid anti-Russian propaganda has set the stage for a false flag low-yield nuclear explosion in Ukraine that the world has been trained to interpret as Russia’s doing. The success of Washington’s perception war and saturation of the CNN/Fox airwaves with condemnation of Russia could lead to hopes that a false flag nuclear event would bring down Putin’s government.  A new Yeltsin installed would return Russia to Washington’s control and leave China, alone, as the next target.  Such an event is not a fantasy.  It is an expression of Stone’s understanding of the neoconservatives commitment to Washington’s hegemony.  Biden officials have made it clear that they are at war with Russia, using Ukraine as a proxy, with the goal of exhausting Russia into weakness and disposing of Putin.  

A false flag event is not the only avenue to nuclear war.  The expansion of NATO to Finland and Sweden is another.  Washington is not only pressuring the governments to apply for NATO membership but also is bribing Swedish and Finnish government officials to do so.  

Think about this expansion of NATO for a minute.  One reason for Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is the stark refusal of Washington and NATO to take Russia’s security concerns seriously.  Ukraine’s membership in NATO is totally unacceptable to Russia, so why was it pushed?  With Western intervention in Ukraine threatening to spin the conflict out of control, why pour gasoline on the fire by bringing Sweden and Finland into NATO?  Currently Scandinavia and the Baltics are nuclear free.  Finland’s entry into NATO would bring more NATO to Russia’s border, a development that the Kremlin has declared as unacceptable. By piling on more provocations, Washington and NATO are intentionally widening a conflict that was deliberately provoked.

Clearly, it is irresponsible for Finland and Sweden to further destabilize the situation by joining NATO.  Dmitry Medvedev has made it clear that NATO membership would mean the end of the nuclear-free Baltic.  More NATO on Russia’s border creates an imbalance that Russia would have to correct with deployment of hypersonic nuclear missiles.  How can it be possible for the governments of Finland and Sweden to regard NATO membership as an increase in security when the result is to have their countries targeted with nuclear weapons? Finland and Sweden are in no danger of being attacked by Russia unless they join NATO.  No one in their right mind would see NATO membership for Finland and Sweden as anything but a reckless act of destabilization.  Like Switzerland, Finland and Sweden have benefitted from their neutrality.  It is nonsensical for them to turn themselves into nuclear targets.

Everyone needs to understand that the neoconservatives’ ideology of hegemony is an expansionist ideology. It is the American Empire that is expanding toward Russia, not Russia expanding into the West.  It is truly amazing how opposite from the truth the anti-Russian propaganda is.  Sooner or later the Kremlin will comprehend that Russia’s enemies are the American neoconservatives and that the pressure point on the neoconservatives is Israel.

As my audience knows, I have been concerned for years that Russia’s low-key response to provocations brings about more and more dangerous provocations that eventually will bring Armageddon upon us.  I saw recently that the Chinese government thinks similarly when a Chinese spokesman said that China can accept no provocation from Washington as the result would be more and worse provocations.

The Kremlin’s policy of relying on reason, negotiations, and good will has not been reciprocated by the West.  The Kremlin’s limited military operation in Ukraine was not of sufficient ferocity to convince the West to abandon its policy of provocation.  It seems Washington will continue its provocations until the fatal line is crossed.

*

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Unz Review

---

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102

PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute  

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***

“Abortion on demand is the ultimate State tyranny; the State simply declares that certain classes of human beings are not persons, and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law. The State protects the ‘right’ of some people to kill others, just as the courts protected the ‘property rights’ of slave masters in their slaves.”—Ron Paul

The government wants to play god.

It wants the power to decide who lives or dies and whose rights are worthy of protection.

Delve beneath the rhetoric and spin that have turned abortion into a politicized, polarized and propagandized frontline in the culture wars, and you will find a greater menace at work.

Abortion may be front and center in the power struggle between the Left and the Right over who has the right to decide—the government or the individual—when it comes to bodily autonomy, the right to privacy, sexual freedom, the rights of the unborn, and property interests in one’s body, but there’s so much more going on here.

The Left would suggest that unborn babies do not have constitutional rights and the only right that matters is a woman’s right to privacy in choosing whether or not to abort a pregnancy. The Right, while fixated on saving the lives of unborn babies, seems less concerned about what happens to those lives from birth to death.

What few seem willing to address is that in the 30 years since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade, the government has come to believe that it not only has the power to determine who is deserving of constitutional rights in the eyes of the law but it also has the authority to deny those rights to an American citizen.

This is how the abortion debate—a politicized tug-of-war over when an unborn child is considered a human being with rights—plays into the police state’s hands by laying the groundwork for discussions about who else may or may not be deserving of rights.

Even if (as a leaked draft opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization suggests) the Supreme Court overturns its earlier rulings recognizing abortion as a constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment, that will not resolve the larger problem that plagues us today: namely, that all along the spectrum of life—from the unborn child to the aged—the government continues to play fast and loose with the lives of the citizenry.

Take a good, hard look at the many ways in which Americans are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

American families who have their dogs shot, their homes trashed and their children terrorized or, worse, killed by errant SWAT team raids in the middle of the night are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Disabled individuals who are being strip searched, handcuffed, arrested and “diagnosed” by police as dangerous or mentally unstable merely because they stutter and walk unevenly are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

School-aged children as young as 4-years-old who are leg shackled, handcuffed and strip searched for violating school zero tolerance policies by chewing a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun and playing an imaginary game of cops and robbers, or engaging in childish behavior such as crying or jumping are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Unarmed citizens who are tasered or shot by police for daring to hesitate, stutter, move a muscle, flee or disagree in any way with a police order are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Likewise, Americans—young and old alike—who are shot by police because they pointed a garden hose at a police officer, reached for their registration in their glove box, relied upon a cane to steady themselves, or were seen playing with air rifles or BB guns are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Female motorists who are unlucky enough to be pulled over for a questionable traffic infraction only to be subjected by police to cavity searches by the side of the road are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Male pedestrians and motorists alike who are being subjected to roadside strip searches and rectal probesby police based largely on the color of their skin are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

American citizens subjected to government surveillance whereby their phone calls are being listened in on, their mail and text messages read, their movements tracked and their transactions monitored are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Homeowners who are being fined and arrested for raising chickens in their backyard, allowing the grass in their front yards to grow too long, and holding Bible studies in their homes are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Decorated military veterans who are being arrested for criticizing the government on social media such as Facebook are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Homeless individuals who are being harassed, arrested and run out of towns by laws that criminalize homelessness are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Individuals whose DNA has been forcibly collected and entered into federal and state law enforcement databases whether or not they have been convicted of any crime are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Drivers whose license plates are being scanned, uploaded to a police database and used to map their movements, whether or not they are suspected of any crime, are being denied their rights under the Constitution. The same goes for drivers who are being ticketed for running afoul of red light cameras without any real opportunity to defend themselves against such a charge are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Protesters and activists who are being labeled domestic terrorists and extremists and accused of hate crimes for speaking freely are being denied their rights under the Constitution. Likewise, American citizens who being targeted for assassination by drone strikes abroad without having been charged, tried and convicted of treason are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Hard-working Americans whose bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash are seized by police(operating according to asset forfeiture schemes that provide profit incentives for highway robbery) are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

So, what is the common denominator here?

These are all American citizens—endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, rights that no person or government can take away from them, among these the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—and they are all being oppressed in one way or another by a government that has grown drunk on power, money and its own authority.

If the government—be it the President, Congress, the courts or any federal, state or local agent or agency—can decide that any person has no rights, then that person becomes less than a citizen, less than human, less than deserving of respect, dignity, civility and bodily integrity. He or she becomes an “it,” a faceless number that can be tallied and tracked, a quantifiable mass of cells that can be discarded without conscience, an expendable cost that can be written off without a second thought, or an animal that can be bought, sold, branded, chained, caged, bred, neutered and euthanized at will.

It’s a slippery slope that justifies all manner of violations in the name of national security, the interest of the state and the so-called greater good.

Yet those who founded this country believed that what we conceive of as our rights were given to us by God—we are created equal, according to the nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence—and that government cannot create, nor can it extinguish our God-given rights. To do so would be to anoint the government with god-like powers and elevate it above the citizenry.

Unfortunately, we have been dancing with this particular devil for quite some time now.

If we continue to wait for the government to restore our freedoms, respect our rights, rein in its abuses and restrain its agents from riding roughshod over our lives, our liberty and our happiness, then we will be waiting forever.

Already, the politicos are beating the war drums to herald the next phase of the abortion wars.

President Biden wants voters to elect more pro-abortion rights officials to ensure that “a woman’s right to choose is fundamental.” The Senate plans to vote to codify the right to an abortion into federal law. Chief Justice John G. Roberts is opening an investigation into how the Supreme Court’s draft abortion ruling was leaked. And polling indicates that the majority of the American people want abortion to remain legal.

Like clockwork, we find ourselves smack dab in the middle of yet another political circus that could get scary, ugly and overwhelming really fast.

Before you get too distracted by this conveniently timed diversion that has everyone forgetting about spiking gas prices, inflation, housing shortages, and warring empires, remind yourself that no matter how the Supreme Court rules in Dobbs, it will not resolve the problem of a culture that values life based on a sliding scale.  Nor will it help us navigate the moral, ethical and scientific minefields that await us as technology and humanity move ever closer to a point of singularity.

Humanity is being propelled at warp speed into a whole new frontier when it comes to privacy, bodily autonomy, and what it means to be a human being. As such, we haven’t even begun to wrap our heads around how present-day legal debates over bodily autonomy, privacy, vaccine mandates, the death penalty, and abortion play into future discussions about singularity, artificial intelligence, cloning, and the privacy rights of the individual in the face of increasingly invasive, intrusive and unavoidable government technologies.

Yet here is what I know.

Life is an inalienable right.

By allowing the government to decide who or what is deserving of rights, it shifts the entire discussion from one in which we are “endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights” (that of life, liberty property and the pursuit of happiness) to one in which only those favored by the government get to enjoy such rights.

If all people are created equal, then all lives should be equally worthy of protection.

There’s an idea embraced by both the Right and the Left according to their biases that there is a hierarchy to life, with some lives worthier of protection than others, but there is no hierarchy of freedoms.

All freedoms hang together.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we must never stop working to protect life, preserve our freedoms and maintain some semblance of our humanity.

Freedom cannot be a piece-meal venture.

*

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

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

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

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

Pope Francis has suggested to Italian daily Corriere Della Sera that the “barking of NATO at the door of Russia” provoked the military operation in Ukraine and alluded that countries should not supply Ukraine with more arms. Specifically, the Pope said that Russia has “an anger that I don’t know whether it was provoked but was perhaps facilitated” by NATO’s unrelenting expansion towards the Eurasian Giant.

Although Pope Francis denounced the Russian military operation and has concern for civilians, he has refrained from naming Moscow as an aggressor – a reflection of the Vatican’s tradition of neutrality and his own ambition to improve relations with the Russian Orthodox Church.

“In Ukraine, it was other states that created the conflict,” Pope Francis said in the interview without naming any specific states. He did highlight though that those foreign states fomented conflict and suffering in “Syria, Yemen, Iraq, one war after another in Africa.”

“I don’t know how to answer—I am too far away—whether it is right to supply the Ukrainians” with weapons, the Pope said. “What’s clear is that in this land, arms are being tested… Wars are fought for this: to test the arms we have made.”

It is recalled that Kiev has criticized the Pope for describing their conflict with Russia as “fratricidal,” which they have said downplays Moscow’s aggression. At the same time, the Pope expressed his desire to visit Ukraine, but said he wanted to travel to Moscow first to meet with President Vladimir Putin to appeal for an end to the war. However, at this time, the Kremlin has not responded to the offer.

Although Pope Francis is the spiritual chief for 1.3 billion Catholic Christians around the world, this does not correspond with political leadership or influence. Take for example President Joe Biden, described by NBC News as “America’s most prominent Catholic” and only the second Catholic president in the US after JFK. It is highly unlikely that Biden will entertain the Pope’s suggestion that NATO forced Russia’s hand against Ukraine.

In fact, Pope Francis has had very little influence over events in Ukraine. It is recalled that his appeals for an Orthodox Easter truce in Ukraine were ignored, his planned meeting with Patriarch Kirill of Moscow was cancelled, and now evidently a proposed visit to Russia has for now been ignored. The fact is that the Vatican is incapable of making a major mark in geopolitical issues, so for Putin it is less of a priority to meet Pope Francis given the issues Russia has in dealing with a war and severe economic sanctions.

Moscow must also consider though that the Pope does hold significant soft power and moral authority that millions across the world find extremely important. One can only imagine that the Polish people, in which 87% identify as Roman Catholic, a near equal amount oppose Putin and 94% support NATO, must be in a conundrum as they try to reconcile the fact that their spiritual leader suggested the Atlantic Alliance provoked Russia’s military response against Ukraine – something in complete opposition to what the Polish media and political establishment claim.

The Pope has caused a sensation across Western media, with many mainstream outlets shocked that he had made such a comment. However, the fact that he highlighted that the “barking of NATO at the door of Russia” could have provoked the war in Ukraine should not be controversial as Moscow had repeatedly warned that it would not tolerate threats to its national security at its border. NATO has been unrelenting in its pursuit to expand membership to Russia’s borders, even to the point of emboldening Georgia despite the country having no realistic prospect for membership, thus sparking the 2008 Russo-Georgian War.

Although Pope Francis has found himself in a position of having Western media demand to explain his refusal to “call out Russia or President Vladimir Putin by name”— it must be noted that Popes traditionally do not make such denunciations.

It is also interesting to note though that the Pope seemingly, despite his main focus being the spiritual wellbeing of Catholics, has more of a geopolitical nuance then most Western academics, experts, policymakers and think-tankers on understanding the harsh world we live in – endless provocations will lead to retaliations and responses, something the West ignored but was shocked to discover when Russian soldiers started crossing into Ukraine on February 24.

Although the Pope will have little influence over the course of the war, what his statement has done is spark debate, and perhaps even realization for some, that it was NATO that provoked Russia into war with Ukraine. In this way, the Pope is more of a realist then the liberal and neocon thinkers that dominate Western discourse and policy, and perhaps his comments can instigate a more realist discussion in the West on what led to Russia’s actions against Ukraine – such as the persecution of Russian-speakers in Ukraine, Kiev’s ambition for NATO membership and nuclear weapons, and operating bioweapon labs near Russia’s border.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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***

What has the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board — or rather, the Biden Administration’s Ministry Of Truth — been up to since its founding? 

Nobody really knows, but the timeline of its creation coincides with increasingly disturbing activities launched within Homeland Security to target not Russians, but American citizens. Far from targeting foreign disinformation or anything of the sort, the activities of DHS have increasingly focused on targeting and surveilling domestic dissent.

We only know about the Truth Ministry’s origin timeline because its appointed leader, progressive activist Nina Jankowicz, revealed as much on Twitter.

Cat's out of the bag: here's what I've been up to the past two months, and why I've been a bit quiet on here.

Honored to be serving in the Biden Administration @DHSgov and helping shape our counter-disinformation efforts. https://t.co/uN20vl7qqV pic.twitter.com/JEn4FqLdck

— Nina Jankowicz 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@wiczipedia) April 27, 2022

Prior to the announcement from DHS last week, there was no sign of such a Disinformation Governance Board outfit operating within the federal bureaucracy, but there are clues, and a track record of similar outfits that may have served as predecessors to the current namesake.

If you’re looking for answers from the government, you’re not going to get any. The people in charge of the Truth Ministry unsurprisingly have no intention of being honest about its founding, function, and leadership.

In an interview over the weekend, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Jankowicz’s boss, claimed she was “eminently qualified,” a “renowned expert,” and politically “neutral.”

The neutral claim is laughably absurd, as Jankowicz has openly campaigned for democrat politicians, most notably, the notorious disinformation launderer that is Hillary Clinton. Jankowicz appears to have personal and professional ties to the Clinton cartel, through her work as a Fulbright-Clinton fellow, a job that included her serving as an adviser to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry.

Civic duty = ✔️ #SuperTuesday #VAprimary #ImWithHer #HillYes pic.twitter.com/Gb45APhrcA

— Nina Jankowicz 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@wiczipedia) March 1, 2016

Thrilled to be headed to #Ukraine this fall as a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellow! @FulbrightPrgrm pic.twitter.com/9y2aglUjor

— Nina Jankowicz 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@wiczipedia) June 14, 2016

In my grandfather’s memory & as a Polish-American, I’m proud to support @HillaryClinton. https://t.co/22L4jwjtSs pic.twitter.com/Iruvq08RKR

— Nina Jankowicz 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@wiczipedia) August 2, 2016

Now that any sane person can clearly establish that Jankowicz is a political activist who has no interest in separating truth from “disinformation,” let’s get back to the DHS component.

DHS claims the Disinformation Governance Board, led by Russia specialist Jankowicz, has a primary mission that will focus on tackling misinformation that leads to migrant surges at the U.S. southern border, in addition to combatting supposed disinformation coming from Russia. It is unclear why Jankowicz would lead an organization that ostensibly targets non-english speaking Latin American residents, given the fact that she has no established familiarity with the languages spoken by the vast majority of migrants.

Additionally, it is the State Department that has traditionally held the role of managing propaganda and counter propaganda operations, especially when it comes to Eastern Europe and Russia, which is the niche focus of Jankowicz’s career thus far.

Perhaps the real target of the Ministry of Truth is the American people, specifically, Americans who don’t conform with the Current Thing.

The campaigns took a rabidly aggressive posture against peaceful American political opposition in late 2021, when DHS infamously issued a series of memos classifying opponents of COVID lockdowns as potential “domestic violent extremists.”

DHS also warned about these so-called extremists discussing “conspiracy theories concerning the origins of COVID-19 and effectiveness of vaccines,” despite the “vaccines” not actually working and the origins of COVID-19 being repeatedly covered up by the federal bureaucracy.

At around the same time of the Truth Ministry’s apparent founding, DHS was continuing to issue increasingly noxious bulletins targeting not foreigners, but American citizens, classing them as disinformation agents and potential violent extremists.

A possible predecessor to the Disinformation Governance Board is an outfit that sprung up in February called the “Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation (MDM) team,” which was tasked with “building national resilience to MDM and foreign influence activities.” The MDM team was established at DHS through the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which, most notably, is in charge of overseeing “election integrity” issues.

In February, at around the same time as the apparent founding of the Disinformation Governance Board, DHS likened opposition to lockdowns as a sign of likely terrorist behavior. In fact, the most notable aspect of a domestic terrorist is a person who will “sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions,” DHS said.

DHS memo

“COVID-19 mitigation measures—particularly COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates—have been used by domestic violent extremists to justify violence since 2020 and could continue to inspire these extremists to target government, healthcare, and academic institutions that they associate with those measures,” the memo adds.

DHS memo

DHS memo

It continues, claiming that those who disseminate what is described as “false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19” are the signs of a likely terrorist.

There is no public track record for the Disinformation Governance Board, but many hints are pointing to the reality of an organization established to continue surveilling and harassing the Biden Administration’s domestic political opposition, under the guise of “fighting disinformation.” Whether it’s a war in Ukraine or your next mRNA COVID shot, you better be on the right side of their Current Thing, or you might just be labeled a potential violent extremist terrorist. And the Ministry of Truth will serve as a complimentary instrument for that system.

*

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***

 

Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) should examine the charitable status of B’nai Brith Canada that demonizes and attempts to destroy Canadians, especially the vulnerable Palestinian and Muslim communities, who strongly oppose the Crime of Apartheid.

On April 30, thousands of protesters rallied in Toronto to oppose apartheid Israel’s systemic discrimination, ethnic cleansing and war crimes against the Indigenous Palestinian Semitic people.

Israel’s Nation-State Law enshrines supremacy against its 2 million Palestinians citizens; Israel also denies any civil or human rights to the 5 million Palestinians under its occupation and prevents 6 million exiled Palestinian refugees from returning to their homeland.

Today, numerous public figures, institutions and human rights organizations worldwide – including Israel’s leading human rights organization B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and UN Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council, Canadian Professor Michael Lynk – recognize that Israel is guilty of committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of apartheid against the indigenous Palestinian Semitic people.

Leading the march were Jewish rabbis and Muslim Imams. Speakers at the rally included Suzanne Weiss, a survivor of the Holocaust, and Dovid Feldman Chief Rabbi of Neturei Karta (Orthodox Jews United against Zionism) whose speech was read on his behalf because it was a Sabbath.

Below are some of the posters carried by some Rabbis at the rally:

• Jews Worldwide Mourn 74 years Existence of “Israel”
• Judaism Condemns the State of “Israel” And its Atrocities
• Torah Demands ALL PALESTINE be returned to Palestinian Sovereignty

Following the rally B’nai Brith unleashed a false and misleading campaign against those mosques whose worshippers participated in a rally opposing apartheid Israel by accusing them of hatred of Jews, even though 4 Rabbis leading the march and 3 of the main speakers at the rally, including a Chief Rabbi, were Jews.

By spreading false and misleading information that demonizes and attempts to silence Muslim Canadians, B’nai Brith may be contributing to more violent racist attacks against Muslim Canadians and their places of worship similar to the 2021 London attack that killed 4 members of a Muslim family, and the 2017 deadly mosque attack in Quebec City that killed 6 worshippers.

Israel falsely claims it represents World Jewry to silence critics of its war crimes and its crime against humanity of apartheid.

While parroting Israel’s false claim, B’nai Brith avoided attacking the Rabbis who led the march and the Jewish speakers at the rally and only accused Muslim participants of hatred of Jews.

By supporting Israel’s false claim that it represents World Jewry and that those who oppose apartheid hate Jews, B’nai Brith is demonizing Muslim Canadians who took part in the rally and, more worryingly, is providing justification for racists to blame Jews for the war crimes and the crime of apartheid that Israel has been found guilty of committing against the Palestinian people.

Canadian and international recognition that Israel is an apartheid state is the first step toward dismantling apartheid. This is why supporters of apartheid Israel like B’nai Brith are panicking and desperately resorting to any means to silence opponents of apartheid.

Instead of defending the human rights of all Canadians, B’nai Brith spends its energy trying to silence and destroy those voices of justice that oppose apartheid.

Canadian taxpayers must not be forced to subsidize the promotion of hatred against anyone, especially the vulnerable Palestinian and Muslim communities, who oppose the crime against humanity of apartheid.

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This article was originally published on One Democratic State.

Khaled Mouammar is a Christian Palestinian Canadian who was forced to flee his hometown Nazareth in 1948. He is one of the founders of the Canadian Arab Federation and a former member of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. He received the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Award from the Governor General of Canada in 1977.

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***

Portions of my work were plagiarised in the infamous ‘intelligence dossier’ that presaged the disastrous 2003 invasion – its roots can be traced back to a meeting in Texas a year earlier

*

Last week, Middle East Eye published a secret memo about an April 2002 meeting between former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former US President George W Bush in Crawford, Texas.

What is revealing about the memo is how determined both leaders were to invade Iraq at that point, abandoning all pretences at seeking a diplomatic solution. They also acknowledged how important it was to win over public opinion for an invasion.

It was a meeting in which Iraq’s fate was sealed. It was also a meeting that would propel me to infamy in February 2003. From Texas, a series of events transpired that landed me in the British parliament in June 2003, where I testified against Blair and this very campaign.

Even nearly two decades after the Iraq War was launched, this memo is revelatory. The role of the media was crucial for the US government and American domestic opinion during the Vietnam War, the 1991 Gulf War, and the conflicts in Somalia and Bosnia in the 90s.

This memo acknowledges the importance of the media battle. Yet, by the 21st century, the arena had evolved. The political theatre, managed by both the US and UK, involved global public opinion, 24-hour news cycles, the internet, Al Jazeera, the UN, and me, an Oxford student whose doctoral research was plagiarised in the rush to go to war.

‘The PR aspect’

David Manning, then Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser, accompanied the British leader to the US president’s ranch in Crawford in 2002 and wrote up a memo of what transpired. While the two heads of state appeared to have made up their minds to wage war on Iraq close to a year before the 2003 invasion, the rationale was not explicit. The memo makes no mention of securing oil, establishing a democratic Iraq, or using the invasion as a means to end terrorism.

They did not even broach top-secret military strategy. A small group within US Central Command had been secretly exploring options for invading Iraq.

While the decision to go to war had been made before the military aspects were planned, the media battleground had to be handled. “Bush accepted we needed to manage the PR aspect of all this with great care,” the memo stated, adding that both leaders agreed the public relations strategy must highlight “the risks of Saddam’s WMD [weapons of mass destruction] programme and his appalling human rights record”.

The Blair government ultimately released a pair of “intelligence dossiers” to this end, aiming to sway public opinion, both domestic and international, and the UK parliament’s vote for war. The first was released in September 2002, focusing on Iraq’s alleged WMD programme.

In that April 2002 meeting, Blair had expected Saddam to stymie the efforts of UN weapons inspectors who would be dispatched months later. Inspections were more spectacle than genuine disarmament: “If, as [Blair] expected, Saddam failed to [cooperate], the Europeans would find it very much harder to resist the logic that we must take action to deal with an evil regime that threatens us with its WMD programme,” the memo noted.

The threatening nature of Iraq’s WMD programme was exaggerated in the September 2002 dossier, which claimed that such munitions could be prepared and launched in 45 minutes against British interests. This claim would generate significant controversy in July 2003, claiming the life of a government scientist, David Kelly, who was engulfed in a media storm and eventually found dead in an apparent suicide.

Architects of war

The second dossier focused on the myriad of secret police and spy agencies that violated the human rights of Iraqis and took part in WMD concealment. Blair had given that dossier to then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell in January 2003, and Powell referenced it during his February 2003 presentation to the UN on Iraq’s alleged WMD programme.

The issuance of these dossiers and the British and American attempts to sway the UN can be traced back to the Crawford meeting. The memo states, referring to the PR campaign: “The PM said this approach would be important in managing European public opinion and in helping the President construct an international coalition.”

The dossiers were not secret, but were meant to be UK “intelligence reports” released to media organisations and the public. The UN was key to the goal to “construct an international coalition”.

Following Powell’s presentation, Jon Snow of Channel 4 News revealed that whole sections of the 2003 dossier were copied off the internet by the British government from an online article I published, based on my Oxford PhD – including my grammatical mistakes. Today, the memo from 2002 has provided me with a glimpse of how these events unfolded.

When Channel 4 released the plagiarism story, it was assumed that UK intelligence services, such as MI6, had produced the dossier. In fact, it was produced under the aegis of Blair’s then-communications director, Alastair Campbell.

The memo’s emphasis on the need to win over the media and public opinion explains why Campbell’s office was involved. This unit in the Blair administration had crafted and molded “intelligence”, and during the rush of meeting the 24-hour news cycle, mistakes were made.

The memo released by MEE underscores that the case for war was not based on an unaltered intelligence analysis, which mistakenly assessed that Iraq had WMDs. From the onset of the Crawford meeting, the architects of the war had planned for a media campaign devoted to the appearance of WMDs in Iraq to legitimise an invasion. If intelligence or UN inspections would later support their claim, all the better. Regardless, the determination to go to war had been decided in Texas.

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Ibrahim al-Marashi is associate professor of Middle East history at California State University San Marcos. His publications include Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History (2008), The Modern History of Iraq (2017), and A Concise History of the Middle East (forthcoming).

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***

There is a fundamental paradox within NATO between rights and responsibilities that has often been misinterpreted. From NATO’s perspective, the priority of a country’s accession to the alliance is not the right of that country to have the alliance’s protection, but on the contrary: the decisive imperative is the responsibility that NATO takes on itself to go to war when one of its member states is attacked. That and nothing else is at the heart of Article 5.

In other words, it is not the Swedish members of parliament who now want to vote for NATO membership who should ultimately decide when Sweden will go to war and against whom. It will be NATO. If another NATO member state other than Sweden is attack, Sweden would be obliged to go to war.

Nevertheless, in the context of several wars in which NATO members have been involved in recent decades, there are also exceptions to the principle of solidarity and mutual assistance.

It happened, for example, when a Russian bomber was shot down by NATO country Turkey in November 2016. According to Swedish media it would have been a casus-belli type of incident, because, according to Turkey, it occurred over Turkish territory while Russia said the plane was in Syrian airspace.

It was reported that Ankara had asked its NATO allies “to invoke Article 5 to help secure Turkey’s border with threats from Syria.” Still, the final decision was, “NATO stands with Turkey but does not invoke Article 5.”

What reliable guarantee from NATO would there be if a similar incident were to occur from the Swedish side, and which would be perceived by Russia as provocative, or worse, as casus belli?

Furthermore, it must be remembered that Swedish membership in NATO would place Sweden only about 300 km from Kaliningrad. The “standard” kaliber missiles Russia recently deployed in Kaliningrad have a range of over six times that distance.

In addition to Sweden’s new anti-missile capability, NATO membership could also mean nuclear weapons being placed on Swedish territory. Russia possesses the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear warheads, along with the most destructive ones.

Moscow’s modern hypersonic missile, according to President Joe Biden, is currently “almost impossible to stop.” It is said that Russia’s new RS-28 “Sarmat” — a missile equipped with 10 to 15 MIRVs — can reach Berlin in about 106 seconds, London 202 seconds and Stockholm in 87 seconds.

The Riksdag building. (Christian Gidlof, Wikimedia Commons)

The general starting point in Swedish media is that the only enemy is Russia and the only risk is war with Russia. But Albin Aronsson, security policy analysts at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, tells the Swedish newspaper DN that “the risk of an actual (Russian) military threat is low at the moment.”

Furthermore, for the United States, NATO’s real engine, Russia is by no means the only potential warring nation. For Washington, other countries such as China, or India — and others in Asia, Africa and Latin America that currently support Russia, or refuse to participate in sanctions against Moscow — together constitute a greater economic and military power than NATO.

Should the United States end up in further military confrontations with any, or a group of those countries, would NATO-member Sweden have any opportunity to avoid participating in, or to be the target of, those hyper destructive weapons that unfortunately modern warfare shall bring about?

Of course, Sweden, must safeguard its national integrity, territorially, politically and culturally. But Sweden is made up of family and every single Swede among over 10 million Swedes. It is everyone’s destiny. It is not only the politicians in the Riksdag who must decide what risks there are in NATO membership. Especially when some of these politicians were elected thanks to the opposite platform on NATO-membership.

A Truly Neutral Country

What would benefits the world — and not just Sweden — is that Sweden once again declares its neutral status. As I wrote in DN, seven years ago:

“A closer Swedish co-operation with the USA / NATO does not lead to increased security, but risks making Sweden a primary target in the event of a military conflict. Why not invest in a neutral Sweden that would contribute to increased security not only for the country but also in the region and thereby reduce the risk of war.”

Olof Palme, then Sweden’s prime minister, at May Day rally in Stockholm, circa 1970. (Oiving, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Historically, the Swedish political culture in the time of Prime Minister Olof Palme enabled serious negotiations for peace, geopolitical conflict-solving, as well hosting agreements for international events in the global fight for human health and the environment. In view of the recent re-enactment of cold-war behavior between West and East, aggravated by new sophisticated and destructive arsenals, humankind needs such a forum more than ever before.

For the above reasons, a referendum on the NATO issue, just as it was in the case of Sweden´s EU-membership, must take place. At the same time, the authorities must allow, and encourage, a debate about these matters within Swedish institutions, at work sites, among students, immigrants, academics and all spheres within society.

The most important thing among human rights is the right to live. The most terrible of political actions is to seek the path of lethal confrontation. The most sublime thing is to seek peace. And the most intelligent.

Rough Waters

Some years ago, Sweden becoming “partner” of NATO, DN ran a story about me with the headline “The professor has sailed in dangerous waters.” It referred to my resistance against the fascist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and that I survived capture, imprisonment, and at the end came back to the friendly nest of European anti-imperialist societies exiting at the time.

The Chilean fascists were eventually ousted from power. During my first visit to Russia I was invited to the military parade in Red Square, November 1981. I was in Moscow at the time when a submarine of the Soviet fleet, because of a technical issue, went unintentionally to ashore on the Swedish coast. Although in the middle of the Cold War, the two governments could resolved incident quickly and in a non-dramatic fashion.

Would the same outcome have happened if neutral Sweden were instead a member of NATO? It’s not too late for Sweden to come back to that geopolitical stance. Better secured in its own neutral port, than navigating in waters of confrontation.

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Professor Marcello Ferrada de Noli is founder of Swedish Doctors for Human Rights and chief-editor of the geopolitical magazine The Indicter.

Featured image: Ann Linde, Sweden’s foreign minister, on right during a NATO meeting with Sweden and Finland on April 6.Finland’s Foreign Affairs Minister Pekka Haavisto on left. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in center. (NATO)

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***

 

 

 

Not only Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban but also Croatian President Zoran Milanovic and a Nobel Prize winner have been listed on Myrotvorets, the Ukrainian intelligence database which acts as a hit list.

Sputnik described the website on Monday as a “notorious Ukrainian kill list”. In April 2015, Myrotvorets, [translated as Peacemaker] published the home addresses of Ukrainian writer Oles Buzina and former Verkhovna Rada parliamentarian Oleg Kalashnikov, “just days before they were assassinated,” according to Wikipedia.

Myrotvorets has outed Orban as an “anti-Ukrainian propagandist”. The Hungarian government has spoken out against an oil and gas embargo against Russia. A spokesman told Reuters news agency that Hungary had not changed its mind on the issue. If this veto is retained, a complete EU import ban would be off the table.

The EU think tank Bruegel estimated that before the war Russia exported oil worth 450 million euros to the EU every day. In addition to Hungary, other EU countries such as Greece, Italy and Spain are worried about an oil boycott. They fear that consumer prices would continue to rise as a result. Even if an embargo is decided, it is still completely unclear when the measures will take effect.

On Sunday, Gergely Gulyas, the head of the Hungarian Prime Minister’s Office, confirmed that at least nine European countries opened accounts in rubles at Russian banks to enable gas payments, even if they do not wish to make this public, possibly for fear of being added to the death list.

‘Enemies of Ukraine’

The Ukrainian database publishes the personal data of the “enemies” of Ukraine. Sputnik reported that “several individuals whose names have been posted on the site have been murdered, and rights groups and governments have repeatedly called for it to be taken down”.

“[Orban] is listed as an ‘accomplice of Russian war criminals,’ an ‘accomplice in the crimes of Russian authorities against Ukraine and its citizens’, for his ‘participation in acts of humanitarian aggression against Ukraine,’ as an ‘anti-Ukrainian propagandist,’ and for his general all-round ‘cooperation with the Russian aggressor’.”

“Orban’s specific ‘crimes’ include his refusal to allow weapons intended for Ukraine to be sent through his country’s territory, and his refusal to reject Russian gas supplies even in the long-term. The prime minister’s willingness to pay for Russian gas in rubles is also mentioned.”

Together with Orban, Croatian President Zoran Milanovic also appears on the list. “Milanovic ended up on the list for saying that Croatia will not in any way get involved in the Ukraine crisis in case of its escalation and that it will not deploy its troops there. He has also said that Ukraine does not belong in NATO and that the European Union triggered a coup in Ukraine in 2014 when the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted,” Croatia’s state press agency HINA reported.

The list contains some 187 000 names, including Pink Floyd member Roger Waters, who three years ago said Russia had more rights to Crimea than Ukraine did.

Even Kremlin critic, the Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich is on the list for mentioning that some ethnic Ukrainians had helped Nazis in the persecution of Jews during World War II.

Some 4 500 Western, Ukrainian, and Russian journalists accredited by the authorities of Donbass, a mandatory requirement for working in the area, later received death threats. FWM contributor, Manuel Ochsenreiter, who passed away last year, was one of them.

“The list is very dangerous and should be removed immediately. The tension is already high and it only adds fuel to the fire,” former Human Rights Watch official in Ukraine Yulia Gorbunova noted. The removal of the list has been requested repeatedly by the UN, G7 and EU ambassadors as well as human rights groups, but to no avail, HINA pointed out.

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Featured image: Kremlin critic and Nobel prize winner for literature Svetlana Alexievich is also on the death list ominously called ‘Peacemaker’. Wikipedia

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***

Malcolm X’s daughter and grandson, Fred Hampton’s son and Tupac Shakur, son of Black Panther Party leaders, were among those targeted by deadly counterintelligence operations

On November 18, 2021, a judge exonerated two of the three men convicted of assassinating Malcolm X, partly due to newly revealed FBI documents implicating their paid informants at the scene and cover-up regarding the actual assassins.^[1]

A mass of evidence supports that U.S. intelligence orchestrated Malcolm X’s assassination and the assassination of numerous other Black leaders, along with murderously targeting their descendants. A sampling of these atrocities reveals the use of similar tactics and personnel in this targeting.

Targeted Malcolm X’s Daughter Qubilah, and Grandson Malcolm

Evidence supports that the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), started in the 1950s, directed police intelligence agents to assassinate Malcolm X. FBI documents revealed in the court case exonerating two of the convicted assassins implicated FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover directly in silencing his paid informants at the scene of Malcolm X’s murder.^[2]

Several police intelligence agents have been implicated in Malcolm’s assassination. Convicted Malcolm X assassin Talmadge Hayer detailed in an affidavit that four different people were involved in Malcolm X’s fatal shooting in 1965.^[3] These included William Bradley, a former Green Beret who fired a shotgun at Malcolm, and was identified by eyewitness Roland Sheppard as someone that appeared to then enter his own office at a nearby police station.^[4]

Roland Sheppard said that Bradley had his seat in front of Malcolm X reserved by Eugene Roberts. After the shooting, Roberts ran to Malcolm X’s body as he laid on the floor dying. Roberts worked in Malcolm’s security unit.^[5]

In 1970, Roberts identified himself at a trial as working for the New York Police Department. He admitted working undercover for the FBI-collaborating NYPD Bureau of Special Services and Investigation (BOSSI) at that trial.

Gene Roberts (in circle) was an undercover NYPD detective who infiltrated Malcolm X’s organization and became part of his main security detail. [Source: face2faceafrica.com]

The CIA monitored Malcolm internationally.^[6]

In 1995, the government dropped a murder for hire charge against Malcolm X’s daughter Qubilah Shabazz. Shabazz said her boyfriend had talked her into a conversation about killing Louis Farrakhan for involvement in her father’s assassination. That boyfriend was a longtime government informant, who Shabazz said entrapped her.^[7]

In 1971, activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole thousands of documents, revealing their murderous Counterintelligence Program activities. This led the FBI to officially close COINTELPRO that year.^[8] Former FBI COINTELPRO agent Wes Swearingen revealed in a 1995 memoir that the FBI then continued COINTELPRO activities under different names until at least the mid-1990s when his memoir was published.^[9]

In 2013, Mexican authorities arrested two men for murdering Qubilah Shabazz’s son, 28-year-old Malcolm Shabazz, in Mexico City. Malcolm had become an activist and was meeting with California-based labor movement organizers there. In a blog post earlier that year, Malcolm said he was being harassed by the FBI.^[10]

At that time, Fred Hampton, Jr., whose father headed the Illinois Black Panther Party, said he and Malcolm Shabazz had planned a “Legacy Tour” schedule of events speaking together in many cities.

Fred Hampton, Jr., is National Chairman of the Prisoners of Conscience Committee (and the Panther Cubs). Hampton said that he expelled his Minister of Information J.R. Valrey from his group for continuous sabotage, believing he was a government agent, soon after Shabazz’s death. He said Valrey lured Malcolm Shabazz to the Mexican location where Shabazz was murdered.^[11]

Same Tactics and Personnel Targeted Malcolm, MLK, Panthers, Hampton Jr., Afeni and Tupac

Undercover agent Eugene Roberts was the first to arrive at Malcolm X’s dying body. Malcolm’s wife Betty Shabazz (1934-1997), a nurse, first tried to run to her husband, but was initially held back by Eugene’s wife Joan Roberts. Shabazz then threw her against the wall and ran to her husband.^[12]

At that 1965 assassination, Eugene Roberts reported checking Malcolm X’s pulse. He then told Shabazz that Malcolm was dead.^[13]

Similarly, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s friend, attorney William Pepper, stated in one of his three books covering evidence of the U.S. government’s assassination of MLK, that Military Intelligence undercover agent Marrell McCollough first arrived at MLK’s wounded body in 1968. McCollough checked MLK’s life signs and indicated to Special Forces Group snipers that the assassination was successful and they could disengage. McCullough soon received a promotion to the CIA.^[14]

Eugene Roberts belied his reported love “trying to save” Malcolm X, as his police work continued against Malcolm’s followers, such as Lumumba Shakur in the Harlem, New York, chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968.

In 1969, New York prosecutors indicted 21 New York City area Panther leaders for a trial that concluded in 1971. Roberts and five other undercover police intelligence agents who infiltrated the Harlem and Bronx Black Panthers revealed themselves in court, in an unsuccessful attempt to frame the Panther leaders.^[15]

Panther 21. [Source: newafrikan77.wordpress.com]

Afeni Shakur legally represented herself in court while she was pregnant with her son, future rap icon Tupac Shakur. By the age of 18, Tupac was elected National Chairman of the New Afrikan Panthers, before producing chart-topping CDs and starring in six films.^[16]

After a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by this writer, a Department of Justice worker admitted that the FBI had a file on Tupac containing more than 4,000 pages.^[17]

FBI COINTELPRO Director Richard Held headed the Los Angeles unit when he targeted Tupac’s godfather—Los Angeles Panther leader Geronimo Pratt.^[18] Held then directed the San Francisco Bay Area office and was caught lying about Panther National co-founder Huey Newton’s murder there in 1989.^[19]

Two years later, police choked Tupac unconscious and passively watched strangers shoot at him in the Bay Area a year after that.^[20]

Plainclothes police also shot at Tupac in Atlanta in 1993. Investigating Los Angeles Police Detective Russell Poole believed his fellow police officer killed Tupac at the age of 25 in 1996.^[21] Some 25 years later, his influence continues with a Tupac museum that opened in Los Angeles in January 2022, and top rappers Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Eminem paying tribute to him at their 2022 Super Bowl halftime performance.^[22]

Panther “cub” Tupac was close in age to fellow Panther cub Fred Hampton, Jr. The 2021 Academy Award-winning film, Judas and the Black Messiah, showed how the FBI orchestrated the Chicago police murder of Illinois Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in Chicago in December 1969.^[23]

Source: imdb.com

Chicago police similarly targeted 22-year-old Fred Hampton. Jr., in 1992 when he headed the socialist Democratic Uhuru Movement.

Hampton Jr. said police officer Joseph Grubesette, one of the officers who had arrested his father in 1969, led the arrest of him in 1992, for arson at the time of the Los Angeles riots.^[24]

Chicago police officers carrying out Fred Hampton’s body after he was murdered. [Source: historyat.wordpress.com]

At Hampton’s trial, the judge admitted that no fire occurred but still sentenced Hampton to 18 years in prison. Hampton also reported several attempts to murder him before, during and after his nine-year imprisonment.^[25]

Use of Romantic Undercover Agents and a ‘Threat-Timing’ Tactic

The instance of Malcom X’s daughter Qubilah Shabazz having a boyfriend being paid by the government to entrap her does not appear isolated. Los Angeles Panther leader Geronimo Pratt (later Ji Jaga) wrote a letter to the activist community in 2007 that former National Panther Spokesperson Kathleen Cleaver sent out for him, stating that former Oakland Panther Elaine Brown was an undercover agent.^[26]

Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall (The COINTELPRO Papers), along with former Panther-turned filmmaker Lee Lew Lee (All Power to the People), also quoted many Panthers and showed much evidence supporting Pratt and Cleaver’s report on Brown.

Pratt stated that Brown slept with many Panther leaders and Black nationalist United Slaves (US) leaders, setting up the murders of LA Panther leaders John Huggins and “Bunchy” Carter.^[27]

Source: facebook.com

Brown sued Pratt and Cleaver for defamation but, after the judge read all the evidence, the case was dismissed.^[28]

Similar to Qubilah Shabazz’s boyfriend possibly contributing to her drug problem in the 1990s, Pratt also said Huey Newton told him that Elaine Brown brought beautiful women and cocaine to him shortly after his prison release. This led to Newton’s cocaine abuse.

Evidence similarly supports that Legs Saunders was an undercover agent who entered one-time Harlem Panther leader Afeni Shakur’s life and started her addiction to cocaine. Kenneth “Legs” Saunders (aka Legs McNeil) dealt drugs and “would stick a [crack]pipe in mouth,” every night according to Afeni.^[29]

Legs Saunders was an associate of “Mr. Untouchable”—New York drug lord Nicky Barnes. Barnes assisted the first national “Black drug kingpin,” Frank Matthews. The Justice Department indicted Matthews’ entire network in 1973, but dropped charges on nine of them due to their CIA ties.^[30]

Regarding a possible “threat-timing” tactic, William Pepper emphasized that U.S. Intelligence orchestrated Martin Luther King’s assassination exactly one year after he officially announced his opposition to the Vietnam War.^[31] This apparent tactic engenders a conscious or subconscious warning with regard to an incident whose timing marks the anniversary date of a previous incident.

A gunman assassinated Congo president Laurent Kabila on January 16, 2001. It was on this exact date 40 years earlier that the U.S. aided the assassination of Kabila’s former comrade, Congo’s first independently elected president, Patrice Lumumba, according to CIA documents.^[32]

The late Laurent Kabila. [Source: facebook.com]

It is a wonder if this tactic was not also used when Huey Newton was assassinated exactly one year after he held a press conference from jail stating he refused release unless Geronimo Ji Jaga was released.^[33] Tupac, who idolized Newton, was shot at by strangers in front of passive police exactly three years from the date of Newton’s assassination.^[34]

This puts into question the real cause of death of Malcolm X’s daughter, Malikah Shabazz. She allegedly “died of natural causes” at the age of 56 on November 22, 2021, just four days after a judge exonerated two of her father’s assassins.^[35]

Al Sharpton countered a claim by police of Shabazz having a long-term illness, stating she was active in his National Action Network office that month. In late February 2021, the Shabazz family released a letter from a police officer reporting on FBI and police involvement in Malcolm’s assassination.^[36]

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John Potash is the author of two books: The FBI War on Tupac Shakur (2nd ed), and Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA War on Musicians and Activists. Both books have been made into films. John’s work can be found at johnpotash.com and he can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/18/malcolm-x-assassination-two-men-exonerated 

2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/18/malcolm-x-assassination-two-men-exonerated 
3. https://innocenceproject.org/malcolm-x-murder-innocent-aziz-butler/ 
4. https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/convinced-government-behind-malcolm-x-assassination-article-1.2115770 
5. https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/convinced-government-behind-malcolm-x-assassination-article-1.2115770 and https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-day-malcolm-x-was-killed 
6. Peter Zimroth, Perversions of Justice: The Prosecution and Acquittal of the Panther 21(New York: The Viking Press, 1974), pp. 16, 48. Also see, Murray Kempton, The Briar Patch: The People of the State of New York v. Lumumba Shakur et al. (New York: Dell Publishing, 1973) p. 200. And, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-day-malcolm-x-was-killed 
7. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-05-02-9505030291-story.html 
8. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/band-of-activists-who-burglarized-fbi-office-in-1971-come-forward/2014/01/07/898d9e0c-77b4-11e3-8963-b4b654bcc9b2_story.html 
9. M. Wesley Swearingen, FBI Secrets: An Agent’s Expose (Boston: South End Press, 1995), p. 105. See images of the book and the pages stating this in Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA War on Musicians and Activists (Progressive Left Productions, 2019) at 1:32:16. https://tubitv.com/movies/566779/drugs-as-weapons-against-us [NOTE: In my copy footnote 9 is shown twice.] 
10. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2324011/Mexican-officials-arrest-men-murder-Malcolm-Xs-grandson.html 
11. Personal Interview with Fred Hampton, Jr., in 2013. Note that the Legacy Tour was to stop in Baltimore where this writer was scheduled to introduce Hampton and Shabazz at the event. Fred Hampton, Jr., wrote an Afterword for this writer’s book, The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders, https://www.amazon.com/Tupac-Shakur-Black-Leaders-Intelligences/dp/0979146909 On Hampton Jr.’s account of Valrey’s sabotage, and on Legacy Tour, see http://chairmanfredjr.blogspot.com/p/defection-of-jrcleveland-valrey-jr.html 
12. On Joan Roberts restraining Betty Shabazz and Shabazz throwing her into a wall, see Eugene Roberts’ interview in the 1980s with Elaine Rivera, “Out of the Shadows: The Man Who Spied on Malcolm X,” Newsday, July 23, 1989, cited in James W. Douglass, “The Murder and Martyrdom of Malcolm X,” in James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, eds., Assassinations (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001), p. 413. Roberts said he calmed Joan Roberts down and escorted her to a taxi after the incident, suggesting he was with her but did not take the taxi home with her because he had more to do at the scene. https://www.kennedysandking.com/malcolm-x-articles/the-murder-and-martyrdom-of-malcolm-x 
13. On checking Malcolm X’s pulse, see author Douglas’s interview with Gene Roberts, July 7, 2000, in Douglas, Assassinations, p. 413. On turning to Betty Shabazz and saying Malcolm’s dead, see Kempton, The Briar Patch, pp. 200-203. 
14. William Pepper, Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Time Warner, 1998), pp. 128, 431, 481, 485. 
15. Peter Zimroth, Perversions of Justice: The Prosecution and Acquittal of the Panther 21.(New York: The Viking Press, 1974), pp. 16-17. Also see Kempton, The Briar Patch. Harlem leader Lumumba Shakur and Bronx leaders Zayd Shakur and Sekou Odinga had been part of Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). Also, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/12/08/archives/detective-tells-panther-trial-of-his-attempt-to-save-malcolm-x.html Also on agents infiltrating New York Panthers, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a53648/nypd-undercover-black-radical-groups/
16. RBG| Tupac Shakur Speaks – National Chairman for the New Afrikan Panther Party (1989) pt. 1 of 2, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW8JeFKEAxM On Tupac’s film and music, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur On Afeni Shakur representing herself in court while pregnant, https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/afeni-shakur-took-on-the-state-and-won
17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtVUjTJ5jxQ&t=90s The video shows a Department of Justice letter to this writer at 1:23. Personal interview with Tawanda Monroe of the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, May 9, 2000. The letter from Department of Justice acknowledged this communication and this author’s willingness to pay for the copying fee of $405 (see Monroe). Ms. Monroe also disclosed that they charged 10 cents per page, fitting her “over 4,000 page disclosure. Ms. Monroe originally said “I’m not allowed to tell you how many pages are in that file,” but then stated the number a few minutes later. The Los Angeles FBI File Number for the Tupac Shakur file is 266A-LA-201807. 
18. Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers (Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 142, 153. Also see, http://www.judibari.org/america’s_secret_police.html 
19. Churchill and Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers, pp. 320, 417, 418. 
20. On police choking Tupac unconscious, see “Claim Against the City of Oakland, California, Claimaint: Tupac Shakur” by John Burris, Esq. Photocopied for Jacob Hoye and Karolyn Ali, eds. Tupac: Resurrection (New York: Atria Books, 2003). On police shooting at Tupac, see eyewitness Watani Tyehimba, Personal interview, November 5, 2003. Also from witness interviews–personal interview, Ken Ellis, May 12, 2000. Kathy Scruggs and Scott Marshall, “Witness says off-duty cops fired first shot: Claims rapper’s return fire caused brothers’ wounds.” Atlanta Journal Constitution, November 3, 1993, p. D12. For more, see Tupac’s press conference and testimony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBKq6AZtoF0 and https://rockthebells.com/articles/tupac-shakur-lawsuit/ 
21. This CovertAction Magazine writer interviewed two eyewitnesses on the scene, Tupac’s cousin Billy Lesane and Tupac’s business manager, former Panther Watani Tyehimba, along with attorney Ken Ellis who interviewed several other eyewitnesses. They all said Tupac grabbed one of his security guard’s guns from them and shot back in self-defense. Personal interview, November 5, 2003 Watani Tyehimba; Billy Lesane, April 10, 1999; attorney Ken Ellis, May 12, 2000. The prosecutors’ top witness, Edward Fields, said the police fired at Tupac first, as stated in Scruggs and Marshall, “Witness says off-duty cops fired first shot.” On LA police officers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MamdDXe5fs 
22. https://www.wakemewhenimfree.com/ and https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/dr-dre-pays-homage-tupac-super-bowl-halftime-show-2022-video-1235031053/ 
23. On film, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_and_the_Black_Messiah For more information on Hampton’s life and death, see Jeffrey Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2009). 
24. Fred Hampton, Jr., at Third Black Panther Film Festival, New York, August 1, 2003. Also written about in “Framed! For Defending the Rights of the Black Community,” www.inpdumchicago.com/framed.html . Fred Hampton, Jr,, as told to Heru, “Assassination Attempt on Fred Hampton, Jr.” October 2, 2002, Davey D’s Hip-Hop Corner: the New Source for the Hip-Hop Generation, http://www.daveyd.com/FullArticles/articleN1274.asp 
25. Personal interview, Fred Hampton, Jr., August 1, 2003. Also written about in “Framed! For Defending the Rights of the Black Community,” www.inpdumchicago.com/framed.html . Fred Hampton Jr, as told to Heru, “Assassination Attempt on Fred Hampton,. Jr.” October 2, 2002, Davey D’s Hip-Hop Corner: the New Source for the Hip-Hop Generation, http://www.daveyd.com/FullArticles/articleN1274.asp On pictures of assassination attempts, J.R. “Young Chairman Fred Hampton Jr. Pictorial,” San Francisco Bay, www.sfbayview.com/022603/manyhaveforgotten022603.shtml and on same police officers attacking him as his dad, https://sfbayview.com/2009/12/international-revolutionary-day-the-40th-commemoration-of-the-assassination-of-chairman-fred-hampton-and-defense-captain-mark-clark-of-the-black-panther-party/ 
26. https://drumsintheglobalvillage.com/2007/05/09/was-elaine-brown-an-agent/ 
27. All Power To The People – The Black Panther Party & Beyond, Lee Lew Lee (Electronic News Group, 1996). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKvE6_s0jy0 Churchill and Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers, p. 362, n.131.
28. https://www.courthousenews.com/cant-old-black-panthers-just-get-along/ and https://www.law.com/almID/1202427713045/ 
29. Ronin Ro, Have Gun Will Travel: The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records (New York: Doubleday, 1998), p. 139. Also see, https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/1997/03/tupac-shakur-rap-death 
30. According to a 1976 “Top Secret” Justice Department report. Jefferson Morley, “The Kid Who Sold Crack to the President,” The City Paper, December 15, 1989, p. 31. On Barnes’s acquittals and The New York Times label, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/nyregion/nicky-barnes-dead.html Also see Hank Messick, Of Grass and Snow: The Secret Criminal Elite (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979), p. 148. Both cited in Clarence Lusane, Pipe Dream Blues: Racism and the War on Drugs (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1991), pp. 41-42, notes 76 and 79. Also see https://darkpolitics.wordpress.com/cia-involvement-in-drug-smuggling-part-1/ 
31. Pepper, Orders to Kill, p. 5. On exact year anniversary, also see https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/martin-luther-king-jr-speaks-out-against-the-war 
32. Antoine Roger Lokongo, “Hands Off the Democratic Republic of Congo, Now!” The Burning Spear, October 2003, p. 17. Also heard on Pacifica’s WBAI radio in New York. On CIA assassinating Lumumba, see, for example, DiEugenio and Pease, The Assassinations, pp. 162-3. Also see, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, White Out: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (New York: Verso), excerpted in Dave Greaves, “The CIA, Drugs and Big Media” Our Times Press, September 1998, p. 8. On CIA attempting/aiding Patrice Lumumba assassination, see Mark Mazzetti and Tim Weiner, “ Files on Illegal Spying Show CIA Skeletons from Cold War,” The New York Times, A1, June 27, 2007. Also see https://www.theafricareport.com/58653/drc-how-the-cia-got-under-patrice-lumumbas-skin/ 
33. https://apnews.com/article/17dd8a1dece4f991bd90168f185e372f and https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-08-22-mn-1089-story.html 
34. Marku Reynolds in video, Thug Immortal, Don’t Back Down Productions, 1997. Also, Robert Sam Anson, “To Die Like A Gangsta,” Vanity Fair, March 1997, p. 248, and Connie Bruck, “The Takedown of Tupac,” The New Yorker, July 7, 1997, p. 47. 
35. https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/malcolm-xs-daughter-malikah-shabazz-died-of-natural-causes-medical-examiner/3458134/ 

36. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-malcolm-x-newser/malcolm-xs-family-releases-letter-alleging-fbi-police-role-in-his-death-idUSKBN2AL0FI and https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2021/11/25/malikah-shabazz-the-daughter-of-malcolm-x-and-dr-betty-shabazz-dead-at-56/ 

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In late April, when the UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss called for the creation of a “Global NATO” as part of “a shift in world order”, few seem to have noticed the magnitude of such an announcement. The statement followed calls by US President Joe Biden for a ‘New World Order to be established’ just four weeks prior during his Warsaw speech. The UK Foreign Secretary claimed that the world order established after the Second World War was failing and that the formation of “a global NATO” was necessary to “restore Western and allied ascent” in global affairs.

“My vision is a world where free nations are assertive and in the ascendant. Where freedom and democracy are strengthened through a network of economic and security partnerships.”

She stressed that the UN Security Council and other post-WWII security structures “have been bent out of shape so far, they have enabled rather than contained aggression.” The bending (or outright ignoring) of UN rules to enable aggression on various countries is most certainly true, just not in the way Liz Truss thinks.

The statement comes amid repeated expressions of frustration among many Western leaders that of the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council, the only two non-Western members (China and Russia) blocked resolutions targeting other non-Western countries such as Syria, Zimbabwe, Iran, Sudan, and most recently Russia itself. It follows longstanding calls for a new global governance superstructure, most likely based on NATO, which would allow the West and Western-aligned countries to “assert and coordinate greater power” in global affairs. In other words, a more “optimized” use of the dwindling power of the political West and its vassals while attempting to take control of other countries’ resources.

Truss stressed that under this new form of globalization, access to international security and trade should be made conditional on countries’ political positions. The UK Foreign Secretary stated that “economic access is no longer a given” and that it “has to be earned.” She added that countries who wish to earn it “must play by the rules” and that “this also includes China.” These statements come as Western powers openly threatened they would target Russian shipping in international waters, a move similar to targeting Iran and North Korea. The possibility of targeting Chinese shipping was notably also raised in a US Naval Institute paper two years prior. This effectively amounts to piracy, ever so euphemistically called “enforcement of freedom of navigation”.

In regards to the “Global NATO” and the future targeting of China, Truss emphasized plans to further arm the government in Taipei, in what would be yet another direct move against the People’s Republic of China. Taiwan is universally recognized as a part of China by the United Nations, all UN member states, as well as the constitution of the island itself. However, maintaining state-like institutions and Western-aligned administration there has increasingly been raised as a priority for Western security architecture.

Combined with attempts of a crawling reformation of the UN, the creation of a “Global NATO”, whatever it may be called, would spell a disaster for the security of the world. The North Atlantic Alliance has a dubious security track record, to say the least. Despite being formed as a supposedly “defensive” security pact, the alliance is anything but. It has so far attacked numerous countries, starting with the destruction of former Yugoslavia to invasions and bombings all across the Middle East, stretching from Libya to Afghanistan.

Concurrently, the belligerent alliance is continuing its expansion in Europe, getting ever closer to Russian borders. Despite decades of Russia’s repeated pleas and warnings, NATO refuses to honor the promise given to Mikhail Gorbachev that it would not be expanding “an inch to the east”. The result of such a policy are the tragic events now taking place in Ukraine. Worse yet, the US, as NATO’s leading member, has withdrawn from all arms control agreements, with the exception of the New START, which is set to expire in less than 4 years.

NATO’s aggressive posturing in Europe and the Middle East has pushed the world into another arms race, with Russia being forced to develop a plethora of new types of weapons, most notably hypersonic weapons and new advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles to restore the delicate strategic balance of power. Middle Eastern powers, such as Iran, are forced to spend a large portion of their GDP on the military since the US (and by extension NATO) has been threatening the country for decades. Conflicts in both Ukraine and Syria primarily stem from NATO policies toward Russia and Iran.

This new “Global NATO” is set to spill over this instability into the Asia-Pacific region, which has so far enjoyed a decades-long period of unprecedented peace and prosperity. The crucial part of this growth has been the blistering economic development of China. In order to curb China’s growth, the US first engaged in a massive trade war with the Asian giant. However, with the realization this would only have a very limited effect on China’s growing power, the US and NATO are determined to challenge China militarily, forcing it to spend more on defense, while also fragmenting the Asia-Pacific region along geopolitical lines. Western planners believe this would inevitably lead to economic decoupling, which would negatively affect China’s export-oriented economy and long-term development.

It’s a certainty that countries such as Japan and Australia would be involved in these efforts. However, getting other powers in the region to come on board will be much more problematic. South Korea is too focused on Pyongyang and China’s influence there is still appreciated in Seoul, in addition to extensive economic cooperation. India, for its part, is deemed as “too independent” for the taste of the political West, which now effectively operates under a “you’re either with us or against us” foreign policy framework.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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Important study conducted in Scandinavia confirms the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis resulting from the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine.

Click here to read the full study.

***

Key Points

Question: Is SARS-CoV-2 messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccination associated with risk of myocarditis?

Findings: In a cohort study of 23.1 million residents across 4 Nordic countries, risk of myocarditis after the first and second doses of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines was highest in young males aged 16 to 24 years after the second dose. For young males receiving 2 doses of the same vaccine, data were compatible with between 4 and 7 excess events in 28 days per 100 000 vaccinees after second-dose BNT162b2, and between 9 and 28 per 100 000 vaccinees after second-dose mRNA-1273.

Meaning: The risk of myocarditis in this large cohort study was highest in young males after the second SARS-CoV-2 vaccine dose, and this risk should be balanced against the benefits of protecting against severe COVID-19 disease.

Importance: Reports of myocarditis after SARS-CoV-2 messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccination have emerged.

Objective: To evaluate the risks of myocarditis and pericarditis following SARS-CoV-2 vaccination by vaccine product, vaccination dose number, sex, and age.

Design, Setting, and Participants: Four cohort studies were conducted according to a common protocol, and the results were combined using meta-analysis. Participants were 23 122 522 residents aged 12 years or older. They were followed up from December 27, 2020, until incident myocarditis or pericarditis, censoring, or study end (October 5, 2021). Data on SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations, hospital diagnoses of myocarditis or pericarditis, and covariates for the participants were obtained from linked nationwide health registers in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.

Exposures: The 28-day risk periods after administration date of the first and second doses of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, including BNT162b2, mRNA-1273, and AZD1222 or combinations thereof. A homologous schedule was defined as receiving the same vaccine type for doses 1 and 2.

Main Outcomes and Measures: Incident outcome events were defined as the date of first inpatient hospital admission based on primary or secondary discharge diagnosis for myocarditis or pericarditis from December 27, 2020, onward. Secondary outcome was myocarditis or pericarditis combined from either inpatient or outpatient hospital care. Poisson regression yielded adjusted incidence rate ratios (IRRs) and excess rates with 95% CIs, comparing rates of myocarditis or pericarditis in the 28-day period following vaccination with rates among unvaccinated individuals.

Results: Among 23 122 522 Nordic residents (81% vaccinated by study end; 50.2% female), 1077 incident myocarditis events and 1149 incident pericarditis events were identified. Within the 28-day period, for males and females 12 years or older combined who received a homologous schedule, the second dose was associated with higher risk of myocarditis, with adjusted IRRs of 1.75 (95% CI, 1.43-2.14) for BNT162b2 and 6.57 (95% CI, 4.64-9.28) for mRNA-1273. Among males 16 to 24 years of age, adjusted IRRs were 5.31 (95% CI, 3.68-7.68) for a second dose of BNT162b2 and 13.83 (95% CI, 8.08-23.68) for a second dose of mRNA-1273, and numbers of excess events were 5.55 (95% CI, 3.70-7.39) events per 100 000 vaccinees after the second dose of BNT162b2 and 18.39 (9.05-27.72) events per 100 000 vaccinees after the second dose of mRNA-1273. Estimates for pericarditis were similar.

Conclusions and Relevance: Results of this large cohort study indicated that both first and second doses of mRNA vaccines were associated with increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis. For individuals receiving 2 doses of the same vaccine, risk of myocarditis was highest among young males (aged 16-24 years) after the second dose. These findings are compatible with between 4 and 7 excess events in 28 days per 100 000 vaccinees after BNT162b2, and between 9 and 28 excess events per 100 000 vaccinees after mRNA-1273. This risk should be balanced against the benefits of protecting against severe COVID-19 disease.

The European Medicines Agency and European Commission have, by October 2021, approved 4 vaccines against SARS-CoV-2: BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech), mRNA-1273 (Moderna), AZD1222 (AstraZeneca), and Ad26.COV2.S (Janssen). The Nordic countries have primarily used the 2 messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273. These vaccines have been shown to be efficient and safe, although cases of myocarditis or pericarditis during the first weeks after vaccination have been reported.¹

Case reports, surveillance data, and other reports from the US, Israel, and Canada indicate an increased risk of myocarditis after vaccination with SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines, higher after the second dose, especially in younger men.^2–9 Data from Canada and France indicate more cases of myocarditis after mRNA-1273 than after BNT162b2, but this remains to be elucidated.^10,11

In nationwide cohort studies in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, we evaluated the risks of myocarditis and pericarditis following SARS-CoV-2 vaccination in a combined population of 23.1 million individuals. High-quality nationwide registers enabled us to evaluate the risk by vaccine product, vaccination dose number, sex, and age.

Click here to read the full study.

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As Americans flounder around, trying wrap their minds around the takeover of the Federal Government by unaccountable powers that now enforce the deadly rule of COVID-19, they struggle to find some solution, any solution.

But efforts to inform friends and family of the truth about vaccines and face masks, to push for accountability through the courts and the legislature have been frustrated.

When solutions are available, they are but gifts from the mighty above, and not the result of due process, or the function of government in accord with the Constitution.

Hanley & Pastreich: Launch International 9/11 investigation from Emanuel Pastreich on Vimeo.

The reason that the United States has been overrun with COVID-19 propaganda and that the government acted as a toy of the rich, pushing through policies that have no support, is that the entire system was gutted in the aftermath of 9/11 and a stark tyranny has replaced the flawed republic that once stood behind the halls of government. The United States after 9/11 is a republic in the sense that Disneyland is a republic.

COVID-19 will be replaced by artificial food shortages, planned inflation, the end of money, the promotion of mass surveillance, social credit totalitarian economics, and a host of other strategies for control.

Only when we Americans are ready to go back to the original sin of 9/11 and look at ourselves in the mirror, only when we are ready to take brave action and to cut off the gangrene parts of the Federal government that have metastasized into an enemy within, only then can we make any progress in fighting against the techno-tyrants who call the shots for the narcissistic and indulgent politicians who appear on television.

The 9/11 incident, that is to say the bombing of the World Trade Center, the firing of a projectile in the Pentagon, and the various secret policies carried out to create a shadow government within the Federal government, in cooperation with foreign interests in Israel, in Great Britain, and elsewhere, was the final blow to what remained of republican government in the United States of America.

Our debased culture, from which philosophy, theology, and aesthetics have been expelled, is blind to shifts in governance and policy unless they are immediately visible, unless they are on the evening news.

The 9/11 incident not only reduced large sections of the government to pay-to-play appendages of private equity, it infected universities, newspapers, civic organizations, and even families with a horrific virus of the mind, with a corrupt vision that securing money and being recognized by a criminal system was the highest priority. There is literally no organization left in the United States that works for the national good, or even a concept of what that national good might be.

The pundits and reporters “attribute evil” to specific presidents and to specific policies and engage in a useless debate about the minor and the trivial. The 9/11 incident has become a taboo topic precisely because it introduced a civilizational cancer into the body politic. If we wish to save our children from slavery, or worse, in a dying empire, we had better muster the courage to pull back the curtains and to look directly, with no illusions, at the withered corpse that our nation has become.

Burying the truth and erecting Potemkin villages of the mind to convince us of lies is not an option.

We must be prepared to take action that will be so decisive as to overwhelm the gatekeepers and puppet masters who have skillfully kept us from making progress for decades, leading us down dead ends like the 9/11 Commission, and paying off, or intimidating, authority figures into embracing myths.

What happened?

Truth is the strongest weapon in our arsenal. We will not bring down these monsters by raising more money because they control money, or by building better political networks because they already own them all. We must prove that they are by nature criminal and that the nation itself no longer has legitimacy with regards to the Constitution—that agreement that established the United States as a nation state. That contract without which government is but a criminal syndicate.

The 9/11 attacks were planned in advance by shadowy figures, primary in the military and in intelligence, lurking in the grey territory of contractors, consulting firms and private equity that stretches out between Washington D.C., London, and Tel Aviv. The relationship of figures like Dick Cheney to the attacks are easily confirmed, whereas others have spent fortunes to hide their tracks.

The motivation of the attacks was to create a government in the United States that was owned by the rich and that no longer followed the constitution—essentially an empire belonging to a handful of self-appointed royalty.

The immediate play was to destabilize the entire Middle East, and to topple the governments of all nations that could possibly challenge the hegemony of Israel.

There were some seeped in Zionist, or Christian Zionist, ideology who believed they were offering Israel the promised land in accord with the prophesies of the Bible, and following the directives from the Greater Israel Project (Odin Yinon Plan).

Others wanted to make fortunes from weapons sales in a forever war that would guarantee high returns.

And then there were those who wished to restructure the international community into a new world order in which a tiny handful of elders would decide the fate of humanity.

The military and intelligence contractors, military officers, and various ambiguous actors in Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia (and perhaps a few other places) who made the plans for this false flag operation, using the assets of Mossad, the CIA, the US Department of Defense, M16 and other agencies and private corporations, were many. Like Agatha Christie’s novel Murder on the Orient Express, everyone had a stab. But the operation was highly compartmentalized so as to make it difficult for those on the ground to grasp the full significance of their actions—or at least to give them the feeling that they were not culpable.

Thus those who made the plans for how to reduce the United States to a de facto “military dictatorship” with a passive population addicted to social media and consumption, for how to overthrow the governments of the entire Middle East and make it into Israel’s playpen, for how to create a new global governance model in which corporations and banks owned the entire Earth, that total plan was known only to the few.

Death threats, and real killings, were generously applied, as well as other economic and social punishments, to destroy, or to isolate, those brave souls who demanded the truth.

How did we get here?

Most educated people in the United States, and around the world, only know the fairytale of a handful of Arab Hijackers with box cutters hijacking four planes and taking down three World Trade Center towers, made of reinforced steel and concrete, and blowing up part of the Pentagon. The tale makes no sense. Yet the denial goes on, and on. Many suffer from cognitive dissonance, unable accept the possibility that the United States government was complicit in such a crime.

The psychology of denial is best understood through an analogy to incest.

If there is a fight in a family about money, it may be unpleasant, but it will be out in the open and can be debated, and even resolved. But in the case of incest, family members may go for decades playing stupid, pretending that the incestuous relationship does not exist. Incest is an attack on the family at a more profound level and so family members fall back on denial because the loss of face is too great.

Some Americans adopt the attitude of false pragmatism, convincing themselves that after twenty years the event is ancient history and we should move on. This dangerous attitude ignores the fundamental transformation of governance wrought by those attacks, to onset of totalitarian governance.

The consequence of that irresponsible attitude is COVID-19 in which the fusion of corporations and governments can now not only claim the right to wage endless wars for no reason other than profit, to can spy on citizens, and to control their every action with impunity, but it can also inject whatever substances it wishes into the bodies of citizens and attack the integrity of their genetic code.

There were Americans who were willing to stand up to this travesty from the moment that the twin towers collapsed defiance of the laws of physics any high school graduate could understand. It was clear that the outcry over this crime could not be completely silenced, but that those who were too effective would die mysteriously.

For example, Philip Marshall, published False Flag 911: How Bush, Cheney and the Saudis Created the Post-911 World (2008), The Big Bamboozle: 9/11 and the War on Terror (2012) and he was writing an even more comprehensive book when his neighbors found him, his two children and the family dog shot to death in their home in February, 2013. The police immediately ruled this improbable case as a murder suicide, thus sending an unmistakable message to other seekers of truth as to what awaits them. Among those truth seekers who survived, many have been subject to bogus psychological exams, dismissed from their jobs, and in many cases forced to leave the country.

How do we end the nightmare?

The Federal government based on the Constitution of 1787 was gradually weakened, especially by the first and second world wars. The process sped up after the Kennedy assassination in 1963 when the insiders making a fortune of the national security state made it clear that politicians at the highest level, with wealth and influence, were not immune from retribution.

The decay deepened with the bombing of the Afred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma on April 19, 1995, a grotesque case in which criminal elements in the Federal government played footsie with anti-government forces to create a grey space wherein mass killing could be carried out with impunity.

Since the 9/11 attacks, a giant Homeland Security and National Security Agency bureaucracy has spread its tentacles to every corner of Washington D.C., taking on the unlimited, unconstitutional powers that were granted by the pre-prepared (and hurriedly pushed through congress) Patriot Act (October 26, 2001). Unlimited and unaccountable domestic spying has been the rule, not the exception, ever since.

We must first move beyond this culture of denial and fantasy and recognize that the governments of all the nations of the world are controlled by the rich and powerful and that citizens have access only to information presented by the media and by the schools that is created by multinational corporations to meet the needs of the globalists.

So complete is the control of information, and of all public intellectuals, that citizens have been overwhelmed, forced to embrace the implausible official 9/11 story, for over twenty years.

We must recognize that the only thing to fear is this fear itself. The powerful, through their multinational corporations, and through the politicians and journalists that they keep as pets, have done everything they could to induce fear and loathing among citizens.

If we remain fearful, clinging to what rights the billionaires condescend to grant us, our first amendment rights will be further eroded and the destruction of the Bill of Rights, including freedom from illegal search and seizure, will be assured. We will be left with an American republic only in the sense that Disneyland is a republic.

An International 9/11 Commission

The American 9/11 Commission was a travesty from the start that was intended to mislead and to confuse the public while making it clear to lawyers and politicians that there are certain topics that can never be discussed—a realm in governance that ordinary mortals cannot enter.

Few leaders in the world have dared to question the 9/11 fairytale. They are afraid that they will not get international financing, that they will be put at a disadvantage in trade, or that they personally will not enjoy the chance to grow rich—something assumed to be a natural benefit of political power.

The United Nations has been taken over by billionaires, as has almost every institution of global governance.

Perhaps the first step towards an International 9/11 Commission could start in the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC). After all the 1.8 billion Muslims suffered the most from the post 9/11 wars and they have the greatest incentive to take such a brave step. Once such an investigation is launched, however, it must be global in scale and must include the victims on all sides, including victims of the wars that were justified by, and financed using, the 9/11 incident.

There must be a demand for the full release of all information (declassifying all relevant documents in the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Great Britain, and elsewhere), for the purpose of the criminal prosecution of those responsible. We must assume that this commission will end with the release to the public of the complete story and their seizure of the assets of those who planned, and who profited from, this conspiracy for compensation of victims around the world.

We must create an accountable, transparent, and scientifically administered organization to run this investigation, one that is empowered to convict and to punish the criminals, and to seize assets for compensation.

In a real sense, the international 9/11 commission will be the first accountable form of governance on the planet in the last two decades and can start the great transformation of the corrupt systems of governance based on lies that have become commonplace.

Although Israel is not uniquely responsible for the 9/11 operation, its government is so corrupt, and has such deep links with criminal networks in finance, money laundering, intelligence and even local government around the world as part of a strategy for full-spectrum domination of global governance. There is no solution to the crisis of global governance post-9/11 that ignores the role of Israel.

AIPAC has replaced the US Federal government that was defined by the Constitution at all levels. Private private equity, often closely linked to Israel, controls the media so completely that the actions of Larry Silverstein, Dov Zakheim, Michael Chertoff, and Philip Zelikow (of the 9/11 Commission) cannot be mentioned in the sources that citizens turn to for information.

Part of the process of ending the 9/11 nightmare must involve providing access to reliable scientific information for citizens in the United States, and around the world. The massive consolidation of the media over the last two decades means that 96% of the news we have access to is filtered through six massive media conglomerates which are controlled by BlackRock, Vanguard, Goldman Sachs and other private equity firms, shell companies that conceal the influence of the billionaire class. The media-entertainment cartels must be completely dismantled and citizens given access to accurate information as part of the resolution.

Once we are on track to facing down the 9/11 fraud, we must terminate the deadly lobbying industry that has made bribery of congressmen and federal judges not only legal, but de jure. So also the criminal rackets within the Department of Justice must be rooted out completely.

This process will be painful and humiliating, but there is no other way forward. As President Lincoln demanded in Gettysburg Address, America must have a “new birth of freedom,” and an international 9/11 commission will serve as the midwife.

The failure of educated Americans to resist the drive for tyranny of the few is a sad, and perhaps final, chapter in the history of our republic. The horrific decadence, complacency, and narcissism in our culture made governance by fear possible.

The resulting absence in public discourse and politics of educated Americans is precisely what made the COVID-19 operation, the controlled demolition of the global economy, possible.

Unless we expose the “criminal cabal” that led us to this dangerous valley back in September, 2001, unless we denounce the public figures who caved in to threats and bribes to embrace this vast fabric of lies stretching to the horizon, our children will face a totalitarian government determined to reduce them to submission, step by step, and to pry away from their hands the last fragments of freedom.

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Dan Hanley is director of 9/11 Pilot Whistleblowers.

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.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Greanville Post

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On April 12, US President Joe Biden described the Russian military operation in Ukraine as a “genocide”, two weeks later the Canadian House of Commons adopted a motion recognizing that Moscow has been committing acts of “genocide” against Ukrainians. The Latvian and Estonian parliaments also voted unanimously on April 21 to approve a similar declaration. This is part of a larger trend of demonizing Moscow while silencing on Kiev’s terrible human rights record.

May 2 marks 8 years since the 2014 Odessa Massacre, when Ukrainian ultranationalists forced the anti-Maidan demonstrators into the Trade Unions House and set it on fire, thus killing 42 people. No one has been tried so far. In 2015, the Council of Europe’s International Advisory Panel concluded there was indication of “police complicity” and that Kiev failed to properly investigate the matter.

In today’s war of narratives, much is being said of the humanitarian aspects pertaining to the current conflict between Moscow and Kiev. However, the fact is that in the Western world in general there has not been a fair and balanced press coverage of the situation. Amid a global wave of Russophobia, Russia is portrayed as the sole aggressor to the point of demonization, while the Ukrainian government is depicted in an almost saintly light, without any basis in actual facts.

For instance, this year, on February 18, Kiev started a vicious bombing campaign on the Donbas region, targeting both the Donestk (DPR) and Luganks People’s Republics (LPR). That day alone, the Ukrainian government had attacked at least 47 points along the conflict zone, targeting its own population (from Kiev’s perspective), that is, the population living in the territories it claims as its own. A kindergarten in the Stanytsia Luganska town was targeted, causing the deaths of civilians.

On February 22, an El Pais piece detailed the humanitarian crisis in Donbas. On February 24, CNN reported that Ukrainian forces “destroyed” a large part of the region. This caused lots of Donbas residents to seek refuge in the Rostov Oblast (Russian Federation). Orphanages and schools were evacuated due to the Ukrainian military campaign.

These refugees arriving in Rostov-on-Don City (Russia) received medical care, food and financial aid, and the reception of the families was urgently organized. At the time, LPR authorities denounced that Ukraine’s military regularly broke the cease-fire and shelled Donbas in a series of provocations so as to instigate its People’s Militia into responding, thus creating a pretext for further Ukrainian aggression while NATO kept supplying arms and mercenaries to Kiev thereby further fueling tensions. The week before that, Moscow had withdrawn troops from the region near the border, which should have de-escalated tensions.

Amid the overwhelming flood of news about the crisis, one will have a hard time finding these aforementioned pieces of news in the English-language press, and thus these events become non-events, as if they had never taken place.

For the people of Donbas, however, the war began 8 years ago, in April 2014. It was preceded by the November 2013 Euromaidan demonstrations, which culminated in the February 2014 coup (that illegally removed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych), followed by mass riots in a polarized society and then the so called Maidan Revolution. This development marked the beginning of a series of ultra-nationalist and chauvinistic Ukrainian policies against Russian-speaking populations (in a largely bilingual country) and other ethnic minorities. This far-right wave has brought neo-Nazi groups to power, and, as a result of that, has further alienated large parts of the Eastern Ukraine’s population culminating in a civil war. It has hampered bilateral relations with Poland to some extent – and, more recently, Greek-Ukrainian relationsalso. However, this has not affected Kiev’s relations with Washington.

Moreover, Ukrainian attacks on language and culture and its violence against civilians in Donbass since 2014 have been denounced as genocidal for a while. For years, the Western press did accurately describe Ukraine’s “greatest weapon”, the Azov battalion, as an openly neo-Nazi organization, in contrast to today’s trend of covering-up or minimizing this fact – a trend that can only be described as pro-Ukrainian propaganda war.

From a Russian perspective, the roots of the current crisis go back to NATO’s enlargement since at least 1999. However, considering all the above, when President Putin claims that, among other reasons, Moscow started its military operation in Ukraine to prevent further Ukrainian violence in Donbas.

Kiev has indeed an awful record regarding neo-Nazism, human rights and torture, an issue that was reported by the Atlantic Council, and the Cato Institute as well as many other voices in the US, albeit it has been forgotten now. It was also the subject of Human Rights and Amnesty International reports for years.  The Ukrainian state has been committing serious human rights violations that are being minimized or ignored to this day. Recent video footages show Ukrainian tortures and shooting of Russian soldiers, and, according to retired US Army Col. Macgregor, military consultant and analyst, while Russians have not been shooting or mistreating surrendering war prisoners the same cannot be said about the Ukrainian forces.

In the age of infowar, propaganda is actually a part of warfare itself. It is quite ironic that the genocidal nature of post-Maidan Ukrainian far-right policies is largely dismissed precisely when the US and its allies are now flirting with the weaponization of Ukraine against Moscow. To sum it up, while Ukraine is losing the conflict, the West seems to be winning the propaganda war so far.

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Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

The Covid-19 Crisis. A Campaign Against Critical Thinking. “Mass Formation Psychosis”

By Prof. Bill Willers, May 03, 2022

Since the declaration of the Covid-19 Pandemic in March, 2020, the phenomenon of “mass formation psychosis”, essentially hypnosis at population level, has become a major subject for discussion, due largely to interviews of psychiatrist Mattias Desmet.

Reckless and Ruthless? Yes. But Is Putin Insane? No.

By Prof. Anatol Lieven, May 03, 2022

The difference between miscalculation and lunacy is an extremely important distinction to draw. The portrayal of adversaries as driven by insane compulsions to reckless aggression have been used again and again to block negotiations with those adversaries, and to argue not just for the most militarized U.S. responses, but also for confronting those adversaries everywhere, regardless of the importance of the actual issues involved.

Reality vs. Illusion. People have been Robbed of their Ability to “Decipher between Fact and Fiction”

By Dustin Broadbery, May 03, 2022

CIA Director, William Casey is reputed to have said to Ronald Reagan ‘We’ll know our disinformation is complete when everything the American public believes is false.’

These Countries Are Willing to Risk US Ire Over Russia-Ukraine

By Stephen Kinzer, May 03, 2022

The impassioned American reaction is matched only in Europe, Canada, and the handful of U.S. allies in East Asia. For many people in the rest of the world, the Russia-Ukraine conflict is just another pointless Western war in which they have no stake.

As Biden Asks for $33 Billion, Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff Surface in Ukraine Meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy

By Sundance, May 03, 2022

The trip comes as Joe Biden is asking congress for an additional $33 billion in aid to fund the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, bringing the total U.S. taxpayer laundry operation to around $50 billion.  Pelosi and Schiff likely setting up the mechanics for the distribution of funds to include congressional family indulgency fees, or Fourth Branch brokerage costs.

The Extinction of Species, Bill Gates, and the US Military

By Jon Rappoport, May 03, 2022

Gene drive technology could be deployed to wipe out troublesome plant-parasites, weeds, crops, animal pests, animals, and…what about humans? Mull that over with your morning coffee.

Noise Matters: Wind Farms, Nuisance and the Law

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, May 04, 2022

On March 25, the Victorian Supreme Court gave private citizens some cause for joy, and policy makers and corporations a potential cause for concern, in challenging the way such farms operate.  The judgement found that the noise from the Bald Hills Wind Farm based at Tarwin Lower in South Gippsland, “caused substantial interference with both plaintiffs’ enjoyment of their land – specifically, their ability to sleep undisturbed at night, in their own beds in their own homes.”

Does Israel Permit Freedom of Worship?

By Philip Giraldi, May 03, 2022

At Christianity’s very birthplace, in what was once Palestine, Israel has been engaged in making the lives of Palestinian so miserable that they frequently choose to emigrate. Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion famously declared in a letter to his son that “We must expel the Arabs and take their places…” and he exploited massacres of unarmed civilians carried out by the Haganah to create terror to accomplish that end.

‘We are living in pervasive toxic soup of chemical exposure,’ Carey Gillam Tells RFK, Jr.

By Susan C. Olmstead, May 03, 2022

Gillam and Kennedy on Friday discussed Gillam’s recent project covering the AltEn LLC ethanol plant in Nebraska, which produced massive quantities of toxic, pesticide-laced waste, polluting the surrounding land and water.

Judicial Watch: Pfizer/BioNTech Study Found Lipid Nanoparticles Materials Outside Injection Site in Test Animals

By Judicial Watch, May 03, 2022

Judicial Watch announced today that it received 466 pages of records from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding biodistribution studies and related data for the COVID-19 vaccines that show a key component of the vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech, lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), were found outside the injection site, mainly the liver, adrenal glands, spleen and ovaries of test animals, eight to 48 hours after injection.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

“Capital can no longer maintain its profitability by exploiting labor alone. This much has been clear for some time. There is only so much surplus value to be extracted before the surplus is insufficient.

The great reset is really about capitalism’s end-game. Those promoting it realize the economic and social system must undergo a reset to a ‘new normal’, something that might no longer resemble ‘capitalism’.” – Colin Todhunter

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The Great Reset is a multi-faceted Global and Globalist approach to controlling, manipulating, enslaving, starving and eventually digitizing humans into transhumans under a Great Tyranny.

We have to exit Globalization.

We have to resist any Globalist attempt to take our submission to this global fraud a step further – towards a Great Reset – which they might as well call a Global Reset.

Because that’s what it is letter by letter, when reading and analyzing Klaus Schwab’s book, “Covid-19 – The Great Reset”. 

In the video below, Klaus Schwab discusses the transition from humans to transhumans with Google Co-founder Sergey  Brin: 

“Can you imagine that in 10 years, when we are sitting here, we have an implant in our brains, and I can immediately feel [what you are feeling] because you all will have implants. I can remeasure your brainwaves, and I can immediately tell you how some people react [emotionally] to your answers. Is it imaginable?”

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It is of utmost importance that We, the People, realize that the Reset bells are tolling since quite a while.

An effective option of countering the Great Reset is people worldwide collectively exiting Globalisation, the Global Concept of a Global Government and a Global, centrally directed economy and society.

Adopting the concept of:

Local production for local consumption with local money and local public banking via a sovereign local central bank – and trading with think-alike nations, bilaterally and multilaterally, according to comparative advantages, to reach to the extent possible “win-win” outcomes” – may be a solution.

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Famine – the Hunger Game, is the name of the game which the elite-cabal is rolling out at warp speed.

Humanity, we the people, must pay special attention to this strategy of submission and fear.

We must depend as little as possible on international food trade.

Independence from international supply chains of food, fertilizers and other agricultural inputs, is crucial.

Produce locally, is a principal question of survival

As long as we do not understand, that our western so-called intellectuals do not grasp that writing letters to compromised, not to say “bought” western politicians, for example, to German Chancellor Scholz, not to deliver German weaponry to Ukraine to fight against Russia – we have not understood who is commanding the chessboard.

As long as newspaper articles accuse the black-green Austrian Government of not doing anything against rampant inflation, we have not understood that a (western) worldwide double-digit inflation is part of the Great Reset’s plan, and that the western coerced and corrupted Governments – like Austria, a symbol for the rest of the corrupted European Union — go along with it.

As long as we do not understand that everything is planned, has been planned by a long but utterly determined hand – and that all what seems coincidence is not coincidence, but is connected, because it is planned, has been planned for decades, probably for a century or more, we have not understood anything.

And we are not only sold to and dominated by the most powerful and financial elite, the monster money corporations, like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and Fidelity, but we are totally enslaved by and to them.

Our UN system, our central banks, our western monetary system work for them.

They want digitized money to even better control and mandate us, our lives and they will get it, if we let them.

Because our politicians, the so-called democratically elected “leaders” (sic), who are paid by our taxes and who run the theatre in our (western) world, are either voluntarily or in one way or another coerced to follow their imposed script.

The World Economic Forum’s “Young Global Leaders”

We have to understand that these puppets that have been put at the helm of our western governments, the likes of Emmanuel Macron (France), Olaf Scholz, successor to Angela Merkel (Germany), Karl Nehammer (Austria), Mark Rutte (Netherlands), Magdalena Andersson (Sweden), Mette Frederiksen (Denmark), Mario Draghi (Italy), Pedro Sanchez (Spain), Scott Morrison (Australia), Jacinda Ardern (New Zealand), Justin Trudeau (Canada), Alberto Fernandez (Argentina); Gabriel Boric (Chile); Shinzo Abe (Japan) – and many more – were not democratically elected by the people, as you are made to believe.

They are all students or “scholars” of Klaus Schwab’s “Young Global Leaders” academy. They are groomed politicians appointed by powerful financial interests.

As such they were all preselected by Klaus Schwab, acting on behalf of powerful financial interests and put into their positions under the guise of elections.

Today’s computerized election fraud is so sophisticated and perfect, that the commons – us – are unable to understand it, let alone successfully fight it. Not even a former US President. Example Donald Trump.

 

The Globalist Agenda and Its Institutions: IMF, WTO, World Bank WHO 

Back to the Globalists. Finally, the heads of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva; of the World Bank, David Malpass; the World Trade Center (WTO), Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and, finally, of WHO (World Health Organization), Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, they are all compromised to the Globalist Agenda, to UN Agenda 2030.

Dr. Tedros, former Head of GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, headquartered just next door to WHO, in Geneva, was appointed by Bill Gates, who also created GAVI. In preparation for things to come, Dr. Tedros, was eventually approved by WHO’s General Assembly in 2017.

For those who do not know, the WHO was created in 1948 by Rockefeller and subsequently integrated into the UN system. The WHO is also unique among the so-called UN agencies, in as much as the organization receives the bulk (between about two thirds and three quarters) of its budget from “private” contributions, i.e., a majority from pharma-trustfunds.

In 1948, at WHO’s inception, the organization’s future role of becoming the world’s health dictator, through a so-called “Pandemic Treaty” that may eventually overrule all 194 WHO-member nations’ Constitutions, was already planned.

The Pandemic Treaty would disempower countries’ health sovereignty, leading to a global health tyranny. We are not there yet, but preparatory discussions and negotiations are ongoing by member countries’ representatives and health ministers to force this treaty through World Health Assembly approval by 2023, so as to make it effective by 2024.

This Pandemic Treaty must be resisted by Us, The People, if we want to have a chance to gain back power over our lives and our destiny. We must organize in spirits, minds and on the ground.

Make no mistake, the Pandemic Treaty is intimately connected to the Hunger Game being played out on us, Humanity. Always remember, every act of oppression and misery descending upon us, is connected. If you don’t see it immediately – look for it. Look for it, not in the lie-prone mainstream, but in alternative media. It may mean more work, than the comfort of watching the evening news. But remember, freedom doesn’t come for free.

All the above heads of states, and many more, as well as the leaders of prominent UN agencies were put into their position by the WEF (World Economic Forum), and the financial elite behind the WEF. Most, if not all of them, have gone through Klaus Schwab’s (WEF’s CEO forever) “academy” for Young Global Leaders.

What do they get in return for obeying? Maybe a placebo instead of a potentially deadly vaxx – if they get a jab at all? But most importantly, they get protection from the most powerful on this earth. They may be guaranteed a safe-haven in Paradise, in case the cabal’s dream collapses.

At Klaus Schwab’s School for Young Global Leaders, they have learned dictatorship and tyranny. They now freely execute it, despite massive peoples’ opposition and protests. They know, they have the backing of enormous powers, of the world’s (financial) super powers, those that control the UN and all its specialized agencies, as well as all the UN member states.

For example, as the Ukraine war is devastatingly distracting people’s attention from what is going on behind the scenes in preparation of total tyranny, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, Klaus Schwab’s Wunderkind, is allegedly quietly working towards implementing: (i) a system of digital IDs; (ii) a Universal Basic Income (UBI); (iii) a Federal Vaxx Mandate; (iv) an Asset Seizure Law; (v) a Social Credit System; (vi) a Biometric Access System (collecting and recording biological data from humans, for example through QR [Quick Response]-coding); and of course, (vii) Extreme Censorship.

We have to wake up from our slumber of Cognitive Dissonance.

We have to break out of Globalization

We have to find alternatives to our wasteful lives of the past, and to the terror-life planned by the elite-cabal, the Deep State, the world’s largest financial carnivores.

On 1 May 2022, the NY Times reports that

“Dozens of countries have thrown up trade barriers in the past two months to protect scarce supplies of food and commodities, but experts say the policies will only exacerbate a global food crisis.” – Of course, such propaganda exacerbates the drive for food hoarding, thus, leading to food shortages.

An effective alternative to Globalization – which is propagated from all angles of our globe – is the simple axiom, mentioned above, and, due to its importance, repeated here:

“Local Production for Local Consumption, with Local (CASH) Money, through a Public Banking System and Local Sovereign Central Banking – and Cross-Border Trading with Thinkalikes, based on Comparative Advantages.”

The focus must be on self-sufficiency and on food production to avoid massive famine and starvation – which is part of the plan. Always be aware, there are no coincidences. Famine – obedience – submissiveness – fear – and population Reduction. They are all connected.

Local Production for Local Consumption

As to food shortages, in the west, especially Europe and the US, at least a third, in some countries more, of all food is being shamefully wasted, thrown away, often for fake expiration dates; and in supermarkets, because after the first or second day, some vegetable food items do no longer keep the “sparkling” sales-attractive “freshness”, while they are still totally consumable.

As an interim step to local production for local consumption (LP4LC) and to counter Reset measures, let us store as much unperishable food (lots of grains and dried food) as possible. It keeps for years and can be stored by people wo do not have their own gardens. In the medium to longer run, LP4LC may be community based, bypassing supermarkets and food corporations.
The same or similar waste prevails in restaurants. In Switzerland, I was told by restaurant staff, that they risk being fired, if they give left-over food away to the poor, after closing of the restaurants. They must throw it in the garbage.

Imagine! Another horrendous inhumane act of snake-capitalism. That’s what we have to keep in mind and eradiate from our lives. And we will make or own Reset, the People’s RESET.

The Globalists’ Artificial Meat 

The cabal – Gates and Co., as well as the huge, interconnected global food producers, own ever more ag-production land which eventually allows them to dictate what we are to eat and not to eat. Already in 2019, the WEF declared: “You will be eating replacement (artificial) meats in 20 years.” See this.

The anti-meat propaganda is part of the so-called Green Agenda to save the planet.

There are good health reasons to eat less red meat, but not those fake environmental reasons advanced and propagated by Bill Gates and the Green Agenda. By those corporate Green Capitalists, who are every year in January for the WEF’s Davos meeting literally congesting the Zurich airport with their private jets – as if this was not enough, they let themselves being flown by helicopter from Zurich to Davos (some 150 km, less than 100 miles) – altogether with this sole event releasing a multiple of CO2 into the atmosphere of what a million cows produce in a year.

The rule of reducing the use of hydrocarbon as “mobility-fuel” does not apply to the elite-cabal. They know very well that their imposed immobility – through ever-more astronomical fuel prices, taxes, and eventually outright “legal” restrictions – have nothing to do with saving the planet, but only with repression, fear – submission – outright tyranny – and transfer of more monetary resources, assets, from the bottom and the middle to the top.

Once in Davos, the elite preach a fully Green Agenda to the plebs. They hire Swedish 19-year-old Greta Thunberg, to talk about environmental protection and “shame on you!” – propagating things, she has no clue about. But it sells, because the Soros-et all-paid propaganda, again, is strong enough to persuade those, who are too comfortable to dig for the climate change and environmental truth on their own.

In Conclusion

The name of Our Game, the People’s Game, ought to be a massive waking up into an alternative lifestyle, quite different from what we have been living in western luxury and comfort. Taking conscience and detach

• from current Government oppression;
• from obedience to our lying, manipulating traitor governments; and
• create alternative independent sovereign societies.

Our western national Constitutions have been quietly disabled, suspended, mostly by emergency laws or otherwise by quietly or even clandestinely passed decrees, about which most people have never been informed.

Most western countries are already living in a pre-state of tyranny that steadily tightens the grip around our societies’ necks, depriving us of ever more what otherwise would have been Constitutional Rights – leaving Us, the People, powerless against government oppression.

Immobility of the commons, is what the cabal, the Cult of Darkness wants.

Immobility at will of a global health institution, i.e. WHO, that under a new Pandemic Treaty, still being worked out and negotiated, with planned effectiveness in 2024, may declare worldwide lockdowns, mask wearing, social distancing, work from home, forced vaxxing and much more – thus, overriding national laws.

In other words, WHO, a Rockefeller creation, may soon decide over life and death. In Henry Kissinger’s infamous words, “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world” – and slightly expanded, “Who controls health, decides over life and death.”

Remember,

• Increasing fuel prices are planned;
• Increasing inflation is planned;
• Food shortages, famine, death by hunger – are planned;
• Wars and annihilating conflicts are planned;
• Massive bankruptcies and consequential misery are planned;
• More plandemics, lockdowns and mask-humiliations, are planned;
• Supply chain disruptions are planned;
• Shortages of everything are planned;
• Production interruptions and stoppages of vital industries are planned; and
• Much more is planned – and connected.

Be aware – all what disrupts society, reduces population, causes discomfort and misery – and of course, anything that causes fear, reduces physical and psychological resistance.

But No fear – and We Shall Overcome!

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing. 

Featured image is from 21st Century Wire

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***

 

 

 

The tools of psychology are dangerous in the hands of the wrong men. Modern educational methods can be applied in therapy to streamline man’s brain and change his opinions so that his thinking conforms with certain ideological systems. — Joost A. M. Meerloo, The Rape Of The Mind, 1956.

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Since the declaration of the Covid-19 Pandemic in March, 2020, the phenomenon of “mass formation psychosis”, essentially hypnosis at population level, has become a major subject for discussion, due largely to interviews of psychiatrist Mattias Desmet. Becoming aware of it, one begins to recognize the effects of the cultivation of anxiety and mental confusion, of the steady diet of terrifying data, of constantly changing and conflicting information, of enforced compliance to shifting policies demanding physical and visual isolation.

Joost Meerloo, in Rape Of The Mind, described totalitarian methods throughout the ages used to force obedience. Modern society, with its refined techniques in marketing and mass communication, he wrote, “tends to robotize and automatize man.” Where competing interpretations of reality are censored, what is constantly repeated “fixes patterns of thought”, which patterns assume realities of their own. “He who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press [and TV], is master of the mind.”

Countering totalitarian technique calls for critical thinking, a pattern of thought hesitant to accept information immediately at face value. Critical thinkers look for inconsistencies within narratives. It’s said that critical thinking can’t be taught, because accumulated life experience is a factor in its ultimate development, if it ever develops at all in a lifetime. On the other hand, critical thinking is open to cultivation, and presumably its cultivation is a feature of liberal education.

Given that, the online search technique now advocated by the Center for an Informed Public came as a surprise for anyone used to seeing critical thinking as a positive trait. The SIFT method, so called, which boasts about the speed with which one can make quick judgments of online material — as briefly as within 30-seconds — would seem to be a recipe for superficiality that brings to mind claims that society is being “dumbed down”. The professed target of SIFT is the evil of “misinformation” — that Pandemic-era charge that is oddly vague beyond its failure to hue to an official, but conflict-riddled, story. SIFT is based on a four-step system suggesting that one often makes better decisions with less information rather than with more.

The New York Times showcased SIFT with an opinion piece subtitled “Critical thinking, as we’re taught to do it, isn’t helping in the fight against misinformation”. One is prompted to “stop overthinking”, because “the goal of disinformation is to capture attention, and critical thinking is deep attention”, this causing people to fall prey to bad actors such as conspiracy theorists who can “warp your perspective”. An example of the SIFT method uses Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., long a target of the NY Times, which paper, remarkably, will not review Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci, nor will it even post a paid ad for the book.

In the example, Kennedy’s name is Googled — “Look how fast this is” — to a sentence on a Wikipedia page identifying Kennedy as anti-vaccine and a conspiracy theorist. Two other sources, a fact checker and the NIH, indicate Kennedy’s views as “outside the consensus”. Not being in accord with majority thinking indicates bias, “And that’s good enough to know we should probably just move on.”

In 2016, there appeared a website, PropOrNot, claiming that Russia was manipulating US opinion online. What stands out is that examples by PropOrNot of information sources that “produce large amounts of propaganda content” are substantially a recitation of excellent sites for crucial information shunned by monopoly media, and for sources of incisive, in-depth analysis and commentary (take a look!), e.g. Corbett Report, Activist Post, Global Research, Paul Craig Roberts, and the like.

What makes PropOrNot momentous, in this case, is that the Washington Post, in an article “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say” included PropOrNot, describing it as “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds”. Nonpartisan? Hardly! For America’s number 2 “Newspaper of Record”, famously a CIA mouthpiece, to give credence to PropOrNot was an assault against foremost sources challenging official narrative.

Another Washington Post piece invites readers to take a confusing quiz to determine “Will you fall into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole?.” Example: Reader is to choose, from 4 items, the only one declared to be backed by evidence. However, a careful search of the items (GMO food dangers; LSD experiments; AIDS spread; Coronavirus creation) reveals that every one has at least some details open to question.

The quiz, in effect, implies that certain questionable issues are “case closed,” when they truly are not. Items covered in the quiz (e.g., election fraud, JFK assassination, false flags, Russian collusion, Rothschilds, Deep State, climate change, et al.) are seemingly matched so as to delegitimize certain avenues of exploration.

In The Rape Of The Mind, in a chapter titled “Mental Contagion And Mass Delusion,” Meerloo writes: “The lie I tell ten times becomes a half truth to me. And as I continue to tell my half truth to others, it becomes my cherished delusion.” Since the Pandemic was declared, the official framework of falsehoods has become truth for much of humanity. Yet some saw through the deception early on. How come?

Igor Chudov, a former student of behavioral economist Richard Thaler, believes those who recognized the fraud are critical thinkers (Chudov has broken with Thaler who is now a central figure in the project to maximize “vaccine uptake” in society¹ ). Chudov, cites the famous Asch conformity experiments that reveal how easily people are seduced by majority opinion. He is interested in critical thinkers, and at his Substack site he invites those who saw through the Pandemic deception to explain their experience.

A key revelation of the Asch experiments was the importance of dissenting voices in countering projects directed toward mass conformity. The dissenter is a reminder that prevailing consensus might be absolutely wrong. This is why departure from the official pharmaceutical/governmental Covid Pandemic story line is attacked as “misinformation” with such viciousness and is pilloried in mainstream media (mass conformity having become a principle MSM aim). From the standpoint of the engineers of the Pandemic narrative, with its goal of injecting humanity with RNA technology, critical thinking is a direct threat, and it is being undercut by every means available.

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Bill Willers is an emeritus professor of biology, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. He is founder of the Superior Wilderness Action Network and editor of Learning to Listen to the Land, and Unmanaged Landscapes, both from Island Press. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Notes

1. Thaler joined with Cass Sunstein to produce the book Nudge, which deals with techniques to influence public decision making. In 2008, Sunstein authored Conspiracy Theories, in which he advocates for “cognitive infiltration”, the sending of governmental agents into communities of dissenting citizens in order to foster thinking desired by government. Sunstein was thereafter (2009-2012) made Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama Administration. Thaler and Sunstein use their influence in the interest of overcoming “vaccine hesitancy.”

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***

A number of things about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine are not in doubt: that it was a deeply criminal act; that it has been accompanied by great brutality on the ground; that it was based on extremely faulty intelligence; and that in consequence it involved extremely serious political and strategic miscalculations.

It would be nice in some ways to think that this reflected insanity on Putin’s part — but outright insanity in international affairs is, thank Heaven, rare. On the other hand, serious miscalculations based on what appeared at the time to be good evidence are rather common — though the mixture that led to Putin’s serial miscalculations over Ukraine was an unusually toxic one, influenced by factors particular to the Russian-Ukrainian relationship.

The difference between miscalculation and lunacy is an extremely important distinction to draw. The portrayal of adversaries as driven by insane compulsions to reckless aggression have been used again and again to block negotiations with those adversaries, and to argue not just for the most militarized U.S. responses, but also for confronting those adversaries everywhere, regardless of the importance of the actual issues involved.

During the later years of the Cold War, this line was used, absurdly, about the elderly, grey bureaucrats of the Brezhnev leadership. But we should remember that when Soviet archives were opened after the end of the Cold War, it turned out that much of the time the Soviet leadership was at least as scared of us as we were of them — as indeed George Kennan had pointed out in his memo setting out the basis of “containment” strategy.

I strongly believe that in view of climate change, a century or so from now most of the basic preconceptions underlying the strategies of leading world powers will be seen by our descendants to have been profoundly irrational. Whether they will see the Russian regime’s obsession with Ukraine as having been more irrational than the Chinese leadership’s obsession with Taiwan or the U.S. Blob’s obsession with global primacy is another matter.

Certainly the desire to keep a hostile military alliance away from Russia’s borders should be understood by every American strategist — even if (like many U.S. analysts), Russians have exaggerated the concrete threats involved. Russia’s motives for dominating Ukraine are nationalist as well as strategic, and to that extent emotional — but so too are Indian motives concerning Kashmir and Chinese motives concerning Taiwan, both of which we treat as geopolitical givens.

The Russian establishment’s fear of the West contributed to a long series of miscalculations over Ukraine, to which historical preconceptions about the Ukrainian-Russian relationship and faulty intelligence about Ukrainian politics and society also contributed.

In terms of the sequence of events leading to the present war, the first mistake was made in 2013, when the Russian government persuaded President Yanukovych of Ukraine to join the Russian-dominated Eurasian Union. This set off the protests in Kiev that eventually led to the U.S.-backed revolution of 2014 that toppled Yanukovych and took most of Ukraine firmly into the Western camp.

This Russian policy was clearly a bad mistake that completely underestimated the depth and extent of the desire of many Ukrainians to move towards the West. I and many other analysts warned publicly back in the 1990s that any attempt to take Ukraine fully either into the Russian or the Western camp would split the country and lead to civil war.

It was not however a completely irrational mistake on the part of Putin. After all, not only had around half of Ukrainians (give or take a few percent either way) voted in every election since independence for good relations with Russia — including electing President Yanukovych — but until 2014, Russia’s aid to Ukraine in the form of subsidized gas had vastly outweighed aid from the West. Moreover, Russian aid was upfront, whereas the European Union was only offering in competition a vague form of association with no promise of eventual membership.

When the Ukrainian revolution occurred, the Putin regime’s response involved two very serious miscalculations — but one of them, oddly enough, was a miscalculation in the direction of restraint. On the one hand, Putin annexed Crimea (as opposed to simply occupying it in order to “defend the Russian population”), thereby putting Russia squarely in the wrong as regards international law and global public opinion.

On the other hand, instead of sending in the Russian army to occupy all that half of Ukraine that had elected President Yanukovych, and declaring him to be still the legal President of Ukraine, the Putin regime opted to give semi-covert backing to a limited separatist revolt in the Donbas region. Putin exercised this restraint despite the fact that in 2014 Ukrainian military resistance would have been minimal, and that incidents like the massacre of pro-Russian protestors in Odessa would have given Russia an excellent excuse to intervene.

To understand this year’s invasion, it is important to understand that sections of the Russian security establishment have regretted ever since not seizing that chance then (and in private blamed Putin for this failure). If Putin did not launch what would have been a successful invasion back in 2014, key reasons seem to be firstly his belief that many Ukrainians would continue to permanently identify with Russia, and this disillusionment with the West, and the deep political and economic dysfunction of Ukraine, would eventually bring Ukraine back to friendship with Russia.

Secondly, Putin was unwilling to break completely with a hope that had shaped Russian strategy since the end of the Cold War: that France and Germany could be persuaded to distance themselves from the United States and reach compromises with Russia over European security. This hope turned out to be empty: but the German and French sponsorship of the Minsk II peace agreement over the Donbas in 2015 seemed to give it continued life, as did the tension between Europe and America resulting from the Trump presidency.

And although Russian frustration grew as Paris and Berlin did nothing to get Ukraine actually to implement the Minsk agreement, as late as January of this year Putin still appears to have believed that President Macron might veto further NATO enlargement, handing Russia a diplomatic victory and leading to a split between Paris and Washington. Comprehensive Russian disappointment with Paris and Berlin was a key factor in precipitating the Russian invasion.

As to the Russian invasion itself, this now looks unbelievably reckless, and was certainly based both on exaggeration of the Western threat to Russia and appallingly poor intelligence about Ukraine’s ability and will to resist; but it should be remembered that most Western military analysts, too, expected Russia to win a relatively quick victory. One reason for the failure was obviously the vastly over-ambitious plan to try to capture Kiev and overthrow the Ukrainian government while simultaneously attacking on several other fronts —which meant that Russian forces were too weak everywhere.

Once again, however, this was not a completely irrational strategy. At the start of the war, the United States offered to evacuate President Zelensky. If he had in fact fled, the Ukrainian government would have fragmented and Ukrainian resistance would have been greatly weakened.

When the Russian army was fought to a standstill outside Kiev, Putin did not however continue to hurl Russian forces against the capital, after the irrational fashion of Hitler at Stalingrad or generals on the Western Front during the First World War. His response was a rational one. The Russian government withdrew its forces from northern Ukraine, regrouped them in the east, and drastically scaled down Russian political objectives.

This record indicates a Russian leader who is extremely ruthless, and indifferent both to international law and to the dreadful human suffering resulting from his actions. It can also be seen that the mistakes of his policies towards Ukraine have been influenced by emotional nationalist and cultural prejudices common among Russians in general. They do not however indicate a leader who is dedicated to blind universal aggression regardless of the risks or the real Russian interests involved. Nor is there any evidence that the emotional compulsions particular to Putin’s, and Russians’ attitudes to Ukraine extend to the rest of Europe.

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Featured image: Russian president Vladimir Putin (Illustration by TPYXA_ILLUSTRATION/Shutterstock)

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***

In one of the great foreign policy blunders of modern times, U.S. and European leaders repeatedly disregarded Vladimir Putin’s warnings that Russia would never tolerate Ukraine becoming a NATO military asset. Because of resistance from the French and German governments (which had as much to do with Ukraine’s chronic corruption as with concerns about Russia’s reaction), the Alliance delayed offering Kyiv a Membership Action Plan – an essential step toward membership. Nevertheless, at the 2008 summit in Bucharest, NATO’s existing members ostentatiously insisted that “someday” Ukraine would join the Alliance, and they repeated that pledge on numerous occasions thereafter.

Worse, Western officials typically insisted that Russia would have nothing to say about the matter. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s Secretary General, was especially blunt and arrogant on that score. He summarily rejected Moscow’s demands in late 2021 that NATO provide binding security guarantees to Russia, including a commitment that Ukraine would never be offered membership, and that NATO military forces would not be deployed in that country. Stoltenberg’s response could not have been more uncompromising.

“NATO has an open-door policy. This is enshrined in NATO’s founding treaty … The message today to Russia is that it is for Ukraine as a sovereign nation to decide its own path. And for the 30 NATO allies to decide when Ukraine is ready to become a member.”

Western officials implicitly assumed that Russia could be intimidated and eventually compelled to accept Ukraine as part of NATO. They dismissed the Kremlin’s increasingly pointed warnings that efforts to make Kyiv an Alliance asset would cross a red line that violated Russia’s security. Their assumption that Moscow would tamely accept a NATO presence inside Russia’s core security zone proved to be spectacularly wrong, and Ukraine is now paying a very high price in treasure and blood for their miscalculation.

One might hope that NATO leaders would have learned an important lesson from such a costly mistake. However, they are stubbornly ignoring a new set of ominous warnings from Moscow, and this time, the price of such tone-deaf arrogance could be utterly catastrophic. Indeed, it is creating the risk of a nuclear clash between Russia and the United States. In his first speech announcing the “special military operation” in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin warned all outside parties (clearly meaning NATO members) not to interfere.

“Anyone who tries to interfere with us . . . must know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never before experienced in your history.” [Emphasis added]

Yet the Biden administration and other NATO governments boast about how much the Alliance is supporting Ukraine’s military resistance to Russia’s invasion. The centerpiece of the effort to this point has been a surge of weapons shipments to Ukraine, including a focus on heavier and more powerful systems. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin vows that the United States will “move Heaven and Earth” to keep arming Ukraine. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman gushes that the United States has again become the “arsenal of democracy,” as it had been in World War II

The policy constitutes an extremely risky venture that could make the United States a belligerent in a perilous war. Moscow has declared on multiple occasions that convoys carrying weapons from NATO countries into Ukraine are legitimate targets of war. Putin could easily interpret the U.S.-orchestrated cascade of NATO weaponry to support Ukraine’s military resistance as unacceptable interference. The same is true of another Biden administration measure – sharing intelligence data with Kyiv, even providing Ukrainian forces with real-time targeting information. In one case, that intelligence sharing apparently enabled Ukraine to shoot down a Russian plane with several hundred troops aboard.

As they did during the prewar period, NATO countries are ignoring the warnings coming out of Moscow. Adopting a defiant stance, they instead are boosting their military aid and creating a full-fledged proxy war against Russia. The Kremlin’s warnings are becoming more strident. Putin himself recently admonished NATO members not to test Russia’s patience by continuing to escalate their support for Ukraine. Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-in chief of both RT and Sputnik and a close associate of the Russian president, stated that Russia might have little choice except to use nuclear weapons if Western policy continues on its current course.

Once again, though, hawks in the foreign policy blob are supremely confident that continued US and NATO belligerence will deter the Kremlin. Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia, contends blithely that warnings from Putin about using nuclear weapons in response to mounting Western military assistance to Kyiv should be ignored.

“The threat of escalation is cheap talk,” McFaul states confidently. “Putin is bluffing.”

In an April 27 Wall Street Journal op-ed, former deputy undersecretary of the Navy Seth Cropsey even emphasized that the United States must be prepared to demonstrate that it would “win” a nuclear war against Russia. Other hawks pressure the Biden administration not to give in to Russia’s “nuclear blackmail.” They seem serenely oblivious to the probable consequences if they are wrong. Two analysts even scorned the administration for being excessively fearful of a direct “skirmish” with Russia, as though a clash with a major nuclear power would be the equivalent of a dust-up on a middle school playground. Unfortunately, the policies that Washington is pursuing by pouring arms into Ukraine and creating a proxy war against Russia suggest that administration policymakers may be nearly as clueless as the ultra-hawks outside government to the dangers.

Western officials and members of the foreign policy establishments in the United States and Europe speak openly of helping Ukraine win its war and inflict a humiliating defeat on Russia. What such individuals do not seem to comprehend is that Ukraine is a vital Russian security interest, and the Kremlin will do whatever is necessary – probably even the use of tactical nuclear weapons – to prevent a defeat. The failure to understand just how important Ukraine is to Russia caused Western leaders to disregard Moscow’s warnings over more than a decade against making Kyiv a military ally. For the same reason, they seem to be making an even more dangerous blunder by ignoring Putin’s latest warning about making Ukraine a pawn in a NATO proxy war against Russia. It is imperative to take the new warnings very seriously and back away from a looming war with potentially horrific consequences.

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Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of 12 books on international affairs.

Featured image is from Stop the War

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***

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a quietly organized trip with a small group of senior House Democrats, including Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and Rules Committee Chair Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) to Ukraine.

The trip comes as Joe Biden is asking congress for an additional $33 billion in aid to fund the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, bringing the total U.S. taxpayer laundry operation to around $50 billion.  Pelosi and Schiff likely setting up the mechanics for the distribution of funds to include congressional family indulgency fees, or Fourth Branch brokerage costs.

“Our delegation traveled to Kyiv to send an unmistakable and resounding message to the entire world: America stands firmly with Ukraine,” the group said in a statement. “When we return to the United States, we will do so further informed, deeply inspired and ready to do what is needed to help the Ukrainian people as they defend democracy for their nation and for the world.” (link)

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***

There is a technology called gene drives.

It asks the question: what species should we make extinct today?

Why are Bill Gates and the US military involved in forwarding that technology?

A gene-drive scientist might say, “I have a plan. By manipulating genes, we can make invasive rodents extinct, on an island where humans are living.”

In the next fraction of a second, a flurry of questions pops up.

The overarching question is: Does this mean genetic manipulation can make ANY species extinct?

Here is a passage from Gene Drive Files, a site with a referenced information on the subject:

“Gene drives are a gene-editing application that allows genetic engineers to drive a single artificial trait through an entire population by ensuring that all of an organism’s offspring carry that trait. For example, recent experiments are fitting mice with ‘daughterless’ gene drives that will cascade through mouse populations so that only male pups are born, ensuring that the population becomes extinct after a few generations.”

“Proponents have framed gene drives as a breakthrough tool for eradicating pests or invasive species. However, the Gene Drive Files reveal that these ‘conservation’ efforts are primarily supported by military funds.”

Gene drive technology could be deployed to wipe out troublesome plant-parasites, weeds, crops, animal pests, animals, and…what about humans? Mull that over with your morning coffee.

Several years ago, UN member nations were considering a recommendation to call a moratorium on the use of gene drives. However, Bill Gates showed up to try to squash the moratorium.

The Gene Drive Files reports:

“Documents received under Freedom of Information requests reveal that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid a private agriculture and biotechnology PR firm $1.6 million for activities on Gene Drives. This included running a covert ‘advocacy coalition’ which appears to have intended to skew the only UN expert process addressing gene drives…”

“Following global calls in December 2016 from Southern countries and over 170 organizations for a UN moratorium on gene drives, emails to gene drive advocates received under a Freedom of Information request by Prickly Research reveal that a private public affairs firm ‘Emerging Ag’ received funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to co-ordinate the ‘fight back against gene drive moratorium proponents’.”

There’s more from the Gene Drive Files. It involves the military:

“A trove of emails (The Gene Drive Files) from leading U.S. gene drive researchers reveals that the U.S. Military is taking the lead in driving forward gene drive development.”

“Emails obtained through a freedom of Information request by U.S.–based Prickly Research reveal that the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has given approximately $100 million for gene drive research, $35 million more than previously reported, making them likely the largest single funder of gene drive research on the planet. The emails also reveal that DARPA either funds or co-ordinates with almost all major players working on gene drive development as well as the key holders of patents on CRISPR gene editing technology.”

“These funds go beyond the US; DARPA is now also directly funding gene drive researchers in Australia (including monies given to an Australian government agency, CSIRO) and researchers in the UK. The files also reveal an extremely high level of interest and activity by other sections of the U.S. military and Intelligence community.”

For the moment, put aside the notion of intentional extinction of species. Consider unintended consequences.

As I’ve shown in past articles, the latest and greatest gene-editing tools (e.g., CRISPR), which are used for gene drives, are far from slam-dunk precise, despite official assurances.

For example, this study: Genome Biology, July14, 2017, titled, “CRISPR/Cas9-mediated genome editing induces exon skipping by alternative splicing or exon deletion.” An exon is “a segment of a DNA or RNA molecule containing information coding for a protein or peptide sequence.” So you can see that exon skipping or deletion is a very bad outcome.

ANY gene editing done on ANY species opens the door wide to all sorts of errors and unforeseen consequences.

As for intentional destruction, we have this: MIT Technology Review, 2/8/16: “We have the technology to destroy all Zika mosquitoes.”

“A controversial genetic technology able to wipe out the mosquito carrying the Zika virus will be available within months, scientists say.”

“The technology, called a ‘gene drive,’ was demonstrated only last year in yeast cells, fruit flies, and a species of mosquito that transmits malaria. It uses the gene-snipping technology CRISPR to force a genetic change to spread through a population as it reproduces.”

“Three U.S. labs that handle mosquitoes, two in California and one in Virginia, say they are already working toward a gene drive for Aedes aegypti, the type of mosquito blamed for spreading Zika. If deployed, the technology could theoretically drive the species to extinction.”

“…a gene drive [gene editing] can…make mosquito populations disappear. The simplest way to do that is to spread a genetic payload that leads to only male offspring. As the ‘male-only’ instructions spread with each new generation, eventually there would be no females left, says Adelman. His lab discovered the Aedes aegypti gene that determines sex only last spring. The next step will be to link it to a gene drive.”

Bill Gates favors this technology. So shouldn’t we? After all, Bill is the number one humanitarian on the planet, right?

Right?

No?

Oops.

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

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An Amish organic farmer is facing a hefty fine and a prison term for the simple crime of producing clean meat.

Amos Miller runs a holistically managed farm in Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, where he breeds cows, chickens and pigs. The animals in his century-old farm are bred without the use of chemicals and medications mandated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). According to Miller, he raises his animals in the way he believes God intended them to be raised – in accordance with nature.

However, a federal judge ordered the Amish farmer to cease and desist all sales of his organic meat. This same magistrate also ordered Miller to pay $250,000 for “contempt of court” last summer. He added that the farmer needs to pay an initial $50,000 as a “good faith” payment to avoid jail.

To make matters worse, armed U.S. marshals raided his property, farm store and freezers at the behest of the federal judge. They took an inventory of all his meat to ensure he will no longer be able to sell or slaughter any more animals.

Miller, who runs a private members-only food distribution network, alleged that the federal government is prosecuting him for practicing his religious freedom in the way he raises and prepares food.

“Our members don’t want any of that. They want fresh, raw meat with no additives. Our members want it straight from the farm with no preservatives on it.”

The members of Miller’s private food club agree, saying they do not like their grass-fed meat laced with chemical preservatives mandated by the USDA. Numbering around 400, they have also signed contracts that state their awareness of the meat not being processed in USDA-inspected plants or treated with preservatives.

USDA prefers people eat chemicals instead of clean foods

According to Miller, all USDA-licensed processing plants are required to treat all meat – regardless of whether they are organic or grass-fed – with synthetic preservatives.

“Often, they use citric acid, which you’d think comes from oranges or lemons. But it’s a modified substance made from corn, and they don’t even have to label it on the meat,” he explained.

A customer who handles the Amish farmer’s website and other modern communications concurred with him, saying:

“The USDA processing plants require the meat to be treated with a chemical cocktail of citric acid, lactic acid and peracetic acid. The peracetic acid is toxic, and the citric and lactic [acids] are GMO.”

Anke, another customer of Miller, pointed out that the lactic acid used to preserve meat is not a natural version.

“It’s not lactic acid coming from the fermentation of sauerkraut. It’s all created in a dish in a lab,” she said. “It’s a synthetic sterilizer that causes many health problems.”

According to Miller, he and other small farmers would still be nearly impossible to make a profit – thanks to giant meat companies acting as middlemen. Furthermore, the exorbitant costs of obtaining a USDA meat processing license make matters worse.

The Amish farmer lamented:

“The rules and regulations are such that you have to get into [a] $100,000 debt before you ever sell your first pound of meat – and the market’s not guaranteed. There’s no option for farmers to start small, and add on and buy equipment as they can.”

“[We have to] either get a license or go out of business. Our position is we’d rather go out of business because their rules and regulations are too hard to follow. We have many small farmers in our area that would love to be farmers, but the business has gotten so monopolized.”

Anke agreed with Miller, saying that ultimately, “it’s all about profit and money.” She added:

“They want a monopoly on beef, pork and poultry. They are basically saying ‘Unless you go through federal inspection, you are making people sick.’”

CleanFoodWatch.com has more stories about Miller and other small farmers being prosecuted for offering clean, chemical-free meat.

Watch this video explaining what the USDA’s “certified organic” label really means.

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According to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, more than 1 million excess deaths — that is, deaths in excess of the historical average — have been recorded since the COVID-19 pandemic began two years ago, and this cannot be explained by COVID-19. Deaths from heart disease, high blood pressure, dementia and many other illnesses rose during that time

Across the world, death rates have also risen in tandem with COVID shot administration, with the most-jabbed areas surpassing the least-jabbed in terms of excess mortality and COVID-related deaths

According to Walgreens data, during the week of April 19 through 25, 2022, 13% of unvaccinated persons tested positive for COVID. Of those who received two doses five months or more ago, 23.1% tested positive, and of those who received a third dose five months or more ago, the positive rate was 26.3%. So, after the first booster shot (the third dose), people are at greatest risk of testing positive for COVID

U.K. government data show the all-cause mortality rate is between 100% and 300% greater among people who got their first COVID shot 21 days or more ago. The risk for all-cause death is also significantly elevated among those who got their second dose at least six months ago, and mildly elevated among those who got their third dose less than 21 days ago. As of January 2022, all who got one or more doses at least 21 days ago were dying at significantly elevated rates

Other data also show that COVID mortality rates are far higher in areas with high vaccination rates, and risk-benefit analyses reveal the jabs do more harm than good in most age groups

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According to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data,¹ more than 1 million excess deaths — that is, deaths in excess of the historical average — have been recorded since the COVID-19 pandemic began two years ago, and this cannot be explained by COVID-19.

Deaths from heart disease, high blood pressure, dementia and many other illnesses rose during that time.² “We’ve never seen anything like it,” Robert Anderson, CDC’s head of mortality statistics, told The Washington Post in mid-February 2022.³

According to University of Warwick researchers, “the scale of excess non-COVID deaths is large enough for it to be seen as its own pandemic.”⁴ A number of explanations have been offered, including the fact that lockdowns and other COVID restrictions discouraged or prevented people from seeking care. But another, less discussed factor may also be at play.

Across the world, death rates have risen in tandem with COVID shot administration, with the most-jabbed areas surpassing the least-jabbed in terms of excess mortality and COVID-related deaths. This flies in the face of official claims that the shots prevent severe COVID infection and lower your risk of death, be it from COVID or all causes.⁵

Boosted? You’re Now at Highest Risk of COVID

Ever since the announcement that the COVID “vaccines” would be using novel mRNA gene transfer technology, I and many others have warned that this appears to be a very bad idea.

Numerous potential mechanisms for harm have been identified and detailed in previous articles, and we’re now seeing some of our worst fears come to bear. “Fully vaccinated” individuals are both more likely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 and more likely to die, whether from COVID or some other cause.

As reported by investigative journalist Jeffrey Jaxen in the April 22, 2022, Highwire video above, data from Walgreens’ COVID-19 tracker⁶ reveal that COVID-jabbed individuals are testing positive for COVID at higher rates than the unjabbed. What’s more, people who got their last shot five months or more ago have the highest risk.

As you can see in the screenshot below, during the week of April 19 through 25, 2022, 13% of unvaccinated tested positive for COVID (with Omicron being the predominant variant). (The data reviewed by Jaxen are from the week of April 10 through 16.)

Of those who received two doses five months or more ago, 23.1% tested positive, and of those who received a third dose five months or more ago, the positive rate was 26.3%. So, after the first booster shot (the third dose), people are at greatest risk of testing positive for COVID.

A deeper dive into the data⁷ reveals that two doses appear to have been protective for a short while, but after five months, it becomes net harmful. The group faring worst of all is the 12 to 17 cohort, where no one with one dose tested positive, but after the second dose, cases suddenly appear, and get higher still after five months. After the third dose, positive cases drop a bit, but then shoot up higher than ever after five months.⁸

Deaths by Vaccination Status in the UK

Data sets from the U.K. government reveal an equally disturbing trend. The raw data from the Office for National Statistics⁹ is difficult to interpret, so Jaxen had data analysts create a bar graph to better illustrate what the data actually tell us. A screenshot from Jaxen’s report is below.

Bars going upward are a good thing, as it indicates the risk for all-cause mortality based on vaccination status is either normal or reduced. Bars that dip below zero percent are indicative of increased all-cause mortality, based on vaccination status.

As you can see, the all-cause mortality rate is between 100% and 300% greater among people who got their first dose 21 days or more ago. The risk for all-cause death is also significantly elevated among those who got their second dose at least six months ago, and mildly elevated among those who got their third dose less than 21 days ago. As of January 2022, all who got one or more doses at least 21 days ago were dying at significantly elevated rates.

More Jabs, More COVID Deaths

Covid Deaths vs. Vaccination Status
🌍 Comparison of:
—Africa (Pop. ~1.37 Billion)
—Europe (Pop. ~748 Million)
—S. America (Pop. ~434 Million)
—N. America (Pop. ~596 Million)

Source: Our World In Data pic.twitter.com/srGwEkGKLF

— Lindsay (@TexasLindsay) April 23, 2022

Everywhere we look, we find trends showing the COVID shots are resulting in higher death rates. Above is an animated illustration¹⁰ from Our World In Data, first showing the vaccination rates of South America, North America, Europe and Africa, from mid-December 2020 through the third week of April 2022, followed by the cumulative confirmed COVID deaths per million in those countries during that same timeframe.

Africa has had a consistently low vaccination rate throughout, while North America, Europe and South America all have had rapidly rising vaccination rates. Africa has also had a consistently low COVID mortality rate, although a slight rise began around September 2021. Still, it’s nowhere near the COVID death rates of North America, South America and Europe, all of which saw dramatic increases.

Here’s another one,¹¹ also sourced from Our World In Data, first showing the excess death rate in the U.S. (the cumulative number of deaths from all causes compared to projections based on previous years), between January 26, 2020, and January 30, 2022, followed by an illustration of the tandem rise of vaccine doses administered and the excess mortality rate. It clearly shows that as vaccination rates rose, so did the excess mortality rate.

United States 🇺🇸
Source: Our World In Data pic.twitter.com/E2KCE9Si3o

— Lindsay (@TexasLindsay) April 25, 2022

Risk-Benefit Analysis Condemns the COVID Jabs

At this point, we also have the benefit of more than one risk-benefit analysis, and all show that, with very few exceptions, the COVID jabs do more harm than good. For example, a risk-benefit analysis¹²by Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., and independent researcher Kathy Dopp, published in mid-February 2022, concluded that the COVID jab is deadlier than COVID-19 itself for anyone under the age of 80.

They looked at publicly available official data from the U.S. and U.K. for all age groups, and compared all-cause mortality to the risk of dying from COVID-19. “All age groups under 50 years old are at greater risk of fatality after receiving a COVID-19 inoculation than an unvaccinated person is at risk of a COVID-19 death,” Seneff and Dopp concluded. And for younger adults and children, there’s no benefit, only risk.

“This analysis is conservative,” the authors note, “because it ignores the fact that inoculation-induced adverse events such as thrombosis, myocarditis, Bell’s palsy, and other vaccine-induced injuries can lead to shortened life span.

When one takes into consideration the fact that there is approximately a 90% decrease in risk of COVID-19 death if early treatment is provided to all symptomatic high-risk persons, one can only conclude that mandates of COVID-19 inoculations are ill-advised.

Considering the emergence of antibody-resistant variants like Delta and Omicron, for most age groups COVID-19 vaccine inoculations result in higher death rates than COVID-19 does for the unvaccinated.”

The analysis is also conservative in the sense that it only considers COVID jab fatalities that occur within one month of injection. As demonstrated by the U.K. data above, the risk of all-cause death is nearly 300% greater for those who got a second dose at least six months ago.

Teens Are at Dramatic Risk of Death From the Jabs

Similarly, an analysis¹³ of data in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) by researchers Spiro Pantazatos and Herve Seligmann suggests that in those under age 18, the shots only increase the risk of death from COVID, and there’s no point at which the shot can prevent a single COVID death, no matter how many are vaccinated.

If you’re under 18, you’re a whopping 51 times more likely to die from the jab than you are to die from COVID if not vaccinated. In the 18 to 29 age range, the shot will kill 16 for every person it saves from dying from COVID, and in the 30 to 39 age range, the expected number of vaccine fatalities to prevent a single COVID death is 15.

Only when you get into the 60 and older categories do the risks between the jab and COVID infection even out. In the 60 to 69 age group, the shot will kill one person for every person it saves from dying of COVID, so it’s a tossup as to whether it might be worth it for any given person.

How Many Are We Willing to Sacrifice?

We also have a risk-benefit analysis by researchers in Germany and The Netherlands. The analysis was initially published June 24, 2021, in the journal Vaccines.¹⁴ The paper caused an uproar among the editorial board, with some of them resigning in protest.¹⁵ In the end, the journal simply retracted it — a strategy that appears to have become norm.

After a thorough re-review, the paper was republished in the August 2021 issue of Science, Public Health Policy and the Law.¹⁶ The analysis found that, “very likely for three deaths prevented by vaccination we will have to accept that about two people die as a consequence of these vaccinations,” the authors wrote in a Letter to the Editor¹⁷ of Clinical and Translational Discovery. Defending their work, they went on to note that:¹⁸

“The database we based our analysis on was a large naturalistic study of the BioNTech vaccine in Israel. This was the only study at the time that allowed for a direct estimation of an absolute risk reduction (ARR) in mortality.

Admittedly, the ARR estimate was only available for a short observation period of 4 weeks after the first vaccine dose, a point raised by critics. One might have wanted a longer observation period to bring out the benefit of vaccinations more clearly, and our estimate of a number needed to vaccinate (NNV) of 16 000 to prevent one death might have been overly conservative.

The recently published 6-month interim report of the BioNTech-regulatory clinical trial now covers a period long enough to let us look at this risk benefit ratio once again. In Table S4 of this publication, 14 deaths are reported in the placebo group (n = 21 921) and 15 in the vaccination group (n = 21 926).

Among them, two deaths in the placebo-group were attributed to COVID-19, and one in the vaccination group was attributed to COVID-19 pneumonia. This leads to an ARR = 4.56 × 10^–5, and conversely to an NNV = 1/ARR = 21 916 to prevent one death by COVID-19. This shows that our original estimate was not so far off the mark.

The most recent safety report of the German Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI) that covers all reported side effects since the vaccination campaign began (27 December 2020 until 30 November 2021¹⁹ … reports 0.02 deaths per 1000 BioNTech vaccinations or 2 per 100 000 vaccinations.

We had gleaned four mortality cases per 100 000 vaccinations (all vaccines) from the Dutch pharmacovigilance database LAREB. Using the data of Thomas et al., a liberal NNV = 20 000, we can calculate that by 100 000 vaccinations we save five lives.

Using the PEI pharmacovigilance report for the same product, we see that these 100 000 vaccinations are associated with two deaths, while using the LAREB database back in June 2021, they were associated with four deaths across all vaccines and are associated with two deaths in the most recent reports concerning the BioNTech vaccine … In other words, as we vaccinate 100 000 persons, we might save five lives but risk two to four deaths.”

The risk-benefit ratio may be even worse than that, though, as these calculations do not take into account the fact that passive pharmacovigilance data “are notorious for underestimating casualties and side effects,” the authors note, or the fact that severe side effects such as myocarditis are affecting young males at a staggering rate, which can reduce lifespan in the longer term.

We Do Not Have a Functioning Pharmacovigilance System

In an August 2021 editorial, editor-in-chief of Science, Public Health Policy and the Law, James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., wrote:²⁰

“There are two messages from those who hold appointed offices or other influential positions in Public Health on long-term vaccine safety.

The first message is that long-term randomized double-blinded placebo-controlled clinical trials are not necessary for the long-term study of vaccine safety because we have ‘pharmacovigilance’; i.e. long- term post-market safety surveillance that is supported by widely accessible, passive vaccine adverse events tracking systems.

The second message is that any use of those very same vaccine adverse events tracking systems that leads to the inference or conclusion that vaccines might cause serious adverse events or death is unsupported by such systems …

When those seeking support for public health initiatives, such as a new vaccination program, offer evidence that long-term vaccine safety studies are well in hand due to the possibility of detecting adverse events that happened following vaccination, they are either:

(a) unaware that the vaccine adverse events tracking systems upon which they are basing their confidence about society’s ability to detect and track vaccine adverse events are alleged to be unable to be used to infer causal links between health outcomes and vaccination exposure, or:

(b) participating in a disinformation campaign to end scrutiny over the absence of properly controlled long-term randomized clinical trials to assess long- term vaccine safety. Neither of these is sufficient empirical basis for the knowledge claim of long- term safety …

There must be room for disagreement in science; otherwise, science does not exist. It is sad to bear witness to the fact that science has degenerated into a war against unwanted and inconvenient results, conclusions and interpretations via the process of post-publication retraction for issues other than fraud, grave error in execution, and plagiarism.

The weaponization of the process of retraction of scientific studies is well underway, and it induces a bias that could be called “retraction bias”, or, in the case in which a few persons haunt journals in search of studies that cast doubt on their commercial products, a ‘ghouling bias,’ which leads to biased systematic reviews and warped meta-analyses.”

In his editorial, Lyons-Weiler specifically criticized the Vaccine journal for its retraction of the risk-benefit analysis cited above, and mocked the editorial board members who quit in protest, noting that “Rage-quitting is not science.”

“The resigning editorial board members’ knowledge claim is that no deaths have occurred due to the vaccination program. As helpful as that claim might be to a prescribed narrative, it is not based on empirical evidence, and it is, therefore, unwarranted,” Lyons-Weiler wrote.²¹

“From a Popperian view of science, one can see the fatal flaw in the editorial board members’ knowledge claim: if, as they insist, passive vaccine adverse events tracking systems cannot test the hypothesis of causality, then how can editorial board members, resigning or otherwise, know that the events were NOT caused by the vaccine? …

It is logical to conclude that since passive vaccine adverse event tracking systems do not lend themselves well to testing hypotheses of causality, they do not provide the opportunity to design and conduct sufficiently critical tests of causality, and therefore a replacement system is needed … one that is suitable to detect risk.”

While we may indeed need better pharmacovigilance, there’s really no doubt at this point that the COVID jabs are ill-advised for most people. I believe that in the years to come, people will look back at this time and vow to never repeat it. In the meantime, all we can do is look at and assess the data we do have, and make decisions accordingly.

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Notes

¹ U.S. CDC, Excess Deaths Associated with COVID-19

² MarketWatch February 16, 2022

³ The Washington Post February 15, 2022

⁴ Studies in Microeconomics October 19, 2021

⁵ CDC MMWR October 29, 2021; 70(43): 1520-1524

⁶ Walgreens COVID-19 Index

^7, 8 Bad Cattitude Substack April 15, 2022

⁹ ONS.gov.uk Deaths by Vaccination Status

¹⁰ Twitter TexasLindsay April 23, 2022

¹¹ Twitter TexasLindsay April 25, 2022

¹² COVID-19 and All-Cause Mortality Data Analysis by Kathy Dopp and Stephanie Seneff (PDF)

¹³ COVID Vaccination and Age-Stratified All-Cause Mortality Risk (PDF)

¹⁴ Vaccines 2021; 9(7): 693

¹⁵ Science, Public Health Policy and the Law August 2021; 3: 81-86, page 82

¹⁶ Science, Public Health Policy and the Law August 2021; 3: 87-89

^17, 18 Clinical and Translational Discovery February 25, 2022; 2(1): e35

¹⁹ Paul-Ehrich Institute December 23, 2021

^20, 21 Science, Public Health Policy and the Law August 2021; 3: 81-86

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The line separating Big Chemical and Big Food is blurring, according to Carey Gillam, an investigative journalist reporting for more than 25 years on corporate America.

Gillam is the author of “The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice.” She also is managing editor at The New Lede.

Her first book, “Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science,” about Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller, won the 2018 Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Gillam and Kennedy on Friday discussed Gillam’s recent project covering the AltEn LLC ethanol plant in Nebraska, which produced massive quantities of toxic, pesticide-laced waste, polluting the surrounding land and water.

AltEn produced biofuel by “recycling” seed companies’ unwanted stocks of seeds coated with neonicotinoids, which can have neurotoxic effects on people and animals.

Gillam called it a “tragic situation,” saying,

“It really is emblematic of the destructive things that can happen when you have such a lack of regulation.”

“We are living in this pervasive toxic soup of chemical exposure,” she added.

The plant is now closed and a massive cleanup is underway, but the chemicals have damaged the soil, water, animals and possibly people in the area, she said.

Kennedy and Gillam agreed that powerful companies such as Bayer, Dow, Monsanto and others use money and influence to control regulatory agencies that are supposed to be protecting the public.

Farmers “can hardly find seed anymore that isn’t coated with these chemicals, because the big chemical companies now also are the big seed companies,” Gillam said.

“They control the market to such a degree that farmers can’t really escape these chemicals when they’re planting conventional crops.”

Kennedy agreed.

“The agricultural regulators are captive agencies that are essentially just subsidiaries for these big chemical companies — in the same way the pharmaceutical companies run the public health regulatory agencies,” he said.

Click the image below to watch the podcast.

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Susan C. Olmstead is the assistant editor of The Defender.

Featured image is from CHD

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Judicial Watch announced today that it received 466 pages of records from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding biodistribution studies and related data for the COVID-19 vaccines that show a key component of the vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech, lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), were found outside the injection site, mainly the liver, adrenal glands, spleen and ovaries of test animals, eight to 48 hours after injection.

Pfizer/BioNTech’s mRNA-based COVID vaccine relies on LNPs as a delivery system. Pfizer said in a January 10, 2022 press release that Acuitas Therapeutics LNP technology is used in COMIRNATY, the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

Judicial Watch also received 663 pages of records from HHS regarding biodistribution studies and related data for COVID-19 vaccines, which show that Johnson & Johnson relied on studies showing that vaccine DNA particles and injected virus particles were still present in test animals months after injection.

The records also show that Johnson & Johnson, as part of its submission to the FDA for approval of its COVID vaccine, did not include studies of the spike protein encoded in the J&J vaccine.

Biodistribution is a method of tracking where compounds of interest travel in an experimental animal or human subject.

Judicial Watch obtained the records in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (No. 1:21-cv-02418)) filed after the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease failed to respond to a June 8, 2021, FOIA request for:

[A]ccess to biodistribution studies and related data for the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines used to treat and/or prevent SARS-CoV-2 and/or COVID-19.

The Pfizer records include a report, which was approved in February 2021, on the animal trials on the distribution of the Pfizer COVID vaccine in rat subjects, in a section titled “Safety Pharmacology,” the report notes, “No safety pharmacology studies were conducted with BNT162b2 [the BioNTech vaccine] as they are not considered necessary for the development of vaccines according to the WHO guideline (WHO, 2005).” Similarly, under “Pharmacodynamic Drug Interactions,” is “Nonclinical studies evaluating pharmacodynamic drug interactions with BNT162b2 were not conducted as they are generally not considered necessary to support development and licensure of vaccine products for infectious diseases (WHO, 2005).”

This Pfizer report notes that when lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) “with a comparable composition,” to that used in the Pfizer COVID vaccine were injected into rats, “Total recovery (% of injected dose) of LNP outside the injection site was greatest in the liver and was much less in the spleen, adrenal glands, and ovaries.” … “in summary” … “the LNP distributes to the liver.” In the detailed analysis, the report states, “Over 48 hours, the LNP distributed mainly to liver, adrenal glands, spleen and ovaries, with maximum concentrations observed at 8-48 hours post-dose. Total recovery (% of injected dose) of LNP, for combined male and female animals, outside of the injection site was greatest in the liver (up to 18%) …”

This same Pfizer/BioNTech study notes “No genotoxicity studies are planned for BNT162b2 [the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID vaccine] as the components of the vaccine constructs are lipids and RNA and are not expected to have genotoxic potential (WHO, 2005).” Similarly, “Carcinogenicity studies with BNT162b2 have not been conducted as the components of the vaccine construct are lipids and RNA and are not expected to have carcinogenic or tumorigenic potential.”

The conclusion of the study begins: “The nonclinical program demonstrates that BNT162b2 is immunogenic in mice, rats, and nonhuman primates, and the toxicity studies support the licensure of this vaccine.” The report notes that “boost immunizations” were also being tested on the animals in the trial. Also, “Vaccine-related microscopic findings at the end of dosing for BNT162b2 were evident in injection sites and surrounding tissues, in the draining iliac lymph nodes, bone marrow, spleen, and liver.”

Also included in the Pfizer records is a report, approved in January 2021, titled “Pharmacokinetics Tabulated Summary.” A table in the report shows the biodistribution of lipid nanoparticles containing mRNA used in the vaccine using rats as the clinical trial subjects reports LNPs accumulating after 48 hours, especially in the lymph nodes, ovaries, small intestine and spleen.

A summary of a study, approved in November 2020, of LNP mRNA distribution in rats, sponsored by Acuitas Therapeutics, notes that the concentrations of the LNP mRNA saw “levels peaking in the plasma by 1-4 hours post-dose and distribution mainly into liver, adrenal glands, spleen and ovaries over 48 hours. Total recovery of radioactivity outside of the injection site was greatest in the liver, with much lower total recovery in spleen, and very little recovery in adrenals glands and ovaries. The mean plasma, blood and tissue concentrations and tissue distribution patterns were broadly similar between the sexes and … did not associate with red blood cells.”

A September 2020 “Confidential” appendix to the clinical trial studies submitted for the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID vaccine (BNT162b2), titled “Justification for the absence of studies in CTD Module 4 (part of 2.4)” notes under “Safety Pharmacology” that “No safety pharmacology studies were conducted as they are not considered necessary according to the WHO guideline (WHO, 2005).”

And under “Pharmacodynamic Drug Interactions,” is written: “Nonclinical studies evaluating pharmacodynamic drug interactions were not conducted as they are not generally considered necessary to support development and licensure of vaccine products for infectious diseases (WHO, 2005).”

Under the heading “Genotoxicity,” is: “No genotoxicity studies are planned for BNT162b2 as the components of the vaccine constructs are lipids and RNA that are not expected to have genotoxic potential (WHO, 2005).”

Regarding “Carcinogenicity (including supportive toxicokinetics evaluations)” is written:

Carcinogenicity studies with BNT162b2 have not been conducted as the components of the vaccine constructs are lipids and RNA that are not expected to have carcinogenic or tumorigenic potential. Carcinogenicity testing is generally not considered necessary to support the development and licensure of vaccine products for infectious diseases (WHO, 2005).

In a “Confidential” Pfizer study, approved in April 2020, looking at four COVID vaccine variants, the company tested a vaccine with an RNA strand “that self-amplifies upon entering the cell.” It “encodes the Venezuelan equine encephalitis (VEE) virus RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RDRP or replicase).”

In the same Pfizer study, the authors note that, “Although liver function tests will be carefully monitored during the clinical development of these vaccines, BioNTech’s prior clinical experience indicates that the distribution to the liver does not pose a safety concern.”

Also, the Pfizer study authors note, “Based on previous nonclinical and clinical experience with the three RNA platforms, a beneficial safety profile is anticipated, and may include transient local reactions (such as swelling/edema or redness) and body temperature increases.”

The Johnson & Johnson records include a 2007 study of the biodistribution of an intramuscular-administered adenovector-based viral vaccine using New Zealand white rabbits, which showed that the vaccine accumulated in “the spleen, iliac lymph node, and the muscle at the site of injection.”

A biodistribution table included as an appendix to the 2007 rabbit study showed that the vaccine DNA particles were still present in the iliac lymph nodes 91 days after injection.

A chart of pharmacokinetics data from a November 2020 report of a study on “VAC31518 JNJ-78436735,” the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, on rabbits shows collection of the injected virus particles in the spleen and iliac lymph nodes up to three months later, as well as particles found in the skin and muscle at the injection site.

In a November 4, 2020, report submitted to the FDA regarding the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine, the authors discuss the 2007 New Zealand rabbit study in which adenovirus-vectored vaccine is trialed, but note that “No pharmacokinetic or biodistribution studies have been conducted with AD26.COV2.S specifically.”

The report notes that metabolism, excretion, and pharmacokinetic interactions with other drugs were not studied in this trial because they are “Not applicable to vaccines.” It is also noted that “biodistribution studies have not been conducted with Ad26.COV2.S.”

A table in the report shows that the vaccine virus continued to appear in the rabbits’ iliac lymph nodes 180 days after injection.

A June 2020 “Pharmacokinetics Written Summary” for the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines notes that:

Ad26COVS1 (also known as VAC31518 or JNJ-78436735) is a monovalent, recombinant replication-incompetent adenovirus type 26 (Ad26) vectored vaccine encoding a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Spike protein…. No specific pharmacokinetic studies have been performed with Ad26COVS1. However, to assess distribution, persistence, and clearance of the Ad26 vector (platform), biodistribution studies were conducted in rabbits using two other Ad26-based vaccines encoding [redacted] and [redacted] antigens…. [T]he available biodistribution results are considered sufficient to inform on the biodistribution profile of Ad26COVS1, for which the same Ad26 vector backbone is used.

“These documents show why many Americans have concerns about whether the novel COVID vaccines that were developed at such an accelerated pace were tested properly and thoroughly,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

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A dense coastal landscape, Broward County never expected to be a battlefield for the fossil fuel industry. More accustomed to tourists and traffic jams than drilling and hazardous trucks, Broward County wanted to keep it that way. So they banned fracking. Within a year, the fracked gas industry moved to town, undeterred, with their latest scheme. It was a liquefied fracked gas (LNG) export out of Broward’s busy Port Everglades.

Now, LNG tankers dock alongside cruise ships, as New Fortress Energy quietly expands fossil fuel operations in South Florida. Fracked gas from out of state is brought via pipeline to a liquefaction facility in Medley. That’s where it is transformed from a volatile gas to a volatile liquid – liquefied fracked gas. That is then loaded onto truck and rail cars and transported over 30 miles to Port Everglades, where it’s Caribbean-bound.

Transporting Volatile Fracked Gas Puts Floridians Directly In Harm’s Way

LNG transport and export keep our region locked into the very fossil fuels supercharging climate chaos, threatening our drinking water and way of life. It’s also putting Floridians directly in harm’s way. Liquefied fracked gas is no safer than regular fracked gas. It’s extremely volatile — leaks at the Medley facility or in transport to Port Everglades can form a flammable vapor cloud. If ignited, these vapor clouds can cause explosions up to a mile wide.

Those explosions have been fatal. In 2020, A gas tanker truck in China exploded on the highway, killing 19 and injuring over 100 people. It’s simply too dangerous to put trucks carrying volatile liquefied fracked gas on the roads, especially on high traffic highways like I-95 where a collision with a vehicle could spell disaster.

The death toll in E.China’s gas tank truck blast has risen to 19 with 172 injured. The State Council announced it will supervise the investigation into the accident and urged stronger safety supervision over the entire chain of transport of dangerous goods https://t.co/bIAPUgWoPn https://t.co/yVEeMZq9fg

— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) June 14, 2020

South Floridians are Unknowing Volunteers In A Dangerous Bomb Train Experiment

The use of trains in transporting liquefied fracked gas is new, untested, and extremely dangerous. South Florida is one of only three U.S. cities where the hazardous material can legally be transported by rail. All three of these dangerous rail transport approvals occurred during the Trump Administration. The Biden Administration has taken steps against the dangerous practice but stopped short of ending rail transport in South Florida. That makes South Floridians unknowing volunteers in a dangerous bomb train experiment.

To make matters worse, South Florida’s liquefied fracked gas “bomb trains” are transported on the same rail line as Brightline. That’s the high-speed train with the highest death rate of any line in the U.S. Adding fracked gas bomb trains to the mix, sharing tracks with passenger rail, is a terrible idea.

Despite Immense Risks, This Fracked Gas Project Escaped Public Oversight

South Florida’s liquefied fracked gas export operation has been active for several years, but not many people know about it. Why? Because New Fortress Energy, the company behind the scheme, sought as few permits as possible, generating almost no public oversight.

First, the corporation used loopholes in federal law to evade the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) jurisdiction. FERC is supposed to oversee gas liquefaction facilities, but New Fortress Energy successfully argued their way out of that process. New Fortress Energy got an air permit from Miami-Dade for the liquefaction facility. However, there wasn’t any oversight from the Broward County Commission when Port Everglades struck a deal with New Fortress Energy. This lack of government oversight means there were too few opportunities for public input. The public deserves an opportunity to weigh in on an operation that puts so many directly in harm’s way.

The Broward County Commission Must Halt The Transport of Liquefied Fracked Gas At Port Everglades

For too long, South Floridians have been subjected to the dangers of New Fortress Energy’s profiteering liquefied fracked gas transport. Luckily, the Broward County Commission can do something about it. We’re calling on the Broward County Commission to halt the transport of liquefied fracked gas and investigate the risky operation.

Port Everglades’ project was the first liquefied fracked gas export project in Florida. Not only has it endangered South Florida residents, but it sparked a push from the fossil fuel industry for more. Jacksonville is now also home to fracked gas exports. Alarmingly, there have been proposals for even more, including in the Panhandle and Tampa Bay. Furthermore, last fall New Fortress Energy doubled its operation in South Florida, sending more liquefied fracked gas into Broward communities. What’s to stop them from continuing to expand?

The Broward County Commission must halt the transport of liquefied fracked gas and conduct an investigation into the operation.

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A week ago I wrote a piece describing how Israel’s power over the US government is such that no American official will confirm that the Israelis have, and have had for years, a secret nuclear arsenal consisting of as many as 200 nukes. The situation is particularly odd in that the United States is on record as being strongly opposed to nuclear proliferation, except for Israel, and the enriched uranium that was used to create Israel’s bombs as well as the nuclear triggers were stolen and exported illegally from the US. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself was reportedly involved in the thefts. One lawyer friend has suggested that the reason for the reticence is that under US law by way of the Symington Amendment, no assistance or aid can be given to any country that has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Israel has not signed and also has a widely acknowledged nuclear arsenal. To preserve Israel’s billions of dollars in annual largesse from the US taxpayer, silence over what goes on when the government breaks its own laws must be maintained. Some might consider that a case of pandering to Israel rather than taking steps to enhance United States security, but when it comes to the Jewish state that argument is a non-starter in Washington as Israel always comes first.

This week I am going to describe another aspect of the Zionist state’s policy that has been invisible if one relies on the mainstream media or the chattering magpies that occupy Capitol Hill and the White House. That is the ongoing elimination of Christianity in the region where it was born being carried out by Israel and its friends. The United States has been the enabler of much of the change in spite of the prevalence of self-described devout Christians in Congress, many of whom ironically are vocal and even enthusiastic supporters of Israeli “security” policies. Killing Palestinians is all too often justified in Congress and the White House with the meaningless expression “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

American power wielded on behalf of Israel has already destroyed a thriving Christian community in Iraq while still laboring to do the same in Syria and possibly even Lebanon. At Christianity’s very birthplace, in what was once Palestine, Israel has been engaged in making the lives of Palestinian so miserable that they frequently choose to emigrate. Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion famously declared in a letter to his son that “We must expel the Arabs and take their places…” and he exploited massacres of unarmed civilians carried out by the Haganah to create terror to accomplish that end. Since that time, Israel has refused to allow Palestinians driven from their homes by the 1948 fighting to return, has destroyed more than 400 Arab villages and confiscated other Palestinian properties, has appropriated additional land and water resources for its illegal settlements, has allowed armed settlers to destroy Palestinians crops and other forms of livelihood, and controlled Palestinian movements through a network of Jews only roads and numerous checkpoints. Even Palestinians who happen to be Israeli citizens are legally and in practice treated like second-class citizens with limited rights. There are more than 60 laws in Israel that discriminate against non-Jews while Israel now legally defines itself as a Jewish state. Israel has also imprisoned without any trial thousands of West Bank and Jerusalem Palestinians, including children, and shot dead hundreds more.

I could go on, but the point is that Israel wants Palestinians gone, a process that has particularly impacted on the Christian community. It has not been done by ethnic cleansing in the classic sense after the initial Nakba massacres and appropriations in 1948, but rather accomplished by creating incentives to leave. And it has been successful. At the end of the Second World War, an estimated one third of the Palestinian population identified as Christian, but the percentage is currently closer to 9% and continuing to decline. The numbers suggest that Christians in the former Palestine are verging on extinction. In fact, Christians have been able to become disproportionately emigrants from their homeland because they more frequently than Muslims have family already established in Europe and the US and have also been able to rely on networking through their churches for resettlement assistance in a new country.

Even by the wretched standards of the past 70 years, Israel’s seeking a “final solution” with the Palestinians recently has become particularly outrageous, focusing as it does on loosening their ties to their religious and cultural institutions while also destroying their livelihoods and appropriating their properties.

Hardly reported in the US media was the use of new Israeli imposed security restrictions to disrupt this year’s Palestinian Christian Orthodox Easter celebrations of Christ’s Resurrection at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. This comes on top of similar police action to support the usual crowd of rampaging settlers and other Jewish extremists at the most recent Ramadan services held by Palestinian Muslims at the al-Aqsa Mosque, which included using a drone to fire tear gas at worshipers.

What took place during Holy Week and more particularly on Easter Sunday has been described by Rod Dreher, who writes for The American Conservative. I will confess that I do not much like Dreher as he is fond of celebrating himself in everything he writes, full of navel gazing and smug sanctimonious twaddle, but as he was a participant and eye witness to what occurred his account is of necessity extremely valuable. To be sure, he makes it clear that readers understand that he is not criticizing Israelis in general, nor is he engaging in anything objectionable to Jewish sensitivities when he includes himself in how “we American Christians, especially those who support Israel,” also as “an American who cares about Israel,” and who refers to “my Israeli Jewish friends” and then goes on to assert “I condemn anti-Semitism unreservedly. Criticizing the Jewish settlers and official Israeli policy does not constitute anti-Semitism” before concluding that “most Israeli Jews wouldn’t support these hate-filled radical settlers.”

Actually, the US and other governments as well as many states do believe that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. And, depending on how the question is phrased many, possibly most Jews worldwide, support firm action against Muslims in particular, who are routinely described in the media and by the Israeli government as “terrorists.” Rod clearly understands that it is a bad idea to veer into areas that Jews are uncomfortable with as they can be surprisingly sensitive and unreasonably reactive to perceived slights. No need to bite the hand that feeds you, as one might put it, particularly if one wants to stay employed.

Dreher reports how he was “staying at a hotel inside the Old City, where I was advised to book a room out of fear that the Jerusalem police would not let Christians into the Old City on Holy Saturday. This turns out to have been very good advice.” Holy Saturday for Orthodox Christians features a “miracle” of the Holy Fire, which is believed to be the first sign of the Resurrection of Jesus. Normally, at 11 am, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher opens and is quickly packed with believers. After noon, the Greek Patriarch the “little house” built directly over the tomb of Christ, prays, and what is referred to as “divine energy” descends from heaven to light the Patriarch’s candles, the flames from which are shared with everyone present. He then emerges and passes the flame to everyone there.

Dreher and a friend reportedly left their hotel early to pray but when they arrived at the end of the street at the Jaffa Gate, two Jewish police officers refused to allow them to pass out of the Old City, warning that if they left they might not be able to come back in. They then walked over to an access point to the Jaffa Gate, and witnessed a large group of Christians behind a barrier on the other side, blocked from entering into the Old City where the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is situated. Dreher observed that at the same time Orthodox Jews wearing white prayer shawls, entered freely into the Old City on their way to the Western Wall to pray on the Jewish Sabbath. Later that morning, Dreher was only allowed to pass into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher because he had obtained a ticket to the “fire” service. The tickets, to control and limit attendance at the church was an innovation by the Israeli police. The Patriarch objected, observing that tickets had never before been required. The tickets allowed entry of only 1,800 worshipers in the church, which normally accommodates 10,000, a reduction of 82% of the faithful permitted to be in attendance on the highest of all holy days.

An Anglican priest from Virginia who spoke to Dreher at the service described that morning’s experience this way: “Police checkpoints were at every corner. Even when we reached the private property of the Greek Patriarchate, police had taken over there as well. They actually turned back nearly a dozen Consuls General and other diplomatic representatives, including ones from the United States. We had to take an alternative route to get inside. If that was the way it worked for VIPs, imagine you’re a local Palestinian Christian simply trying to worship on the holiest of Christian holidays inside the church built over the very Tomb of Christ.”

At issue are demands by radical Jewish groups, most notably the extremist Jewish settlers’ organization Ateret Cohanim, a type of Jewish Taliban, to “cleanse” Jerusalem of all non-Jews. They have been aggressively buying or otherwise occupying properties in and around the traditional Christian and Muslim quarters of the city and often use violence when they are resisted by local residents. Christians, unlike the Muslim community, notably do not tend to resort to violence in support of their property or civic rights even though recourse to the Israeli courts is useless as the judges have consistently sided with the settlers and police.

In Jerusalem there have been regular instances of verbal abuse, vandalism and spitting on Christian clergy, as well as sporadic violent assaults. In the Armenian Christian quarter a monk reports how “[The settlers] destroy the tires of our cars, graffiti ‘death to Christians’, break windows, they desecrate our cemetery, you know… ugly things, and it’s really invasive.” Some Christians have pointed to what happened to the former St John’s Hospice near the Jaffa Gate as a prime example of what the Christian churches fear could happen across the quarter. The building’s lintel still shows the tau-phi monogram of the Greek Patriarchate but in 1990, this pilgrims’ hostel was illegally occupied by Ateret Cohanim, and now the vast building is covered with multiple Israeli flags and houses violent armed Israeli settlers. The local Christians Dreher talked to “believe that this is part of a settler plot to choke off access to Christian holy sites within the city, and force Christians out.”

The Israeli authorities tend to ignore the settler activity as they have powerful supporters, including from the diaspora community in the US and some Evangelicals who help to fund them. Ateret Cohanim’s 2010 annual gathering featured as guest speaker no less than John Bolton and the Kushner Family Foundation has reportedly helped finance its activities. In addition, Israel’s religious conservative parties are a necessary component in the coalition government and their extreme behavior is tolerated and even aided and abetted on the sly. Nor will secular Jews stand up for their Christian brothers in Israel in enough numbers to matter. Also, many Israelis believe that increasingly hardline radical Jewish groups are actually the future of Israel based on demographic trends. All excuses aside, clearly enough of the ruling elite in America, and in Israel, support the radical settlers, or none of this would be happening.

And the situation is little better for Christians in Palestine outside Jerusalem. A Franciscan monk visitor to a monastery outside of the city reported how the Israeli authorities had cut off water to the building while the missionaries themselves were verbally abused and had rocks and other debris hurled at them by settlers. In Bethlehem, a Christian gift shop was deliberately put out of business after nearby Jewish settlements were allowed to erect walls blocking access to it. Other attacks on Christians have included a June 2015 arson incident at the Church of the Multiplication and a nearby Benedictine monastery in Tabgha, located 120 miles north of Jerusalem. The church is built on the site where Christ fed the 5,000 through the multiplication of loaves and fishes. The attackers left Hebrew graffiti on the walls, reading “all idols will be smashed.” In 2014 occurred vandalization of a Romanian Orthodox church, the Benedictine Abbey of the Dormition, and Catholic offices in Jerusalem, as well as a monastery in Beit Shemesh. The year before, more than 20 Christian sites of the Latin Patriarchate were attacked by vandals. And in 2012, a Trappist monastery in Latroun was subject to arson and graffiti, while the Convent of St. Francis on Mt. Zion was vandalized. Non-Jews in Bethlehem and on the West Bank meanwhile live under a system of Israeli military laws and check points established by government order number 101. In Hebron, non-Jews living on Jewish-only streets cannot even walk out their front doors and they are regularly bombarded by feces and other waste hurled down upon them by the settlers.

Israel’s anti-Christian policies are international and includes support of groups the US has called terrorists. Israel has given money and weapons to the jihadists fighting against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, which includes al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate. Wounded jihadists even have crossed into Israel to received hospital treatment. Once, ISIS accidentally fired into Israel and then publicly apologized. Israel is intent on removing al-Assad, which will lead to an exodus of Christians from Syria, similar to what took place in neighboring Iraq after US forces deposed Saddam Hussein.

There is a certain irony in how the United States doggedly pursues China over its alleged maltreatment of the Uighurs while at the same time rewarding and protecting Israel even though it spies relentlessly on the US and very clearly persecutes Palestinians. Dreher asks the question why the US government, which gives Israel multiple billions of dollars a year, cannot stop Israel’s de facto official punishment of its Christians. The answer is at least in part simple, that most American Christians do not care about the plight of their co-religionists in the Middle East. Millions of true-blue Christians not unlike Dreher, many weaned on the Scofield Bible and its dispensationalism, and many of whom wind up in government or other positions of power, choose to disengage from the problem, accepting that Jews are the “chosen people” of God and, for some, part of End Time prophecy. They are therefore to be given a pass by both the media and government on all their exclusivism and bad behavior even as they meddle in US politics and work to hobble freedom of speech by criminalizing anyone who criticizes Israel or supports Palestinians by urging a boycott against it. Until all that changes, if it even can happen, Christians in the so-called Holy Land will be on the chopping block and when the churches and monasteries no longer have a community to sustain them, it will be the end of Christianity in the place where it was born. And more’s the pity, the United States will have played a major role in enabling that to happen.

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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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In celebration of World Press Freedom Day, we repost this article from 2020.

Global human rights organisations and press freedom groups will today hold events across the world to mark International Press Freedom day, held annually on May 3.

It was established by the United Nations in 1993 on the second anniversary of the signing of the Windhoek Declaration, a statement of free press principles put together by African newspaper journalists.

Its stated aim is to “raise awareness of the importance of freedom of the press and remind governments of their duty to respect and uphold the right to freedom of expression enshrined under Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

But in reality the event is a jamboree of hypocrisy, with the multimillion press freedom and human rights business operating as the human face of US imperialism, bankrolled by a rogues’ gallery of organisations linked to the CIA and touting for regime change across the world.

The obvious campaign to highlight this year should be that of Julian Assange who faces 175 years in a US prison under the draconian Espionage Act for exposing war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet he remains locked up in Britain’s high-security Belmarsh prison where he has been subjected to what has been described as torture – to an almost blanket silence from the press freedom business.

Those who are hypocritically talking about press freedom today were also noticeably silent last week on the 21^st anniversary of one of a litany of war crimes committed by Nato during the body’s 70-year existence which was celebrated with hubris in London last year.

April 23 marked the anniversary of Nato’s bombing of the Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) building in Belgrade which killed 16 journalists in a targeted attack.

It justified the operation saying it was necessary “to disrupt and degrade the command, control and communications network” of the Yugoslav Armed Forces.

But the deliberate targeting of a non-military building is against the so-called rules of war and was too much even for pro-imperialist shills Amnesty International who branded the attack a war crime.

There has been no justice for the victims of the attack or their families and nobody has been held accountable for the bombing. In fact, the only individual prosecuted was Dragoljub Milanovic, general manager of RTS who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for failing to evacuate the building.

In 2011, the Associated Press released a particularly shameful statement, dutifully published in the Guardian, which appeared to justify the bombing saying: “The station blatantly spread Milosevic’s nationalist propaganda, portraying Serbs as the victims of ethnic attacks in the former Yugoslavia, thus whipping up nationalism that led to wars.

“At the same time, the television accused the Serbian opposition of being foreign mercenaries and traitors who were working against the country’s interests. The propaganda was so intense that it led to anti-government protests in March 1991 in the capital, during which two people were killed in what was the first popular uprising against Milosevic’s rule.

“It also prompted Nato in 1999 to declare the state TV a legitimate target. The RTS building was bombed during the air war that the alliance launched to stop Milosevic’s onslaught against Kosovo Albanian separatists. Sixteen RTS employees died in the attack.”

Its response displayed a staggering disregard not only for press freedom, but for human life.

It was also a statement of staggering hypocrisy given the role of imperialism in destroying most of the media organisations that supported the government in Serbia while funnelling millions of dollars in cash and equipment to opposition radio and newspapers.

One of the main beneficiaries of Western support was the “independent” media outlet B92 Radio which still functions as a news organisation in Serbia today.

It was used to amplify pro-Nato propaganda with the assistance of the BBC which re-transmitted its programmes.

The German media organisation Deutsche Welle paid for news print and printing presses for opposition newspapers.

They, along with a compliant Western liberal media, conducted a propaganda exercise to demonise the Serbian people and soften up public opinion to justify the bombardment and break-up of the rest of Yugoslavia.

Much of the substandard reporting became mainstream narrative including the BBC peddling the fabricated claim that Serbian snipers were paid 2,700 French francs for every child they killed.

But a particular low point was the report carried in the Daily Mirror and subsequently Germany’s Bild am Sonntag and the Italian daily La Repubblica which claimed a Bosnian woman died “after being forced to give birth to a dog” by Serbians.

Propaganda plays an important role in any war and has always been paid close attention to by intelligence services.

Last year I reported on the collusion between the BBC and British intelligence services to manipulate international media in both the Middle East and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

In an elaborate scheme the British government paid newswire service Reuters to set up reporting services, which were funded covertly via the BBC.

The “news” was then rehashed by local media allowing the British to exercise “political influence” in the regions.

It is a tried and tested pattern. During the cold war the CIA funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as an explicitly anti-communist news organisation pumping propaganda into the Soviet states.

At one stage it even employed several former nazi agents who had been involved in anti-Soviet activities under the direction of Adolf Hitler.

Following the end of the second world war, the CIA and its predecessor organisations realised the importance of waging a cultural war to win the battle for post-war Europe with its former ally, the Soviet Union now perceived as a threat.

It established a number of anti-communist fronts, including the influential Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). It was led by major figures from the art and literary world including former communists Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone with CIA officer Michael Josselson as its secretary.

At its peak it published art and literary magazines in at least 20 countries and led a bitter campaign against Chilean poet and communist Pablo Neruda as he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Its CIA support ensured it benefited from an almost endless supply of cash with literary works of dubious merit published and promoted as long as they promoted an anti-communist agenda.

But, despite being one of the literary world’s worst kept secrets, its links to the US intelligence services were made public in 1966.

In 1967 the CCF was rebranded the International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF) and continued to receive funding from the nefarious CIA-funded Ford Foundation.

One of the CCF London publications was the magazine Censorship, which ran at a substantial loss before folding in late 1967.

But the magazine was the model for Index on Censorship which was set up by Stephen Spender in 1972 with cash from the Ford Foundation.

Index on Censorship continues to function today, posing as an organisation that promotes freedom of expression across the world. But a cursory glance at its major donors sets alarm bells ringing.

As well as the aforementioned Ford Foundation, it is funded by Open Society Foundations, Open Democracy and the shady soft power organisation the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The NED was formed in 1983 to “do today what was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA” according to its co-founder Allen Weinstein.

It operates as a vehicle for US-backed regime change in a range of countries including Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ukraine and China amongst others pouring billions of dollars into opposition groups and media organisations.

Its funding of press freedom groups should be a major source of concern. But its support is not limited to Index on Censorship.

The NED is also one of a host of dodgy donors for another press freedom group – Article 19, named after the section of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on press freedom.

This so-called press freedom group also lists Open Society Foundations, the US Department of State and USAid and Freedom House among its backers.

Freedom House has been condemned by US dissident academic Noam Chomsky as “a virtual propaganda arm of the [US] government and international right-wing” with alleged links to the CIA.

The NGO has been accused of conducting “clandestine operations” in Iran and formenting opposition in China, Cuba and Ukraine as well as Russia.

As would be expected, Article 19 obediently follows the line of its financial backers in a classic case of “he who pays the piper” echoing US propaganda on countries where it seeks regime change, including Nicaragua.

Its allegations of violence by an oppressive regime there were matched by English PEN with which it shares London’s Free Word Centre.

The founding centre of PEN International was established in 1921 as a worldwide writers’ centre and champion of free expression.

During last year’s World Press Freedom Day, English PEN saw fit to raise the case of Nicaraguan “journalist” Miguel Mora, portraying him as a plucky dissident bravely opposing a brutal dictatorship.

The truth however is very different. Mora has been blamed for hundreds of deaths in Nicaragua and has called for President Daniel Ortega to be killed. In April 2018, during an attempted coup, he incited his supporters to burn down the building of Radio Ya, a pro-Sandinista media organisation.

Twenty journalists were locked inside as Mora’s supporters fired at police and firefighters. He was jailed for his actions but released as part of an amnesty in a government bid to restore peace after the unrest.

Following his release he announced his intention to stand against Daniel Ortega in presidential elections – all of which seems strange in an apparent dictatorship. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists – which also backs regime change in Venezuela – was one of those to honour him with a press freedom award at a lavish dinner ceremony.

Like other press freedom groups, PEN International also has history with the CCF and the CIA which successfully infiltrated the organisation in the 1960s with its operatives and associated writers and activists penetrating its upper echelons.

Substantial sums of CIA cash were pumped into PEN International to turn it into a vehicle for US government interests culminating in the organisation holding its 1966 conference in New York, seen as a major success for the CCF.

In 1976 CIA agent Frank Platt was appointed as liaison for PEN’S Writers in Prison Work colluding with Index on Censorship’s Michael Scammel. He used his position to feed information to former CCF secretary and CIA official Michael Josseslon.

More latterly PEN I has attracted criticism for its appointment of Suzanne Nossel as executive director of its American Centre.

She is a classic example of the revolving door between government and NGOs having served as executive director at Amnesty International and as chief operating officer for Human Rights Watch – an organisation which recently backed the fascist coup in Bolivia.

But it is her support for wars in Afghanistan and policy of liberal internationalism which advocates the use of US military and soft power for regime change that is of major concern.

Her appointment at PEN caused journalist Chris Hedges to resign citing “Nossel’s relentless championing of preemptive war — which under international law is illegal — as a State Department official along with her callous disregard for Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians and her refusal as a government official to denounce the use of torture and use of extrajudicial killings, makes her utterly unfit to lead any human rights organisation, especially one that has global concerns.”

The continued covert CIA funding of these multimillion pound organisations raise some serious questions. Should we trust these groups as purveyors of human rights and press freedom? Clearly not.

The appointment of people such as Nossel and the behaviour of the organisations are deeply ideological and reflect the interests they serve.

The infiltration and manipulation of press freedom and human rights groups by the intelligence services is merely an extension of the cold war efforts to ensure that they remain largely ineffective and steer any campaign into safe, apolitical liberalism.

As Frances Stonor Saunders points out in her excellent “Who Paid the Piper?” this is a deliberate tactic deployed by both British and US intelligence services from the 1940s – “they soon realised the usefulness of accommodating those people and institutions, who, in the tradition of left-wing politics, broadly perceived themselves to be in opposition to the centre of power.

“The purpose of such accommodation was twofold: first, to acquire a proximity to ‘progressive’ groups in order to monitor their activities; secondly, to dilute the impact of these groups by achieving influence from within, or by drawing [their] members into a parallel – and subtly less radical forum.”

It would be foolish to suggest this is not happening today, and evidence suggests that it is, particularly when it comes to journalists in Turkey where attention is diverted away from serious political campaigning involving broad organisations into safe letter-writing and middle-class moralism.

Once the panel discussions with high-profile guest speakers and writers are over the audience is left to go home feeling good about themselves while in reality nothing changes and hundreds remain behind bars.

Perhaps more worrying is the potential monitoring of activists that attend their events, particularly those at risk and have been forced to flee persecution – concerns that were raised and subsequently brushed aside last year.

This is why last May saw the launch of Journalists for Democracy in Turkey and Kurdistan as an independent alternative to the multimillion-pound press freedom business.

On May 3 it is important to remember those incarcerated around the world for raising their voices, but it is equally important to ask the key question of the press freedom groups – whose freedom are they really fighting for?

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Steve Sweeney is the Morning Star’s international editor.

Featured image is from PA

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In celebration of World Press Freedom Day, we repost this article from 2020.

One of the most repugnant political faults is hypocrisy. Politicians say one thing, then do the opposite. This leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and brings public life into disrepute. 

The British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab is a case in point. Sunday saw a grim example of Raab’s double dealing. He said that he supported free speech. “A strong and independent media,” declared the foreign secretary, “is more important than ever.”

Splendid words on World Press Freedom Day.

If only the British foreign secretary had meant a word he said. As Raab spoke up for free speech, his cabinet colleague Oliver Dowden led the latest government assault on the BBC.

Threatening the media

In a move pregnant with menace, Dowden dispatched a letter to BBC director general Tony Hall complaining about last week’s Panorama documentary which exposed shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) and expressed concern that health workers will die from the Covid-19 virus.

With his government threatening the media over coronavirus in the UK, it’s no surprise that the foreign secretary has had nothing to say about Egypt’s throwing out of the country of a Guardian journalist in March after she reported on a scientific study that said the country was likely to have many more coronavirus cases than have been officially confirmed.

A foreign office spokesman came up with this:

“The UK supports media freedom around the world. We have urged Egypt to guarantee freedom of expression. UK ministers have raised this case with the Egyptian authorities.”

The foreign secretary has had nothing to say either about Amnesty’s bleak report yesterday revealing that Egyptian journalists are being flung into jail and accused of terrorism for reporting stories that annoy the regime of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Saudi Arabia, a British ally, jailed 26 journalists last year alone. Did the foreign office have anything to say? If so I can’t find it. No wonder that Britain has dropped to 35th out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ 2020 World Freedom Index.

Last week, the foreign secretary claimed that the United Kingdom “remains committed to media freedom” during the coronavirus crisis. This, unfortunately, is not true. Nothing shows the emptiness of these claims more than the British government’s handling of the Julian Assange case.

The gory truth

The Wikileaks founder continues to rot in Belmarsh jail as the US demands his extradition on espionage charges. If there was an ounce of sincerity in the foreign secretary’s claim that he is a supporter of media freedom, he would be resisting the US attempt to get its hands on Assange with every bone in his body.

There’s not the slightest suggestion that he’s doing that. As Human Rights Watch has pointed out, the British authorities have the power to prevent any US prosecution from eroding media freedom. Britain has so far – at least – shown no appetite to exercise that power. Unfortunately for Raab, Assange’s real crime is doing journalism.

I’ve never met Assange. Some people that I know and respect say that he is vain and difficult. I believe them. There’s no denying, however, that Assange has done more than every other journalist in Britain put together to shed light on the way the world truly works.

For example, thanks to Assange that we now know about many violations including: British vote-trading with Saudi Arabia to ensure that both states were elected onto the United Nations human rights council in 2013; the linksbetween the fascist British National Party and members of the police and army; the horrifying details of civilians killed by the US army in Afghanistan.

And the US helicopter gunmen laughing as they shot and killed unarmed civilians in Iraq, including two Reuters journalists. An incident that the US military lied about, claiming at first that the dead were all insurgents.

I could go on and on. Vanity Fair called the release of Assange’s stories “one of the greatest journalistic scoops of last thirty years”. And so it was. This wasn’t espionage, as the US claims. It was journalism.

Journalism not a crime

The US authorities aren’t out to get Assange because he’s a spy. They want him behind bars for his journalism.

That’s why the consequences are so chilling if Britain gives into the US extradition request and allows Assange to face trial in the United States. Not just for Assange, who faces a long prison sentence (up to 175 years) from which he will almost certainly never emerge.

We should be under no illusions. If successful, the US indictment against Assange will have terrible consequences for the free press.

The charges, in the words of former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, look like an attempt to “criminalise things journalists regularly do as they receive and publish true information given to them by sources or whistleblowers. Assange is accused of trying to persuade a source to disclose yet more secret information. Most reporters would do the same. Then he is charged with behaviour that, on the face of it, looks like a reporter seeking to help a source protect her identity. If that’s indeed what Assange was doing, good for him.”

Yet, British newspapers will not fight for Assange. Whether left or right, broadsheet or tabloid, British papers are agreed on one thing; they’ll fall over each other to grab the latest official hand-out about British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his fiance Carrie Symonds’ baby. Or the new Downing Street dog.

They will, however, look the other way when it comes to standing up for press freedom and Julian Assange.

Client journalism

How pathetic. What a betrayal of their trade. Client journalism. An inversion of what newspapers stand for. If the British foreign secretary is two-faced about a free press, so are British newspaper editors who say they care about press freedom. With even less excuse.

To be fair, it’s not so much that they fail to oppose Assange’s extradition. It’s more that they ignore almost completely one of the most powerful threats to press freedom of modern times.

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***

First published in 2021 for World Press Freedom Day

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press released its fourth annual report about conditions that members of the U.S. media faced while on the job last year—and revealed “the startling extent of police violence against journalists during a year of protest.”

The new report (pdf), published on World Press Freedom Day, analyzes data from the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Launched in 2017, the tracker is led by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) along with other organizations including Reporters Without Borders and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

“The importance of the tracker and its role documenting press freedoms in the U.S. came into sharp focus in 2020—only the fourth year of its existence—when the country faced a wave of protests, and journalists covering those protests were arrested and attacked in record numbers,” the report says.

Since its founding in 2017, @uspresstracker has documented #pressfreedom violations. In 2020, journalists experienced:

🚨 438 physical attacks
🚨 139 arrests
🚨 110 cases of damaged equipment
🚨 31 subpoenas

Full report from @rcfp: https://t.co/AdJfah2zFo pic.twitter.com/84PnWV9IH5

— International Women's Media Foundation (@IWMF) May 3, 2021

While noting that “protests have long been one of the most dangerous places for journalists to report the news,” the report highlights some startling figures:

Ignited by the May 25 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, protests for racial justice and against police brutality erupted across the country, marking a tumultuous moment for press freedom in the U.S. As journalists reported on these historic demonstrations (collectively referred to as Black Lives Matter protests by the tracker), they faced a record number of attacks (400) and arrests (129)—more than 11 and 15 times the number reported for 2019, respectively. The press freedom incidents that occurred during these protests, which included damaged equipment, represented the vast majority—at least 82% (517)—of the total number of incidents documented by the Tracker in 2020 (625).

While private individuals assaulted many journalists, law enforcement was responsible for 80% of these attacks. In cities across the country—from Portland to Miami, Minneapolis to Los Angeles—police officers shot journalists with various forms of projectiles, like rubber-coated bullets, which can be lethal at close range. They caused serious injuries to reporters, permanently blinding one of them. Police also sprayed tear gas, fired pepper balls, and used their batons and fists. Officers often ignored journalists’ press credentials and flouted news media exemptions to local curfew ordinances. Police also detained reporters during mass arrests—and, in at least one case, even handcuffed a TV news journalist as he reported live, on-air.

In another case, the report says, a Buffalo officer reportedly told a freelance photojournalist, “F*ck your First Amendment,” as police pointed guns at his head.

5 takeaways from @rcfp's annual U.S. #pressfreedom report:

-Police responsible for majority of attacks on journalists

-15x increase in arrests

-Subpoenas increased for 3rd consecutive year

-Journalists denied access due to their coverage

-Trump accelerated #AttacksOnPress pic.twitter.com/C2lAbVsvuF

— Committee to Protect Journalists (@pressfreedom) May 3, 2021

“2020 marked the third consecutive year that the number of subpoenas reported to the tracker increased, renewing concerns that journalists may be facing these legal threats more frequently,” according to the report. It also notes that “although 2020 saw a drop in prior restraint cases, three lawsuits over the summer involved unsuccessful efforts to block the publication of books about former President Donald Trump.”

Other key findings include:

• Despite Covid-19, many courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, live-streamed proceedings, but federal, state, and local officials excluded journalists from press briefings in apparent retaliation for their coverage;
• Trump set a new record for anti-press tweets, while state legislators repeated his attacks, and the Department of Homeland Security compiled “intelligence reports” about journalists; and
• In 2020, federal officials again excluded specific news outlets or reporters from press events in apparent retaliation for their coverage, in violation of the First Amendment.

Former President Trump tweeted a record 632 attacks on the press during his last year in office — the highest count of his term, according to @uspresstracker — up until Twitter permanently suspended his account in January 2021. pic.twitter.com/FEhfGSm69B

— Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (@rcfp) May 3, 2021

Although the report concludes that “there are reasons for optimism in 2021,” it also points out that President Joe Biden’s administration “has continued to pursue a historic criminal prosecution against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, which includes charges based solely on the act of publicly disclosing government secrets—the first time such a legal theory has advanced beyond the grand jury stage.”

In a lengthy statement acknowledging World Press Freedom Day, Biden said that “we celebrate the courage of truth-tellers who refuse to be intimidated, often at great personal risk, and we reaffirm the timeless and essential role journalism and a free media play in societies everywhere.”

Journalists “are indispensable to the functioning of democracy,” Biden continued. “Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, journalists and media workers have been on the frontlines to keep the public informed, at significant risk to their own health. And, at a time when the truth is increasingly under attack, our need for accurate, fact-based reporting, open public conversation, and accountability has never been greater.”

“It is incumbent on all of us to counter these threats to a free and independent media, including physical risk and arbitrary detention,” the president added, citing the CPJ’s imprisonment findings for 2020. “Online abuse and harassment of journalists, particularly women and journalists of color, continues to increase. Authoritarians are striving to undermine the free press, manipulate the truth, or spread disinformation even as a shrinking news industry is creating more and more ‘news deserts,’ areas without local media, around the world. These attacks are nothing less than a threat to democracies everywhere.”

Though Biden’s administration has faced some criticism from reporters and press freedom advocates—particularly for his refusal to hold Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman accountable for the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi as well as for delaying media access to U.S. government facilities used to temporarily detain unaccompanied migrant children—his statement still stood in start contrast to those of his predecessor.

On #WorldPressFreedomDay, the 46th @potus called journalists “indispensable to the functioning of democracy” & celebrated the “integral role a free press plays in building prosperous, resilient and free societies.”https://t.co/Kkt2LVccao https://t.co/L92hLzPsdG

— Alex Howard (@digiphile) May 3, 2021

CPJ program director Carlos Martinez de la Serna told Newsweek that “Biden’s statement is an important reminder of the essential value of press freedom and the role of the U.S. in defending it.”

“It is critical for the safety of journalists around the world that his administration restores U.S. press freedom leadership after the attacks on journalists and their work became a defining feature of the Trump years,” Martinez de la Serna said, “and is vocal about its support of a free press as a matter of principle and a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy, one of the six steps we laid out in our white paper released in November.”

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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Nazi Atrocities at Odessa – 8 Years On

By John Goss, May 02, 2022

The fascists were chanting “Slava Ukraini”, that is “Glory to Ukraine”, as people burnt to death. The perpetrators walked free. These are the same Nazis fighting for Kiev.

Parents Sue After School Allegedly Bullied Son to Suicide by Shaming Him for Being Unvaxxed

By Matt Agorist, May 02, 2022

A tragic case has surfaced out of Chicago this week, highlighting the worst possible scenario of the corporate government’s divisive propaganda that stoked hatred and fear toward vaccine skeptics. According to a lawsuit filed by Robert and Rosellene Bronstein this week, their 15-year-old son was bullied to suicide by teachers and fellow students for not having taken the covid vaccination.

Human Rights Violations by Multinational Corporations: Corruption, Lawlessness and The “Global Value Chain”

By Prof. Joseph H. Chung, May 02, 2022

We seldom discuss human rights violations committed by large corporations, especially multinational corporations (MNCs). Moreover, in many cases, the violation of human rights by host country governments is motivated as a means to cover up MNCs’ human rights abuse.

The COVID-19 Crisis, Justin Trudeau, The Freedom Convoy and “The Emergency Act” Fiasco

By Prof. Anthony J. Hall, May 02, 2022

Like other peoples throughout the world, the Canadian people are in desperate need of independent investigations to look into many facets of government corruption, malfeasance and outright lies perpetrated under the pretext of fighting COVID-19.

Ukraine Hunts Down “Traitors Helping Russia”

By Jeremy Kuzmarov, May 02, 2022

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s saintly image in the media is contradicted by state terror operations being conducted under his orders against political dissidents and Ukrainian civilians accused of collaboration with Russia.

Clash of Christianities: Why Europe Cannot Understand Russia

By Pepe Escobar, May 02, 2022

Under an ubiquitous, toxic atmosphere of cognitive dissonance drenched in Russophobia, it’s absolutely impossible to have a meaningful discussion on finer points of Russian history and culture across the NATO space – a phenomenon I’m experiencing back in Paris right now, fresh from a long stint in Istanbul.

Big Pharma Set to Control Entire Food Supply. Monsanto-Bayer and Bill Gates Join Hands

By Greg Reese, May 02, 2022

The indoor vertical farming industry, which is a highly-innovative and efficient method is being funded by Bill Gates and pushed by the World Economic Forum as a replacement to conventional outdoor farming.

Afghanistan Braces for New War

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, May 02, 2022

There is media buzz lately about an anti-Taliban insurgency struggling to be born in Afghanistan. A former Afghan army general, Sami Sadat, is returning home as the West’s favourite to don the mantle of leadership of a pan-Afghan “resistance” movement against repressive Taliban rule. 

COVID Crisis Triggers Economic Devastation. A Quarter of a Billion More People Will Be Precipitated Into Extreme Poverty in 2022

By Colin Todhunter, May 02, 2022

There is a terrifying prospect that in excess of a quarter of a billion more people will fall into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 alone. Without immediate radical action, we could be witnessing the most profound collapse of humanity into extreme poverty and suffering in memory.

Ukraine War, Military and Economic Dimensions: UN Secretary General Holds Talks in Moscow and Kyiv

By Abayomi Azikiwe, May 02, 2022

Obviously, the U.S. and NATO actions indicate that the Biden administration and its European allies are not interested in a speedy conclusion to the war in Ukraine. The sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the EU have created a crisis in Western Europe where several leading states such as Germany are continuing, out of necessity, to purchase oil and natural gas from the Russian Federation.

Australia’s Pacific Neglect: Distractions from Climate Change Security

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, May 02, 2022

The hysteria in Canberra and Washington over the Sino-Solomon Islands security pact has shown, again, how irrelevant the individual affairs of Pacific Island states are in the chess game of geopolitics. The one thing conspicuously missing has been the issue of climate change, near and dear to those whose lands are gradually being inundated by rising sea levels.

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Despite children facing a near zero chance of dying from COVID-19, the FDA jumped on board and quickly approved Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine for children ages 5-11 last year. Governments across the country then began requiring children to get the jab to go to school as researchers began to see an increase in myocarditis.

Since the vaccine was approved in December 2020, there has been a record number of adverse reactions reported to the CDC and many of them include children. After seeing the increase in adverse reactions, parents of healthy children began to become skeptical of giving their children the jab. But the multi-billion dollar propaganda campaign had already been waged — turning many Americans into rabid pro-vaxxers who wished death and harm on anyone who would dare question their prophets from the book of Big Pharma.

Social media influencers were brought to the White House to convince people to get jabbed. The president himself chastised “anti-vaxxers” wishing them a “winter of severe illness and death,” and Big Pharma propaganda had convinced kids they were “super heroes” for getting the shot.

Those locked into the mass formation psychosis had been put under the spell and companies — with criminally sinister track records — became their new god. Those who didn’t embrace this dogma with all their faith became the enemy — including children.

A tragic case has surfaced out of Chicago this week, highlighting the worst possible scenario of the corporate government’s divisive propaganda that stoked hatred and fear toward vaccine skeptics. According to a lawsuit filed by Robert and Rosellene Bronstein this week, their 15-year-old son was bullied to suicide by teachers and fellow students for not having taken the covid vaccination.

The Bronsteins are not “antivax” and their son Nate was fully vaccinated against covid but once the vicious rumor took hold that Nate was part of the dirty unvaccinated class, a cruel war was waged by the indoctrinated masses.

According to the lawsuit, Nate was “tormented on a regular basis” by other children at the $40,000 per year Latin School of Chicago who claimed that the boy hadn’t been vaccinated against COVID.

Despite more than 30 complaints from Nate’s parents, according to the lawsuit, the school did nothing to stop bullying.

The Chicago Tribune reports:

A student at the school, whose parents are named in the suit, spread a false rumor that the boy was unvaccinated, the suit alleges. Though he was vaccinated, the boy was harassed about his perceived vaccination status, the suit says. The Bronsteins reached out to the student’s family about the alleged harassment, according to the suit.

The bullying escalated from there, according to the lawsuit. He was told by a teacher in front of a class that he was going “nowhere in life,” the suit alleges, and was cyberbullied in a group text message thread by members of the junior varsity basketball team and on the social media app Snapchat. A Snapchat message circulated around the school said of the boy: “Ur a terrible person.”

On Dec. 13, a student sent a Snapchat message to the boy encouraging him to kill himself, the suit alleges.

Likely due to the fact that they believed the rumor too, when Nate reported the students to school staff, they did nothing to stop it. After all, even the teachers were bullying him for it. Despite having anti-bullying policies and a stated “zero tolerance” policy for hate speech, school administrators turned a “blind eye” to the “increasingly desperate” pleas for help from the Bronstein family, according to the complaint.

Upon news of the lawsuit and in spite of the paper trail of complaints, the school refused to acknowledge their role in the child’s death and promised to “vigorously defend itself” from the Bronsteins lawsuit.

“The allegations of wrongdoing by the school officials are inaccurate and misplaced,” a statement from the school read. “The school’s faculty and staff are compassionate people who put students’ interests first, as they did in this instance.”

“My son was so alone,” Rosellene Bronstein, Nate’s mother said in a news release. “Not only were the administrators who were supposed to protect him ignoring his cries for help, but they had the self-serving gall to try to protect their own reputations after his death rather than just having the decency of being honest with his grieving family. This is a legal and moral failure that has caused us indescribable pain and agony.”

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s saintly image in the media is contradicted by state terror operations being conducted under his orders against political dissidents and Ukrainian civilians accused of collaboration with Russia.

The Associated Press reported last week that nearly 400 people in the northeastern city of Kharkiv alone have been detained under anti-collaboration laws enacted by Ukraine’s parliament and signed by Zelensky after Russia’s February 24 invasion.

Source: britannica.com

A YouTube video accompanying the short article juxtaposed a speech by Zelensky saying that “collaborators will be brought to justice” with the arrest of a middle-aged Kharkiv man named Viktor by the Ukrainian Security Services (SBU) because of a social media post praising Vladimir Putin, calling for secession and insulting the Ukrainian flag—which Viktor called a “symbol of death.”

The SBU agent showed Viktor his social media post and asked: “You supported Putin? Are you supporting the Russian army. You are not speaking very nicely about the Ukrainian flag, are you?”

Viktor responded, before being taken away: “I am sorry. Yes I commented a lot. I told you. I changed my mind.”

The video shows another raid by the SBU on an apartment in Kharkiv where the SBU arrested a former Ukrainian army officer who had contacts with the Russians on his phone in the days after the city had been shelled.

An SBU agent says that the man had “put us in danger and civilians [in danger].”

Man detained for Russian collaboration in SBU raid in Kharkiv. [Source: abcnews.go.com]

The man’s father, Volodymyr Radnenko, asked the SBU agent: “Who is shelling us? It’s not our (people). It’s your fascists. And he [the son] just gets angry at that. So you understand. That’s all.”

Mr. Radnenko’s comments sum up the injustice of the SBU sweeps. Ukrainian citizens are being criminalized for expressing anger at Ukrainian army practices.

“Registry of Collaborators”

Roman Dudin, head of the Kharkiv branch of the SBU, in an interview with the Associated Press, said that the purpose of the SBU raids was to “have no one stab our armed forces in the back.”

Dudin ominously spoke in a dark basement where the SBU moved its operations after its building in central Kharkiv was shelled.

According to Oleksiy Danilov, head of Ukraine’s Security Council, a “registry of collaborators” by Ukraine is currently being compiled and will be released to the public as part of martial law programs that have resulted in the banning of 11 political parties.

Under the current regulations, offenders face up to 15 years in prison for collaborating with Russian forces, making public denials about Russian aggression or supporting Moscow. Anyone whose actions result in deaths could face life in prison.

The governor of the Nikolaev region, Vitaly Kim, a member of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, openly called for the assassination of any Ukrainian citizen who supports Russia.

Phoenix Redux

A previous CAM exposé pointed to the ominous parallels between the SBU operations in Ukraine and the Phoenix program in Vietnam, which resulted in the killing, imprisonment and torture of thousands of South Vietnamese, including civilian officials accused of being loyal to the left-wing, anti-imperialist National Liberation Front (NLF).’

Phung Hoang or Phoenix program image. [Source: youtube.com]

In both cases, the CIA is a key coordinator behind the scenes and helps in the compiling of blacklists that result in the detainment, and often torture and murder of civilians. .

Vasily Prozorov, a former officer with the SBU, stated soon after his defection to Russia in 2018 that the SBU had been advised by the CIA since 2014.

“CIA employees [who have been present in Kyiv since 2014] are residing in clandestine apartments and suburban houses,” he said. “However, they frequently come to the SBU’s central office for holding specific meetings or plotting secret operations.”

Douglas Valentine, author of the seminal book The Phoenix Program (1990), in a recent interview told me that Phoenix went public in 1968 under the justification that it was “protecting the people from terrorism”—like with the SBU programs today. The detentions were largely designed to encourage defections while striking fear in the public.

According to Valentine, on January 6, 1969, New York Times reporter Drummond Ayres offered a favorable commentary on Operation Phoenix, saying that “more than 15,000 of the 80,000 VC [Vietcong] political agents thought to be in South Vietnam are said to have been captured or killed.”

Ayres further expressed the belief that “the general course of the war…now appears to favor the Government” and predicted that Phoenix would “achieve much greater success as the center’s files grow.”

William Colby (in bow tie) with South Vietnamese officials reviewing dossier as part of Phoenix program operations. [Source: thevietnamwar.info]

Despite the good reviews, Valentine said that the surfacing of Phoenix in the press sent the publicity-shy CIA running for cover, and led to new legislation designed to legitimate its activities.

Similarly today, as more information comes to light, we may see renewed CIA efforts to try to legitimate its undercover operations and to burnish the image of its proxy forces in Ukraine whose modus operandi—like that of its predecessors in Vietnam—is morally abhorrent.

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].

Featured image: SBU raid in Kharkiv. [Source: mercurynews.com]

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For decades many in the West may look back in horrified wonder at the killings of men, women and children, the war crimes and the attacks on hospitals and schools in Ukraine.

Was it avoidable? It should have been.

Declassified has highlighted Vladimir Putin’s long standing threats over Ukraine and Russia’s special links to the country, which have been emphasised not least by former British defence chiefs.

Through an unstable mixture of complacency and greed, successive British governments have encouraged Vladimir Putin to believe he would get away with his designs on Ukraine.

But now, as if to make up for past misjudgments, the foreign secretary, Liz Truss says the West must “keep going further and faster to push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine.”

Her speech, at London’s Mansion House on Wednesday, implies that Russia must leave Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Putin annexed in 2014. After expressions of disapproval over the illegal act, then and since, Britain and its allies in the West continued dealing with Russia similarly to before.

If Truss was not indulging in mere rhetoric – very dangerous though that would be – her speech has far-reaching implications with the prospect of a war of attrition with no end in sight. What other European countries think of an increasingly risky strategy remains to be seen.

The British government’s response to the war so far has been infused with a particularly heavy dose of hypocrisy.

Revelling in the distraction from his problems at home, including Partygate, Johnson has repeatedly insisted that Britain is in the forefront of helping Ukraine – supplying a vast arsenal of weapons while also erecting a wall of obstacles preventing a few refugees from the country coming to Britain.

Although the UK military trained 22,000 of Ukrainian troops after 2014, successive prime ministers for years dismissed Ukraine’s pleas for weapons. At the same time, they continued to grant Russian oligarchs golden visas with the freedom to invest in British property and the City of London’s stock market.

After resisting Ukraine’s pleas for help for so long – while sending entirely wrong messages to Putin – the government now seems to do whatever Volodymyr Zelensky wants both in supplying weapons and in war aims.

In a muddle

The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has told the House of Commons:

“In its simplest form, Britain wants to help Ukraine be free to choose. What it chooses is slightly secondary to the fact that it has the freedom to choose in the first place as a sovereign state.”

Wallace added:

“There can be no return to normality for President Putin and his inner circle… What they have done, despite international warnings from presidents and prime ministers who endlessly asked them not to do it, is build their own cage—and they are living in it. From my point of view, they need to remain in it.”

He also told the Commons:

“I want Putin not only beyond the pre-February boundaries. He invaded Crimea illegally, he invaded Donetsk illegally, and he should comply with international law and in the long run leave Ukraine”.

What does keeping Putin “in a cage” mean? If Ukraine is a sovereign nation will Britain accept anything Zelensky says about war aims or a negotiated peace with Russia?

Zelensky has said he is prepared to hold separate talks on Crimea. Would the British government accept Ukraine conceding Crimea to the Kremlin if that was the price of peace?

And what would “success” look like? The top civil servant at the Ministry of Defence, David Williams, called this “a fluid question” at a recent session of the House of Commons defence committee.

Also, what do British ministers mean by saying Putin must “fail”? Or is the goal really that Putin must fall?

Historian Niall Fergusson says senior British figures believe that “the UK’s No.1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.”

‘Proxy war’

Tobias Ellwood, the defence committee’s Conservative chairman and former defence minister, said:

“I do encourage the MoD, through Nato, the Defence Secretary, to establish and confirm what mission success looks like, because that then determines what equipment you pile in”.

He added:

“This is ever-increasingly a proxy war which will spill beyond Ukraine if any part of Ukraine remains in Russian hands”.

Truss appears to want to go further than her Cabinet colleagues by suggesting Britain should send warplanes to Ukraine.

“Heavy weapons, tanks, aeroplanes – digging deep into our inventories, ramping up production. We need to do all of this”, she said in her speech.

The prime minister’s office told the BBC, however, that “there are no plans to send things like planes from the UK”.

Among the difficult questions that need answering is whether Britain and other European members of Nato are equipped to withstand an escalating conflict with Russia. There were disagreements about that in the defence committee.

The government’s policy is a muddle, ministers seem to be making policy on the hoof, with rhetoric masquerading as clarity.

One thing is absolutely clear – the conflict is a boost to those demanding higher defence spending and to arms companies.

Defence of selling arms

In a telling though perhaps inadvertent defence of selling arms to any government, Defence minister James Heappey said in response questions about arming Ukraine:

“There are lots of countries around the world that operate kit that they have imported from other countries; when those bits of kit are used we tend not to blame the country that manufactured it, you blame the country that fired it.”

That is also the defence of the UK arming Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen, and other Gulf states with appalling human rights records.

Britain continues to cuddle up to Saudi Arabia’s rulers, whose de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, now appears to be banking on Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – another of Britain’s close allies in the Gulf – have declined to oppose Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. These are two of Britain’s biggest markets for arms and the British government says its links with them are important for Britain’s security. Yet they abstained on the UN vote condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

So too did India, though this did not prevent Johnson from visiting the increasingly autocratic Indian prime minister in search of trade and arms deals.

Acting against Russia

The government did not act against Russian oligarchs with assets in Britain until after the second Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

In August 2016, two years after Putin’s annexation of Crimea and occupation of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine, Johnson, then foreign secretary, told Sergei Lavrov, his Russian opposite number, that he wanted a new “constructive” relationship with Moscow.

The following year, at Christmas 2017, Johnson was the first British minister to visit Moscow for five years. Despite continuing Russian attacks by pro-Russian forces in the Donbas and cyber attacks against British targets, he described Russia as a large untapped market for British goods that should be exploited by post-Brexit Britain.

In 2018, despite the poisoning in Salisbury of the former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, with the powerful nerve agent, novichok, the government pursued its “golden visa” scheme allowing rich Russians to buy the right to live in Britain.

The government took no action against Putin’s associate, Oleg Deripaska, founder of the large aluminium company, Rusal, who has a large property portfolio in Britain and alleged ties to Putin.

The Conservative Party was at the time receiving a record £700,000 in Russian-linked donations, a figure that increased to £1.5 million in the election year of 2019. Russian oligarchs with links to Putin carried on benefiting from secretive British tax havens.

London libel lawyers continued to try and help stop investigations into Conservative Party donors with links to Putin through SLAPP (strategic lawsuits against public participation) operations.

Moscow’s gold

In 2018, the Commons foreign affairs committee published a report, Moscow’s Gold: Russian Corruption in the UK. It said that despite all the rhetoric,

“President Putin and his allies have been able to continue ‘business as usual’ by hiding and laundering their corrupt assets in London.”

It added,

“These assets on which the Kremlin can call at any time, both directly and indirectly support President Putin’s campaign to subvert the international rules-based system, undermine our allies, and erode the mutually-reinforcing international networks that support UK foreign policy.”

The report was ignored.

The parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), meanwhile, was drawing up a report, simply entitled “Russia”, whose publication was blocked by Johnson until after the December 2019 general election.

This was partly because of suggestions the Kremlin had tried to interfere in the Brexit referendum in June 2016. The ISC did not mince its words.

“Russian influence in the UK is the new normal”, it said.

It continued:

“Successive Governments have welcomed the oligarchs and their money with open arms, providing them with a means of recycling illicit finance through the London ‘laundromat’, and connections at the highest levels with access to UK companies and political figures. This has led to a growth industry of ‘enablers’ including lawyers, accountants, and estate agents who are – wittingly or unwittingly – de facto agents of the Russian state.”

The West is on the defensive after the failure in Afghanistan and the illegal war in Iraq, events that unsurprisingly Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, repeatedly cites.

Officials in Whitehall – the permanent government – who have been revelling in post-imperial complacency, should start to worry when even their long standing allies, the Gulf regimes, are reluctant to upset the Kremlin even when it is engaged in brutal warfare.

As we enter a new world disorder, sustained and rigorous scrutiny of British foreign and security policies is more vital than it has been for a very long time, perhaps since before the outbreak of the second world war.

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Richard is a British editor, journalist and playwright, and the doyen of British national security reporting. He wrote for the Guardian on defence and security matters and was the newspaper’s security editor for three decades.

Featured image is from TruePublica